Toolkit
The AIDA self Assessment Toolkit is a toolkit to enable your institution to perform self-assessment of your capacity, state of readiness, and overall capability for digital asset management.
New! Mark II version of the Toolkit released May 2009
Previous version (July 2008)
This is not intended to function as an audit. It’s about measurement, not improvement; you don’t need to supply ‘evidence’ that you are doing anything. But you do need to know that evidence exists, that you can get hold of it, and where you can get hold of it. (If you can’t find any evidence at all, then that in itself may tell us something).
Although the toolkit will be weighted and scored, there’s no such thing as a ‘bad score’.
The toolkit is structured as a set of simple elements, each one describing an aspect of digital asset management. Each element is positioned on one of five Stages, indicating a stage of maturity or development. Stage 1 is the least developed, Stage 5 is the most developed. Each stage is outlined with a short and very general description, backed up with additional indicators and exemplars.
The process is spread over three discrete areas. There are three ‘legs’ which tell us what we need to know about your Institution’s assets from an Organisational, Technology and Resources point of view.
These Five Stages (Acknowledge, Act, Consolidate, Institutionalise and Externalise). and the Three Legs are based on the Cornell University maturity model, originally designed to assess an Institution’s readiness for digital preservation. The AIDA project has adapted the Cornell model to apply to digital asset management. The attached Appendix contains further characterisation of the Five Stages.
Along with the typical characteristics, we provide indicators of practice. Using these indicators, its then up to you to evaluate your own institution, and identify your own practice. You might be well advanced in one area, but require a lot of effort to improve practice in another. Only you know the priorities of your institution and the resources available to you.
For each element, you will try and locate your institution at the stage which best describes the place you’re working in, and record your decisions using the assessment scorecard provided.
The scores are evaluated with the AIDA balanced scorecard.