This is the second article in a three-part series on creating and maintaining digital archives for artists and arts organizations. It offers practical, actionable guidance on the simple steps that anyone can take to start caring for their digital materials.
- Part 1: The Cloud Ate My Homework: Why Artists and Arts Orgs Need a Digital Archive
- Part 2: (You are here!) Archive Smarter: A Step-by-Step Guide to Digital Preservation
- Part 3: Future You Says Thanks: Making Digital Archiving Part of Your Workflow
This second part focuses on how, and why, to develop a strategy for your archives. It walks you through a simple structure that you can customize to fit your specific needs and context.
The Value of a Strategy
Starting an archive for your organization or art practice can feel like a lot! It can be easy to get overwhelmed and not end up doing anything.
This is where an archive strategy plays such an important role. Your strategy, or plan, functions as a set of intentions and instructions to guide you in building and maintaining your archive.
It is a place where you document initial decisions about the structure and process for your archive, and serves as a resource to refer to when carrying out ongoing archival tasks.
It can also be used as a guide to train other folks in doing archival tasks. This can be especially useful if you are an artist who temporarily hires part-time studio assistants for projects.
If you’re someone who benefits from examples of how this might work in action, jump to part 3, which runs through a scenario of how one artist might use and add to an archive over the course of a major project.
Download Our Archive Strategy Template
Use this template as a starting point for developing a local plan for your archive. Each section of the template is explained in detail below.
First: Decide What to Keep
Keeping everything you produce isn’t necessary, feasible, or sustainable.
Searching and finding digital assets later on can be much more difficult if you have a huge volume of files to wade through. And while digital storage is relatively inexpensive, it is more cost-effective to only store the materials you need to keep. This is why selection, or deciding what specific digital materials are valuable and worth keeping, is a key component of an archive strategy.
Developing a selection framework where you define and assign levels of value to your digital assets will be helpful in determining what assets need to be kept for different periods of time and which assets can be deleted.
This step is key to ensuring that you are consistently identifying and selecting materials for long-term care and access, as well as being efficient and effective with the resources that will be needed to ensure continued access.
If you have already created a basic inventory for your digital materials (see part 1!) you can use it as a starting point for developing a selection framework.
Step 1: Create Categories
Start by coming up with a small set (5 – 8) of initial categories or groups for the digital materials you are regularly producing. These categories could be based on your work activities and outputs, or some other system that makes sense to you.
As you put these categories into practice, you may find that not all your digital assets easily fit, and that’s ok. You can add more categories and refine them over time. Below are some examples to consider.
Example Material Categories for Artists
| Category | Example Materials |
|---|---|
| Project Proposals | Project proposals, grant applications, budgets |
| Administration | Contracts, invoices, receipts, grant reports, meeting notes |
| Research | Images, notes, articles |
| Fabrication | Drawings, designs, models |
| Documentation | Images, text |
Example Material Categories for Arts Organizations
| Category | Example Materials |
|---|---|
| Fundraising | Membership documents and data |
| Communications | Newsletters, publications |
| Administration | Financial documents, board meeting minutes |
Step 2: Assign Value Levels
Determining what is “valuable” is a subjective process.
Creating a set of value levels gives you a framework for the everyday work of organizing and categorizing the materials generated in your regular workflows.
The language you use for these value levels should be meaningful and useful to you, while still being easy for others to understand.
For example, here’s a set of value levels based on duration—how long it’s necessary to keep materials:
| Value Level | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Short-term value | Materials that are produced during regular processes but are not needed or used after a project is completed | Email correspondence with project partners |
| Near-term value | Materials that are needed for designated periods of time (e.g. for legal and/or financial reasons) but not over the long-term | Draft versions of contracts |
| Long-term value | Materials that are produced during regular processes and have continual value. They are regularly needed, and/or are representative of your work | Documentation of installed artworks |
Step 3: Document Your Selection Framework
Now that you’ve established categories and values, bring them together into a clear selection framework.
Each category will likely have a different set of values of what is important to archive. Create a rubric or table that captures both, so you can reference it at a glance.
Consider adding a “duration” column to indicate how long specific types of assets should be kept.
| Category | Example Materials | Value Level | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fundraising | Membership campaign data | Near-term | 1 year |
| Administration | Annual reports | Long-term | Permanent |
| Documentation | Photographs of installed artwork | Long-term | Permanent |
So, What Actually Goes Into the Archive?
In your selection framework, the assets marked with the “Long-term” value level are the ones to include in the digital archive.
Other types of assets—like working files or raw data—may need to be kept for a set period of time, but can eventually be removed or deleted. The “Long-term” assets are the ones with lasting value and worth preserving permanently.
Next: Describe and Organize your Assets
Once you’ve decided what to keep, the next step is describing, organizing, and preparing those assets for storage and future access.
Next steps include putting those categories into practice through a filenaming system and folder structure and coming up with a minimal set of metadata that makes sense for your context and workflows.
Organizing and describing your materials is often the most time-consuming part of digital stewardship. But it’s also the bridge between the moment you create something and the moment you need to find it again.
Investing effort here will pay off in the future, making it far easier to search, browse, and access your materials when you need them.
Step 4: Implement Consistent Filenaming
Using a consistent filenaming system based on best practices will make it easier to find, open, and quickly understand the contents of files over the long term.
Think of the filename as the file’s title: it should provide a simple, recognizable description without needing to capture every detail.
Consider building your filenames from the categories you’ve already developed. It’s usually easier to be consistent if you apply the system as you create new files rather than trying to rename them later.
That said, the best approach is to determining a filenaming system that you will actually use consistently.
-
Regularly making meeting notes?
You could use a file name system like YYYYMMDD-projectname-meeting-notes.
-
Moving projects from “draft’ to ‘finish?’
It can be helpful to include this indicator of the version or status of a digital asset in the filename, especially for documents like grant applications, annual reports, etc. An example could look something like: YYYYMMDD-projectname-grantproposal-draft.
-
What’s up with this YYYYMMDD?
It’s a recommended practice to start a filename with a date in the YYYYMMDD standard format (for instance, September 15, 2025 would be 20250915). This method can be very helpful in sorting and easily understanding the differences between versions of files!
Step 5: Address Folder Naming and Organization
In a similar vein, designing a folder structure and naming system will make it easier to quickly organize your assets as you create them. Again, the categories that you develop for your assets could be an excellent starting point for a folder structure.
If you are an artist, using a project-based folder template that you repeat with every project could make sense:
- Project name
- Administration
- Contracts
- Invoices
- Budget
- Reports
- Proposal
- Grant applications
- Fabrication
- Drawings
- Models
- Documentation
- Administration
If you are an arts organization, a folder structure based on departments or units might be a good fit:
- Board Governance
- Administration
- Finance
- Operations
- Human Resources
- Development
- Programs and Services
- Community Outreach
- Communications
Step 6: Consider File Formats
A key element that has a significant impact on the ability to access a digital file in the future is its file format. A file format defines how information is encoded in a digital file and provides instructions for how that information can be rendered and displayed by software applications.
Determining what file formats digital assets will be saved in is an important step in preparing those assets for future access and use. Selecting file formats that are open, well-documented, and based on community standards will better support preservation and future access.
When you save or output your working files in preservation-friendly file formats will depend on your local workflows, but generally this step will happen when the final versions of the digital assets are created.
It is likely that you will use specific file formats for the archival versions of your digital assets and different formats for the access versions you use to share with others.
See Part 3 of this series for an example of this process in practice.
File Format Preferences
| Content Type | Preservation | Access |
|---|---|---|
| Text Document | ||
| Still Image | TIFF, PNG | JPEG |
| Audio | WAV | MP3 |
| Video | MOV, MPEG2 | MPEG4 |
| Design / 3D (vector) | SVG, DXF | |
| Design / 3D (raster) | TIFF | |
| EML, MBOX | EML, MBOX |
Finally: Store Your Materials
Once you have prepared, described, and organized your digital materials, the final step is putting them in a safe and secure storage location.
Keeping multiple copies in multiple locations is a simple and robust archive storage strategy for preventing complete loss of your valuable digital assets.
The intention of archive storage is to be the place to put copies of digital materials that are only accessed if there is some kind of disaster or loss with locally stored copies.
The 3-2-1 rule provides a helpful way to remember some basic requirements for archive storage:
- Create 3 copies of your valued digital materials.
- Store these copies on 2 different types of storage media.
- Ensure 1 of the copies is stored in a different geographic location.
These are not strict rules, and it may not always be possible to implement each of these fully at first, but they do serve as useful goals to aim for.
A simple example of a 3-2-1 storage strategy in practice could include keeping one copy on a laptop, another copy on an external hard drive, and a third copy in cloud-based storage service.
Different approaches to implementing the 3-2-1 method will likely be needed if you are primarily creating and editing your digital assets in web-based platforms like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.
Check out Part 3 of the series for examples of different storage strategies in practice.
Up Next: Future You Says Thanks: Making Digital Archiving Part of Your Workflow
With a basic archive strategy in place, you can start to put it into practice by integrating archival actions into your regular organization workflows and creative processes.
Click to read the next article in the series, which will discuss how to build sustainable habits that help you stay organized and protect your work—one folder, filename, or upload at a time.