A Strategic Framework For Creating Digital Collections

In today's digital environment, the context of content is a vast international network of digital materials and services. Objects, metadata and collections should be viewed not only within the context of the projects that created them but as building blocks that others can reuse, repackage, and build services upon. Indicators of goodness correspondingly must now also emphasize factors contributing to interoperability, reusability, persistence, verification and documentation. At the same time attention must be focused on mechanisms for respecting copyright and intellectual property law. In this document you will find a framework for identifying, organizing, and applying existing knowledge and resources that can be used as an aid in the development of local guidelines and procedures. This Framework is intended for two audiences: first, for people who are working in the context of projects and want to develop good digital collections; and second, for funding organizations and agencies that want to encourage the creation of good digital collections. There are no absolute rules for creating good collections, objects or metadata. Every project is unique and each has its own goals. There are almost as many ways of categorizing collections as there are collections. ... The key to a successful project is not to follow any particular path, but to think strategically and make wise choices.