The Levels of Digital Preservation (LoP) is a resource developed by the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) LoP Working Group to assist practitioners in building and/or assessing their digital preservation programs. Harvard Library has been an active NDSA member since the organizations inception in 2010.
Levels of Preservation matrix, version 2.0
The table below outlines Harvard's Digital Repository Service (DRS) current conformance with the LoP.
| Functional Area | Level of Conformance | Examples of Conformance |
|---|
| Storage | 4 | - All content preserved in the DRS is replicated 3 to 5 times, depending upon curatorially-designated storage classification
- DRS storage is spread across geographically-dispersed areas with varying disaster profiles (Eastern and Central Massachusetts and Virginia); these locations provide a heterogeneous mixture of on-line, near-line, and off-line storage proactively managed by Harvard FASRC, the NESE regional consortium, and commercial cloud providers
- Storage refreshes occur consistently every 4-5 years
|
| Integrity | 4 | - Checksums are generated at ingest and recorded for integrity verification
- Integrity is verified at regular intervals
- Checksums are verified on demand, when needed
|
| Control | 3 | - PREMIS metadata records actions taken on content and agents performing the actions
|
| Metadata | 4 | - Each file and object is associated with robust administrative, technical, and preservation metadata
- PREMIS metadata registers preservation actions taken, as well as the agents who perform them
|
| Content | 4 | - Digital Preservation Services (DPS) monitors at-risk file formats, reports out to curators, and coordinates with appropriate partners to remediate appropriately, through normalization and migration
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