The Museum’s Handbook for Digital Stewardship: Governance, Metadata, and Preservation Strategies

Cultural institutions have always been stewards of information as well as objects. Every accession record, provenance note, conservation report, photograph, exhibition history, and piece of research contributes to what an institution knows about the collections in its care. Increasingly, that knowledge is created, managed, preserved, and shared digitally.

The implications extend far beyond digitization. Institutions now manage born-digital collections, high-resolution images, audiovisual material, conservation documentation, research data, and rights information, much of it continually enriched over decades and used by more people, across more systems, than ever before.

The challenge is no longer simply how to store digital information. Institutions must ensure that information remains trustworthy, understandable, connected, accessible, and usable over time. This is the work of digital stewardship, and it requires a more connected approach to collections information.

Digital preservation, collections documentation, digital asset management, and online access cannot be treated as entirely separate disciplines. Effective digital stewardship depends on managing the relationships between information, not simply preserving individual records and files. This means bringing together three areas that have too often been considered independently: governance, metadata, and preservation.

This is an important distinction for institutions developing or reassessing their digital strategies. Digital stewardship is not a project to complete or a responsibility to delegate entirely to IT: it is an ongoing collections management practice embedded in how an institution cares for, understands, manages, and shares its collections.

From Digital Preservation to Digital Stewardship

Digital preservation and digital stewardship are closely related, but they are not interchangeable. Preservation is concerned with ensuring that digital material remains accessible and usable over time. Stewardship takes a broader view, considering how digital information is created, described, governed, protected, maintained, connected, and ultimately made useful throughout its lifecycle.

A museum might successfully retain a digital file for 30 years, for example, but if its relationship to an object has been lost, its rights information is unclear, or its metadata no longer provides sufficient context, retaining the file alone has not necessarily preserved its value. Likewise, a carefully cataloged digital asset remains vulnerable without a strategy for storage, integrity checking, recovery, or changing file formats.

Digital stewardship therefore requires institutions to consider the entire information lifecycle.

This approach increasingly reflects wider collections management practice. Spectrum 5.1, the Collections Trust collections management standard used in the UK and internationally, sets out 21 procedures covering the activities involved in managing collections. The Toolkit for Managing Digital Collections, developed by the London Museum Documentation Network with support from The National Archives, applies digital preservation practices to those same Spectrum procedures for accessioned digital collections.

The principle is important: digital collections are collections. Their long-term management should be integrated into established collections management practices rather than treated as an isolated technical activity.

Five Questions Every Institution Should Ask About Its Digital Collections

The scale of digital stewardship can make it difficult to determine where to begin. A useful starting point is to consider five questions that connect collections management, governance, metadata, and preservation:

1. What do we have?

Does the institution know which digital collections, assets, and associated information it is responsible for, where they are held, and in which systems they are managed?

2. What does it mean?

Is there sufficient structured metadata and contextual information for someone unfamiliar with the material to understand its significance and relationships?

3. Who is responsible?

Are ownership, permissions, workflows, and decision-making responsibilities clearly defined?

4. How is it protected?

Does the institution understand the risks to its digital information, and are proportionate measures in place to preserve it?

5. How will it remain useful?

Can the information continue to be discovered, connected, migrated, interpreted, and reused as technologies, research priorities, and audience expectations change?

Together, these questions move digital stewardship beyond a technology conversation and position it where it belongs: as a fundamental part of responsible collections management.