Digital Assets Discussion Group: Learning About Digital Assets - Selection

Digital assets can originate in several ways, however, it is possible for them to be categorized in two groups: born-digital and reformatted digital.

Selection for Digital Reformatting
Selection for digital reformatting focuses primarily on selection of the analog or physical resources to be digitally converted. This section will introduce the topic and offer guidance to further resources on selection. Selection of born-digital resources has a slightly different connotation.

Selection of Born-Digital Assets
Born digital-assets, like other information entities, posses attributes that help determine their usefulness to potential user communities Additionally, the technological structure of a born-digital asset determines how a digital object will be managed and preserved throughout the entity's lifecycle. The tenuous nature of a digital object existing primarily as a bit stream necessitates that planning for persistent retention of a digital assets begin before or during the selection period.

In both cases, balancing the costs involved in digital reformatting and/or long-term retention with the intellectual value of the digital asset can be difficult. It is perhaps most important in any selection process to resist myopic tendencies when making decisions and to consistently consider long-term repercussions of decisions made today for protecting invested resources in a digital collection project.