How to Use This Toolkit

Digital readiness is defined by WiLS as: “Having the knowledge, tools, resources and infrastructure to provide online public access to archives and historical records.” The Community Archiving Workshop also defines digital readiness as “the ability to preserve obsolete audiovisual formats and provide long-term storage of digital records.” CAW recognizes that online public access is not always possible or preferable for digital audiovisual materials with privacy restrictions or other cultural restrictions.

Digital stewardship is defined by the Society of American Archivists as “the management of digital objects throughout their life cycle to facilitate their long-term preservation and use.”

A digital project is defined by WiLS and CAW as any project that involves the creation, storage, or management of digital files. Throughout the Toolkit, we use the phrase “digital projects” as an umbrella term to encompass digitization as well as digital stewardship, or the ongoing work of maintaining digital collections.

Digital Readiness Levels

The Toolkit focuses on seven topics at the heart of digital cultural heritage work:

• Planning and prioritization: What is your project plan and how will you decide what to digitize?
• Permissions and copyright: How will you know if you can share these materials?
• Digitization: How will you undertake the actual digitization work?
• Description: How will you describe the digitized materials?
• Sharing and access: How will you share what you’ve digitized?
• Storage and maintenance: What is the long-term plan for storing digital materials?
• Evaluation: How will you know that what you set out to do was achieved?

Each of these focus areas is organized into three levels: Bronze, Silver, and Gold. This tiered structure is a way to break down a large and complex process into smaller achievable steps. Together, these seven focus areas and three levels form a structured roadmap to plan and sustainably grow a digital initiative.

Bronze: Laying a Strong Foundation

In this level, you will get your organization ready for successful digital work. You’ll define your goals, shore up your documentation and storage, and understand your options for moving forward.

Silver: Putting it Into Practice

In this level, you will identify, plan, and carry out a small-scale digital project. As you digitize, describe, share, and store a focused group of materials, you’ll test-drive the standards and processes you identified in the Bronze level.

Gold: Refining and Sustaining

In this level, you will strengthen your digital program by adopting key policies and enhance your ongoing digital project work with more advanced standards and procedures.

Of course, these tidy categories and incremental steps are much messier in the real world. Chances are, your organization may be further along in one focus area than another; for instance, you might already be following the Gold-level recommendations for digitizing, but at the Silver level for description, and the Bronze level in other areas. Or maybe you’re all the way to the Gold level with your photograph collections, but just getting started at the Bronze level with audio and video collections. You might set a long-range goal to reach the Gold level in all areas, or you might decide that the Bronze level is the best place for your organization to stay. All of these approaches to digital readiness are perfectly valid! We encourage you to take what is useful to you in this Toolkit, mix and match and repurpose in the ways that you know will work best for your organization and your community.

For a video describing the Digital Readiness Levels and Focus Areas, visit Recollection Wisconsin’s YouTube channel.

Navigating the Toolkit

Each section of the Toolkit opens with a short checklist of key activities for that focus area and level (you can also find all of those key activities together in one big checklist in Appendix H: Key Activities). After that, you’ll see a brief description of each activity, plus links to real-world examples, articles, and tools from other sources that we find particularly helpful.

Working with audiovisual materials such as film, videotape or audiotape? These collections have special challenges for identification, digitization, and preservation. Throughout the Toolkit, you’ll see guidance and resources specific to A/V materials. Many of the overarching principles are the same for any type of collection – make a plan, obtain permission, digitize, create metadata, etc. – but the order of steps might be different for A/V materials. Two of the main tools for assessing your audiovisual collections are the Audiovisual Digital Readiness Self-Assessment Survey and the Audiovisual Inventory Template. If you’re embarking on a project that includes A/V materials, we recommend adding these steps into your navigation of the Toolkit.

The Digital Readiness Self-Assessment Survey may also be adapted for use in any small organization’s planning process, though. If you don’t have A/V materials in your digital project’s future, please still feel free to use the Self-Assessment Survey to guide your work.

The key activities are expanded with more detail in the Audiovisual Digital Readiness Self-Assessment Survey than what you’ll find in the Focus Area sections of the main Toolkit. They cover the same ground but more carefully, so that your organization can fully assess its place in the Digital Readiness Levels. If you’re looking for key activities that are broken out into more process steps, the Self-Assessment is the place to look.

At the end of the Toolkit, you’ll find several printable worksheets. We recommend starting with the Digital Project Planning Worksheet, which will help you plot out the steps needed for any project.

Searching and finding

Looking for a specific topic? Use the search function in this eBook to find a particular word or phrase, or skim the Table of Contents in the left sidebar for subject areas. If you use the search function and go to one of the results pages, press Control + F (Windows) or Command + F (Mac) to find the term on the resulting page.

Using the Digital Readiness Resources: A Hypothetical Scenario

Organization A has a collection of 500 VHS tapes documenting their organization’s history. They aren’t sure of the copyright of some of the tapes. They would like to digitize the tapes and make them available for streaming online. They aren’t sure where to get the equipment to do so, and don’t know what file type they should use, since video files are so large. They aren’t sure how to provide online access to the files since they don’t have a budget for a digital asset management system. They decide to use the Audiovisual Digital Readiness Self-Assessment Survey to help them figure out where to start.

Organization A goes through the self-assessment and determines that they are at Bronze level in Focus Area: Plan and Prioritize, because they have not completed the recommended Key Activity “create an item level inventory.” They determine they are at Bronze in Focus Area: Store and Maintain, because they have not completed the key activities “determine where digital collections are stored” or “create an inventory to track digital collections.” They determine they are a Bronze in Focus Area: Digitize, because they have not completed the recommended step “digitize your most fragile and unique A/V assets.”

After the self-assessment, Organization A determines that they need an item-level inventory of the collection before they can digitize. They call their project the VHS Inventory Project. They use the Toolkit’s Project Planning Worksheet to plan out how to create the inventory. They use the collection inventory template in the Toolkit to create an outline for the inventory. They attend the online community of practice webinars and present the VHS Inventory Project to the community. During the webinar, they meet another local organization with a large meeting room where a workshop could take place. The two organizations decide to hold a local Collection Inventory Day in the workshop space to complete the VHS Inventory Project together. Organization A completes the inventory of all 500 tapes. They review their Digital Readiness Levels, check off the Key Activities completed, and determine that they are now at Silver level in a focus area. They review their priority projects from the Pathway to Digital Readiness Plan and decide to work on developing a plan for digital storage over the next six months. They call the project the Digital Storage Planning Project and the process begins again.

But Where Do I Start?

One of the most common questions we get is “How do I get started on a digital project?” This work can feel overwhelming, even when broken down into manageable steps. We recommend starting small, building partnerships, and connecting with peer organizations as you go.

To that end, we asked some of our partners to complete the sentence “If I could do it all over again, I would…”

• Tackle a smaller group of materials at first
• Make sure two people started the project at the same time so we could help each other
• Start with a clearer plan
• Take the time to sort and research the physical collection before digitizing
• Have firm deadlines to help me stay on track

We hope this comprehensive Toolkit will provide you with the guidance, reassurance wisdom, resources, and direction needed to accomplish your digital projects goals!