Preservation Policy

Texas ScholarWorks (TSW) is committed to responsible and sustainable management of submitted works. The Texas Digital Library hosts TSW in a secure, professionally managed environment in the Amazon Cloud. It is regularly and automatically backed up, with backups maintained for a minimum of one year.

Digital preservation is an evolving field; therefore, TSW’s long-term access strategies are shaped by the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) reference model (ISO 14721:2012) and informed by relevant international standards and emerging best practices.

Prudent efforts will be employed to preserve work in any digital format submitted to TSW, however submission in a recommended file format is strongly encouraged in order to facilitate long-term preservation. Please see Recommended File Formats for a list of preferred formats.

For files in formats other than those listed in Recommended File Formats, a derivative file in a more stable format may be created. In such cases, resources permitting, the original file as well as the derivative will be preserved, along with associated descriptive and administrative metadata for both files. We encourage all users to save their archival master files in addition to access copies. Some users may choose to keep their archival master files in a separate location from TSW.

TSW will provide long-term access to submitted works, as well as associated descriptive and administrative metadata, by employing a strategy combining the following:

• Secure backup
• Storage media refreshment
• File format migration (including possible migration to standard formats during submission)

At this time, TSW is committed to preserving the bitstream (the binary form of the data). Further practical measures to preserve as much functionality ("look and feel") of the original as possible will be employed as resources permit. Priority will be given to works submitted in a Recommended File Format.

All works submitted to TSW will be assigned a persistent URL.

This policy and related preservation activities will be reviewed regularly to ensure practices remain current as technology and institutional practices evolve.