Checklist
Corporate Heritage Stewardship Checklist
Assess how effectively your organization is protecting its corporate heritage and identify opportunities to strengthen your stewardship practices for the future.
Is Your Corporate Collection Protected for the Long Term?
Your corporate collection preserves the stories and milestones that have shaped your organization. Use this 10-question checklist to assess your current approach and identify opportunities to strengthen its long-term stewardship.
Assess your data governance
Review whether responsibilities, policies, permissions, and processes are clearly defined so collections stewardship does not depend on informal practices or individual knowledge.
Evaluate your collections documentation
Consider whether your records capture the context that gives objects and assets meaning, including provenance, creators, dates, locations, documents, and images.
Protect institutional knowledge
Identify where valuable knowledge may be held in personal spreadsheets, inboxes, local files, or individual memory rather than preserved as an organizational resource.
Review discoverability and security
Assess whether authorized teams can find the information they need while sensitive and valuable collections information remains appropriately protected.
Review your digital assets and rights
Consider how effectively digital resources are connected to collection records and whether your organization can confidently determine how heritage assets can be accessed, shared, and reused.
Prepare your collection for the future
Evaluate whether your systems, workflows, backups, and processes can support reliable collections information as people, technologies, and organizational priorities change.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Corporate Heritage Stewardship Checklist?
The Corporate Heritage Stewardship Checklist is a practical self-assessment designed to help organizations evaluate how effectively they are managing and protecting their corporate collections and the information surrounding them.
Who is this checklist for?
The checklist is designed for corporate archivists, collections managers, heritage teams, brand heritage professionals, and others responsible for preserving and managing an organization’s historical collections and information.
What does the checklist cover?
It covers 10 areas of corporate collections stewardship: data governance, documentation, data consistency, institutional knowledge, discoverability and access, security and permissions, digital assets, rights and reuse, lifecycle management, and continuity and future readiness.
How long does the assessment take?
The checklist is designed to provide a straightforward review of your current practices. Each section includes four statements to assess, an explanation of why the area matters, and a question to help you consider potential risks or opportunities.
Do I receive a result from the checklist?
Yes. Once you have completed the assessment, you can use the scoring guidance to understand whether your organization has strong foundations in place or where there may be opportunities to strengthen your approach.
Do we need a dedicated collections management system to use the checklist?
No. The checklist can help you assess your current approach regardless of the systems you use today. It can also highlight areas where disconnected files, spreadsheets, or processes may make long-term stewardship more difficult.
From Corporate Memory to Corporate Heritage
A corporate collection does not preserve itself. As staff change, departments reorganize, technology evolves, and collections grow, valuable knowledge can become fragmented, difficult to find, or dependent on individual expertise.
TMS Suite provides a centralized foundation for managing collections information, digital resources, workflows, and access, helping organizations preserve their corporate heritage as a trusted and usable resource for the future.