Bronze Level

Laying a strong foundation

Plan and Prioritize

• Articulate your organization’s goals for digital work.
• Develop a digital mission statement.
• Assess collections and prioritize potential digital projects.
• Assess and document organization’s strengths and weaknesses in caring for digital collections.

For A/V materials

• For audiovisual materials, create an item-level inventory of analog and digital collections.
• Identify the most fragile and unique A/V assets in your collections.

Obtain Permissions

• Adopt deed of gift form includes language about online access to digitized and born-digital streaming content, downloading, and re-use or update existing deed of gift form.
• If creating new digital content, such as oral history interviews, use a permission form that includes language about online access, or update existing permission forms.

Digitize

• Identify the resolution, color, bit depth, file format, and other standards you will use to digitize materials.
• Choose equipment for reformatting, identify partnerships, or select an appropriate vendor.

For A/V materials

• Identify the sample rate, bit rate, codec, wrapper, and other standards you will use to digitize materials.

Describe

• Adopt a file naming convention and document it.
• Determine the metadata standard you will use and how the metadata fields apply to your collections.

Share

• Review options for providing access to digital content.
• Choose access options that meet your needs and goals.

Store and Maintain

• 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.

Evaluate

• Define user groups and their information needs.
• Develop outreach ideas, plans or strategies.
• Revisit original project goals and determine if project goals were reached.

Silver Level

Putting it into practice

Plan and Prioritize

• Create a detailed plan for a high-priority digital project.
  • Determine if your project will be completed in-house, by a vendor, or a combination.
• Determine resources needed to support your project plan.
  • Identify roles and responsibilities, who might fill them and if you will need new staff or volunteers.
• Get input from partners as you develop the plan.

Obtain Permissions

• Gather existing documentation that may inform copyright and permissions: deeds of gift, donor permission forms, or correspondence with donors.
• Identify items not covered by copyright (in the public domain).
• Identify items potentially covered by copyright and make determinations about appropriate access.
• Review items to determine whether privacy, ethical, or cultural considerations will determine appropriate access.

Digitize

• Prepare physical materials for reformatting.
•  Complete a pilot project. Digitize a handful of items to check your settings and make sure  the standards you identified will give you the results you want.
• Document your workflow. Create a step-by-step outline of your digitization procedures.

Describe

• Create metadata for items.

Share

• Add digital collection items and related metadata to your CMS or other identified access option(s).
• Identify partnership opportunities to make your items more widely discoverable.

Store and Maintain

• Move copies of files to their on-site and off-site storage locations.
• Implement a plan for checking and refreshing storage media on a regular schedule.
• Develop a plan for checking file integrity (fixity).

Evaluate

• Gather information about how your collections are being used, such as research inquiries or reproduction requests.
• Consider using tools such as Google Analytics or Facebook Page Insights to gather data about views and searches.

Gold Level

Refining and sustaining

Plan and Prioritize

• Gather ideas and examples of digital collection development policies that include both born-digital and digitized analog collections.
• Draft a digital collection development policy and obtain feedback from stakeholders.
• Finalize and adopt the policy.

Obtain Permissions

• Use standardized rights statements or Creative Commons licenses to describe the copyright status of digital items.
• Develop a takedown policy.
• Develop a statement or notice about potentially harmful content.

Digitize

• Develop a list of what to check during a quality control review.
• Determine who is responsible for quality control.
• Use a log to track digitization work and quality control reviews.

Describe

• Identify and/or create controlled vocabulary lists to use when creating metadata.
• Create a data dictionary to document the standards you will use for metadata.

Share

• Provide alternative text descriptions for all visual images made available online.
• Provide searchable full text for all text materials made available online.
• Provide transcripts or captions for all audio and video recordings shared online.

Store and Maintain

• Document your storage decisions. Where is it? Who can access it? How?
• Implement plan for checking file integrity (fixity).
• Document procedures used for any file checking tools and perform checks on a regular schedule.

Evaluate

• Document lessons learned and ideas for how to apply what you’ve learned to future projects.
• Connect with other practitioners engaged in digital work