The Discipline of Organizing: Professional Edition, 3rd Edition

2.5. Maintaining Resources

Maintaining resources is an important activity in every organizing system regardless of the nature of its collection because resources or surrogates for them must be available at the time they are needed. Beyond these basic shared motivations are substantial differences in maintenance goals and methods depending on the domain of the organizing system.

Different domains sometimes use the same terms to describe different maintenance activities and different terms for similar activities. Common maintenance activities are storage, preservation, curation, and governance. Storage is most often used when referring to physical or technological aspects of maintaining resources; backup (for short-term storage), archiving (for long-term storage), and migration (moving stored resources from one storage device to another) are similar in this respect. The other three terms generally refer to activities or methods that more closely overlap in meaning; we will distinguish them in §2.5.2 through §2.5.4.

Selection and maintenance are interdependent. Selection is based on an initial set of rules that determine which resources enter the organizing system. Maintenance includes the work to preserve the resources, the processes for evaluating and revising the original selection criteria, and the removal of resources from the system when they no longer need to be preserved. More stringent rules for selecting resources generally imply a maintenance plan that carefully enforces the ...