Digital Readiness Levels
The Digital Readiness Levels are a structured roadmap for public history organizations to plan and sustainably grow their digital initiatives in order to improve access to collections.
| Focus Area | Bronze | Silver | Gold |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laying a strong foundation | Putting it into practice | Refining and sustaining | |
| Plan and Prioritize | Set goals for digital work that fit the organization's mission and policies. Adopt a digital mission statement or revise existing mission statement to include digital work. | Identify and prioritize potential digital projects. Make a digital project plan that includes roles, activities, required resources and partners. | Adopt a digital collection development policy or revise existing policy to include digitized and born digital content. |
| Obtain Permissions | Create and use permission forms and donor agreements that include specific language for the use of digitized and born digital content or modify existing forms. | Evaluate copyright status of content. Identify items with access restrictions or concerns, including privacy, ethical, or cultural considerations. | Assign standardized rights statements or Creative Commons licenses for collection items. Adopt a takedown policy and, if applicable, a statement on harmful content. |
| Digitize | Determine standards and procedures to be used to digitize physical materials or process born digital content. | Using identified standards, undertake digitization or born-digital processing work either in-house or with an appropriate vendor or partner. | Use a quality control checklist to review content and confirm it meets identified standards. |
| Describe | Adopt a consistent naming convention for digital files. Determine standards to be used to describe digital content. | Using identified standards, create basic descriptive metadata for terms. | Develop a data dictionary and use controlled vocabularies to standardize metadata. |
| Share | Review goals and options for providing access to content. Choose an access platform or system that meets identified needs. | Make items and associated descriptive information available for discovery and repurposing. | Implement techniques to support accessibility of online content, including alt text, transcripts, and other best practices. |
| Store and Maintain | Create and maintain a collection-level inventory of digital content. | Store at least two, preferably three, copies of each primary file and related metadata, with one copy stored off-site. Check and refresh storage media on a regular schedule. | Plan for future storage needs. Use software tools to check file integrity. |
| Evaluate | Identify primary users and ways to engage them with digital content. | Collect data and stories about how digital content is stored. | Use collected data and stories to inform future collection development, outreach, and programming. Share knowledge with other practitioners to build community around digital work. |
