SAOA is committed to the preservation of, access to and discovery of resources (digital assets as well as the associated metadata) created by and facilitated through SAOA. The cooperative and federated nature of SAOA necessitates that this preservation, access, and discoverability may take many forms, differing timelines, and separately determined costs, depending on the nature and scope of each individual project. As such, each project may need to be interpreted and championed on its own terms but SAOA is guided by the principles below.
Preservation
The long term maintenance of digital content is central to SAOA’s mission but responsibility for it may be distributed depending on creator and institutional capacity. To the extent possible, SAOA strives to preserve its digital files according to established digital preservation standards for stable and flexible format (ex., tif image files). A long-term goal of SAOA is to preserve a dark archived master of every SAOA-affiliated resource in a SAOA-controlled repository.
Digital Files Created by SAOA (using SAOA funds)
Digital master files created by SAOA will be stored in a dark archive by CRL.
Digital Files Created by a SAOA Partner (not using SAOA funds)
If a SAOA partner has the institutional capacity to preserve digital files (a “trusted digital repository”), they will be maintained at the partner institution, pursuant to that institution’s policies and procedures. Any access and/or discoverability files will be required to point back to the preservation files in associated metadata.
If the SAOA partner does not have the institutional capacity to preserve digital files, they will be transferred to a dark archive at CRL.
Access
Free and open access to materials associated with SAOA is paramount to SAOA’s mission. Building upon SAOA’s distributed and federated nature, SAOA strives to avoid duplication and to encourage digital file accessibility (“hosting”) from multiple institutions. SAOA strives to provide access to multiple access file types (ex. JP2, JPG, PDF).
Digital Files Created by SAOA (using SAOA funds)
Digital files created by SAOA will be made openly accessible through SAOA platform(s).
Digital Files Created by a SAOA Partner (not using SAOA funds)
If a SAOA partner has the institutional capacity to make digital files accessible in a stable and sustainable way, with institutionally-supported permanent URLs for each item (i.e. to “host” them on their own repository servers), they will be maintained at the partner institution following that institution’s policies and procedures.
If the SAOA partner does not have the institutional capacity to make digital files they have created accessible in that fashion, or if in the future, they are unable to maintain their provision of access, the files will be transferred to SAOA for ingest on SAOA’s platform(s).
Discoverability
SAOA resources are made valuable through their discovery and use. The cooperative and federated nature of SAOA determines that this discovery may take many forms depending on the nature and scope of each individual project. The long-term goal of SAOA is to enable integrated discovery across the SAOA corpus of resources, encompassing materials hosted through SAOA platforms, partners, and other institutions.
Metadata
All SAOA resources have sufficient technical and descriptive metadata to be discoverable.
All metadata will be openly and sustainably maintained on web-based platform(s).
All metadata will follow established standards (ex. MARC, Dublin Core).
All metadata will be open and exposed for harvesting, by SAOA or other interested institutions.
Last updated: December 21, 2017
