What

• Curation questions
  • Where does the stuff come from? How will be reused and by whom? What are their requirements?
  • What is the importance of the asset from the point of view of the institution?
  • Do you need to provide guidance or support, to the depositor or to the user?
  • What are the responsibilities? Who is the 'collection owner'? Who decides how it is catalogued, etc.?
  • Are there any rights issues associated with the content itself (eg privacy) or in the transfer (eg copyright)
  • What resources do you have available? Is this entirely new, or an extension of something you are doing already in part or in whole?

• Technical questions
  • What do you need to know - how much detail? Know what you don't need to know. What is enough information?
  • Technical properties
    • What have you got: complexity/diversity, volume/growth
    • What is the carrier medium? What is the refreshment cycle? What are you going to do about it?
    • What formats do you have? Are these problematic? (e.g. can you render the format? do files render correctly? what level of QA does the collection need - e.g. file by file? - do you have the resources available for the workflow?)
    • What is the expected usage? What is the long-term DP approach (just stablise / migrate / emulate)
  • Provenance or audit trail properties
    • What do you need to control? What changes are you willing to accept? What do you need to track and what not?

• Solutions
  • What are you proposing? What actions?

• • • Once we know who we need to communicate with we then can start looking at what we've got ... We can describe the assets that we have.
    • What have you got - complexity, volume
    • what do you need to do?
    • Assess your digital collections
    • Identify risks and challenges
    • Identify solutions

• • further information
    • characterisation
    • case studies
    • content audit etc