How did you get involved with your community group?  

TTHG has a long-standing commitment to preserving the history of Grindon Parish, County Durham. Founded in 2005, the group’s focus is on engaging the local community with its heritage. Over the years, TTHG has completed several projects related to local history, including oral history interviews, archaeological research, and the production of digital and physical publications. With 13 full members and 7 associate members, the group is actively involved in both research and education, leveraging their digital collections to engage the public. 

How do you collect material for your collections?  

TTHG’s collection efforts include: 

• Digitisation of Hard Copy Assets: The group is systematically digitising remaining hard copy materials, such as photographs, manuscripts, and historical documents. They have previously digitised other materials and are now focused on the remainder. 

• Oral Histories and DVDs: TTHG is converting their existing audio files from their oral history project, along with several DVD productions, into web-friendly formats like MP4. These will be uploaded to platforms such as YouTube and their website. 

• Photogrammetry and 3D Models: In addition to traditional media, TTHG is exploring the use of photogrammetry to create 3D digital models of local heritage sites, which will be made available online for public exploration. 

What processes are in place to manage and process your collections?  

Organising and Managing Collections 
TTHG is developing a comprehensive data management strategy that includes: 

• File Naming Conventions and Metadata: A major part of the project is to update and standardise file naming conventions across all digital assets to ensure consistency and easier searchability. This process will also include adding comprehensive metadata to describe each file (e.g., date, location, and subject matter) in a way that can be indexed for future use. 

• Digital Catalogue System: TTHG is implementing a digital cataloguing system to organise their collections. This will likely involve dedicated cataloguing software to manage assets. The group is also exploring the use of a GIS (Geographic Information System) for interactive mapping of historical sites, in combination with WordPress. 

• Storage Solutions: TTHG is adopting a dual-storage solution where digital assets are backed up on solid-state hard drives and simultaneously stored in a cloud-based archive. This combination ensures both physical and remote data security. 

• Website Integration: TTHG is upgrading its website to integrate digital collections directly. Using WordPress, the group aims to make a significant proportion of their archive accessible to the public with interactive features such as 3D models, videos, and GIS-based historic timelines. They are partnering with a professional website design and hosting company to ensure long-term maintenance and scalability. 

How do you preserve your collections?  

TTHG is committed to the long-term preservation of their digital collections, through: 

• Cloud and Physical Backup: TTHG is implementing a storage system that combines cloud-based backups with solid-state drives to ensure that the digital collections remain secure and accessible even if physical devices fail. 

• Planned Transfer to Durham County Record Office: For long-term custodianship, TTHG is preparing to transfer their digital archive to the Durham County Record Office to ensure preservation in a professional archival environment. – Currently we are not planning to share the digital archive but to ensure that it is in a form such that a nominated organisation, such as Durham Records Office (DRO), will be willing to accept it to add to their collection. Only if TTHG is unable to continue as a self-funding organisation will its constitutional dissolution clause be put into effect. This will trigger the donation of its digital archive to one or more nominated local institutions (e.g. DRO or Tees Archaeology etc.).    

• 3D Digital Preservation: The use of photogrammetry and 3D models for recording significant local heritage sites is part of a larger strategy to preserve deteriorating sites digitally. For example, work on the St. Thomas à Becket’s Church ruins will provide a digital record of the site, to be shared with Tees Archaeology and included in the local Historic Environment Record (HER). 

• Training for Long-Term Management: TTHG is investing in digital skills training for its members, focusing on areas like website maintenance, cataloguing techniques, and public engagement through social media. This will empower the group to manage its digital collections more effectively moving forward, ensuring sustainability and proper long-term curation. 

Archive your website You may decide that you would rather capture your own website to ensure your content is preserved. There are many ways to do this. Web archiving can be a complex and technical process. For this reason, we have chosen to focus on one manual web archiving method, which, although time consuming, is effective and easy to do.

ArchiveWeb is a piece of software that allows you to capture your website using a Google Chrome web browser extension. The process is manual, as you need to click on each page and link to load the content and play any film or sounds content to capture it, so it can be time consuming to do. But once you have it you can then play it back from within the same browser and extension.  

You can find a full user guide on the ArchiveWeb website.

If you have a large website, this type of manual exercise may be too time consuming for you. The resource guide provides links to other options that may require some learning to use but will be less time consuming in the long run.

You may also choose to implement a hybrid approach by submitting some page URLs to the Internet Archive or UK Web Archive and capturing the most important pages yourself. There are no rules and whatever works best for your group is what you should do.

Naming conventions Naming files is important, not only so you can find them again, but also so anyone accessing the records can easily find what they are looking for.   How you name your files will depend on the content you have, but in general, file names should be as short as possible while clearly identifying the record. You can also include dates in the file name if this is useful but use the same date format for very record (for example 28112012 or 28th Nov 2012).

Just One Thing 

Decide how you want to name your files and use this method to name every digital file you collect. Write down the method you have chosen and make everyone who will be naming records aware.  

This document contains advice about deciding on and implementing name and date conventions. 

Next Steps  Naming all your files in a similar style is the first step of using Naming Conventions. Level two will take this one step further and provide details on how to structure your files to make them more accessible.

What to keep  The process that involves reviewing records to decide if they should become a part of your collections is known as appraisal. There are two situations where appraisal is needed;  To review content you are being offered by a potential donor to decide if you will accept it  To review collections you currently hold to make sure they align with your collecting policy  This level discusses these scenarios in more detail.

Reviewing content being offered by a potential donor 

If someone is offering you content for your collections, it is important that you evaluate that content against the criteria you set out in your collecting policy to decide whether it should be part of your collection. If you decide it should be, you can accept the content using the process you have in place (remembering the plan to share level 2 advice).  

If you decide that the content is not suitable for your collection, it is important to explain clearly why this is the case, so the donor is not offended or discouraged from approaching you in the future. You could suggest other archives where the content might be a better fit.  

Reviewing collections you currently hold against your collecting policy 

This task can be carried out at a time that suits you or be tackled gradually, one collection at a time if needed.  

Once you’ve assessed the content against your collecting policy, you need to decide what to do with it. You have several options 

• If the content has no value at all, you can destroy it. 

• If the content would be more suited to another organization or community group, contact them and ask if they would like it. 

• If it has useful information but no historically unique value, it can be removed from your collection but kept in a reference section. 

• If the content fits with your collecting policy, keep it as part of your collection. 

Whatever situation you are working within, the following steps should be followed. 

• Write down each decision you make and why you made it. This will be useful if someone asks in the future why a particular collection wasn’t kept. Make sure this document Is available for anyone who may need access. Store this with the other documents you have created throughout level one and two. 

• Always consider how the donors you are working with will feel about what is happening with their material. Empathy and clear communication are essential. 

Consistency is important so the criteria set out in your collecting policy should be followed each time you have to appraise a collection. Having a document which lists all the criteria you have on one page would be a useful tool.

What to collect  When planning to preserve digital records, there are many different options and a range of different processes to think about. Your policy from level one stating what you will and won’t collect is a good start, but being clear about what you want to collect, how you will collect it and how you will identify content you want to add to your collections, will help you grow and organise your collections in the best way.

Things to think about 

• What do you want to collect?  

• What will you collect? What will you not collect? 

• Are you collecting everything related to your theme, or only certain topics/ records? Are you only collecting photographs, or content in other formats? Do you want everything you can find, or do you only want records from certain sources? 

• Is this material already collected somewhere else? If so, does it need to be added to your collection (most likely not)? 

• Do you need to focus on certain types of data or specific file formats? 

• Do you already have a collection? If so,  

• Do you want to keep everything you have? 

• Are there gaps in your collection you would like to fill? Is it possible to fill them?  

• How will you collect? 

• Do community members donate content? 

• Do you need to locate content and ask for it to be donated? 

• Are you creating your own content, such as oral history recordings? 

• Who is the audience of your collection? 

• How will people in your community access the collection? 

• Do you want people outside of your community to access the collection, if so, how will they do this? 

What to do 

• Write down your answers to the above questions.  Use short sentences and plain English. Bullet points are great! 

• Make the document easily accessible, and share with everyone who works on your collection 

 This template will give more guidance. 

Next Steps Now that you know what you want to collect and how you will collect it. Reviewing what you have already and making sure it is aligned with your new policy is a useful exercise. Level three will provide advice on how to review your collections and how to review the content being offered to your group to decide if you want to accept it or not. This process is called appraisal.

Selecting your content Whether you are just starting to think about creating a collection, or you already have digital content in your care, documenting what you are collecting will make it clear what you want to collect and where you will get the content from.   This will be useful to point to if you are offered a collection that doesn’t fit with the rest of the collections you hold. It will also help you to identify any gaps that you may want to fill. Including where your collections have come from will help with future processing work and give you somewhere to start if you want to collect more records in the future.   The most common way to document what you collect is by creating a collecting policy. A collecting policy aims to set out your principles and criteria for selecting and acquiring collections. A good policy doesn't need to be too lengthy or detailed, as long the statements in it are clear.

Just One Thing 

Write a one paragraph collecting policy that states what you will and what you won’t collect. Make it available to everyone who works with your collections to help you to streamline your collecting process and ensure you only collect the records that fit with your organisation's remit. 

 This collecting policy template will help you get started. 

Next Steps Creating a more detailed collecting policy will allow you to expand on the type of records you collect, in what format, and why you have made these decisions. The next level will show you what you should be thinking about and how to use your audience to inform the decisions you make about what to collect.

Create a succession plan in case your organisation closes.

Ensure the long term preservation of your website by submitting it for archiving.

Make sure you have the right documentation to allow you to provide access to your content.

Use this to decide how you will make copies of your content.