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Municipal Research Center Digital Archive Collection Priorities

The Milwaukee Municipal Research Center Digital Archive is, along with the MRC’s Recollection Wisconsin partnership, intended as both repository and showcase of significant or often requested records from the three units of the Municipal Research Center: City Records, Municipal Research Library, and Historic Preservation Commission. Because of the limited storage space on our Preservica account, the units contributing to the digital archive must make decisions about what will be stored, temporarily or permanently on the cloud platform devoted to hosting our records.

High Priority

Highest priority is given to those resources that are either born-digital or critically endangered for reasons of format, and specifically to those to those that are likely to be of interest to Members of the public. Examples of Resources include:

  • Records of major city officials, such as the mayor;
  • Photographs and digital images of places, people, or events likely to be of general or research interest;
  • Audio visual recordingsof major events or meetings, such as those created by the Common Council and its standing committees (Pre-2014).

Medium Priority

 Records of mid-level priority include:  

As above, within this priority level preference should be given to those records which can be easily described or described in bulk.

For scanned images of records produced by request, an embargo shall be maintained for no less than less than one month after delivering the record to the customer, particularly if record location and reproduction fees were paid by that customer. Such records should be placed in a drop box collection, which is itself private and unlinked, but which can host records made available publicly. If the record is of broad interest, it will be added to a primary collection once the embargo has expired.

Low Priority

 These records include records that are:

  • Part of large data or record sets, such as historical permit images;  
  • Case Files of routine activity by City of Milwaukee departments,  such as Housing loan applications
  • Routine or niche records from city websites that are not in danger of major changes, such as DNS permitting instructions PDFs;
  • Records that are known to be maintained in another long term repository, such as by the Wisconsin Historical Society or Milwaukee Public Library Archives; and
  • Records that may contain sensitive or confidential information, such as building plans and personnel files.

 

In general, records in the Low Priority category are not actively collected and uploaded to Preservica, although they may be added incidentally or if they provide additional context to records in High or Medium Priorities.