This section provides an overview of the recommended steps for designing, building, and maintaining a DAR. Some of the elements covered are examined in more detail in the “More on Information Gathering”, “Template for Building a Digital Asset Register”, and “Hints and Tips” Sections. Use this section to help plan how you will build your DAR. The main steps and activities are outlined in the following:

1. Identify Your Motivations for Building a DAR
2. Setting the Scope
3. Make a Plan for Building Your DAR
4. Gathering and Adding Information
5. Using Your DAR
6. Updating Your DAR
7. Reviewing Your DAR

1. Identify Your Motivations for Building a DAR

Having a clear understanding of why you are building a DAR, what it will be used for, and who will use it, helps to ensure you produce a register that is effective, functional, and straightforward to maintain. Take time to consider the following questions, and to document the answers, at the beginning of the process:

• What issues do you hope to address with your DAR?
• What opportunities do you hope to create?
• How will the DAR be used?
• Who will use the DAR?
• Are there any other interested parties to consider? (e.g. content creators or holders, managers or executives, IT colleagues)

You may wish to answer these questions on your own, or to invite other interested parties to contribute. After answering these questions, you may wish to use the information to develop a set of guiding principles to guide the development of your DAR.

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2. Setting the Scope

Being clear about the scope of the content to be documented in the DAR is essential. Without clear scoping, critical content may not be included, or the DAR may be populated with lots of extraneous information. When setting the scope, it is important to consider what content will be included, as well as what information should be collected about that content. When first building your DAR, you may wish to err on the side of a broad but shallow register to ensure nothing important is missed. The scope can then be tightened, and more detailed information captured as the DAR is updated.

Answering the following questions, and documenting the answers, can help with setting the scope:

• What content should be included within the DAR? For example:
  • Born-digital content and/or digitized content?
  • Only digital content currently managed by the archive/library/digital preservation team, all digital content produced by the organization that will require preservation. (e.g. records in current use, web content, social media data, etc.), or some other defined grouping?
  • Digital content generated by the organization and/or digital content received from external depositors?
• How will organizational culture affect your ability to capture information for the DAR?
  • Is there a clear mandate for preservation and/or is it a priority for the organization? If yes, it should be straightforward to engage colleagues in contributing to the gathering of information. No mandate and/or executive and managerial support can be a barrier to information gathering.
• What resources (time, tools, staffing, and skills) do you have available for undertaking this work? If they are limited, you may need to aim for a tightly scoped DAR.
• Are there types of content that need to be prioritized as they have a high-risk profile? For example, if they are critical organizationally or they are stored on unreliable/unstable storage media.
• Are there any “low-hanging fruit” that would be easy to capture information on first? For example, documenting all digitized material because it is relatively homogenous, or all born-digital material as it is stored in a single location.

As with identifying motivations (above), while you may be able to complete a scoping exercise on your own, it may be useful to include interested parties in the process.

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3. Make a Plan for Building Your DAR

Once you have established the motivations and scope for your DAR, you should then develop a plan for how to achieve these aims in practice. At a minimum, your plan should cover the following:

• Clearly identified roles and responsibilities for designing the DAR, gathering information, ongoing management, and review.
  • It is important to carefully consider who should be involved and when. You should look to balance the advocacy benefits of getting other colleagues involved and the potential complications this may add to the process.
• The format that will be used for the DAR, and a template design. Ideally, this will also include documenting the various column headings/data elements and defining the information to be captured in each. More detailed guidance on this process is included in the section “Template for Building a Digital Asset Register” later in the toolkit.
  • Make sure to consider potential duplication of information that is held in other systems, and whether or not the inclusion of this information is necessary to facilitate the intended uses of the DAR. For example, some organizations find it useful to gather a small amount of provenance information within their DAR, to ensure it is easy to access and is recorded consistently across digital content. If, however, you already have robust accessioning processes in place that record the information in an accessible register or system, then there is little point in duplicating this in the DAR.
• The Who, What, When, Where, and How of the information gathering phase:
  • Who will carry out the information gathering and who will they need to talk to/ask for information?
  • What information needs to be gathered?
  • When will the information gathering take place?
  • Where will the information be gathered? Will meeting space be required for interviews? Do you need access to survey and/or characterization tools? Will you gather information in a separate document before processing and entering it into the DAR?
  • How will you gather the information? Will you interview colleagues? Will you circulate a survey? Will you use characterization tools to gather information from various storage areas? Will you need to analyze data from existing systems, e.g. accession records or catalogue records?

It is also important to consider if you will need to gain approval for your plan. Having the plan approved by your line or program manager will provide a mandate for carrying-out the work, which may help to prioritize it. Having the plan approved by a senior manager may also help smooth the information gathering process by providing a directive that will motivate colleagues to participate.

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4. Gathering and Adding Information

Your plan developed in the previous step should clearly describe your approach to gathering information for your DAR. This will likely be the most time-consuming and intensive step of building it. The following section of this toolkit will examine possible information gathering techniques in more detail, but they might include the following:

• Extracting information from existing resources, such as deposit agreements, accession records, catalogues, digital repository systems or other documentation. These may be held digitally, but in some cases, you may need to consult paper records.
• Interviews with colleagues to gather information on digital content they produce and/or manage.
• Circulating a survey to capture information on what digital content is produced and/or managed across the organization.
• Using characterization tools to survey digital content currently held on archive drives, shared drives, or other storage areas.
• Surveying physical media that has been included with deposited content but has not yet been transferred to the organization’s storage.

You may wish to gather information in an intermediary document before processing it for inclusion in the digital asset register. This can be particularly helpful if your DAR is highly structured and utilizes techniques such as agreed lists of terms to be used.

When adding information, try to be consistent in the minimum level of detail included and also adhere to any guidance you have developed. When adding information to your DAR for the first time, you might find yourself updating and refining the initial guidance based on the lessons learned during the information gathering and the quality and completeness of the data that was collected. Continuous improvement of resources is always to be encouraged but do make sure to update the relevant documentation or guidance.

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5. Using Your DAR

Once you have added all of the information to your DAR, you will be able to use it as a core resource to support your digital preservation activities. In particular, there are two key types of activities DARs are used to help with. These are:

• For planning and collections management. This can include:
  • Documenting where content is stored.
  • Helping to locate content when you need to provide access. This is generally for content prior to its ingest into a repository system. This process may also include checking if there are any reasons to deny or limit access, due to sensitive data or restrictions relating to intellectual property rights.
  • Planning for storage needs by tracking content growth over time.
  • Documenting risks to digital content, including identifying common risks which you should take action to address.
  • Planning and managing the ingest of content into a digital preservation repository. In particular, a DAR can be used for prioritizing content for ingest based on criteria such as risk profile and format types.
  • Managing retention and disposal.

• For advocacy and reporting purposes. This can include:
  • Producing figures and charts, for example showing progress over time (e.g. content growth, amount of content processed, or changes in the types of content being collected). This information can be useful for tasks such as annual reporting.
  • Making the extent of digital content evident and also aiding with transparency in relation to the amount of digital preservation work being undertaken. Summary visualizations can be particularly effective in highlighting digital content that might otherwise be “invisible” to colleagues.
  • Communicating with colleagues, in particular facilitating discussions with IT colleagues as you will be able to be clearer and more specific about requirements for storage, hardware, software, and other technical infrastructure.
  • Supporting requests for prioritization of digital preservation activities and making the case for additional resources.

The information captured within your DAR may also be useful for activities such as applying for accreditation and measuring capacity and capabilities with tools such as maturity models. Finally, your DAR can be a great tool to help new members of staff joining your team become familiar with your organization’s digital content and the types of digital content they will be working with.

You may find this list of potential uses helpful when considering your motivations for creating a DAR and setting its scope.

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6. Updating Your DAR

It is important that your DAR is kept up-to-date and does not lie dormant. Making a clear plan for updating it on a regular basis will ensure it remains accurate and relevant. How you approach updates will depend on a number of factors including your organization’s type and culture, when and how new digital content is created or received, and how much time and resources you have available to put towards the activity. There is no one correct way to approach updating your DAR, but you may consider a method similar to one of the following:

• Adding information at the point of acquiring and/or accessioning new digital content or deposit.
• At a regular time, each week or month, e.g. setting aside a regular afternoon slot for updating the information.
• As part of a regular content audit process, e.g. a quarterly survey of physical media.
• At regular points in the year if your organization follows a particular cycle of activity, e.g. at the end of each term in a university context or the end of an exhibition or tour if you work in the arts.

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7. Reviewing Your DAR

It is important to review your DAR from time to time to ensure that it is still fit for purpose and that information is being added in a consistent and suitable manner. If multiple people are updating it , you may wish to identify a person or small group of people to have editorial control of the register to oversee the quality of information captured, with checks carried out on a regular schedule.

Less frequent, but more in-depth reviews are also recommended to revisit the purposes of the DAR, its scope, and structure. These reviews may be triggered by significant changes in digital preservation practice or linked to a policy review or new planning exercise. For these reviews, you may wish to work through a set of similar steps as described in this toolkit for first building a DAR.

Finally, if you reach a point where all of your digital content has been ingested into a repository system, you may find that maintaining a DAR has become redundant. It is likely that all of the information that would be entered into and retrieved from the DAR is now managed by the repository or held in other systems such as those for accessioning and cataloguing. If this is achieved, you can make the decision to cease active use of the DAR. You should also consider at this point whether it would be helpful to retain the DAR as an institutional record and a back-up of information held elsewhere or, particularly if the DAR contains sensitive information, if it should be disposed of.

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This section highlights some of the key pieces of advice covered later in this toolkit, you might use these to ensure you set off in the right direction for creating your Digital Asset Register (DAR). You may wish to summarize some of these points and other relevant requirements into a set of guiding principles to inform the creation of your DAR. This will allow you to refer back to these throughout the process to ensure you are meeting the aims you set out.

No assigned responsibilities for managing, updating, and reviewing the DAR.

This section provides an overview and introduction to DARs and how they can be used. Use this to find out what DARs are and why you might want one.

What is a Digital Asset Register?

A DAR is a tool for gathering information about digital content to support an understanding of the digital content held by an organization, and to facilitate efficient management of its preservation. It will capture information such as a brief description of digital content, where content is stored, its size, what formats are included, and who holds intellectual property rights. A DAR might take the form of a spreadsheet, a database, or another format that is useful for practitioners.

A DAR provides an overarching view of digital content that helps practitioners to identify gaps, overlap, related risks, and other information useful to making preservation decisions and managing content over time. The information held in a DAR can also be useful when making the case for digital preservation, as it allows the generation of key statistics about the content.

A DAR, as a high-level summary used for managing content, exists at one end of the spectrum of the information you will need to help manage digital content. At the other end of the spectrum, you may look to maintain item level metadata in what can be referred to as “File Manifests”. These capture detailed metadata about individual files that can include the file’s name, location, size, and format.

Why Build a Digital Asset Register?

Building a DAR can bring many benefits in relation to the management of digital content. By its nature, digital content is ephemeral. There is no easily identifiable “original” in the way there can be for physical, analogue records. Digital files contain binary information on storage media that is easy to replicate and requires software and hardware to be able to interpret it. To help manage this less tangible content, we need new ways to record information about what we have, where it is stored, and what we need to do to preserve it over time.

With these issues in mind, perhaps the primary benefit of a DAR is the ability to gain intellectual control of digital content held by your organization. Carrying out a survey to gather the information for your DAR will allow a unique opportunity to “get to know'' your digital content. You will get a better “big picture” understanding of the landscape of your digital content, whilst also gathering useful data on content types, file formats, intellectual property rights, risks, and more.

It also allows you to capture a view of your digital content in a “non-systems centric” way. This means bringing together information by intellectual grouping, e.g. by accession, collection, or series, rather than capturing simple information such as how many files are held in a particular storage area, repository, or digital asset management system.

Building a DAR can also facilitate better management of digital content by:

• Capturing important information in one place that might otherwise be scattered across accession records, paper documentation, catalogues, or not captured at all.
• Acting as a finding aid for content not yet fully processed.
• Providing information needed to plan and prioritize ingest and processing of digital content.
• Facilitating retention decisions and processes.
• Establishing clear responsibilities for the management and preservation of digital content.

Building a DAR also brings a range of potential advocacy benefits, allowing engagement with a wide range of colleagues and providing a reason to discuss the importance of digital content and how it is managed. Due to its lack of physical presence, digital content can sometimes be “invisible” to those not working with them directly. The information and statistics that can be generated from a DAR can help to convey their extent. Ultimately, the resulting DAR can also help frame the digital content as an organizational asset, and the information it contains can be used to make the case for additional resources for digital preservation. Additionally, it provides a concrete reason to request the time and resources required to complete a full survey to assess the extent of your digital content. Without a defined and practical end product like a DAR, it can be difficult to persuade decision makers of the importance of this process.

Finally, you may wish to build a DAR as it is a recognized good practice activity that is recommended by a number of accreditation and bench-marking processes. In the UK, a DAR is a useful tool to help support Archive Service Accreditation, providing information needed for the application, as well as being a demonstration of robust management practices. The development and use of a DAR is also mentioned in the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM), and building your own will aid in leveling-up your digital preservation capabilities. These requirements can also, in turn, feed into advocacy activities, showing the importance of a DAR and how its development and use will reflect well on the organization’s digital preservation activities.

This Toolkit aims to offer practical guidance on how to build, maintain, and use a Digital Asset Register (DAR). It starts by taking you through what a DAR is, why you may wish to build one, and who this toolkit is aimed at. Subsequent sections detail what makes a good DAR, a step-by-step guide to developing one, an example template, further details about information gathering, and using and updating your DAR.

This Toolkit is for anyone who would like to create a DAR to aid their digital preservation activities. It is targeted at practitioners who are working with digital resources and would like a method for gaining better intellectual control of their digital content. The Toolkit is primarily aimed at those developing a DAR for the first time, but it will also be useful for those wishing to review and enhance an existing one.

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for building a DAR. How you build it will depend on your own context and will need to take account of the types of content to be preserved, what it will be used for, and the wider organizational context. This Toolkit seeks to guide you through a process which will help you to understand what you need from your DAR and how to build and maintain a register that will meet those requirements.

This toolkit was developed by the Digital Preservation Coalition, with support and funding from The National Archives (UK). Much of the guidance included here was gathered from experienced digital preservation practitioners during a series of focus groups held in November 2023. Many thanks to all who participated in the focus groups, for all of the excellent information and advice provided, and to The National Archives (UK) for their continued generous support for the development of digital preservation good practice.

	Introduction An overview and introduction to DARs and how they can be used. Use this to find out what DARs are and why you might want one.
	What Makes a Good Digital Asset Register? Information on what makes a good (and bad) DAR. Use this to understand key elements of good practice for creating your DAR.
	Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Digital Asset Register A step by step guide to designing, developing, using, and maintaining you DAR. Use this to plan out how you will build and manage your DAR.
	Template for Building a Digital Asset Register A detailed guide to a recommended structure for your DAR, including general tips and advice on format and storage. Use this to help establish the structure and format of your DAR.
	More on Information Gathering Guidance on the information gathering methods you might use to gather the data for your DAR. Use this to find out how to gather the necessary information to populate your DAR.
	Useful Resources A list of additional resources that can help with planning, building, and maintaining your DAR. Use this as a reference point for further reading on the subject.

This is version 1 of the Digital Asset Register Toolkit (released May 2024). Do contact us with any comments and feedback to help us improve this toolkit.

Attributions for the Digital Asset Register Toolkit should be as follows:
Digital Preservation Coalition, Digital Asset Register Toolkit, 1st Edition, , © 2024

Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM)

DPC's Rapid Assessment Model (version 3) (PDF) - This document includes introductory information about the history and structure of the model, details of how it should be used, and the model itself. The document also includes a RAM worksheet that can be printed out and used to carry out a RAM assessment.

DPC RAM assessment spreadsheet (XLSX) - This assessment spreadsheet can be used to record the results of an assessment using DPC RAM. As well as recording your assessment (current and target levels as well as additional context), it also provides visualizations of your results and a new tab which can be used to visualize results over time.

Forward plan template

DPC RAM Forward plan template (DOCX) - This template can be used to create a forward plan based on gaps identified by a RAM assessment. The template can be adapted and edited to suit individual needs.

Translations

Translations of DPC RAM and our other resources are carried out by volunteers within the community. Translations of the current version of DPC RAM will be added to this page as they are made available.

Translations of previous versions of DPC RAM are available. 

See our acknowledgements page for further details on our translators and information on how to contribute.

Changes from Version 2 to Version 3

This version of the Model shows key changes in Version 3 which have been highlighted in yellow.

Translations

Translations of DPC RAM and our other resources are carried out by volunteers within the community. Translations of the current version of DPC RAM will be added to this page as they are made available.

Translations of previous versions of DPC RAM are also available. 

See our acknowledgements page for further details on our translators and information on how to contribute.

Watch Introductory Video 

This video gives a 10 minute introduction to DPC RAM and includes information on what it is, why we created it and how to use it.

DPC Members are able to access summary information about RAM assessments received from the membership as a whole. 

Log in to the DPC website to view this information.

The DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM) is a digital preservation maturity modelling tool that has been designed to enable rapid benchmarking of an organization’s digital preservation capability and facilitate continuous improvement over time. 

The DPC RAM model and a spreadsheet for recording and visualizing results can be downloaded here.

Further resources relating to DPC RAM include an introductory video explaining what the model is and how to use it, a 'Level up' resource which provides tips for moving forward with each section of RAM, an FAQ and benchmarking information for DPC Members, and further resources and case studies showing how RAM has been used in the digital preservation community.

	Introduction An introduction to DPC RAM. Watch this short video to find out more about DPC RAM and how to use it.
	Download DPC RAM Download RAM and associated resources. Get a copy of DPC RAM, a worksheet to enter your results and a template to use to create a forward plan. Translations of DPC RAM will also be available here.
	Level up with RAM How to level up with DPC RAM. Find a range of useful tips, resources and case studies to help you make progress with each of the sections of DPC RAM.
	FAQ for DPC Members  DPC Member questions answered. Find out how the DPC uses DPC RAM with its Members, what support you can get from us and what we do with the information you share with us.
	Benchmarking Compare your RAM assessment with other DPC Members (DPC Members only). Use these statistics and reports to see how your RAM assessment compares with other DPC Members.
	Further resources and case studies A list of additional resources and case studies relating to DPC RAM. Use this to find out how others have used DPC RAM.

This model was originally developed in conjunction with the UK Nuclear Decommissioning Authority.

Do contact us with comments and feedback to help us improve DPC RAM.

This section of the guide provides information to help you create documentation, from understanding how things are done at your own organization, to selecting the right tool and creating illustrations.

• Understanding your own organization

• Tips for writing documentation

• Tools and platforms

• Templates and style guides

• Illustrations and diagrams

• Testing documentation

Understanding your own organization

Organizations create and manage their documentation in a number of different ways using a range of tools and platforms. Organizations may have particular processes in place that relate to documentation - for example around testing, communication, and sign off. It is important to find an approach that works for your own context and for that reason, there is some exploratory ground work that you should do to ensure that you approach the task in the right way.

• What digital preservation documentation already exists? It is likely that there is already some documentation within your organization. Find out what is out there already: Where is it? Who owns it? Is it up to date? What format is it in? Where are the gaps? Talk to colleagues to help answer these questions - there may be existing documentation that you don’t know about. Make sure to explain what types of materials can be covered by the term “documentation”. Colleagues may have their own resources that they do not realize fall into this category (for example informal checklists or ‘cheat sheets’ that document processes). 

• What is the process for creating documentation within your organization or department? Who needs to be involved? Is sign off or approval of the documentation required or encouraged? Having a formal procedure to follow can help ensure consistency and quality.

• Which tools, platforms, and file formats are used for creating documentation within your organization? Speak to colleagues about what works and doesn’t work and also find out how it is done in other departments - there may be different practices across your organization that you can learn from. 

• Are there documentation style guides or templates in place within your organization? You may be able to make use of these or adapt them to suit your own purposes.

Tips for writing documentation

• Take a flexible approach - be prepared to adapt your documentation as you go along in order to find a style that works for you and your intended audience.

• Try to get the basic structure of your documentation right before you start to fill in too many details - you may find it helpful to do this collaboratively or get feedback from colleagues at an early stage.

• A helpful tip from Write The Docs is to try to ensure your documentation is ‘skimmable’ - documentation can be long (often by necessity), and users are unlikely to want to read it all in a linear fashion. Having clear headings, a consistent style and keywords appearing as early on in paragraphs and list items as possible, will help a user quickly locate the section they are interested in.

• Your documentation should be easy to understand and interpret - try to write in ‘plain language’ where possible. See for example this guidance from New South Wales government. Also consider the accessibility of your documentation. There is a helpful guidance on writing accessible and inclusive content from the Australian Government.

• Consider the level of detail of your documentation - if documenting a process, typically it should describe what to do and how to do it. In some cases though, it might also be helpful to briefly describe why a process is being run or why a particular decision has been made. Justification for procedures can be useful in getting staff on board as they can see the rationale and benefit of the effort required. 

Tools and platforms for creating and providing access to documentation

There are many different tools and platforms that could be used to create and provide access to documentation and these all come with their own pros and cons. Establish what you have access to within your organization and consider what will best meet the needs of your audience. 

Some additional points to consider when deciding on a tool or methodology for creating and updating documentation:

• Who needs to be able to update documentation? One person or multiple people? If multiple people, how will this be managed?

• Is there a culture of printing documentation out in your organization? If so, can you use a platform that builds value into using the live (and therefore most up-to-date) version?

• How will you provide access to the documentation? Can you use a platform that displays all the available documentation in a logical and intuitive way, allowing a user to easily see all current versions of documentation and allowing for interlinking or cross-referencing between them?

• Do you need to make different elements of your documentation available for different audiences? Do you have a tool or platform that allows you to implement these access permissions?

• How frequently will your documentation need to be updated? If frequently, don’t put barriers in the way with the tools and platforms that are used (for example a process that requires documentation to be converted to pdf and uploaded somewhere after each update).

• Do previous versions of documentation need to be saved/retained? Either to be preserved as a record of what happened at a particular point in time, or to be able to roll back to a previous version where appropriate? If you have these needs, consider how the tools can support this. The section on updating and versioning documentation discusses this in a little more detail.

• How will you get your documentation out of the platform that it is created and/or hosted on? Plan for your documentation to outlive the platform or format it exists in. Your documentation may need to be preserved for the long term (see ‘Preserving Documentation’ section), and exit strategy should always be considered.

• Who owns the documentation? If you use a tool or platform (such as Google Drive) that assigns ownership of a document to a particular account holder, ensure a process is in place to retain access to this documentation should that individual leave the organization.  

As well as the tool or platform for creating and hosting documentation, you may also wish to employ a project management tool for helping to manage the process of maintaining the documentation. For example for tracking progress, keeping a record of issues or update requests and logging review dates. Focus group participants reported using a range of project management tools to aid the documentation process (for example Jira, Trello and asana).

Find out which tools some of our focus group participants use in our series of interviews. The table below provides an overview of some of the tools and platforms.

For further information about tools for documentation (and in particular, a really clear description of how to use tools such as GitHub and GitLab), take a look at this presentation from Nathan Tallman and Carly Dearborn. The whole presentation is worth watching, but if you are specifically interested in tools, watch from 16:12.

Templates and style guides

As discussed earlier in this guide, one of the characteristics of good documentation is consistency. Consistency of formatting, structure and language are all helpful in increasing usability, particularly with long documents or a large suite of documentation. Consistent use of a particular platform and/or file format is also helpful. A user will quickly become familiar with the style, format and conventions used and this will help them to retrieve the relevant information more efficiently. Some organizations use templates or style guides to help them to achieve this. A template can be useful, particularly in making sure that key navigational and structural elements (e.g. table of contents, page numbering) or information about document history (e.g. owner, creator, date of last update, date of review) are not forgotten.

Your organization may already have a template for documentation, either for your immediate department, a related department (e.g. IT), or a wider context. If your organization favors a particular project management approach or methodology, this may include templates and processes for documenting standard operating procedures. 

You may be interested in looking at the templates developed by the OSSArcFlow project. The Guide to Documenting Born-Digital Archival Workflows provides a template, including a legend for symbols and conventions used in the workflow diagrams that were created by project partners. 

Another useful tool is a style guide. This can be helpful in ensuring consistency in formatting and use of language. 

• Write the Docs has an extensive set of pages relevant to documentation style guides if you are interested in further reading on this topic. 

• The gov.uk style guide includes common sense advice on writing in clear and simple language (even when writing on quite specialist topics).

• The Australian Government also has a helpful style manual which includes (among other things) recommendations for grammar and punctuation and use of plain language.

Illustrations and diagrams

Documentation can be greatly enhanced with the addition of a screenshot or a clear and informative diagram. The presence of both images and text can be helpful where a variety of learning styles, preferences, and abilities are present within your target audience. Note, however, that a heavy reliance on graphical representations of workflows may not be appropriate for those with a visual impairment so do consider whether this information can be conveyed in an alternative way.

Screenshots are easy to create and incorporate into your documentation. They can really help with clarity - for example when describing how a tool should be configured it can be helpful to illustrate this with a screenshot of the relevant dialogue box. Note though that screenshots can become out of date quickly as the tools evolve, and excessive use can make documentation large and unwieldy. 

Diagrams can be particularly effective in helping to explain complex information, decisions or workflows. There are a number of tools available for creating effective diagrams and it can be helpful to look at examples from other organizations too.

Tools

The OSSArcFlow project provides some helpful advice on creating diagrams. The project team used LucidChart to create their workflow diagrams and also provided guidance on conventions to use to illustrate different elements within the workflow. See the OSSArcFlow Guide to Documenting Born-Digital Archival Workflows (page 38 to 41).

Several participants at the focus group meetings reported using Visio to document workflows - this is a useful tool that includes different conventions for different elements of the process. It was also noted that PowerPoint or Google Slides can be used to create simple and effective diagrams and this is sometimes a quick and easy way to get started.

There is further advice on creating diagrams within the Community Owned Workflows resource.

Whichever tool you choose to use to create diagrams, there are some problems and pitfalls to watch out for. Avoid overcrowded diagrams with illegible text. A balance needs to be struck between the amount of information included and the clarity and legibility of the end product. 

Examples

Here are some good sources of examples that you can look at for inspiration:

• OSSArcFlow project - a series of ‘as is’ workflows were created as part of this project and can be viewed here. These workflows were all created using similar tools and conventions.

• Community Owned Workflows (COW) - there are a range of workflow diagrams shared on the COW wiki pages - see for example the diagrams created for the Cloud-based preservation and access workflow for MXF and MPG video from the Wellcome Collection.

Testing documentation

Testing documentation is a great way of getting feedback from your target audience. Let your audience see the documentation that has been created. Ask them if it is clear and understandable. See if they can follow it or if they find any gaps. 

• One focus group member described how they tested their documentation with a colleague in the IT department. Though digital preservation wasn’t a part of their role, IT would need to step in and help if there was a system problem and digital preservation staff were unavailable. Having an IT colleague work through the documentation was really helpful in ensuring that it was clear and gave confidence to both parties that problems could be resolved in an emergency. 

• Another participant tested documentation in an informal way with other members of the Archives team. Doing this helped build up the confidence and awareness of other staff members about digital preservation activities.