# Preservation areas

Preservation areas are a logical grouping applied to the preserved objects. This grouping allows for:

* **Association to permissions**. So that it determines that users access a specific part of the repository.
* **Limiting the scope of audits / selecting the objects for the audits**. Allowing for the setting of different audit frequencies, according to the importance of each part of the repository.
* **Linking preservation plans**. Allowing applying different submission agreements and setting each one’s associated characteristics, metadata schemas, object conditions, formats, etc.

![](/files/-MjyeW5ZPcVeFXu7UT1Q)

There are some concepts that may be used as the base for the division of the repository in preservation areas:

* Compliance with the different submission agreements.
* Information source.
* Object type. For example: documents, files, sound, web files, and video.
* Access rights to objects. For example: security grants in document access.

These concepts should be considered and combined to generate the preservation areas to configure. The usual quantity of configured preservation areas goes between a few units and a few dozens. In case of preserving material from a lot of different sources, it may be reasonable to generate the areas around another concept, and allow object selection in the catalog through association of source-related metadata descriptors.

{% hint style="info" %}
**Note**: a preservation area may have several preservation plans associated to it, but there may only be one active at a time.
{% endhint %}


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