Digitally preserving your assets can bring new life to your collection, but you can only use your assets if you can easily find what you need, when you need it. We recommend you include digital copies of your legacy media and associated information in your digital media asset management system, so your team won't be doing the digital equivalent of rummaging through unlabeled boxes when you need that perfect shot of your founder or a significant company milestone from twenty years ago.

The goal is to get as perfect a copy of the original media as possible. (In some cases, this will be the last copy that may ever be made from old formats.) Generally, it’s recommended that you create at least three copies: a high-quality, “perfect” copy for future use; a smaller, viewable copy or proxy version for accessibility and easy viewing; and a long-term storage copy for deep archive, to be used only if something happens to the original.

Assess and Organize

Determine what media you have and what media you want to keep. Begin by assessing the information you have about your legacy asset library. Break it down into discrete information points, with standardized formats to make it easier for you to sort and determine exactly what you have by format, and begin the process of determining what you want to preserve digitally.

Use the information you gathered to prioritize what you want to preserve digitally. You may not have direct knowledge of all the media, so this process will also allow you to sort out subsets of media that your colleagues can help to assess and determine which items should be preserved while capturing important information that will become your metadata.

Once you’ve determined which assets should be preserved digitally, you are ready to convert the assets into digital files. You will likely need specialized equipment and dedicated expertise to do this, and it’s important to include a quality control checkpoint in this stage of the process.

Preserve