What Should You Digitise First?
A Practical Prioritisation Guide for Small Heritage Organisations
LAST UPDATED: June 2026
Every library, museum and historical society has more to preserve than time or budget allows. The boxes in the storeroom, the donated photographs that haven't been looked at in years, the fragile ledgers sitting in conditions that would make a conservator wince. Knowing you should digitise is one thing. Knowing where to start is another.
Prioritisation is not a sign that you are falling behind. It is a strategic decision. The organisations that make real progress with digitisation are rarely the ones with the most resources. They are the ones that have thought clearly about what matters most, in what order, and why.
This guide walks through a practical framework for making those decisions, including how to involve volunteers, how to build a realistic 12-month roadmap, and how to move from paralysis to progress.
Why Prioritisation Matters Beyond the Obvious
The practical argument for prioritisation is straightforward: you cannot do everything, so you have to choose. But there are less obvious reasons why a clear prioritisation strategy is worth developing properly.
Funders increasingly want to see evidence of strategic thinking. A digitisation project with a clear rationale for why certain materials were tackled first demonstrates organisational competence and makes for a far stronger funding application than a list of what happened to be accessible. If you can explain that you prioritised fragile photographic collections because of documented deterioration, or local records with demonstrable community demand, that is a compelling case.
Our guide to what heritage funders want to see from archives, libraries and museums covers this in detail, including how to demonstrate meaningful community engagement and measurable impact.
Trustees and boards are more likely to support resource allocation when they can see a coherent plan. Staff and volunteers sustain motivation more easily when they understand the purpose behind the work they are doing.
And perhaps most importantly, prioritised digitisation produces collections that actually get used. A thoughtful approach ensures that what you put online has an audience, generates enquiries, and builds the community engagement that makes digital archives genuinely worthwhile.
Five Criteria for Prioritising Your Digitisation Work
Condition & fragility
Uniqueness & irreplaceability
Community relevance & demand
Engagement & storytelling potential
Accessibility & findability
Condition & fragility
Uniqueness & irreplaceability
Community relevance & demand
Engagement & storytelling potential
Accessibility & findability
These five criteria work best when used together rather than individually. An item that scores well across several of them is a strong candidate for early digitisation. An item that scores highly on only one may be worth holding for a later phase.
Collections Trust recommends that organisations consider significance, risk of deterioration, popularity and planned use when deciding what to digitise — a framework that aligns closely with the criteria below.
1. Condition and Fragility
The most urgent case for digitisation is always materials that are actively deteriorating. Photographic prints that are fading, nitrate film, documents stored in poor conditions, magnetic media from the 1980s and 1990s that is approaching the end of its readable life. Once these materials are gone, they are gone. Digital capture does not replace conservation, but it preserves the content even if the original cannot be saved.
Carry out a basic condition assessment before you begin any digitisation phase. Flag the materials that are most at risk and build them into your early priorities, even if they are not the most publicly interesting items in the collection.
Questions to ask:
Is this item visibly deteriorating?
Is it stored in conditions that are accelerating damage?
If it were lost tomorrow, would the content be gone forever?
2. Uniqueness and Irreplaceability
Some items in your collection exist nowhere else. A set of parish photographs from the 1890s. Minutes from a local organisation that no longer exists. A personal diary donated by a family with no other known copies. These items carry a weight of irreplaceability that should move them up your list regardless of their current physical condition.
Conversely, materials that are already held and digitised by other institutions (national newspapers, widely distributed publications, standard government records) can reasonably be deprioritised unless your copy has specific local annotations or provenance that adds unique value.
Questions to ask:
Does this item exist in any other collection?
If our copy were lost, would the content survive elsewhere?
3. Community Relevance and Demand
What are people already asking for? Enquiries from researchers, genealogists, local schools and community groups are a direct signal of where demand sits. If your reference desk regularly fields questions about a particular decade, street, community or event, that is a prioritisation signal worth taking seriously.
Materials with strong community relevance also tend to generate the most engagement once they are online. Local faces, recognisable places, events that people remember or have been told about by older relatives — these are the collections that attract contributions, comments and new material, turning a static archive into a living resource.
Questions to ask:
What do people most often ask us about?
Which parts of the collection would generate the most immediate interest if made accessible online?
4. Engagement and Storytelling Potential
Not all materials are equally useful once digitised. A ledger of names and dates is historically significant but offers limited engagement for a general audience without considerable additional context. A collection of photographs, postcards, local newspaper clippings, maps or personal letters carries inherent storytelling potential. It is shareable, discussable, and more likely to draw in contributions from community members who recognise people or places.
This does not mean prioritising the superficially interesting over the historically significant. It means being realistic about what your digitised collection will actually do once it is online. Our article on building a digital archive explores how collections that generate engagement and community contributions make a stronger case for continued funding and staff time.
Questions to ask:
Once this is online, could people do something with it?
Could it anchor a story, a local history post, a school project?
Does it have the kind of visual or narrative quality that invites people in?
5. Accessibility and Findability
There is little value in digitising materials that then become impossible to find or use. Before committing to a digitisation phase, consider how the resulting files will be described, tagged and made searchable. Materials that are straightforward to catalogue, tag with names and places, or link to related items are better candidates for early digitisation than highly complex collections that will require specialist description to be usable.
A digital archive that allows community members to add context, identify people in photographs, and search by name or location transforms a collection of files into something genuinely navigable. Digitisation without discoverability is a missed opportunity.
Questions to ask:
Can we describe this material well enough for people to find it?
Can community members help with identification and context?
Will it be searchable and linkable once it is online?
The Prioritisation Matrix
Use this matrix to score items or collections before deciding which to tackle first. Score each criterion from 1 to 3, then total the scores.
Stable, good storage
Some deterioration
Actively deteriorating
Held elsewhere
Partially unique
Unique to this collection
No known interest
Occasional enquiries
Frequent requests
Text or statistical
Mixed formats
Strong visual or narrative
Complex to describe
Moderate effort
Easy to tag & search
Score interpretation
No scoring tool replaces professional judgement. Use this as a starting framework and adjust it to reflect your organisation's specific mission and community.
Download the free prioritisation matrix
To make this easier to apply to your own collections, we have created a free Excel tool you can download and use straight away. Enter your collections in the inventory tab and they pull through automatically into the scoring matrix. Score each one using the dropdown menus, add an urgent flag for anything that needs to jump the queue regardless of its score, and the tool calculates your priority phases which you can then use to populate a 12-month roadmap. (We discuss the 12 month digitisation roadmap in more depth further in the article).
Seeing the matrix in actionA worked example
A small local historical society is sitting on four main collections: 5,000 loose photographs, a run of local newspapers, a box of committee minutes dating back to the 1950s, and 23 cassette recordings of oral history interviews conducted in the 1990s.
Applying the matrix, the oral history recordings score highest across almost every criterion:
- The cassettes are actively deteriorating and may become unplayable within a decade.
- The interviews exist nowhere else.
- Researchers regularly ask about them.
- The personal stories they contain have strong storytelling potential.
- Once digitised and transcribed, they are straightforward to describe and publish.
The photographs score well on community demand and engagement potential but are stable and can wait. The newspapers are largely available through regional archives, which reduces their uniqueness score. The committee minutes are unique but score low on engagement and demand.
The oral histories become phase one. The photographs follow in phase two. The newspapers and minutes are scheduled for later in the year once workflows are established and the volunteer team is confident.
The matrix did not make the decision. But it gave the society a clear, defensible rationale for the order they chose — one they could present to their trustees and include in their next funding application.
The Role of Your Community in Deciding What Matters
Your community is not just an audience for your digitised collections. It is also one of your most valuable sources of intelligence about what should be digitised in the first place.
Local residents, former community members, families of people whose records you hold, members of historical and genealogical societies — these are people with detailed, lived knowledge of what matters and why. They know which collections relate to communities whose voices are underrepresented. They know which photographs contain people who are still remembered. They know which events, streets or organisations generate the most curiosity.
Involving the community in prioritisation decisions does not mean putting everything to a public vote. It means creating channels for people to tell you what they are looking for and using that information alongside your professional assessment.
Practical approaches include:
a standing request form for research enquiries that captures recurring themes over time
brief surveys or conversations at events
a simple online submission form inviting people to suggest what they would most like to see digitised
Once materials are online, community members who can identify people in photographs, add contextual knowledge, or link records to related items become active contributors to the quality of your collection, not just passive users of it.
How Volunteers Can Help
Volunteers are often the difference between a digitisation project that moves forward and one that stalls. Our volunteer guide for libraries, museums and historical societies covers how to recruit, involve and retain volunteers across all aspects of heritage work, including how to capture the contextual knowledge they carry before it is lost.
Where volunteers make the biggest difference
Scanning and basic capture - with proper guidance on equipment, handling and file naming conventions, volunteers can significantly expand your scanning capacity. Supervised scanfest events, where community members bring their own photographs and documents to be digitised, combine collection growth with community engagement.
Cataloguing and description - volunteers with local knowledge are often well placed to write basic catalogue entries, identify locations, and flag items for specialist attention. Simple templates and clear standards make this manageable for people without archival training.
Photograph identification - community volunteers who grew up in the area, or who are members of local history groups, can often identify faces and places that would otherwise remain unknown. This work is best done collaboratively, with a clear process for recording identifications and flagging uncertainty.
Transcription - handwritten documents, registers and letters that are legible but time-consuming to transcribe are well suited to volunteer involvement, particularly through online platforms that allow remote participation.
Setting volunteers up to succeed
Provide clear written guidance for every task. Be specific about what good work looks like, and equally specific about what to do when something is unclear or potentially problematic. Build in regular check-in points rather than leaving volunteers unsupported for long stretches. And wherever possible, connect the work volunteers are doing to the broader purpose of the collection. People sustain motivation when they understand why what they are doing matters.
Creating a 12-Month Digitisation Roadmap
A 12-month roadmap does not need to be complicated. Its purpose is to make your intentions concrete, create accountability, and give you a framework for reporting progress to funders, trustees or partners. The National Lottery Heritage Fund's guidance on digitisation is a useful reference point when planning your project, particularly if you are considering a funding application to support the work.
| Timeline | Phase | Key actions |
|---|---|---|
| Months 1–2 | Assessment & planning | Complete a condition survey. Score collections using the matrix. Agree file naming, metadata standards and folder structures. Recruit and brief volunteers. |
| Months 3–5 | First digitisation phase | Focus on Phase 1 collections — fragile, unique, high demand. Complete one defined batch. Catalogue as you go. |
| Months 4–6 | Publishing & engagement | Get the first batch online. Invite community contributions. Use the response to refine Phase 2 priorities. |
| Months 6–8 | Review & Phase 2 planning | Assess what worked. Re-score remaining collections. Use new enquiries to inform next priorities. |
| Months 8–11 | Second digitisation phase | Move into Phase 2 collections with established workflows and a trained volunteer team. |
| Month 12 | Review, report & plan ahead | Document progress: items digitised, records published, contributions received. Prepare next annual plan and any funding applications. |
A Note on "Good Enough" Digitisation
Perfect is the enemy of progress in heritage digitisation, particularly for under-resourced organisations.
The practical standard for most collections is: good enough to be usable, good enough to preserve the content, and good enough to be found. For photographs, that typically means a minimum of 400 DPI for prints, 600 DPI for negatives and slides. For documents, 300 DPI is adequate for most text-based records. For audio and video, capture at the highest quality your equipment allows.
File naming and folder structure matter more than many organisations realise. A consistent, logical system applied from the start saves enormous amounts of time later. Agree on a format before you begin and stick to it.
Metadata does not need to be exhaustive to be useful. A title, date (even approximate), a brief description, and any known names or locations will make records significantly more findable than files with no description at all. Our guide to digital preservation for public libraries explores how community contribution builds a collection that improves in quality long after the initial digitisation work is complete. The goal at the point of digitisation is to create a usable foundation, not a complete scholarly record.
Where to Start
The most common mistake in heritage digitisation is waiting until everything is organised, properly funded and fully planned before beginning. The collections that are making the most progress are the ones where someone decided to start somewhere, even imperfectly.
Choose one collection. Apply the matrix. Agree on a basic standard. Get it online.
The first batch you publish will teach you more about your audience, your workflows and your priorities than any amount of advance planning. It will also generate the kind of visible progress that sustains volunteer motivation, builds trustee confidence, and creates a foundation for future funding applications.
Your community is waiting to see what you have. The question of where to start has a simple answer: with whatever matters most, right now, with what you have available.
About YourArchive
YourArchive supports libraries, museums, historical societies and community archives to digitise, publish and share their collections. Find out more about how YourArchive can help your organisation build a digital archive your community will use by contacting us or booking a short demonstration here.
FAQs:
How do you prioritise archive collections when you have thousands of items?
Use a simple scoring matrix that assesses each collection or batch against five key criteria: condition and fragility, uniqueness, community demand, engagement potential, and accessibility. The matrix works best applied to collections or batches rather than individual items. Start by grouping your holdings into broad categories (photographs, documents, audio/visual, objects) and score each category as a whole. This gives you a workable phase order without needing to assess every item before you can begin. Once you are into a phase, triage within it as you go.
What should a small museum, library or historical society digitise first?
Start with materials that score highest across fragility, uniqueness, community demand, engagement potential and accessibility. For many organisations this means local photographs, oral histories and unique records that are both at risk and frequently requested by researchers.
Can you start a digitisation project without professional scanning equipment?
Yes. Smartphone cameras and flatbed scanners costing well under £200 / $250 are adequate for many standard documents and photographic prints at the resolutions this guide recommends. The National Lottery Heritage Fund's budget digitisation guidance covers low-cost approaches in detail. The priority is capturing content that would otherwise be lost. A good-enough digital record made now is worth more than a perfect one made in three years when funding finally arrives.
How do we handle copyright on items we want to digitise and publish?
Copyright is one of the most common reasons digitisation projects stall, but it does not have to stop you. In the UK, materials published before 1 January 1957 are generally out of copyright. Collections Trust and the Intellectual Property Office offer guidance specifically for heritage organisations, including how to handle orphan works where the rights holder cannot be traced. In the US, works published before 1 January 1928 are in the public domain at federal level, and the American Library Association's guidance on copyright for cultural institutions is a practical starting point for anything more recent. For both contexts, a sensible approach is to digitise for preservation first and hold back from publishing until rights are clarified.
Should you publish digitised collections as you go, or wait until the project is complete?
Publish as you go. Waiting until a collection is complete before going online delays the community engagement that improves your collection's quality, and it defers the visible progress that sustains volunteer motivation and funder confidence. An adequately described record published today can be enriched by community contributions over time. A perfect record that sits unpublished helps no one.
