What issues do archives need to consider when developing a plan for accessioning an organization's Sharepoint content

Many organizations are using Microsoft SharePoint as a tool to both manage content and collaborate. When archives (either as an institutional archive or as the archival home of the organization's materials) are tasked with preserving this content they face some challenges. First and foremost is defining what it is in the SharePoint content that they actually want to preserve.

In what cases would it make sense to just extract the documents and preserve them and in what cases does it make sense to try and capture the date that exists in SharePoint itself. To clarify, this is more of a significant properties and feasibility question than a how-to question. How one would actually go about either extracting documents or trying to preserve an entire SharePoint environment are each interesting questions in their own right (that I imagine will come up on this site at some point). However, before getting to those questions the first question at hand is how do you go about deciding what inside SharePoint is the actual content you are tasked to preserve.

So what issues would an archives want to consider in deciding on the significant properties they need to preserve in SharePoint content?

Trevor Owens

• software
• accession
• sharepoint
• significant-properties

Comments

• Andy Jackson: I don't really understand this question. Whether you extract the documents or not depends on where the information you want to preserve is held. Determining what you want to preserve seems to be a separate, generic issue that has little to do with whether you're using SharePoint or not.
• Donald.McLean: I have two issues with this question. First, there seems to be either grammar issues or typos in the second paragraph that make it hard to read. Second, you appear to be asking about data other than the documents themselves, but with providing any kind of definition or description of that data. How can anyone possibly hope to answer a question that is so incredibly vague and generic? Also, I agree with @AndyJackson - does it matter whether or not everything is in SharePoint? If so, how does it matter?
• Christian Pietsch: This is a question for Microsoft support, which you are probably already paying for.
• Nick Krabbenhoeft: This question is something like a project Archives New Zealand published last year. They had analog copies of land records, but the indexing system was on a MS SQL server. There was value in the actual records but much more when the index was preserved as well. Because of that, they virtualized the server to retain the access system. http://openplanetsfoundation.org/blogs/2012-04-23-migrating-windows-2000-database-server-virtualized-and-emulated-hardware
• mopennock: There are at least three separate questions in this question a) In what cases would it make sense to just extract the documents from Sharepoint and preserve them, b) in what cases does it make sense to try and capture the date that exists in SharePoint itself, c) what issues would an archives want to consider in deciding on the significant properties they need to preserve in SharePoint content? It's not going to solicit any useful answers in this form. Can you simplify it please?