Create/Choose Your Content – Level 2

What to collect  When planning to preserve digital records, there are many different options and a range of different processes to think about. Your policy from level one stating what you will and won’t collect is a good start, but being clear about what you want to collect, how you will collect it and how you will identify content you want to add to your collections, will help you grow and organise your collections in the best way.

Things to think about 

• What do you want to collect?  

• What will you collect? What will you not collect? 

• Are you collecting everything related to your theme, or only certain topics/ records? Are you only collecting photographs, or content in other formats? Do you want everything you can find, or do you only want records from certain sources? 

• Is this material already collected somewhere else? If so, does it need to be added to your collection (most likely not)? 

• Do you need to focus on certain types of data or specific file formats? 

• Do you already have a collection? If so,  

• Do you want to keep everything you have? 

• Are there gaps in your collection you would like to fill? Is it possible to fill them?  

• How will you collect? 

• Do community members donate content? 

• Do you need to locate content and ask for it to be donated? 

• Are you creating your own content, such as oral history recordings? 

• Who is the audience of your collection? 

• How will people in your community access the collection? 

• Do you want people outside of your community to access the collection, if so, how will they do this? 

What to do 

• Write down your answers to the above questions.  Use short sentences and plain English. Bullet points are great! 

• Make the document easily accessible, and share with everyone who works on your collection 

  This template will give more guidance. 

Next Steps Now that you know what you want to collect and how you will collect it. Reviewing what you have already and making sure it is aligned with your new policy is a useful exercise. Level three will provide advice on how to review your collections and how to review the content being offered to your group to decide if you want to accept it or not. This process is called appraisal.