Athletic Archive Derivative File Creation Policy: Masters, Access Copies, and Thumbnails
An athletic archive derivative file creation policy is the written rule that tells everyone on your team — archive coordinator, IT staff, athletic department administrators, and hall-of-fame committee volunteers — exactly when to create a master file, when to produce an access copy, and when a thumbnail is required. The short answer: every digitized or natively digital file in a school athletic archive should exist in at least two tiers — a preservation master and an access copy — and any item displayed in a searchable interface or recognition screen should also have a thumbnail. Without a policy, derivative file creation is left to individual judgment each time a file is processed, producing an archive where some items have all three tiers, others have only a compressed copy of unknown provenance, and no one can reliably reproduce missing files from a master that may or may not have been saved.
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Athletic Archive Digital Preservation File Formats: Master Files, Access Copies, and Migration
Athletic archive digital preservation file formats determine whether a school’s historical photographs, rosters, video recordings, audio files, and statistical records remain usable in twenty years or silently become unreadable. Choosing the right formats at the moment a file is created — or at the moment a physical item is digitized — is one of the highest-leverage decisions an athletic department or archive committee can make, because correcting a poor format choice later is far more expensive than getting it right the first time.
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