Background
Client: The Swedish American Museum
- Located in Andersonville neighborhood in Chicago, IL
- Focused on Swedish immigration and Swedish-American heritage
- Approx. 16,000 objects in permanent collection
Research and Assessment:
- Locate comparable institutions’ digital preservation policies
- Adapt tools to assess the Museum’s current practices
- Contextual interviews with museum staff
- Research digital preservation best practices for a variety of data types
Developing a Museum Digital Preservation Policy and Plan
Shelby Long and Emmeline Kaser
SI699: Mastery Course in Librarianship and Archival Practice
Objectives
Create a foundational digital preservation policy
Develop a scalable digital preservation
plan based on the NDSA Levels of
Digital Preservation
Prioritize the preservation of administrative documents
Tailor the workflows to different
levels of expertise
Outcomes
- A formal digital preservation policy
- Guides preservation decisions going forward
- Can be used to frame future digitization criteria
- Can be shared with similar institutions
- Recommendations for bringing the museum to an appropriate version of the NDSA Level 2
- Can also be shared with similar institutions
- Options for tools, software, and practices within budget
- Workflows for immediate implementation
- Immediately implementable processes to meet NDSA level goals
- Provides-step by step tutorials and/or guides for decision-making
- Establishes projects for future interns and volunteers
- Recommendations for future collecting goals
- High-level guidance for reaching further
NDSA levels and dealing with different
kinds of digital material in the future