An Overview of The Digital Preservation Storage Criteria and Usage Guide

The Digital Preservation Storage Criteria (or “Criteria”) resulted from a community discussion at iPres 2015 on providing guidance to organizations that either use or provide digital preservation storage. First developed in 2016, they have been refined in iterative versions over the last three years based on feedback gathered at conference sessions and through a survey. The Criteria are intended to help with developing requirements for, or evaluations of, preservation storage solutions; to seed discussions about preservation storage; or to use within digital preservation instructional material. The latest version of the Criteria contains sixty-one criteria grouped into eight categories: content integrity, cost considerations, flexibility, information security, resilience, scalability & performance, support, and transparency. A usage guide, developed to accompany the Criteria, has recently been developed. It includes sections on key topics to consider for preservation storage in addition to the Criteria: risk management, independence, elements in establishing bit safety, and cost considerations. The usage guide will be released publicly for review as one of the next steps in the project, along with developing version 4 of the Criteria and taking steps to further build the community around the Criteria.