Hi all - something that’s come up recently at Yale (there’s been some shifts and new additions to the special collections curatorial unit that’s made it an opportune moment to re-examine) is an idea of an updated survey or similar communication channel with donors that would in particular ask more questions about born-digital materials and help prepare other units (like Digital Preservation and Software Preservation and Emulation!) for what’s incoming.
Of course one of the big struggles is in coming up with a set of questions that is 1) broad enough to be made into a template, 2) detailed enough to gather actually-useful info for prepping future access (especially via emulation) and 3) short enough that a donor might actually try to answer them 
We touched a bit in our discussions on Aug. 18 on donor relations: visiting architecture firms or companies, bringing individual engineers into a lab space to have them interact and discuss the objects to be preserved and their hopes for access if possible. Has anyone had luck with structured donor surveys or some other kind of asynchronous/written system for gathering info about access to born-digital collections before or while they’re coming in to your institution? Do you have a form or set of questions you would be willing to share? If so, do you tweak anything for working with architecture or design records in particular?