Digital preservation policies: mapping of legal aspects in Brazil and Mozambique

Abstract

Aiming to bring up the state of the art of Digital Preservation Policies to raise more institutional and/or governmental actions and deepen the academic debate around access to digital information that, in itself, supports the decision-making process, a mapping of legal aspects as part of the basic requirements for the formulation of a Digital Preservation Policy was made. The work is part of a qualitative, exploratory approach, materialized by bibliographic and documentary research, having explored theoretical texts from books and articles from scientific journals, as well as legal texts, from the Constitution of the Republic of each country, laws and decrees that allowed the construction of the theoretical framework oriented towards the digital object, digital preservation and the digital preservation policy. The material collected through observation underwent a process of categorization and systematization and was subsequently treated based on the content analysis method. It was found that Brazil and Mozambique have norms that circumscribe Digital Preservation and that can guide the construction of institutional and/or national Digital Preservation Policies, however, in both realities, no specific legal instrument that regulates the matter was identified. In the Brazilian context, Digital Preservation Policies have been developed, particularly in universities, in response to the demands caused by the continuous evolution of Information and Communication Technologies. In the set of instruments related to digital preservation, there are terminological jumble between “conservation and preservation; electronic and digital” and other similar terms, with greater incidence in the Mozambican context. It should be noted that, in Mozambique, there is talk of digital transformation (through digitization), but there is no mention of Digital Preservation and the guidelines related to this process. However, it is concluded that the inexistence of a Digital Preservation Policy (national) in Mozambique cannot inhibit institutions from moving forward with the elaboration of institutional policies that base and outline the guidelines of professional action in a process that makes the preservation of information in the long term effective and accessible with guarantees of authenticity and integrity.