This section of the Procurement Toolkit proposes the requirements that should be considered when procuring an IT system (for example, an EDRMS, DAMS or GIS), that may ultimately contain at least some records or digital content that need to be retained beyond the life of the system.
The aim of this work is to provide typical requirements relating to digital preservation that practitioners can contribute to procurement exercises for non-digital preservation systems at their organization. These requirements relate primarily to ensuring that digital content can be extracted from the IT system in question, along with necessary metadata, in a form that can be reused without dependence on that system. Justification is included to show why these requirements are important. Ultimately this work is about ensuring that IT systems purchased today have a digital content exit strategy and do not lock-in data when the system reaches end of life. Note that these requirements may need to be adapted to your local context.
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Digital preservation requirements for procuring IT systems ( download )