The SCAPE Policy Framework, maturity levels and the need for realistic preservation policies: Paper - iPES 2014 - Melbourne

A digital preservation policy is an essential document in which an organization summarizes its approaches to achieve the goals and objectives for the long term preservation of the collections in its digital archive. In this paper the reference to preservation policies in various standards is compared with a set of publicly available preservation policies, showing that there is a big gap between theory and practice. Recent work done in the European project SCAPE (http://www.scape-project.eu/) in building a Catalogue of Policy Elements could contribute to bridging this gap. The paper concludes with suggestions to further develop the practical use of preservation policies by aligning them to the maturity level of the organization