Scholars' Mine accepts formats on deposit that have shown to be of an open technology that is easily transformed and not reliant on a single company (i.e. Microsoft, Apple, etc.) to support it indefinitely.

As far as resources and technology permit, Scholars' Mine will take steps to ensure that the files deposited survive uncorrupted and continue to be usable. The steps taken to ensure longterm viability of the materials include:

• nightly production of ASCII text backup, when possible, for those files that are text-based
• nightly incremental backup of files and metadata to the Libraries’ mass storage unit
• bi-weekly backup from the mass storage unit to tape
• bi-monthly export of the metadata and directory structure as a tar file to another system
• storage of magnetic tapes outside of the main library building
• conversion of some file formats upon deposit to more secure file formats
• periodic checking of file integrity to avoid data corruption
• monitoring the technological environment to prepare for file migration as file formats become obsolete or the software needed to run them becomes unavailable

Because the technological environment is changing rapidly, it may not be possible to preserve the usability of every file format that is deposited in Scholars' Mine. The Scholars' Mine staff will make a good-faith effort to maintain the viability of the materials deposited in Scholars' Mine or return them to their authors if unable to do so.

Scholars' Mine is endeavoring to comply with the Open Archival Information System Reference Model and the RLG-OCLC Attributes of a Trusted Digital Repository.