DPC

This section provides guidance on how to design the template for your DAR. This includes general tips on things to think about, recommendations for key headings to incorporate, and some suggestions about particular formats and tools you can use to practically implement your plan.

1. General Tips for Developing Your DAR Template
2. Recommended Basic Template
3. Choosing a Format and Storage Location for Your DAR

General Tips for Developing Your DAR Template

The following are some general items to consider when you are developing the template for your DAR. Following these tips will help you to create a DAR that is easier to use and update.

• Use agreed lists of terms to be used and/or set formats for individual data elements where possible. This will help to ensure the capture of good quality data, as well as making it easier to manipulate. This can be implemented by having clear guidance on the terms to use under particular headings, or by using functionality like drop-down lists for data entry.

• Consider carefully who will be updating the DAR as well as who needs to use it. Some staff members may be more technically proficient than others and this may guide the format you choose for your DAR.

• You may also wish to add a layer of security to help control who can make edits to the DAR. This might be implemented using password protection for editing the document, or by placing it in storage where you can control access permissions.

• Remember to find a balance between trying to be comprehensive and the time taken to complete entries. Consider starting with a simpler set of essential headings and growing these over time.

  • Also consider if some columns might be marked as “required” or “optional”.

• Reduce duplication of effort by only including information that is captured in other systems (e.g. accession or catalogue records) where there is good reason. For example, the information in other systems is not readily accessible or is not consistently captured for digital content.

• Depending on how you manage digital content, you may wish to use separate tabs, sections or DARs for different types of content. For example, separating born-digital content and digitized content into different areas.

• Consider adding a dashboard that automatically generates key statistics about the digital content, and graphs and charts that provide visual representations of the stats. This may include total counts of number of files and the size of content, as well as breakdowns or these figures using factors such as year received or current processing status. This information is then readily available for advocacy purposes.

• Finally, if you have a digital preservation repository system in place, consider aligning the headings of your DAR with reports that can be produced by the repository to help streamline the information.

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Recommended Basic Template

This subsection provides an overview of the headings (or data elements) that we recommend you include within your DAR. These recommendations were derived from an analysis of 14 real-world DARs shared by practitioners. The most commonly used and fundamental headings are included here. Additional possible headings you may consider adding are included in Appendix One of this toolkit. Some of the headings below may duplicate information held in other systems. A note has been added to the description field for headings you may choose to omit to reduce duplication.

For each heading below, we have included suggestions as to how it might be formatted, as well as a description of the information you might record under each. If alternative names for the heading were used in any of the analyzed DARs, they have also been included. You may find one of these alternatives better matches the terminology used at your organization.

Accompanying this toolkit there is  an Excel spreadsheet DAR template that includes each of these headings, a ready to use statistics dashboard, and guidance for completing and updating the template. This is free for you to download, edit, and use to help create your own DAR.

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Choosing a Format and Storage Location for Your DAR

In addition to selecting the headings and data elements for your DAR, you must also decide the format in which to maintain the information and where the DAR will be stored. When selecting the right format and location you will need to consider:

• What software options you have available and what functionality they offer that will help with building, managing, and using your DAR. For example:

  • Do you want to control data entry on certain fields by implementing pick lists?

  • Do you want to save your data in a flat table structure or develop a structure with more complex data relationships?

  • Does it need to have inbuilt security functionality to stop unauthorized edits?

• Who will be adding information to and/or using the DAR? What software do they have access to and feel comfortable using?

• Where is the DAR going to be stored? Is it possible to manage access permissions based on its location?

  • Your DAR will contain a lot of important data about your organization’s digital content, and it is important to keep this secure. Make sure to consider security when selecting both the creation tool and storage location.

Excel spreadsheets are the most commonly used format for the creation of DARs as the software is relatively ubiquitous, it can support controlled data entry and validation, and you can also add data visualizations such as summary tables, graphs, and charts. These can even be added as a separate statistics dashboard. Free alternatives to Excel include Google Sheets and LibreOffice Sheets.

Spreadsheets are not, however, the only format options for your DAR. If you want to have a more complex data structure, as mentioned above, you may wish to select a database format for building your DAR. This will likely require a higher level of technical skill but does offer the advantage of developing a user interface for data entry and editing. Do keep in mind though, that these formats can be more difficult to maintain over time due to their complexity. Other, simpler, options that have been used by practitioners include a table in a Word or other word processing document, the Lists functionality in Teams, or using pages in Sharepoint.

Once you have selected the format and storage location for your DAR, take time to ensure it has been set up correctly and that functionality has been well tested before starting to input information in earnest.

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Digital Preservation for the Arts, Social Sciences & Humanities (DPASSH) is a biennial conference responding to questions relating to digital preservation within the arts and social sciences subject domain.

The conference seeks to address the complexities of long-term digital preservation in the social and cultural realms. It also aims to provide a platform for early career researchers, academics, scholars, cultural heritage and research institutions, as well as libraries, archives and industry to engage with the domain and exchange ideas on solutions.

This section provides an overview of the recommended steps for designing, building, and maintaining a DAR. Some of the elements covered are examined in more detail in the “More on Information Gathering”, “Template for Building a Digital Asset Register”, and “Hints and Tips” Sections. Use this section to help plan how you will build your DAR. The main steps and activities are outlined in the following:

1. Identify Your Motivations for Building a DAR
2. Setting the Scope
3. Make a Plan for Building Your DAR
4. Gathering and Adding Information
5. Using Your DAR
6. Updating Your DAR
7. Reviewing Your DAR

1. Identify Your Motivations for Building a DAR

Having a clear understanding of why you are building a DAR, what it will be used for, and who will use it, helps to ensure you produce a register that is effective, functional, and straightforward to maintain. Take time to consider the following questions, and to document the answers, at the beginning of the process:

• What issues do you hope to address with your DAR?

• What opportunities do you hope to create?

• How will the DAR be used?

• Who will use the DAR?

• Are there any other interested parties to consider? (e.g. content creators or holders, managers or executives, IT colleagues)

You may wish to answer these questions on your own, or to invite other interested parties to contribute. After answering these questions, you may wish to use the information to develop a set of guiding principles to guide the development of your DAR.

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2. Setting the Scope

Being clear about the scope of the content to be documented in the DAR is essential. Without clear scoping, critical content may not be included, or the DAR may be populated with lots of extraneous information. When setting the scope, it is important to consider what content will be included, as well as what information should be collected about that content. When first building your DAR, you may wish to err on the side of a broad but shallow register to ensure nothing important is missed. The scope can then be tightened, and more detailed information captured as the DAR is updated.

Answering the following questions, and documenting the answers, can help with setting the scope:

• What content should be included within the DAR? For example:

  • Born-digital content and/or digitized content?

  • Only digital content currently managed by the archive/library/digital preservation team, all digital content produced by the organization that will require preservation. (e.g. records in current use, web content, social media data, etc.), or some other defined grouping?

  • Digital content generated by the organization and/or digital content received from external depositors?

• How will organizational culture affect your ability to capture information for the DAR?

  • Is there a clear mandate for preservation and/or is it a priority for the organization? If yes, it should be straightforward to engage colleagues in contributing to the gathering of information. No mandate and/or executive and managerial support can be a barrier to information gathering.

• What resources (time, tools, staffing, and skills) do you have available for undertaking this work? If they are limited, you may need to aim for a tightly scoped DAR.

• Are there types of content that need to be prioritized as they have a high-risk profile? For example, if they are critical organizationally or they are stored on unreliable/unstable storage media.

• Are there any “low-hanging fruit” that would be easy to capture information on first? For example, documenting all digitized material because it is relatively homogenous, or all born-digital material as it is stored in a single location.

As with identifying motivations (above), while you may be able to complete a scoping exercise on your own, it may be useful to include interested parties in the process.

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3. Make a Plan for Building Your DAR

Once you have established the motivations and scope for your DAR, you should then develop a plan for how to achieve these aims in practice. At a minimum, your plan should cover the following:

• Clearly identified roles and responsibilities for designing the DAR, gathering information, ongoing management, and review.

  • It is important to carefully consider who should be involved and when. You should look to balance the advocacy benefits of getting other colleagues involved and the potential complications this may add to the process.

• The format that will be used for the DAR, and a template design. Ideally, this will also include documenting the various column headings/data elements and defining the information to be captured in each. More detailed guidance on this process is included in the section “Template for Building a Digital Asset Register” later in the toolkit.

  • Make sure to consider potential duplication of information that is held in other systems, and whether or not the inclusion of this information is necessary to facilitate the intended uses of the DAR. For example, some organizations find it useful to gather a small amount of provenance information within their DAR, to ensure it is easy to access and is recorded consistently across digital content. If, however, you already have robust accessioning processes in place that record the information in an accessible register or system, then there is little point in duplicating this in the DAR.

• The Who, What, When, Where, and How of the information gathering phase:

  • Who will carry out the information gathering and who will they need to talk to/ask for information?

  • What information needs to be gathered?

  • When will the information gathering take place?

  • Where will the information be gathered? Will meeting space be required for interviews? Do you need access to survey and/or characterization tools? Will you gather information in a separate document before processing and entering it into the DAR?

  • How will you gather the information? Will you interview colleagues? Will you circulate a survey? Will you use characterization tools to gather information from various storage areas? Will you need to analyze data from existing systems, e.g. accession records or catalogue records?

It is also important to consider if you will need to gain approval for your plan. Having the plan approved by your line or program manager will provide a mandate for carrying-out the work, which may help to prioritize it. Having the plan approved by a senior manager may also help smooth the information gathering process by providing a directive that will motivate colleagues to participate.

To help with this step,  a DAR planning template is available for you to download.

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4. Gathering and Adding Information

Your plan developed in the previous step should clearly describe your approach to gathering information for your DAR. This will likely be the most time-consuming and intensive step of building it. The following section of this toolkit will examine possible information gathering techniques in more detail, but they might include the following:

• Extracting information from existing resources, such as deposit agreements, accession records, catalogues, digital repository systems or other documentation. These may be held digitally, but in some cases, you may need to consult paper records.

• Interviews with colleagues to gather information on digital content they produce and/or manage.

• Circulating a survey to capture information on what digital content is produced and/or managed across the organization.

• Using characterization tools to survey digital content currently held on archive drives, shared drives, or other storage areas.

• Surveying physical media that has been included with deposited content but has not yet been transferred to the organization’s storage.

You may wish to gather information in an intermediary document before processing it for inclusion in the digital asset register. This can be particularly helpful if your DAR is highly structured and utilizes techniques such as agreed lists of terms to be used.

When adding information, try to be consistent in the minimum level of detail included and also adhere to any guidance you have developed. When adding information to your DAR for the first time, you might find yourself updating and refining the initial guidance based on the lessons learned during the information gathering and the quality and completeness of the data that was collected. Continuous improvement of resources is always to be encouraged but do make sure to update the relevant documentation or guidance.

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5. Using Your DAR

Once you have added all of the information to your DAR, you will be able to use it as a core resource to support your digital preservation activities. In particular, there are two key types of activities DARs are used to help with. These are:

• For planning and collections management. This can include:

  • Documenting where content is stored.

  • Helping to locate content when you need to provide access. This is generally for content prior to its ingest into a repository system. This process may also include checking if there are any reasons to deny or limit access, due to sensitive data or restrictions relating to intellectual property rights.

  • Planning for storage needs by tracking content growth over time.

  • Documenting risks to digital content, including identifying common risks which you should take action to address.

  • Planning and managing the ingest of content into a digital preservation repository. In particular, a DAR can be used for prioritizing content for ingest based on criteria such as risk profile and format types.

  • Managing retention and disposal.

• For advocacy and reporting purposes. This can include:

  • Producing figures and charts, for example showing progress over time (e.g. content growth, amount of content processed, or changes in the types of content being collected). This information can be useful for tasks such as annual reporting.

  • Making the extent of digital content evident and also aiding with transparency in relation to the amount of digital preservation work being undertaken. Summary visualizations can be particularly effective in highlighting digital content that might otherwise be “invisible” to colleagues.

  • Communicating with colleagues, in particular facilitating discussions with IT colleagues as you will be able to be clearer and more specific about requirements for storage, hardware, software, and other technical infrastructure.

  • Supporting requests for prioritization of digital preservation activities and making the case for additional resources.

The information captured within your DAR may also be useful for activities such as applying for accreditation and measuring capacity and capabilities with tools such as maturity models. Finally, your DAR can be a great tool to help new members of staff joining your team become familiar with your organization’s digital content and the types of digital content they will be working with.

You may find this list of potential uses helpful when considering your motivations for creating a DAR and setting its scope.

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6. Updating Your DAR

It is important that your DAR is kept up-to-date and does not lie dormant. Making a clear plan for updating it on a regular basis will ensure it remains accurate and relevant. How you approach updates will depend on a number of factors including your organization’s type and culture, when and how new digital content is created or received, and how much time and resources you have available to put towards the activity. There is no one correct way to approach updating your DAR, but you may consider a method similar to one of the following:

• Adding information at the point of acquiring and/or accessioning new digital content or deposit.

• At a regular time, each week or month, e.g. setting aside a regular afternoon slot for updating the information.

• As part of a regular content audit process, e.g. a quarterly survey of physical media.

• At regular points in the year if your organization follows a particular cycle of activity, e.g. at the end of each term in a university context or the end of an exhibition or tour if you work in the arts.

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7. Reviewing Your DAR

It is important to review your DAR from time to time to ensure that it is still fit for purpose and that information is being added in a consistent and suitable manner. If multiple people are updating it , you may wish to identify a person or small group of people to have editorial control of the register to oversee the quality of information captured, with checks carried out on a regular schedule.

Less frequent, but more in-depth reviews are also recommended to revisit the purposes of the DAR, its scope, and structure. These reviews may be triggered by significant changes in digital preservation practice or linked to a policy review or new planning exercise. For these reviews, you may wish to work through a set of similar steps as described in this toolkit for first building a DAR.

Finally, if you reach a point where all of your digital content has been ingested into a repository system, you may find that maintaining a DAR has become redundant. It is likely that all of the information that would be entered into and retrieved from the DAR is now managed by the repository or held in other systems such as those for accessioning and cataloguing. If this is achieved, you can make the decision to cease active use of the DAR. You should also consider at this point whether it would be helpful to retain the DAR as an institutional record and a back-up of information held elsewhere or, particularly if the DAR contains sensitive information, if it should be disposed of.

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This section highlights some of the key pieces of advice covered later in this toolkit, you might use these to ensure you set off in the right direction for creating your Digital Asset Register (DAR). You may wish to summarize some of these points and other relevant requirements into a set of guiding principles to inform the creation of your DAR. This will allow you to refer back to these throughout the process to ensure you are meeting the aims you set out.

No assigned responsibilities for managing, updating, and reviewing the DAR.

This section provides an overview and introduction to DARs and how they can be used. Use this to find out what DARs are and why you might want one.

What is a Digital Asset Register?

A DAR is a tool for gathering information about digital content to support an understanding of the digital content held by an organization, and to facilitate efficient management of its preservation. It will capture information such as a brief description of digital content, where content is stored, its size, what formats are included, and who holds intellectual property rights. A DAR might take the form of a spreadsheet, a database, or another format that is useful for practitioners.

A DAR provides an overarching view of digital content that helps practitioners to identify gaps, overlap, related risks, and other information useful to making preservation decisions and managing content over time. The information held in a DAR can also be useful when making the case for digital preservation, as it allows the generation of key statistics about the content.

A DAR, as a high-level summary used for managing content, exists at one end of the spectrum of the information you will need to help manage digital content. At the other end of the spectrum, you may look to maintain item level metadata in what can be referred to as “File Manifests”. These capture detailed metadata about individual files that can include the file’s name, location, size, and format.

Why Build a Digital Asset Register?

Building a DAR can bring many benefits in relation to the management of digital content. By its nature, digital content is ephemeral. There is no easily identifiable “original” in the way there can be for physical, analogue records. Digital files contain binary information on storage media that is easy to replicate and requires software and hardware to be able to interpret it. To help manage this less tangible content, we need new ways to record information about what we have, where it is stored, and what we need to do to preserve it over time.

With these issues in mind, perhaps the primary benefit of a DAR is the ability to gain intellectual control of digital content held by your organization. Carrying out a survey to gather the information for your DAR will allow a unique opportunity to “get to know'' your digital content. You will get a better “big picture” understanding of the landscape of your digital content, whilst also gathering useful data on content types, file formats, intellectual property rights, risks, and more.

It also allows you to capture a view of your digital content in a “non-systems centric” way. This means bringing together information by intellectual grouping, e.g. by accession, collection, or series, rather than capturing simple information such as how many files are held in a particular storage area, repository, or digital asset management system.

Building a DAR can also facilitate better management of digital content by:

• Capturing important information in one place that might otherwise be scattered across accession records, paper documentation, catalogues, or not captured at all.

• Acting as a finding aid for content not yet fully processed.

• Providing information needed to plan and prioritize ingest and processing of digital content.

• Facilitating retention decisions and processes.

• Establishing clear responsibilities for the management and preservation of digital content.

Building a DAR also brings a range of potential advocacy benefits, allowing engagement with a wide range of colleagues and providing a reason to discuss the importance of digital content and how it is managed. Due to its lack of physical presence, digital content can sometimes be “invisible” to those not working with them directly. The information and statistics that can be generated from a DAR can help to convey their extent. Ultimately, the resulting DAR can also help frame the digital content as an organizational asset, and the information it contains can be used to make the case for additional resources for digital preservation. Additionally, it provides a concrete reason to request the time and resources required to complete a full survey to assess the extent of your digital content. Without a defined and practical end product like a DAR, it can be difficult to persuade decision makers of the importance of this process.

Finally, you may wish to build a DAR as it is a recognized good practice activity that is recommended by a number of accreditation and bench-marking processes. In the UK, a DAR is a useful tool to help support Archive Service Accreditation, providing information needed for the application, as well as being a demonstration of robust management practices. The development and use of a DAR is also mentioned in the DPC’s Rapid Assessment Model (DPC RAM), and building your own will aid in leveling-up your digital preservation capabilities. These requirements can also, in turn, feed into advocacy activities, showing the importance of a DAR and how its development and use will reflect well on the organization’s digital preservation activities.

This Toolkit aims to offer practical guidance on how to build, maintain, and use a Digital Asset Register (DAR). It starts by taking you through what a DAR is, why you may wish to build one, and who this toolkit is aimed at. Subsequent sections detail what makes a good DAR, a step-by-step guide to developing one, an example template, further details about information gathering, and using and updating your DAR.

This Toolkit is for anyone who would like to create a DAR to aid their digital preservation activities. It is targeted at practitioners who are working with digital resources and would like a method for gaining better intellectual control of their digital content. The Toolkit is primarily aimed at those developing a DAR for the first time, but it will also be useful for those wishing to review and enhance an existing one.

There is no one-size-fits-all formula for building a DAR. How you build it will depend on your own context and will need to take account of the types of content to be preserved, what it will be used for, and the wider organizational context. This Toolkit seeks to guide you through a process which will help you to understand what you need from your DAR and how to build and maintain a register that will meet those requirements.

This toolkit was developed by the Digital Preservation Coalition, with support and funding from The National Archives (UK). Much of the guidance included here was gathered from experienced digital preservation practitioners during a series of focus groups held in November 2023. Many thanks to all who participated in the focus groups, for all of the excellent information and advice provided, and to The National Archives (UK) for their continued generous support for the development of digital preservation good practice.

Accompanying the toolkit are two practical resources to help you build a digital asset register: a Word template for planning the development of your register, and an Excel template for an actual register. The register template also includes a dashboard that will provide summary statistics and graphs about the content described in it. Download these, and a PDF copy of the toolkit using the following links:

• Digital Asset Register Toolkit (PDF Version)
• Digital Asset Register Planning Template (.DOCX)
• Template for a Digital Asset Register (.XSLX)

	Introduction An overview and introduction to DARs and how they can be used. Use this to find out what DARs are and why you might want one.
	What Makes a Good Digital Asset Register? Information on what makes a good (and bad) DAR. Use this to understand key elements of good practice for creating your DAR.
	Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Digital Asset Register A step by step guide to designing, developing, using, and maintaining you DAR. Use this to plan out how you will build and manage your DAR.
	Template for Building a Digital Asset Register A detailed guide to a recommended structure for your DAR, including general tips and advice on format and storage. A list of optional additional headings that might be included is also available. Use this to help establish the structure and format of your DAR.
	More on Information Gathering Guidance on the information gathering methods you might use to gather the data for your DAR. This also includes a list example interview questions.  Use this to find out how to gather the necessary information to populate your DAR.
	Useful Resources A list of additional resources that can help with planning, building, and maintaining your DAR. Use this as a reference point for further reading on the subject.

This is version 1 of the Digital Asset Register Toolkit (released May 2024). Do contact us with any comments and feedback to help us improve this toolkit.

Attributions for the Digital Asset Register Toolkit should be as follows:
Digital Preservation Coalition, Digital Asset Register Toolkit, 1st Edition, http://www.doi.org/10.7207/dartool24-01, © 2024

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) is pleased to offer a Career Development Fund travel grant to support a DPC member attending the 8th edition of The No Time To Wait Conference (#NTTW8), taking place September 11 to 13, 2024 at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe.

This grant will contribute funding to help with the costs of travel and accommodation. Grant applications are welcomed from all DPC Members until the deadline of 7:00 UTC on 4th June 2024, and more details are provided below.

The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) welcomes Cerabyte to its Supporter Program this week.

With origins in the Memory of Mankind project, Cerabyte is a start-up business offering a sustainable and long-term storage technology for retaining data. The development of Cerabyte, a technology based on silicate materials, is able to preserve audio, visual, gaming and other formats – as well as text-based data.