Audiovisual Collection Review Presentation


This policy aligns with the University of ACTS’s Strategic Plan 2020-2025, and delivers to UAA users as seen in the slide. This table shows our guiding strategic aims when thinking about how we craft a collection that helps us fulfil our purpose. The following slides will explore methods that help us to maintain a purposeful collection, which can include uncovering insights by conducting significance assessment, a Collection Profile, and the rarer method of deselection and disposal of items.

We understand that one of our weaknesses is that we lack in more contemporary items, and we are especially focusing on building up our internally owned audiovisual output from our unique corporate, academic, research, teaching, and social history, as part of University of ACT Retention Regulations. Much like the university’s documentation is retained by the University of ACT Archive, UAA is seeking to better archive the university’s ever-increasing output of digital audiovisual content.
Collection Intent as part of Review is a way to describe how and why decisions are made. Articulating the intent of the collection is to describe the decisions that explain the collection’s existence. We have an array of tools and methods to help us best articulate our decisions about our collection and a statement of intent is a great starting point. It also gives us — along with our mission, strategy, and purpose — a starting point for accountability for our decision-making, as well.

At the University Audiovisual Archive, our users are our university staff, faculty, students, and the wider community that the university and its people interact with. To understand what is of value and has meaning to our users, we can use a significance criterion to come to a better understanding of what it is we develop and manage in our collection.
The purpose of a significance assessment is to understand what is in a collection that will then guide acquisition and preservation priorities. It can also be used in understanding what needs to be deselected, which will be explained further, in the coming slides.
The criteria for conducting a significance assessment are seen here (on the slide), with a framework used to understand how and why an item is significant, and that creates a nuanced assessment. This is a very detailed and complex method to understand the importance of an item and is used at the UAA when making acquisition and deselection decisions, guide conservation priorities, and strength and weakness assessments (Russell & Winkworth, 2009, p. 23).

Our most recent collection profile focused on discovering what items we have in this area of weakness, which amounted to approximately 25 percent of the collection (Russell & Winkworth, 2008). Examining this 25 percent helps us to guide our collecting efforts of this majority, born-digital audiovisual content.
For this collection profile we used a collection-centered technique. A client-centered technique is what is commonly used in a library to gauge usage or loan statistics. We do hope to build up our collection review process to include a client-centered approach as we roll out our digitization, digital access, and engagement strategies and ascertain the metrics that should be measured. But at this stage we think understanding our holdings is the priority. Using the metadata associated with each accessioned item we can view this 25 percent to determine the type of content in the collection, without concern for format (Evans & Pymm, 2020a).



Pursuing deselection as a step in the collection review process is a unique action and can be contentious at times. An archive is physically and financially unable to collect everything and at times a collection needs to be analyzed and brought into balance and the result can be the deselection of items. Examples that might influence a deselection decision include changes to “policy focus, technologies, resources, circumstances, procedures, perspectives, analyses and client demands” (Evans & Pymm, 2020b).
For the UAA, our organization’s priorities have reoriented due to technological changes that have seen an exponential increase in digital audiovisual items that the university’s staff, faculty, and students are producing. With our previous priorities of establishing the collection to reflect the university’s beginnings from 1975, we think that, while we should still be collecting unique past experiences, it has come at the expense of collecting the present. With the support of the university’s retention policy, we have an opportunity to retain a lot of the university’s intellectual property that is currently simply disappearing. This audiovisual IP is of great value to the university’s strategic priorities and to its history.


Description
Audiovisual Archiving
September 2021
Presentation created for Audiovisual Archiving course in Master of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University.