Competency F

Use the basic concepts and principles related to the selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation of physical and digital information items.

Section 1: Introduction

When I began learning about collection management, I had only a limited understanding of how libraries and archives actually build their collections. I knew, in a general sense, that materials could be purchased or donated, and I understood that institutions maintained collections of materials for their users. What I had not really considered were the decisions behind those collections: what institutions choose to accept, what they decline, what they discard, and how they determine what is worth preserving. I initially thought of a collection primarily as an accumulation of materials. Through my coursework, I have come to understand it instead as the result of ongoing professional decisions about selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation. These responsibilities are interconnected: deciding what belongs in a collection creates obligations to make those materials findable, usable, and sustainable over time.

Selection and evaluation were among the first aspects of collection management that changed my understanding of what it means to build a collection. Ritzenthaler (1993) frames appraisal as central to archival practice precisely because resources, including physical space, digital storage, staff time, and funding, are finite. Institutions therefore cannot simply retain everything they encounter, even when individual materials may have some value. Selection requires weighing an item’s informational and evidentiary value against the practical costs and responsibilities associated with retaining it. I have also come to understand the importance of explicit collection development policies in making these decisions consistent and defensible. A well-designed collection development policy constrains a collection’s scope to particular subject areas, formats, time periods, and/or geographic regions. This creates consistency over time and across staff members, signals collecting priorities to donors and the public, and provides a rationale for rejecting donations, since no institution can collect everything it is offered. Most importantly, it ties selection decisions back to the organization’s mission, helping ensure that resources are allocated to storing and preserving a purposeful collection.

Evaluation is related to but distinct from selection. While selection determines whether a particular item belongs in a collection, evaluation involves assessing the qualities of an item or system against defined criteria, such as physical condition, authenticity, completeness, or technical usability. This type of assessment applies not only to individual items, but also to the systems and tools an institution uses to manage a collection, like a preservation platform or digital asset management system. This kind of system evaluation was central to my fifth piece of evidence, described in a section below.

My understanding of organization developed alongside this realization. Once an institution decides to retain something, simply keeping it is not enough. Materials must be organized and described in ways that allow staff and users to find and understand them. This can involve metadata schemas, controlled vocabularies, and relationships between related materials. Digital collections make this especially apparent because a single intellectual work may exist in several technical forms, such as a preservation master, mezzanine file, and access copy. These different instances need to remain connected to the intellectual work they represent while also being described appropriately for their technical characteristics. Without effective organization and description, materials can be preserved physically or digitally and still be functionally inaccessible.

Studying preservation further changed my understanding of collection management by making clear that selection creates a long-term responsibility. Physical materials have specific chemical and material vulnerabilities that require appropriate environmental conditions and storage strategies. For example, the National Film Preservation Foundation (2004) describes how different types of film bases, gelatin binders, and image dyes deteriorate through different mechanisms, demonstrating why preservation strategies must account for the characteristics of individual formats. Digital preservation presents different but related challenges, including format obsolescence, storage media failure, and dependence on the hardware and software needed to render files. Frameworks such as OAIS, PREMIS, and the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation provide structured approaches to managing these challenges, while disaster planning provides procedures for responding when preservation conditions fail unexpectedly (Harvey & Mahard, 2020).

Taken together, these concepts have shifted my understanding of collection management from the relatively simple idea of acquiring and storing materials to a broader concept of stewardship. What gets selected shapes whose stories and records survive; evaluation determines whether an item or system actually meets the standards that its initial selection assumed it would; how materials are organized determines whether that survival translates into meaningful access; and preservation determines whether that access can continue into the future. My coursework has shown me that selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation are not separate technical tasks or one-time decisions, but connected responsibilities that must be continually reconsidered as collections, technologies, and institutional priorities change. I now see this competency as foundational to the kind of information professional I hope to become: someone who can make deliberate and defensible decisions about what to preserve while remaining attentive to whether those decisions ultimately serve the people and communities who rely on collections.

References

Section 2: Evidence

My understanding of selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation comes from a combination of formal archival methodology, physical preservation science, institutional systems design, and my own hands-on work managing a personal digital collection. Together, these experiences span both physical and digital materials, and both institutional and personal scales of collection management.

My first piece of evidence is a formal appraisal assignment from INFO 256, in which I evaluated a real donated collection, the papers of the Ladies’ Relief Society of Oakland, appraising it against a real library’s collection development policy, which prioritizes materials that document California and the broader American West. California social welfare history has long been one of this library’s collecting areas, making these papers a strong fit. This artifact demonstrates my understanding of selection and evaluation as a formal, criteria-based process rather than an intuitive judgment call. Using a worksheet supplied by my professor, I assessed the collection’s research value, evidentiary significance, and its priority within a stated collection development policy, assigning numeric values to multiple elements, while separately weighing the practical costs of retention, including digital storage requirements, estimated file conversion costs, and ongoing bit-refreshing needs for the collection’s born-digital components. I also grappled with real complications archivists regularly face, including unclear copyright ownership and gaps in the original order of a born-digital directory structure, and considered the broader institutional implications of accepting the collection, including whether doing so might create pressure to accept similar donations in the future. This artifact shows that selection is not simply about determining whether an item has value, but about weighing that value against institutional costs and constraints, guided by policy rather than personal preference.

My second piece of evidence is a research paper from INFO 259 on the preservation of 16mm color film. This project taught me that physical preservation requires knowledge of a format’s specific material composition and decay mechanisms. I explained how film base, gelatin binder, and image dye layers are each vulnerable to different forms of deterioration, including vinegar syndrome in acetate-based film and progressive color dye fading, and detailed the environmental conditions, including relative humidity, temperature, and enclosure materials, required to slow these processes for a specific, well-understood format. This artifact shows that appropriate preservation storage cannot be applied generically; it must be tailored to the chemical and physical properties of the actual materials being preserved. While I had previously thought of film preservation primarily in terms of providing appropriate storage conditions, this project showed me that effective preservation requires understanding the physical and chemical nature of the material itself, identifying the specific mechanisms through which it deteriorates, and often, copying the material to more durable formats in order to preserve its contents.

My third piece of evidence is a paper from INFO 259 in which I applied a university archive’s disaster response plan to a water leak situation affecting an archival collection. My paper addressed triage and evacuation priorities for at-risk materials and appropriate drying and recovery methods depending on material type, proceeding from initial response to restoring the damaged area and sending materials out for specialized treatment. In conducting my analysis, I identified a significant gap in typical institutional disaster planning: many plans focus heavily on physical materials while giving comparatively little attention to digital infrastructure risks, such as server room vulnerability, backup redundancy, and coordination with an institution’s IT recovery procedures during a physical disaster. Applying the plan to the scenario showed me that effective preservation planning must address both physical and digital risk simultaneously, since a disaster affecting a building can just as easily compromise digital systems and backups as it can paper or film. This project also taught me that effective disaster preparedness requires archivists to work closely with colleagues outside the archives. Working through the scenario made me more aware of how dependent preservation is on institutional infrastructure: IT staff may be responsible for servers, backups, and digital systems, while facilities staff may be responsible for building systems, environmental controls, utilities, and physical hazards. As an archivist, I cannot assume that I can address these risks independently or that I fully understand the technical systems involved. Instead, preservation planning requires building relationships with the people responsible for those systems and making sure that archival priorities are incorporated into broader institutional emergency planning. This changed my understanding of the archivist’s role from someone who simply responds to damage to someone who participates in the larger organizational planning needed to prevent or mitigate it.

My fourth piece of evidence is a project from INFO 259 in which I archived my own personal collection of powerlifting training videos. This project brought selection, organization, and digital preservation together at a personal rather than institutional scale. For selection, I established explicit keep-or-discard criteria, retaining videos based on camera angle quality and my interest in tracking progress in specific exercises rather than attempting to preserve everything I had recorded. For organization, I sorted the video files into folders by year, developed a consistent file-naming convention and a personal codebook of abbreviations, and used embedded keyword metadata to record additional details like location and personal bests. For preservation, I evaluated the long-term viability of my actual file formats, noting that my videos were encoded in lossy formats including the patent-encumbered HEVC codec, and weighed the tradeoffs between re-encoding to a more open, sustainable format like AV1 versus the quality loss and computing resources that conversion would require, ultimately storing redundant copies across multiple physical devices. Working with my own videos also made the consequences of these decisions more tangible to me. I had a long-standing habit of constantly accumulating videos without considering long-term utility or storage space. Applying collection-management principles forced me to think differently: I had to decide what actually had continuing value, how I would find particular videos years later, and whether the formats I was using would remain usable. Before this project, I mostly thought of preservation as keeping multiple copies of important files in multiple locations. While this is a key aspect of digital preservation, working through my own collection made me realize that I first had to decide what was worth keeping and then consider how I would make sure those files remained accessible in the future.

My fifth piece of evidence is a project from INFO 282, in which I designed a digital asset management system for an audiovisual collection at a university-based archive. Unlike the earlier artifacts, which each focused on one or two aspects of collection management in isolation, this project required all four—selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation—to function as parts of one working system. For selection, I helped design a demand-driven digitization queue, using researcher requests, licensing inquiries, and item condition to prioritize which portion of an undigitized backlog should be digitized first. For evaluation, I conducted a criteria-based comparison of DAM vendors and preservation repository platforms, assessing each against criteria such as cultural heritage experience, metadata flexibility, and preservation integration. For organization, I helped design a two-level metadata hierarchy distinguishing an intellectual work from its various digital versions, incorporating controlled vocabularies including Library of Congress Subject Headings and LC Genre/Form Terms. For preservation, I incorporated the 3-2-1 backup rule, hierarchical storage management, fixity checking, and a format migration policy informed by PRONOM format registry monitoring, aligning the overall system design with established frameworks including OAIS, PREMIS, and the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. The project taught me that these aspects of digital asset management cannot be designed independently: decisions in one area often reverberate in another. For example, I added metadata elements partway through the project after realizing that a stage of the digitization pipeline required information I had not originally accounted for, which meant revisiting how earlier stages of the workflow captured and passed along that data.

Section 3: Conclusion

Taken together, these five pieces of evidence show how my understanding of collection management has developed across different scales and contexts: from appraising a single institutional donation, to preserving a specific physical format, to planning for disasters, managing my own digital collection, and designing an institutional digital asset management system. Across these projects, I learned that selection, evaluation, organization, and preservation are closely connected. Decisions made in one area often create new responsibilities in the others, and those decisions have to be revisited as materials, technologies, and institutional needs change, whether the materials in question are physical or digital, institutional or personal. In my future career, I will apply this competency by approaching collection management as an ongoing process of stewardship, using established criteria and professional standards to make defensible decisions about what to acquire, how to describe and organize it, and what preservation strategies are appropriate for its physical or digital characteristics. To remain current, I will regularly consult the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Standards Portal and American Archivist for developments in archival standards and professional practice, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA) Levels of Digital Preservation, including its most recent revision, for developments in digital preservation practice, and the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage Materials for technical standards relevant to digitization. Because I am particularly interested in audiovisual archives, I will also follow the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) through its publications, educational resources, and professional conferences. These resources will give me specific, ongoing ways to evaluate my practices against current professional standards as preservation technologies, formats, and approaches continue to change. Using these resources will help me continue evaluating collection management decisions not simply according to what is possible today, but according to what will allow information to remain meaningful, accessible, and usable in the future.