Derived from the Thinking Digital Society of American Archivists (SAA) Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) course

  1. Macro Level Survey
    1. Collections
      1. What do we have?
        1. What are the Media/Storage Types?
        2. What are the Data types?
        3. What are the File types?
        4. Appraisal - Do these records have permanent (archival) value?
      2. Where is what we have located?
      3. How much do we have?
      4. What do we have that is of high priority? (Danger of obsolesce, etc.)
    2. Infrastructure
      1. What Hardware do we have?
        1. What computers do we have, and what are their drives?
        2. What external drives do we have?
        3. Do we have Physical Write-blockers?
        4. Do we have file converters?
        5. Do we have administrative rights to our computers?
      2. What Software do we have?
        1. What Operating Systems are available to us?
        2. Do we have access to Checksum tools?
        3. Do we have access to Migration tools?
      3. What Storage do we have?
      4. What Systems are in place?
        1. What enterprise systems do we have in place?
      5. What Back-ups do we have in place?
        1. Remember, these are important but only part of the DP equation.
        2. They are meant for disaster recovery, not preservation
    3. Skills
      1. What skills do we have?
      2. Can we get help to learn what we don't know
      3. Do we know what to ask for?!
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