Digital Preservation

The Instituto Argentino de Profesores Universitarios de Costos IAPUCo, publisher of the journal Costos y Gestión, ensures the long-term preservation of the intellectual content of its electronic archival documents through digital preservation methods, maintaining attributes such as integrity, authenticity, unalterability, originality, reliability and accessibility.

Defining Preservation Policies

Digital preservation must be established as an institutional responsibility and a commitment of all staff. The Instituto Argentino de Profesores Universitarios de Costos IAPUCo, adheres to the following principles: What to save and why? Where to save it? How long to save it? How to find it later? How to ensure it remains unaltered? And how to prevent it from becoming obsolete?

Preservation Procedures

The Instituto Argentino de Profesores Universitarios de Costos IAPUCo, in compliance with its Preservation Policies, adheres to the following implemented procedures:

- The storage of digital resources is handled with the utmost technological care.

- Evaluations of preservation strategies, such as data consistency checks, migration, emulation, and preservation of digital technology.

- Encapsulation of the information to be preserved, along with descriptive metadata.

- Self-documentation, understanding and encoding the preserved information without reference to external documentation.

- Self-sufficiency, minimizing dependencies on systems, data, or documentation.

- Documentation of the content type, with a view to enabling future users to find or implement software that allows them to view the preserved information.

 

In fact, IAPUCo has included a policy that focuses on storing information in formats that are widely used today. (This increases the likelihood that when a format becomes obsolete, programs will still exist to convert it: XML, HTML, and PDF are examples of these.)

Types of Digital Preservation

Local Preservation on Own Servers (Repositories)

This type of preservation is proprietary, where internal documents containing information that may be the product of research are stored without violating copyright or commercialization rights. It uses software to manage the information, and its interface is simple. In this case, it refers to the IAPUCo repositories already mentioned. The benefits of this type of preservation are that the digital objects to be preserved are located on an internal server, and the management of these documents can be found as administrative software.

Continuous or Permanent Access (Perpetuity) in Technical and Scientific Journals

Publishers offer continuous and permanent access to their published titles. With this model, IAPUCo guarantees access to the published content of these titles through its platform, which can be considered a commitment by IAPUCo to maintain the content and thus enable access. Continuous or permanent access is the most well-known and widely used model among universities worldwide.

Collaborative Digital Preservation

This is a digital preservation service hosted on servers independent of IAPUCo's. The service is provided by a third party through an agreement that allows access to the subscribed titles in case of failure. It is a service in which IAPUCo agrees to authorize the preservation of its information on external servers, with the option to release the stored information in the event of a technical failure.

Digital Preservation Services

The most representative digital preservation service providers in the Americas, with a strong international presence, include:

LOCKSS. Part of an initiative by librarians concerned with preserving the digital content acquired by their universities, LOCKSS provides libraries and publishers with open-source tools for digital preservation and local access to digital content. LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) "allows librarians at each institution to preserve access to the electronic content they subscribe to, using their own equipment and network connections, as well as provide access to acquired copies of digital content." The material is downloaded to a local "LOCKSS Box," which can be a computer, and thus remains available to community members in a secure environment, even when the publisher ceases publishing or their information is no longer viewable. The content is always accessible to the local community, directly from the library, without the need for third-party services; therefore, stored collections do not suffer access problems in the event of such incidents.