Any sort of installation preservation will inevitably involve determining what the important aspects of a piece are.  This could be vital in ensuring that the work is set-up the way the way that you would wish.  Depending on the installation, the factors that may affect the experience, and that you may want to consider, could include the manner of the space, the acoustics, the balance of sounds, the light levels and the matters of entrance and exit.   As discussed in other parts of this site, the technological components may also require some thought in regard to their obsolescence.

A good way to begin would be to metaphorically breakdown an installation into its smaller parts; the listing of each part and thinking about how these parts relate should help with ascertaining their individual importance.  Can some parts be replaced and if so, how different can their replacements be without changing the nature of the work?  For the sake of exhibition, it might be tempting to ignore the historic and aesthetic nature of the technology in your piece and instead focus purely on the immediately functional, and in doing so agree to its technological update and change, but does this process just avoid some difficult questions?  For example, what is the precise relationship of this projector or monitor to the other parts around it and is it appropriate to migrate/copy work that’s on one format, onto another?  It may be that an alteration or up-date is acceptable, but for the sake of the integrity of the work, it's important that this becomes an active decision rather than a passive one.

For more guiding thoughts, it would be worth looking at decisions and documentation within issues to consider.  You can also download a documentation form below in a variety of formats.  The form lists the particular techinical and descriptive elements of your work you should think about and identify. You can enlarge these sections to fill out as much detail as you need to in the Word and Rich Text formats; the PDF can only be edited by a PDF editor such as Adobe Acrobat or some Mac applications.