When establishing an archive its goals have to be explicitly constituted beforehand. Thereby, the digital objects the collection will be composed of are determined. This is a crucial step since specifying the contents of the archive will have substantial implications on the management of the data, access provision, as well as other aspects concerning the operation of the system.
Foremost, a suitable source has to be found and the scope needs to be delimited thereon, which is discussed in Section 2.1.1. Section 2.1.2 deals with data types to be included in the repository. Selecting the documents to be included based on their content is addressed in Section 2.1.3.