Your history is the backbone of your anniversary celebration. Using historical assets that are uniquely yours—like photographs, historic logos, videos, and company archives—makes your story come to life.
While you are preparing for the celebration, you have a golden opportunity to revitalize your archives. Properly organizing and storing your company’s historical digital assets now is will give you lasting benefits into the future. You’ll have an organized and accessible body of knowledge that your company can use to refresh marketing campaigns, create employee engagement programs, develop corporate storytelling initiatives, and even mitigate risk. Plus, you’ll make it easier for the next anniversary celebration!
Here are some quick tips for making your efforts pay off in the long run:
Pay Attention to Metadata
- Make full use of the tools available to you for describing your assets, whether you are using a digital asset management (DAM) solution, a content management system (CMS), a digital preservation solution, or a simple shared drive. Add in as much information as you can while you are in the gathering stage. This can make all the difference in how the material is searched for, found, and ultimately used.
- Agree on a standard for consistent description. Use a common vocabulary to make searching for assets more reliable. Where applicable, use your industry standards.
- Determine your minimum data set. What information is needed in order to find and access what you need? Think about how this might evolve over time.
Consider Long-Term Use of Digital Content
- Scan at the right resolution. For analog material like documents and photos, archivists recommend creating files at production-quality resolution, so that the scan can serve as a master file of the document. You can also create reference copies at lower resolution for quick use.
- Keep all native files used in production and add them to your asset collection if they weren’t there already.
Format obsolescence might not be on your mind while getting ready for an anniversary, but if you take steps now to save your files, your hard work will be usable long after the party’s over.
Create a Central Repository
- Take the opportunity to revisit and upgrade the way you currently save your historical material! A well-organized repository of historical assets might well be a lasting benefit of your anniversary celebration.
- Make it a catalog. If you use a database system, consider adding records that describe your analog and artifact collections as well, so you have a true, centralized knowledge base to draw from.
- Consider integrating a digital preservation tool along with your DAM system so digital assets are safe, can be re-purposed to new formats, and easily found over decades.
Planning for a major organizational anniversary can be a full-time job at times, but it is well worth the effort. Taking a few extra steps now will yield not only happy memories but a lasting legacy of well-curated, historical content that can serve as a living resource again and again!
Our team of historians, storytellers, collections managers, and archivists, has helped several clients preserve and share their stories. Our case studies offer insight into how we’ve collaborated with clients like supermarket chain Meijer and the Farm Credit System to organize historical assets and celebrate milestones.
