Plan for long-term preservation of all data acquired

Making your collection digitally accessible online or otherwise does not equal archiving or long-term preservation, not even when doing multiple backups.

Take into consideration long-term preservation from the beginning, including all aspects such as formats, storage, future migrations and re-use, ongoing maintenance and the corresponding long-term costs.

Keep as much data as possible from the digitisation process, depending on the storage and data management capabilities available, including the raw data.

Select an archive that is able to accept the incoming digital data files, has the necessary storage space, and can offer a preservation service.

Use and support as much as possible open file formats, software and hardware, and consider archiving also the software and any other system needed to open the files.

Log and store all metadata collected, including the paradata about the digitisation process, and all the different versions generated for various uses.

Put in place a data management system that tags all data, in order to make it easy to store and research the data. Read more about planning for long-term preservation of all data acquired in Chapter 6 of this Handbook.