Preserving and sharing born-digital and hybrid objects from and across the National Collection (Decision-Making Model)

When considering the complex challenges faced by cultural heritage organisations in collecting, preserving and sharing born digital and hybrid objects, it becomes clear that the process of defining solutions as a community of practice is in its early probing phase: characterised as tentative, exploratory, questioning, experimental. The workshops within this Preserving and sharing born-digital and hybrid objects from and across the National Collection project, which examined the case studies from multiple angles, yielded a richly discursive examination of the main considerations.

This Decision Model represents an attempt to create a structured representation of those main considerations and the discourse from the workshops, to codify the main decision-making processes that an organisation may go through when assessing an acquisition of such an object, categorised into high level areas. It attempts to create a traversable system that could be used by collections professionals in their work - policy makers, managers, collections management or digital preservation practitioners, conservators.