Digital Asset Register

Course

Digital Preservation, MLIS 7997

Competence

The competence for this assignment is organization for recorded knowledge and information.

Learning Outcome (1)

This assignment addresses explaining information-seeking behavior in theoretical and practical terms.

Learning Outcome (2)

This assignment addresses the principles and techniques of physical and digital preservation of materials.

Learning Outcome (3)

This assignment addresses demonstrating the techniques of bibliographic organization and control.

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment was to have the students create their own digital registers which are documents that explain the various items and/or records in a digital repository for an archive. This assignment addressed the student’s ability to group digital assets together to identify the type via labels (A for Collection, B for Surrogate, and C for an individual Record). This relates to the first learning outcome as creating a digital asset register fulfills a need where employees and others could peruse the register and get assistance for information needed without asking a colleague.

         Creating this digital asset register expanded upon previous learnings of principles and techniques regarding digital preservation materials by forcing the student to understand and correctly detail the file format and extensions of the digital record, its size, and its value to the digital repository as a whole, which falls under learning outcome two. In other words, it forced the student to address the question, “Why was this digital record or item included in this collection/repository?” It is also an exercise on taking bibliographic data of different digital records and organizing it into a spreadsheet for others’ consumption which would help them know where things are located in a digital repository and glimpse the record’s issues, file formats, size, and more which falls under learning outcome three.

         This digital asset register was chosen for inclusion in the portfolio because out of all the digital preservation tasks I learned about or conducted in my Digital Preservation class last Fall semester, this was the most helpful to me in understanding how digital repositories choose their items. I also came to understand who is truly responsible for the items in a collection (which led to understanding the repository’s mission statement), and who has the rights to the record. These understandings helped me learn to read bibliographic information for all digital items in the collection and understand why a digital asset register would be useful for archivists and/or employees that need a quick, easy-to-understand and accessible document that details all information in a digital collection briefly.

Analysis

For this assignment, I wasn’t sure how easy or difficult this was going to be, but once I dug into it (and got over my fear of doing it wrong), I took my time in analyzing my chosen collection. I followed the example set by the professor as best I could, as well as curtailing my assets to the instruction panel information, which ultimately made the assignment very easy. Overall, the assignment was simple: to include metadata about the digital items into titled columns and rows for a cohesive research experience.

         One of the Axioms of Digital Preservation, “The affordances of digital media prompt a need for digital preservation to be entangled in digital collection development,” by Trevor Owens (2018), repeated in my head while completing this assignment. He uses this axiom to explain, “the affordances of what can be easily preserved should inform decisions about what an organization wants to go out and collect and preserve” (pg. 8). For me, in doing this assignment, I focused on why this collection was being preserved and what it afforded the university by doing so. The answer was in a previous assignment we had to do where we initially chose our digital collection to focus on for the semester. Being a university, its digital collection would be focused on yearbooks, photographs, and images of the various apartments and buildings of the university over the years. That they chose these collections speaks to what was important for the university to preserve over the years, to have a history to go back to and share for future stakeholders.

Reflection

         This assignment has given me a good foundation to explore creating my own digital asset register for a digital collection I would be working on in the future. I also would have a greater interest in choosing the items for the collection in terms of what they bring to the repository in terms of value, and with the knowledge of who is responsible for the item/collection and who holds the rights, I feel this would help me make more informed choices regarding the collection’s content with regard to cost to maintain its place in the repository. This, of course, would translate to the entire archive the digital repository is housed in, allowing for greater analysis of acquisition and processing for all items in terms of value and cost for the preservation of chosen items.

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