Appendix B: Acceptance Criteria Template
The goal of the Acceptance Criteria document is to create and record an actionable plan for transferring, preserving, and viewing the work as outlined by the publisher and preservation partner. All monitoring and changes to the original plan will be recorded in this document.
Name of Preservation Partner
Name of Publisher
URL of original work
Link to Mock-up
Section A: Pre-transfer activities
Preservation objectives
A1. Brief description of the agreed upon goals for this publication - what content and behavioral elements are we attempting to preserve? This is the criteria or basis upon which we will plan and evaluate the preservation activities. [Publisher]
Transfer of content to preservation partner
A2. Describe and document how the package will be collected, e.g. scraped from a website vs publisher delivered by FTP. What is the frequency and volume of transfer? Note any special tools for transfer used. [Preservation Provider]
Describe contents submitted for preservation
Summary
A3. A very general description of content sent to or made available to the preservation provider. e.g. a zip file which contains the contents of an e-book. [Publisher]
Submission information package (For file transfers)
A4-1. Describe in detail the content sent. This is a full description of the file types, what each file or group of files represents and how the files together from the work to be preserved. Include metadata and any information about how the metadata is mapped to the corresponding files. This might be descriptive, technical and/or structural metadata. [Publisher and Preservation Provider together]
Define content sets and starting points (For web transfers)
A4-2. Describe in detail the content made available for web harvester. [Publisher and Preservation Provider together]
Define parameters for full-server disk imaging / VM migration (For emulation)
A4-3. Describe in detail the content made available for imaging and transfer to emulated hardware. [Publisher and Preservation Provider together]
Playback / experience instructions
A5. What should the intended audience be able to do when this archived content is made available? Provide instructions and necessary context for the playback or reading experience of the material submitted. What features are possible with the files included? What is absent or limited? e.g. embedded remote YouTube videos which are not included. Are there software dependencies for playback that are not in the package? e.g. a 3D viewer. [Publisher]
A6. Are there relationships between the components that need to be explained? e.g. the relationship between an EPUB monograph and annotations saved as separate JSON files will need some context about how they were originally connected/presented. [Publisher]
Section B: Preservation activities
Assessment of submitted materials
Archive evaluates contents of a submitted package. This section describes the iterative and final decisions about what to preserve and any concessions made. [Preservation Provider]
Preservability concerns
B1. Document any concerns about the overall preservability of the material e.g. say an EPUB3 package references external JavaScript.
Documented decisions
B2. Make notes on whether changes were made to the original submission package, or when there are decisions around acceptable limitations, or if additional tickets were created during this process.
Preparation for Archiving
B3. Use this section to document the process of converting to a package that can be archived. [Preservation Provider]
Workflow
B4. How was the submitted package reorganized for ingest into the archive? Was anything excluded (e.g. thumbs.db), unzipped, validated, or migrated?
Metadata
B5. Was any metadata added or transformed during the process?
Archived package
B6. Description of the archived package
Access to Archived Copy
Describe how to view the archived copy including a description of the user experience. [Preservation Provider]
How to access
B7. Document how a user can view the preserved copy
Dissemination package
B8. Description of what the user will see in the archive.
UI changes
B9. Description of any changes to the access interface to support presentation of the material
Section C: Assessment activities
Evaluation
These questions will be asked at the end of each cycle in order to feed into the guidelines and to draw out the information inferred in other sections.
Playback / experience
C1. How closely did the archived content available match with the preservation goals and publisher’s requirements / expectations about what would be preserved? Will the intended audience be able to experience this archived content as initially proposed by the publisher?
What was preservable using current tools?
C2. What could and could not be preserved. Explain the constraints – were there technical limitations based on what can be managed using existing tools? or fiscal based on what is financially feasible or possible in the time frame provided? The former might be something like the preservation of embedded YouTube videos, the latter might be user data accessible only by logging in.
Guidelines for better preservability
C3. What could the publisher/author have changed during the creation of the original work to improve the preservability of the material while maintaining the message of the content?
Alternative approaches to consider
C4. What were other approaches considered in determining preservation of the work? What resources would have been necessary to execute an alternative methodology?