VAULT is CCA’s digital archive. Its purpose is to preserve the intellectual and creative output of the institution. The Libraries strive to make VAULT a useful service to academic programs and college departments, as well as external parties. However, we cannot afford to provide perpetual access to everything contributed to VAULT. Our aim is to preserve distinguished works that offer demonstrable, continuing value to the CCA community while removing other works from the archive in a responsible, transparent manner.

The Retention Period

All works affiliated with academic programs in VAULT are retained for at least seven years, to align with the Institutional Data Policy.

Annually, we review VAULT for items older than the retention period. We exclude items that pose continuing value (see the Exceptions below). Exempt items may be migrated from academic program collections to archival ones. The purpose of this is to separate the functional, focused design of the academic program collections from historically important items that relate less to a program’s day-to-day operations.

Items not exempt undergo the deaccession procedures described below.

Where possible, we contact the owners or creators of items in VAULT that are scheduled to be deleted with instructions on how to export their works. We give notice at least six months prior to deletion. There are two caveats to this procedure:

• Due to account management issues beyond the Libraries’ control and inconsistencies with VAULT’s software, we are not always able to ascertain the owner of uploaded works
• The number of works to be removed may be enormous, involving thousands of individual records and terabytes of data, so we cannot guarantee individualized support for each person wishing to export content

Once items are identified for deaccession and the requisite six months pass, a bulk operation removes their present and all previous versions from the archive.

We exclude items that pose continuing value from the retention procedures where possible. Some properties of items that may exempt them from being removed include:

• Winning awards
• Historical importance
• Being marked by faculty or administrators as "high quality"
• Relation to an event, such as an exhibition or gallery showing
• Syllabi in the Syllabus Collection

An item whose retention period expires is considered exempt if any litigation, claim, negotiation, audit, public information request, administrative review, or other action involving the record is initiated; its removal shall not occur until the completion of the action and the resolution of all issues that arise from it.