A memória institucional da Escola de Engenharia da UFRGS: uma proposta de preservação digital

Abstract

This study aims to investigate preservation strategies for electronic documents from the Institutional Memory of Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) Engineering School. This collection of electronic documents comprises intellectual works of teachers and staff from the academic unit and it not available in the University’s institutional repository. The adoption of digital preservation strategies is important to ensure integrity, authenticity and access to those documents in the long run. A brief description and historical background of the Engineering School Library as well as the University's is presented. In the literature review, the following topics were discussed: institutional memory, digital repositories, file formats, storage media, digital preservation and widely cited preservation techniques in specialized literature. The study adopted an exploratory profile with qualitative approach. The following data collection tools used in this study were literature review and semi-structured interviewing. Two people were interviewed: the librarian in charge of the Engineering School Library’s technology section and a IT professional with publications on that subject. The results show that the Library adopts some of the strategies, but those need to be documented through a digital preservation policy and a routine manual. The study proposes the media evaluation and its periodical migration (refreshing) as a basic strategy for digital document preservation.