6 Focus Area 6: Store and Maintain
The activities in this section of the Toolkit will help put your organization in a position to manage your digital content over time, across generations of technology, so that the files you create or collect today can be opened and used 5, 10, or 50 years from now.
STORE AND MAINTAIN: BRONZE LEVEL
| Key Activities |
|---|
| - Establish an inventory to document existing and incoming born-digital collections. |
| - Establish an inventory to document existing and incoming reformatted analog collections. |
| - Develop a plan for storage locations of unmodified primary files and related metadata, both on-site and off-site. |
| - Develop a plan for checking and refreshing storage media on a regular schedule. |
Documenting Digital Collections
Use a collection-level log to document your existing digital collections and any new collections you create or acquire. Creating a list and updating it regularly will give you a big-picture view of the digital collections your organization is responsible for storing and maintaining. This log is not the same as the item-level inventory you may have created in the Plan and Prioritize section; instead, it’s a way to keep track of what you have digitized or acquired in digital form and where you’re storing those files. We’ve included a template for a collection level log in Appendix B.
This information will be useful for creating item-level metadata, estimating the amount of storage space needed for digital collections, budgeting, and future planning. Collection-level descriptions might also be shared with users in finding aids, as part of a catalog record, or on a website providing context for the collection.
Keep in mind that this log is a collection-level snapshot; don’t use it to describe individual items. Oftentimes, digital content doesn’t align into neatly defined collections. If that’s the case, just think in broad categories. You might determine groups based on format or topic (a map collection, a yearbooks collection, an oral history collection) or the source of the content (materials from a donor, a student intern project, photos scanned for researchers).
Types of digital collections to document in your log might include:
- Scanning projects
- Oral history interview projects
- Born-digital collections donated by a community member
- Born-digital materials created by your organization, such as event photos or newsletters
- Materials digitized for exhibits, outreach, or educational activities
- Materials digitized to fill reference requests
Basic information to record in a collection-level log includes:
- A name for the digital collection
- Total number of files in the collection
- Total size of all files in the collection
- File format(s)
- Storage location(s)
- Date of digitization
You may want to include information in your log indicating the current status of the collection, such as Digitization Done, Metadata Done, and/or Ready For Upload. This can be a helpful way of tr