Digital Preservation Declaration of Shared Values
The Digital Preservation Services Collaborative has expanded and revised the Declaration of Shared Values. Please review Version 3 and submit your feedback by the end of August 2022.
Published: April 12, 2018
Version 2
Issued by representatives of Academic Preservation Trust (APTrust), Chronopolis, CLOCKSS, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), Digital Preservation Network (DPN), DuraSpace, Educopia/MetaArchive Cooperative, HathiTrust, Stanford University - LOCKSS, Texas Digital Library (TDL), Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL).
Digital preservation combines policies, strategies, and actions that ensure access to digital content over time. 1 Digital preservation is essential to the cumulative record of human activity and memory.
We are a group of collaborating organizations united in our commitment to preserve the cultural, intellectual, scientific and academic record for current and future generations. We believe that preservation should be sustainable, affordable, practical, and available to all. We believe we can accomplish these goals better together rather than separately. We provide services for the cultural heritage, research, and academic communities, and all kinds of scholars.
We embrace participation from communities reflective of the full range of human experience and strive to preserve the histories, cultures, experiences and perspectives of people of different genders, races, ethnicities, spiritual choices, sexual orientation or identity, physical or mental abilities and places of origins.
The mission of our shared work is rooted in a set of core values. These core values inform and direct our collective work:
- Collaboration - We work together and will collaborate with organizations that share the values set out in this statement.
- Affordability and Sustainability - We endeavor to balance providing affordable services to the widest possible communities with sustainability of the content we protect.
- Inclusiveness - We strive to adopt and promote inclusive practices in the partnerships we form, the collections we preserve, and the organizations we serve.
- Technological Diversity - We develop and deploy a variety of platforms and technologies to create a heterogeneous network that spans diverse geographic, technical, and institutional environments.
- Portability/Interoperability - We recognize that digital preservation involves moving data across systems and time. We design and maintain our services to maximize the integrity of the content and ease by which we transfer this content.
- Openness and Transparency - We favor open technologies, standards, and protocols. We share information about costs and technologies openly.
- Accountability - We are responsible to each other and the broader community for employing ethical and transparent preservation practices.
- Stewardship Continuity - We will collaborate to help identify new locations for content when one of the undersigned organization’s stewardship cannot continue.
- Advocacy - We aim to inspire stakeholders at every level to engage, invest in, and sustain preserving our collective cultural heritage and academic record.
- Empowerment - We encourage capacity-building in our partners, members, and the larger digital preservation community to sustain our shared goal.
Purpose of the Declaration of Shared Values
Values and professional ethics are at the core of our work and guide our practices.
This declaration of shared values accomplishes the following:
- Summarizes principles that reflect our core values and establishes a set of specific standards that should be used to guide our efforts.
- Helps identify relevant considerations when professional obligations conflict or uncertainties arise.
- Provides standards to which our community can hold us accountable.
- Socializes practitioners new to the field to our mission and values.
The declaration of shared values does not specify which values, principles, and standards are most important and ought to outweigh others in instances when they conflict. Reasonable differences of opinion can and do exist among our community. We will work together to resolve those conflicts in ways that support and promote our common goal.
Our work and thinking will evolve over time. We will strive to include stakeholders from all over the world and we invite those interested to join us in working together to preserve the collective human record. Contact our group to ask questions and/or participate.
1 Short Definition of Digital Preservation by the Association of Library Collections and Technical Services, a Division of the American Library Association