Medalta Museum Digital Preservation Policy

Purpose

The purpose of this policy is to support Medalta Museum’s operations by preserving and ensuring long-term access to digital artefacts and digital representations of the museum holdings and the holdings of the Medicine Hat Clay Industries National Historic District, and by preserving and ensuring access to any digital asset necessary for these operations.

Mandate

All decisions regarding regular museum operations, including the development and implementation of this digital preservation policy and its associated plan are arrived at through the approval of Medalta Museum’s executive staff.

Objectives

Medalta Museum intends, by virtue of this policy, to preserve and provide long-term access to its digital holdings; specifically digital copies of the museum’s images, digitized audio and video, born-digital recordings of interviews and similar digital artefacts.

A further objective is to provide access, for as long as required, to any digital asset necessary for the regular operation of the museum. Access to all of these digital assets should be available, on demand, to a limited number of museum staff, who may in turn decide to whom copies of the asset should be distributed.

Scope

All digital assets held by Medalta Museum have been identified in the museum’s Digital Inventory Template^{Footnote 1} and have been categorized into 10 groups. As per the museum’s Digital Asset Retention and Disposition Schedule^{Footnote 2}, all these groups (with the exception of administrative documents) are to be preserved indefinitely.

Administrative documents are (in general) to be kept for seven years. While these are normally not addressed as part of a museum’s digital preservation policy or plan for the preservation of its digital assets, they are mentioned here, as it is sufficiently simple to include them given the Medalta Museum Digital Preservation plan.

Operating Principles

The scale of digital preservation to be carried out renders a full OAIS solution untenable. However, the following generally accepted digital archiving practices will be observed:

1. Digital content will be created with preservation in mind (populating metadata for the content, where possible).
2. Preservation copies of material will be made on a regular basis.
3. An automated process will be used to create basic preservation metadata as preservation copies are made.
4. Preservation copies will be kept on multiple forms of physical media, in multiple locations.
5. Preservation copies will be periodically verified for data integrity.
6. Preservation copies will be refreshed to new media on a regular basis.
7. Preservation copies will be migrated to new formats as required.
8. Access to preservation copies will be limited to specific museum staff.

Selection and Acquisition

Note that this section addresses selection and acquisition of the museum’s digital assets into its archived digital content, and it is not to be confused with the selection and acquisition of the museum’s physical holdings.

If a digital asset falls into groups 1 through 10 (as per the museum’s Digital Inventory Template), then it is to be preserved as per the museums Digital Asset Retention and Disposition Schedule. If a digital asset is not identified on the Digital Inventory Template, the decision trees found in CHIN’s Digital Preservation Toolkit may be used to determine if it should be preserved^{Footnote 3}.

Access and Use

Digital preservation of the museum’s content is ultimately for the benefit of those showing an interest in the history and holdings of Medalta Museum and the Medicine Hat Historic Clay District. It is anticipated that members of this community will have indirect access to preserved content so that they might benefit from it or contribute to the museum’s knowledge base. To ensure integrity of the preserved data, only a limited number of museum staff will have direct access to preservation records.

While some of these digital assets may be made available online to the public, it is anticipated that queries by museum stakeholders regarding digital images, scans, interviews or similar content will be addressed by staff, who will require a searchable copy of the preserved data onsite. While limited staff availability may result in a response to such queries taking days, the actual time to perform a query should be minimized by ensuring that working copies of the content are not compressed, encrypted or otherwise encumbered in a manner that hinders searchability.

Challenges and Risks

1. Limited time and resources: These constraints prevent the museum from adopting a standard OAIS model, thus a hybridized solution is required. As such, no formal archival software will be used. By ensuring the process is simple and affordable, it is expected that the process will remain sustainable.
2. Existing physical media: Some recordings over 10 years old are on analog magnetic tape. Others are on CD of an unknown type. Digitization from older analog magnetic media should be addressed immediately, as should refreshing of content from CDs of unknown quality.
3. Training: In spite of the simplified process, training will be required. The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) is offering to assist with this step.
4. Unknown risks: Because the process does not follow the traditional OAIS model, there is a risk that an important feature of this model may be overlooked.