Appendix H: Checklist of Key Activities
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