Yesterday I finished my second trial of the Preservation Planning process on the 17,000+ files of our photo collection. While the preservation activities were a little laborious and time-consuming by their very nature, there’s no doubt that the planning process was a whole lot easier the second time around with the benefit of the experience and template documentation from the first trial. The first trial highlighted a need to undertake pre-planning work on file formats, and I duly did this to good effect – that aspect will become embedded in the process  going forward.

I believe I now have enough knowledge to embark on Preservation work on my PAW/DOC document collection (which was the original objective of the two trials) sometime early next year. First, though, I’ll update the documentation and templates to reflect the findings of this second trial. I think I may also write up my findings in the form of a journal paper since, as I discovered when I started this work, such process guidance for owners of personal collections does not seem to be freely available.