The Murray Research Archive’s policy for digital archiving is part of the institution's general mission to preserve all of its archival collections and to ensure their availability for current and future use. More specifically, this policy for preserving our digital data collections is meant to ensure continued access to born digital and digitized data, to ensure their authenticity, and to maintain data quality using the best digital archival practice.
The Archive's digital archival procedure consists of:
Daily Data Backup
In addition to the backup media kept in the server room for quick restoration of data when needed, the Archive also uses the Harvard Depository to keep copies of backup media off-site. The Harvard Depository is a climate-controlled storage and retrieval facility designed for just this kind of long-term preservation. Periodically, the Murray Research Archive will update the media transport and replacement schedule with the Depository in order to maintain the continued quality of the backups and the efficiency of data restoration.
To ensure long-term continual access to digital materials when required hardware, software, and other technologies evolve over time, a systematic data migration plan has been designed. Following this plan, the Murray Research Archive will move data from any storage media, data format and associated hardware and/or software that are becoming obsolete to new media, format, hardware, and/or software that are or are becoming standard or currently considered best practice. The Murray Research Archive will also have an annual review of the media, format, hardware and software that are used in our data backup and storage, and will have the budgetary means to migrate data when necessary. The data status review and migration schedule will additionally be recorded with Harvard's Records Management Office, so that important maintenance dates for our data stored in the Harvard Depository will be monitored and proper schedules will be maintained.
For material accepted into the MRA holdings, and distributed through the Murray Research Archive (as reflected in the data citation, and provenance information) the MRA provides full archival services:
Preservation of Materials Deposited in the IQSS DVN
The Henry A. Murray Archive, through its endowment, supports permanent bit-level preservation of all social science research studies directly deposited in the IQSS Dataverse Network.
Specifically, the MRA has made a commitment to Dataverse owners to maintain on-line storage, backup, and media migration for up to 10 TB of material deposited in IQSS DVN. This provides capacity more than sufficient for the entire collection size of any major U.S. social science data archives (e.g. ICPSR, the Roper Center, the Odum Institute). This capacity is sufficient for many times the current holdings of the IQSS DVN, and we project this to be sufficient for new additions DVN's to social science data collections for the foreseeable future.
Notwithstanding the MRA's commitment to supporting bit-level storage and backup capacity, the MRA cannot guarantee the usability, quality, accessibility, usability, or permanent archiving of data that it does not distribute. All questions about finding, using and archiving data distributed by others in the IQSS DVN network should be referred to individual dataverse owners. Owners of individual dataverses have sole control over selection of materials, choice of archival practices, documentation, access policies, usability, and formatting of all material in these dataverses; and individual dataverse owners may choose to permanently remove or modify data stored in these dataverses.
Please also click here to see our data usage policies
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