Digitization Workflows for Museums & Archives: From Scanning to Sustainable Digital Preservation Pt.2
This blog post is based on a presentation we gave for the Oregon Museum Association (OMA) on creating thoughtful, sustainable digitization workflows for museums, historical societies, libraries, and community archives. The presentation was designed to help organizations think beyond simply scanning or capturing their collections and instead consider the entire process—from assessing materials and choosing appropriate equipment to creating metadata, organizing files, and planning for long-term storage and access. We’ve adapted that presentation into a blog article so that these ideas can be a useful resource for anyone working with an institutional collection that needs to be digitized and preserved. This is the second part of this piece. Please click here to read last month’s blog.
-Rachel and Morgan
Digitization Is Not The Same as Digital Preservation
This distinction is worth repeating. Creating a digital file does not mean you've preserved it. Once you've digitized a collection, the preservation work continues.
You still need to:
Maintain backups
Monitor storage
Replace aging hardware
Evaluate file formats
Maintain documentation
Manage metadata
Test your backups
Plan for future access
Technology changes and hard drives can fail. You might need to change cloud services or you may have file formats become obsolete. Beyond technology, people leave organizations and often their systems leave with them. Digital preservation is an ongoing process—not a box you check once.
The 3-2-1 Backup Rule
A simple place to start is the 3-2-1 backup strategy:
3 copies
2 different types of storage
1 copy stored somewhere else
For a small organization, that might look like:
Copy 1: Working files on a local computer or server
Copy 2: Backup on an external drive or NAS
Copy 3: Cloud storage or geographically separate storage
You don't have to build the perfect system overnight. If you currently have one copy on one hard drive, adding a second copy is already a significant improvement. Then work toward three copies and geographic separation.
Please remember, a RAID is not a backup. RAID can protect against certain types of hardware failure, but it doesn't protect you from accidental deletion, malware, theft, fire, or other disasters.
The goal of multiple copies is simple: one failure shouldn't become a permanent loss of the collection.
Choosing Storage for Your Digital Collection
There are many ways to store digital collections.
External drives: They're affordable, accessible, and easy to understand. But they can fail, be lost, damaged, or accidentally disconnected. Important collections should never exist on a single external drive.
RAID: RAID can provide redundancy against certain hardware failures, but it is not a backup.
NAS: A Network Attached Storage system can provide centralized storage for organizations where multiple people need access to the same files. The tradeoff is that NAS systems require more technical knowledge to configure and maintain.
Cloud storage: Cloud storage can provide geographic separation and eliminate the need to maintain some physical storage hardware onsite.
However, you should understand:
Pricing as the collection grows
File versioning
Deletion policies
Security
Account access
Data retrieval
What happens if you stop using the service
Institutional repositories and digital preservation systems
Larger organizations or significant collections may benefit from specialized systems offering features such as redundancy, metadata management, integrity checking, access controls, and format monitoring.
But the most sophisticated solution isn't automatically the best solution.
Choose the system your organization can actually maintain.
Think About Ethics and Community Context
Digitization isn't simply a technical process. Archives represent people, families, communities, cultures, and experiences. Decisions about what gets digitized, how materials are described, and who can access them can have real consequences.
Consider:
Copyright
Privacy
Permissions
Cultural sensitivity
Donor restrictions
Community perspectives
Appropriate access
The people represented in a collection may have perspectives about the materials that aren't reflected in an institutional description.
Whenever possible, involve the communities represented in the collection.
Good stewardship means recognizing that you're not simply converting objects into digital files. You're making decisions about how those objects—and the stories connected to them—will be understood in the future.
Making Digital Collections Useful and Accessible
Digitizing a collection is only the first step. The real goal is to help people discover, understand, and connect with the history it contains. The best way to provide access depends on your audience, resources, and collection.
There are several ways to share digital collections:
Digital exhibits: Combine photographs, documents, audio, video, and storytelling to bring history to life.
Digital collection platforms: Tools such as Omeka and Permanent.org offer ways to organize and share materials.
Existing websites and shared drives: For smaller organizations, these may be more practical and sustainable options, provided files have consistent naming conventions, appropriate permissions, and useful metadata.
Social media: Sharing unidentified photographs and asking the community for help can uncover names, places, and stories that add valuable context. However, social media is an engagement tool, not a long-term preservation system.
Start by thinking about your audience. Researchers may need detailed metadata and powerful search tools, while community members or students may benefit more from photographs, stories, and historical context. The goal is to choose an approach that helps people find and connect with the information they need.
Accessibility is another important consideration. Simple steps can make a digital collection more useful to a wider audience:
Add descriptive alt text to images.
Provide captions and transcripts for audio and video.
Use readable fonts and good color contrast.
Make navigation clear and ensure the website works on mobile devices and with a keyboard.
Finally, consider what your organization can realistically maintain over time. A sophisticated platform isn't necessarily the best choice if you lack the resources to keep it running and updated.
The goal isn't simply to put digital files online. It's to create meaningful, accessible, and sustainable ways for people to discover, understand, and engage with the history you've worked so hard to preserve.
The Bigger Picture: You're Preserving More Than Files
It's easy to think of digitization as a technical project. But that's not really what we're doing. We're preserving information. We're preserving context. We're preserving stories. We're creating opportunities for researchers, students, families, and community members to discover materials that might otherwise remain hidden in boxes or on obsolete media.
Digitized collections can support education, storytelling, exhibits, research, community engagement, and disaster preparedness. And when files are accompanied by meaningful metadata, they become much easier to discover and use.
Technology will continue to change. Equipment will become obsolete. File formats will evolve. New technologies—including AI—will change how we work.
But the fundamental principles remain remarkably consistent:
Be thoughtful.
Be consistent.
Document your decisions.
Preserve the original context.
Plan for the future.
And care for the collection as a steward, not simply as a technician.
If we do those things, we're giving future generations something much more valuable than a folder full of digital files.
We're giving them access to the history, stories, and knowledge those files represent.
Need Help Creating a Digitization Workflow?
Digitization projects can quickly become complicated, especially when you're working with mixed formats, large collections, limited staff, or aging audiovisual media.
At The Family Archivists, we help organizations and families make sense of their collections—from digitization and file organization to metadata, storage, and long-term preservation planning.
You don't have to digitize everything at once, and you don't have to build the perfect system on day one.
Start with your goals. Assess what you have. Create a workflow. Document it. And build from there.
Your future self—and the people who inherit the collection—will thank you.
Additional Digitization & Preservation Resources
If you're ready to dig deeper, there are excellent free resources available from organizations including:
You don't need to read everything. Start with the resource that addresses the problem you're trying to solve right now—whether that's scanning, file formats, storage, digital preservation, or audiovisual materials.