Today we can easily discover, share and use our knowledge and creativity using technologies in ways vastly different from the pre-digital era. Our ability to do this will only increase over time. The Make it Digital approach is to identify elements of good practice for digital content creation based on an understanding of the digital content life cycle. Key to the life cycle and how long your digital content will survive is the use of open standards. Including the new digitising family history & whakapapa.
The first step in the digital content life cycle is selecting content to be made digital. There is a common belief that everything worth keeping is worth digitising, but that may not always be desirable or even feasible. In some cases the technology may not be mature enough, in others the cost of digital creation and ongoing maintenance may be unaffordable. Whether you plan to create new material or digitise existing material, having a robust selection and prioritisation process will be key to a successful outcome. (including the Make it Digital Scorecard)
Unless digital content is being created for one-time use and will be discarded, good practice should be to design and format your content for different environments and uses over time, even if they are not immediately known. The ability to re-format and re-purpose are key strengths of digital content given how easily it can be copied and distributed. The choices you make at the point of creation, in particular the format that your content is created in, greatly affects how useful and long-lived your content will be. (including new image standards)
If you want your digital content to be stored, found and used over time, it needs to have good file naming and associated metadata that describes what the content is, where it came from, and who can use it. File naming conventions are essential to good workflow and organisation, while structured metadata that follows open standards is central to usability and interoperability.
Acquiring a basic knowledge and practice of records or collection management is a pre-requisite for properly organising and managing any volume of digital content beyond a few dozen items. Over time you can expect that your content will need to be added to, removed or updated. A backup and maintenance strategy will be essential to protect your content from loss or corruption. Every few years, software or hardware changes will require you to migrate or reformat your content for new platforms. All of this can be greatly assisted by using a repository, content management, library or database system that supports open standards, and by adopting a few good workflow practices.
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All digital content is born equal. Stored as a digital object or file, your valuable content consists of binary data materially the same as any other. Even with good metadata it's almost impossible to distinguish one piece of content from another without the aid of software that specialises in search or discovery. Ensuring your content can be readily found, navigated and searched over is essential to ensuring potential users learn what you hold and how it can be accessed and used.
Digital content relies exclusively on physical media that can decay or fail rapidly without visible signs of damage. Digital technologies also become obsolete within relatively short periods of time. Back up strategies are a vital first step to avoiding short-term content loss. In the long term, storage for preservation involves planning for archival copies of your content to be migrated and contingencies for transfer to a new owner should your organisation or service face closure. This is where your choices of appropriate formats, descriptions, collections policy and rights statements really come into their own. (New guide)
Digital content is made to be copied, distributed and adapted. The ability to incorporate and re-use content in new works provides enormous creative opportunities. On the other hand, adapting non-digital models of rights and usage to a digital environment can be challenging. Good practice needs to be built around encouraging users to respect clear rights and licence statements that focus on permitted behaviour, providing value that does not rely on controlling copies, and thinking carefully about putting restricted content online. (Updated to add the 2010 Public Domain guide)
Except where otherwise noted, the Make it Digital Guides are licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 New Zealand License
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