The quality of an information resource being extant, contextually described, findable, and retrievable with respect to administrative, intellectual, legal, and technical considerations.  Note that a resource may be accessible without necessarily being usable.

The HLPS agential role exercising delegated preservation responsibility for DRS-managed resources on behalf of their owners and curators.

The LTS agential role exercising primary technical and operational oversight and control of HL’s preservation infrastructure on behalf of HLPS preservation administrators.

The quality of an information resource being what it purports to be.  Note that a resource may be authentic without necessarily being reliable. 

The technically-mediated modalities by which a digital resource may be manipulated, including conversion from its material form to perceptual form. For example, the material bits underlying a JPEG image have to be rendered into a perceptual analog form in order to be susceptible to human visual comprehension.  Such an image also can be zoomed to present finer or coarser levels of visual detail, or rotated to align with a more appropriate visual orientation.

The quality of a digital resource’s material form being comprised of the exact sequence of bits as in its canonical state.  Note that a resource may possess this integrity without necessarily being usable in all possible contexts.

An aggregation of information resources sharing a common administrative or intellectual identity based upon topical or thematic unity.

An identifiable and intellectually-meaningful subset of a larger digital resource, for example, the OCR text for a single page of a digitized monographic volume.

A set of optional, recommended, and required characteristics regarding a digital resource’s description, encoding format(s), structural arrangement, internal and external relationships, and packaging (Harvard Library, 2018).  These were prescriptive in the sense that conformance was enforced as a condition of deposit eligibility.  Note that while pertinent to previous versions of the DRS, the content model concept has been replaced in the current version by resource type.

The cultural, organizational, functional, and operational circumstances surrounding the production, management, or consumption of an information resource.

Pertaining to intellectual concerns of resource stewardship, especially as exercised by curators.

The University agential role exercising primary intellectual oversight and control of digital resources managed by the DRS on behalf of their owners.

The permanent removal of resources from managed stewardship.

The University agential role designated by collection owners or curators with approval of HL managers to be granted privileges by LTS administrators to permit the physical transfer of digital resources from University collections to the DRS

An information resource created through adaptation, rearrangement, translation, or transformation of another resource.

A documented set of functional, informational, and technical characteristics that identify and distinguish an information resource.

The conditions under which a digital resource is stored, including the number and distribution of replica copies, the medium (e.g., magnetic or optical) and media (e.g., disk, tape, or film) of those copies, and their responsivity (e.g., online, nearline, or offline).

An information resource materialized in one or more digitally-encoded files.

The programmatic enterprise facilitating meaningful human communication of digital-encoded information across time and ever-accumulating technical and cultural distance.  A complex of actors, policies, processes, and technologies ensuring ongoing integrity, authenticity, accessibility, and usability of digital resources.

The abstract representation of an information resource’s informative meaning in terms of a distinct arrangement of signifying semantic or affective signs. For example, a PDF document is conceptually organized in a hierarchy of pages, paragraphs, words, glyphs, tables, pictures, etc.  All of these can be considered independent from their internal symbolic or material form or external perceptual form.

A coherent, identifiable unit of informative meaning.

The quality of an information resource being whole and unaltered from its canonical state. 

An affirmative action taken to ensure the ongoing integrity, authenticity, accessibility, and usability of a managed digital resource consistent with that resource’s preservation service level and term of service.

The tangible representation of an information resource’s symbolic form in terms of one or more digitally-encoded files.  All resources’ material form is a linear sequence of bits conforming to rules of their particular format.

The abstract intellectual or aesthetic idea underlying an information resource as intended by its creator.

The proactive review of managed digital resources with respect to assurances of their ongoing integrity, accessibility, authenticity, and usability, leading if necessary to reactive intervention.

The University agential role exercising primary administrative, financial, and legal oversight and control of digital resources managed by the DRS, including their creation or acquisition and proprietorial custody external to the DRS, on behalf of the University.

The tangible representation of an information resource directly apprehensible by a human sensory modality, primarily vision and hearing, generated by the application of a behavior against the resource’s material form. For example, for an image resource, the perceptual form is the visual sensation of that image as comprehended by the human sense of sight.  For an audio resource, it is the aural sensation comprehended by the human sense of hearing.

Enduring across a significant bounded or open-ended time period.

The HL agential role exercising delegated digital preservation oversight and control of digital resources managed by the DRS on behalf of their owners and curators. The Digital Preservation Services (DPS) team are the primary Harvard Library preservation managers.

Pertaining to administrative, financial, and legal concerns of resource ownership, especially as exercised by owners.

The documented history of a managed information resource as it may change over time.

The quality of an information resource’s underlying information meaning being dependable and worthy of trust.  Note that a resource may be reliable without necessarily being authentic.

A set of required and recommended characteristics regarding the structure of a digital resource’s digital form (Harvard Library, 2025b).  Note that a similar, though more prescriptive, purpose was served in previous versions of the DRS by the concept of content model.  Unlike content model, beyond a very minimal set of necessary characteristics, resource type guidance is descriptive rather than prescriptive.  Although curators should attempt to conform to this guidance, it is not enforced as a condition of deposit eligibility.

The set of affirmative obligations regarding the creation, management, and use of University information (Harvard University, 2019).

Recommendations and activities broadly recognized as efficacious by the international digital preservation community, including conformance to or consistency with the OAIS reference model (ISO 2012a), trustworthy digital repository (TDR) audit and certification (ISO, 2012b), and NDSA levels of preservation (Phillips et al., 2013).

The representation of an information resource’s expressive form in terms of digital encoding rules, i.e., its format.

The subjective interpretation of an information resource’s informative meaning as experienced by its patron.

The quality of an information resource being susceptible to meaningful exploitation for some purpose potentially unique with respect to time, place, person, and modality of use.  Note that a resource may be usable in theory without necessarily being accessible in practice.