Mission Statement
The aim of Gwynedd Archives Service is to protect the archival heritage of the county by collecting, preserving, giving access to and promoting the use of archives so that everyone can discover, learn and understand more about themselves and their community.
Policy aims
To describe the current service provision for maintaining digital records received by the service and set out the service’s direction of travel in seeking to meet the acquisition, storage and preservation needs of digital material.
Context
Gwynedd Archives Service recognises that increasingly documents and archives are being created in digital form and:
- There is an expectation that the service will maintain these records over time with the same professional care afforded to analogue material.
- It must work towards finding a way to ensure that this material can be preserved now and remain discoverable and accessible in the future.
- Will seek to adopt emerging best practice within the bounds of practicability and the constraints of available resources.
Purpose and Scope
The policy aims to outline what the service hopes to achieve in preserving digital material and meeting the expectations of depositors and other stakeholders.
This policy covers material in formats outside the traditional media collected by the service, material which requires the use of further digital technology in order to interpret it.
For the purposes of this policy digital preservation refers to all actions required to maintain access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological change.
This policy covers material received by the service from all stakeholders.
Digital preservation objectives
The Service will:
- Develop and seek to apply where practicable working practices and software solutions to manage the digital archive to negate the possible loss of digital material.
- Seek to employ the most appropriate, cost effective and efficient solutions to ensure sustainability of the digital resource over time.
- Work with the IT section to mitigate the risks posed to the corporate IT network when managing the digital archive.
- Seek to access old and/or obsolete technology, whether equipment or software, to assist with migration programmes, working in partnership with external organisations whenever desirable or necessary to ensure the long-term accessibility of the digital archive.
- Share best practice for maintaining a digital archive.
Standards
The Service will use Open Archive Information Systems (OAIS) reference model as its baseline for working practices and digital archive management.
Deposits and accessioning
The Service will:
- Recognises that the accessioning information required from depositors of digital archives may differ from that required for analogue archives. However, all accessioning processes will conform to professional standards and be in line with the Collections Management Policy.
- Will liaise with depositors on acceptable formats and will seek advice from IT officers when needed.
- Acknowledges that sufficient metadata to provide identification and reasonable access to the content of the digital archive is required at the time of deposit and will work with depositors to obtain this information.
Migration and Storage
The Service will:
- Migrate migrating digital to the server and a separate storage device.
- Will utilise available software and hardware to manage the digital archive in line with the OAIS model.
- Monitor file formats to ensure that digital material is available in the most currently acceptable archival file format for the file type.
- Ensure that copies of the digital masters will be in separate locations to mitigate the risk of loss of information should one digital storage facility fail.
Public Access
Public access to the digital content will be provided via a dedicated public workstation or copied to an appropriate format for sharing with those unable to visit.
Future Developments
The Service:
- Accepts that as digital deposits grow that further development work is required to achieve an effective and successful management programme for the storage and accessibility of digital archives.
- Recognises that due to the anticipated high costs associated with the long-term preservation and storage of digital material, the service will seek to work in partnership with Records Management colleagues to develop a collaborative approach to maintaining digital archives over time.
Review
This policy was approved by the Head of Economy and Community in 2026. It will be reviewed within 5 years or sooner if circumstances dictate.