Launching our new Digital Preservation Policy

Blog series Collection care

Author Maureen Pennock

Digital Preservation is so much more than just storage. It’s a continuous endeavour integrated into organisational and technological processes throughout the entire digital collection lifecycle, from acquisition to access​. It ensures that digital content remains retrievable, authentic, and accessible over time, addressing the underlying intangibility of intellectual content and the inevitable technological changes that would otherwise present problems in the future. It’s especially challenging for exceptionally diverse digital collections such as ours, with so many underlying and associated dependencies. 

The new policy sets out the underlying principles on how we care for our growing digital collections, to ensure their long-term preservation for future generations.

Four core principles

Preservation at scale necessitates a sustainable approach, underpinned by operational consistency, risk management, and thoughtful pragmatism, all overseen by effective and participatory governance. These four guiding principles are woven throughout the policy and define how we balance ambition with practicality in a complex and evolving digital landscape:

• Thoughtful pragmatism ensures flexibility where it matters most. We take a pragmatic approach, recognising that effective preservation begins early in the digital lifecycle. Our three tiers of preservation capability and two modes of support (passive and active) allow us to meet essential standards from the outset, rather than waiting until content enters a formal preservation system.
• Operational consistency enables efficiency across the organisation. We take a consistent approach through a centralised digital preservation function, ensuring preservation support is embedded in workflows across different operational teamsand content types. This reduces local variations that can otherwise introduce inefficiencies at scale.
• Risk awareness informs our decision-making. We take a risk-informed approach, grounded in the CHARM digital preservation risk framework. This helps us navigate the complexity of preservation risk, balancing organisational needs with proportionate and evidence-based risk responses.
• Sustainability embeds our long-term mandate into everything we do.We apply a triple bottom line perspective of environmental, social, and economic considerations, to ensure our preservation decisions are balanced, responsible, and forward-looking. This extends beyond digital content to include the systems and infrastructure that support it.

The policy is built around these four interdependent principles to shape our overall approach to digital preservation.

A distinctive approach

This policy marks a significant step forward in our strategic alignment with the British Library’s Sustainability Strategy (PDF, 4.9MB), integrating preservation practice with wider commitments to environmental responsibility and long-term stewardship. It also represents a distinctive approach to preservation policy modelling, placing sustainability and operational pragmatism at its core in an approach we hope will resonate across the sector.

Looking ahead

Our new Digital Preservation Policy provides a practical foundation for sustainable digital preservation at scale. It provides clear direction for our future implementations, with a holistic perspective that enables flexibility where it matters most whilst still meeting essential preservation standards.

Read the Digital Preservation Policy in the British Library’s Research Repository.