Overview: Organizing your digital material for storage can be important when you either need to add files or when you need to retrieve files. For most collections, there is some structure whether that was put in place by the producers or by the archivists or librarians.
Preserving digital records collections combines the existing archival practice of validating, compiling, describing, and storing the records along with the additional digital archives practice of validating, identifying file formats, identifying file versions, capturing file names / IDs, and packaging the digital records for digital preservation.
Example:
An organization’s Board meets monthly. According to the records schedule, all Board meeting Agendas, Meeting Minutes, and Handouts are permanent records and scheduled for transfer annually to the organization’s archives for preservation.
Because there is a lot of activity in the Board offices, the administrator asks if they can transfer the records every two months. When the digital records are transferred, there are printable versions, digital versions for the Board’s tablets, and the final version of the files in the original file format. The records schedule indicates that the permanent records are the ones that the Board uses during the monthly Board meetings. With the records manager and the Board administrator, the archivist decides to accept the digital versions for the Board and the final file version in the original file format.
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