Yesterday I completed the Preservation Planning work on my PAW-PERS collection. The final activity was to create a Preservation Maintenance Plan which will initiate future work at intervals down the years. I had never undertaken preservation planning before, so the whole exercise was designed to be one of learning by trial and error. The Preservation Maintenance Plan essentially captures all that learning by specifying a preferred process for the next scheduled preservation maintenance activity on the PAW-PERS collection.

Having completed work on PAW-PERS, I shall now try out the improved preservation planning process on my collection of 17,000 photos. This exercise will identify any further process refinements that are needed, before I start on the original objective of all this work – to undertake preservation planning on my lifetime collection of working documents (referred to as PAW-DOC). This is a very large collection of diverse and some very old files all managed in a proprietary document management system integrated with an index held in a Filemaker database. Performing preservation planning on this beast is going to be a stretch for me as an individual with no corporate resources to draw on – I will need all the knowledge and expertise I can glean from working on the PAW-PERS and the Photo collections.