What resources are we focussing on?

Money and people/time. Find out whether you can make the case for one or the other more easily.
Know whether this is entirely new, or an extension of something you are doing already in part or in whole.
Think about: staffing/skills, technical infrastructure (storage, processing), processes (e.g. cataloguing)
Distinguish reccurent costs from capital investment costs.

Know your mandate, collecting policy, retention schedule.
Know your producers and the nature of the relationship. Develop working understandings where possible.
Understand the amount of influence you have and the guidance and support you can provide to control what you receive.
Make sure you receive enough contextual information, or can create it during acquistion.
Define an exit plan where possible.
Try to plan and project for the types and quantities of content you are likely to receive based on your collections policy.

Map existing roles and responsibilities.
Identify gaps or unrealistic expectations by consulting staff, community team profiles and job descriptions.
Decide whether the gaps or bottlenecks can be addressed by training for existing people or hiring new posts.
Understand willingness to change - whether you can stop doing things you do now and change job roles.
Define a skills roadmap showing development over time. Include succession planning.

Accessioning workstation - capacity to process various media types.
Ingest - tools for characterisation, fixity, etc.
Store - capacity, understanding growth, redundancy/backups.
Access - user requirements, interfaces for discovery/rendering, accessibility.
Consult with other stakeholding departments to determine who has responsibility for supporting infrastructure.
Are there existing resources within the wider organisation that could provide infrastructure.
Prioritise your implementation with a clear roadmap. Don't try to do everything at once!

Determine IPR, data protection and potential liability issues. Are they known or do they need to be reviewed?
Ensure that depositor conditions are clear (closure periods or embargos, reproduction rights, etc.)
Define use cases. Define user requirements (as far as they can be anticipated). For example authenticity - will material be available remotely?.

Know what you need to know - how much detail?
Know what you don't need to know. What is enough information?
Think about complexity/diversity, volume/growth.
What is the integrity of the content? Is it sanitised? Can you safely ingest it?
Are the assets organised or catalogued in anyway?
Is there any supporting material that provides wider context?

Save the bits!
Find fragile media (e.g. floppy disk, CDs/DVDs, flash drives)
Volume/complexity/quantity: Large files, complex technology or large numbers of files can be problematic for data management.
Derive fixity information and check it regularly.

Identify the variety of formats, and number of files in each format.
- use format identification tools.
Determine the problems that these formats might cause:
- decide the level of analysis you can realistically achieve
- pro-active (checking all files and formats)
- approaches: consult the community format registries
- does a file validate against it's file format specification? Does this matter? Can you identify long term risks? Can you check if the file renders correctly, now?
- reactive (provide files as-is and wait for problems to be reported)
What metadata (descriptive and preservation) do you have? Do you need to create any more?
- Just in case metadata can be costly. Each field should have a clear use case.
Identify your needs for documentation and the needs of your depositors and users.

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