Accessible Preservation: developing an inclusive strategy for management and preservation of born-digital assets

Many born-digital collections are created with access and shareability in mind, shaped by varying technical capacity and resources. At the same time, institutional moves towards digital submission procedures, e.g. university e-theses, can inadvertently encourage compression, encryption, hyperlinked content, and web-optimisation, as depositors mitigate upload constraints or rights management in the digital environment. This poster highlights some early findings from a project looking at e-thesis deposits as a case study for the practical decisions needed to balance inclusivity with stakeholder capacity in repository management. Data is drawn from a survey and discussions designed to understand how and why depositors select file formats for saving and sharing projects, as well as the practical, technical and social implications of this for preservation management of born–digital assets.