Accessible Preservation: developing an inclusive strategy for management and preservation of access quality born-digital assets
Ailie O'Hagan
Many born-digital collections are created with access and shareability in mind, shaped by varying technical capacity and resources. At the same time, institutional moves towards digital submission procedures, e.g. university e-theses, can inadvertently encourage compression, encryption, hyperlinked content, and web-optimisation, as depositors mitigate upload constraints or rights management in the digital environment.  

 

Although we can recommend ideals around high quality deposits for preservation going forward, how do we address the challenges of our pre-existing digital collections and early legacy work? And if we choose to exclude collections based on the unavailability of appropriate preservation originals, do we risk creating inequalities that unintentionally bias our collections in the long-term, against lower-budget, often arts and humanities, and community research?  

  

This poster visualises some early findings from a project looking at e-thesis deposits as a case study for the practical decisions needed to balance inclusivity with stakeholder capacity in repository management. Data is drawn from a survey and focus groups designed to understand how and why depositors select file formats for saving and sharing projects, as well as the practical, technical and social implications of this for preservation management of born–digital assets. 

 

This is the beginning of a year-long project hosted at Queen’s University Belfast and facilitated by The National Archives and Research Libraries UK as part of their Professional Fellowship programme. Feedback and interaction from iPRES attendees is welcomed via zooming, rotation, and annotation features enabled by applications such as Spline3D and Sketchfab, to encourage closer viewing and ideas sharing, as well as QR codes linking to my project blogs and information.
approaches to preservation start 2 preserve