What resources are we focussing on?

What resources do you have available?

• 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.

Where does the stuff come from?

• 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.
• Where possible try to plan and project for the types and quantities of content you are likely to receive based on your collections policy.

Have you got a skills gap?

• 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.

Have you got the infrastructure you need?

• 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!

What are the access conditions affecting nature of resource?

• 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?.

What is the condition of the 'stuff'?

• 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?
• Is the 'stuff' organised or catalogued in anyway?
• Is there any supporting material that provides wider context?

What are the bit-level problems?

• Save the bits!
• Find fragile media. Legacy devices, or short-lifecycle (e.g. floppy disk, CDs/DVDs, flash drives)
• If you have large files, understand if they have to be moved around, this can be problematic.
• Derive fixity information and check it regularly.

What are the content-level problems?

• Identify the variety of formats, and number of files in each format
  • use format identification tools

• Determine the problems that these formats cause:
  • decide the level of QA you can realistically achieve

• • pro-active (checking all files and formats)
    • approaches: consult the community format registries, open every file, find software packages

• • reactive (provide files as-is and wait for problems to be reported)

• Decide what degree of stabilisation of assets is required via migration/emulation etc.
• What metadata (descriptive and preservation) do you have? Do you need to create any more?
• Identify your needs for documentation,and the needs of your depositors and users.