What resources are we focussing on?

• What resources do you have available?

     Money or people? Can you make the case for one or the other more easily?
     Is this 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)
     What are the recurrent costs as opposed to capital costs?

• Where does the stuff come from?

     Who are the producers? Do you have an ongoing relationship?
     How much context is provided?
     How much control do you have over the source? Mediated/unmediated?
     What is your mandate, collecting policy, retention schedule?
     Do you have an exit strategy?

• Have you got a skills gap?

     Who is in post already?
     Is there a bottleneck, or too much focus on a few people? Do you have a succession plan?
     Do you need to create new posts?
     Do you need a training programme for people who are in post already?
     Do you need to stop doing things and change job roles? And can you?!
     Do you have a skills roadmap? What skills can you build over time?

• Have you got the infrastructure you need?

     Ingest - tools for characterisation, fixity, etc.
     Store - capacity, understanding growth, redundancy/backups
     Access - user requirements, interfaces for discovery/rendering, accessibility
     Can you prioritise? Do you have an infrastructure roadmap?

• What are the access conditions affecting nature of resource?

     Are there sensitivity issues?
     Are there closure periods, embargos?
     What are the requirements? Explain the use cases.
     

• 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 are the bit-level problems?

     Do you have large files that are difficult to process or move around your network?
     What is the carrier medium? What is lifetime and refreshment cycle?

• 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)
     What degree of stabilisation of assets is required via emulation etc

What is the authenticity requirement?