A couple of days ago I completed an experiment to use the Maintenance Plan template to undertake initial Digital Preservation work on a collection instead of using the Scoping document. It proved to be very successful. The collection is relatively small with only 840 digital files of either jpg, pdf or MS Office format, so there were few complications and I was able to proceed through the Maintenance Plan process steps without any serious holdups. The whole exercise took just over a week with the majority of the time being taken up by the inventory check of the digital files and of about 300 associated physical artefacts. I used the structure of the Maintenance Plan to document what I was doing and to keep a handle on where I was up to.

As a result of this exercise I’ve now added the following guidance to the beginning of the Maintenance Plan template, and equivalent text to the beginning of the Scoping document template:

If this is the first time that Digital Preservation work has been done on a collection

EITHER use the Scoping template to get started (best for large, complex collections)

OR use this Maintenance Plan template to get started (can be effective for smaller, simpler collections – retitle it to ‘Initial Digital Preservation work on the @@@ collection’ and ignore sections Schedule, 3, 4 and 7)

This concludes the interim testing and revision of the Maintenance Plan template. It has resulted in some substantial changes to the latest version 2.5 of the document (an equivalent version 2.5 of the SCOPING Document Template has also been produced). The final and most substantial test of the Maintenance Plan template will take in September 2021 when the large and complex PAWDOC collection is due to undergo its first maintenance exercise.