Preservation policies for digital archives

The Universidad Politécnica Estatal del Carchi (UPEC), publisher of the magazine Sathiri, guarantees, through methods of digital preservation, that all the digital contents of the publication are preserved for long periods of time, ensuring that they do not suffer any impairment in their integrity, originality and accessibility.

The process of preservation of digital archives will employ techniques that allow digital documents to remain authentic and reliable, being able to be used over time, always preserving their identification.

The units responsible for carrying out the digital preservation process are: 1) the Directorate of Information and Communication Technologies, ICT, which has as its function to administer all UPEC digital media; and 2) the Academic and Scientific Production and Dissemination Unit, which aims to manage the serial and unitary publications produced by the university community.

In the process of preservation of digital files, data integrity control mechanisms are used, which, through redundancy algorithms, verify that the data already recorded and in the process of recording are not altered, but that they keep their configuration intact.

The process of preservation of digital files, when performing the loading of contents, takes into account the following criterion: it is not enough to have stored the information, but it is indispensable to have an efficient search and recovery system. To this end, the ICT Directorate generates file and folder naming protocols that allow users to quickly and intuitively access each file required.

The preservation of digital archives is carried out every month the complete migration of all the material produced by the magazine Sathiri, passing it from its public support to two private media of exclusive access of the UPEC. In this way, the backups of the OJS, the Sathiri magazine website and the Sathiri magazine database are stored on a physical server belonging to the UPEC and only accessible to ICT Directorate officials. These backups are also backed up in the cloud, with the aim of avoiding inconvenience in the event of damage to the physical server.

The backup test will be done once a year.

At the time of data migration, the following procedures are taken into account: self-sufficiency minimizing system or data dependencies; self-documentation codifying preserved information without external reference; encapsulated to preserve metadata.

At the time of data migration, the following procedures are taken into account: self-sufficiency minimizing system or data dependencies; self-documentation codifying preserved information without external reference; encapsulated to preserve metadata.

In the event that the process of preservation of digital files presents any of the following problems: errors of negligence, errors of failures, mechanical errors, operator errors, errors of obsolescence or incompatibility, the Publications Unit must immediately notify the ICT Directorate, which will be responsible for managing a solution.

In the event that any of the following failures occur during the digital file preservation process: virus failure, electrical failure, electronic failure, metadata loss failure, information ageing failure, the Publications Unit must immediately notify the ICT Directorate, which will be responsible for managing a solution.