Gathering and Collecting – PPC Program Resources

Summary

Gathering encompasses the various ways that we collect items. This stage is building on the decisions that were made during the preparing stage, meaning that it should support your organizations’ purpose and goals.

Planning Your Gathering

When thinking about what you will gather, consider:

Subjects that are relevant to your community (people, history, events, location).
Cultural, ethical, or legal issues related to items, especially if they are considered culturally sensitive or have copyright or access restrictions.
Logistics related to acquiring physical items, such as the quantity you are able to store, the formats you can accept, their condition, and staff time and resources needed to properly store and care for them. It’s important to balance the benefit to the community with the responsibility for the management of cultural items. Specifications for digital items, including file formats and minimum quality standards that you will accept and storage media types that you can support.

Methods

Gathering is a multi-faceted activity, since cultural items can come from many places. Methods for gathering include.

Community donations through various means, including outreach to specific people or groups, public calls for donations, and digitization events.
External partnerships with other groups or organizations. The nature of each partnership varies, and could look like:
- Lending or donating physical items
- Creating copies of items
- Helping with identification or metadata (descriptive information)
- Providing technology to help with the digitization workflow
- A one-time project or an ongoing agreement
Creating new content, such as recording oral histories
Digitizing physical or analog items. (See Digitization for more details of this process)

Community collecting is a specific approach to gathering that identifies voices and stories missing from your collections. It involves making connections, building trust, and engaging in respectful collaboration that leads to ongoing relationships.

Documentation

Your digital collections documentation should reflect the various components of your gathering process. For instance:

Collection development policies address selection criteria
Collection development procedures address how that collecting will take place and any other ongoing workflow information
Forms may be required as part of your intake workflow (for instance, during the donations process)

Donations

Since most organizations accept donations as part of their overall gathering activities, it’s important to plan ahead, especially regarding:

Appraisal (not monetary). Consider how you will evaluate something to determine whether you will accept it. Does it fit within your collecting guidelines, based on your collection development policy?
Acquisition. This could include processes that address transfer of physical custody, transfer of copyright, right to display digital copies, and embargoes. We highly recommend preparing a donor form and deed of gift as part of your documentation.
- Understanding copyright basics is an important professional skill that can help you understand some of the questions to ask donors. For instance, does the donor hold the necessary rights to transfer ownership?
Accessioning. After deciding to accept an item, you will need a process for documenting the basic description, unique identifier, filename, and location, and addressing next steps in your workflow.

Policy Creation Guides, Forms & Worksheets

Collaborative Curation Model. Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation, Washington State University. Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Worksheet PDF
- Example PDF
- Slides
Digitization Selection Criteria Worksheet. Strategic Digitization Goals, Sustainable Heritage Network
Digitization Plan Worksheet, Plains to Peaks Collective. There are aspects of the document that you may want to consider documenting now.
Collections Development Policy Worksheet, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation
Donor Form and Deed of Gift, Center for Digital Scholarship and Curation
- Worksheet
- Slides

Discussion Questions

Does your organization have any documented policies and/or procedures that address gathering or collecting? What is missing?
What are some methods you have used to gather items? What has worked well or not so well? What are some other methods you would like to explore?
Have you ever partnered with an external organization for the gathering process? How did the partnership work? Would you do it again?
Do you accept physical items? If so, have you defined any limits (number, size, condition, etc.) on what you will accept?
Have you ever had to turn away a donation? How did it go, and would you do anything differently next time?
What are the collective memories of the community you serve? What is the dominant narrative?
Which communities are already included in the digital collection you are planning or currently working on?What voices are currently missing from your collection?
What opportunities do you have to reach out to new communities? How could you build trust with them?
What strategies or communication channels could you use to maintain current and future relationships?