What resources are we focussing on?

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Revision as of 16:40, 31 July 2013 by EFay (talk | contribs)
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  • 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?
     Map existing roles and responsibilities.
     Identify gaps or unrealistic expectations by consulting community team profiles and job descriptions.
     Decide whether to gaps can be filled 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?
     Ingest - tools for characterisation, fixity, etc.
     Store - capacity, understanding growth, redundancy/backups
     Access - user requirements, interfaces for discovery/rendering, accessibility
     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 and sensitivity issues. Are they known or do they need to be reviewed?
     Ensure that depositor condition are clear (closure periods or embargos, reproduction rights, etc.)
     Define use cases. Define user requirements (as far as they can be anticipated).
     
  • 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?
     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.
  • 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?