Preparing a digital asset inventory.
Before you can care for a digital collection, you need to know what you have and where it is. For most small heritage organisations the honest answer is "spread across old laptops, external drives, memory sticks, cloud folders and a scanner PC that nobody switches on any more". This guide gives you a method for turning that into a single, usable inventory. It needs no special software, only a spreadsheet, and it can be run by a volunteer.
Step 1. List the places, not the files
Start a sheet called Locations. Walk through, physically and digitally, everywhere your organisation keeps digital material and record one row per place: the office PC, each external drive and memory stick, the shared Google Drive or Dropbox, email attachments folders, DVDs and CDs in the cupboard, the retired treasurer's laptop. For each, note who controls it, roughly how much is on it, and whether anything on it exists nowhere else. That last column matters most: it tells you where your risk is.
Step 2. Decide the units you will count
Counting every file drowns you in noise. Count meaningful groups instead: a digitisation batch, an event's photographs, an oral history interview and its transcript, a scanned minute book. Aim for rows a person can recognise, not rows a computer would produce.
Step 3. Build the inventory sheet
One row per group, with columns you can fill in an afternoon:
- Name: what a colleague would call it ("2019 centenary exhibition photos").
- Location: which place from Step 1 it lives in, and the folder path if there is one.
- Format: JPEG photographs, TIFF scans, Word documents, MP4 video, audio cassettes awaiting digitisation.
- Quantity and size: approximate numbers are fine; "about 800 photos, 12 GB" is useful, "unknown" is a finding.
- Copies: does this exist anywhere else? "Only copy" should ring an alarm.
- Rights and consent: do you know who created it and what you may do with it? A simple yes, no or unsure is enough at this stage.
- Value: high, medium or low to your organisation's purpose. Be ruthless; not everything is heritage.
Step 4. Read what the inventory tells you
Three findings appear almost every time. First, a small number of groups are both high value and single copy: back those up first, this week, before anything else. Second, a lot of material is duplicated in slightly different versions: do not try to resolve that now, just record it. Third, rights information is missing for a lot of material: our companion guide on consent and copyright basics covers what to do about that.
Step 5. Keep it alive
Date the inventory, name an owner, and review it twice a year. When you eventually move to a digital asset management system, or apply for funding to digitise more, this inventory is the first thing you will be asked for, and the columns above map directly onto the metadata that migration will need.
Licence
This guide is published by Aetopia under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. You may use, adapt and share it, with attribution. It is practical guidance, not legal advice.