Practical First Steps

Last week I helped organise a training day on born-digital archives for the East of England Regional Archive Council. I was joined by Chris Hilton from the Wellcome Library, Ellie Robinson from LSE and Grant Young from Cambridge University Library. The day followed a similar pattern to an event hosted in Hull last November. There were four main elements to the day:

Institutional Overview
The four of us gave a brief overview of the development of digital preservation in our respective institutions and included Chris’s now legendary simplification of OAIS to "Get Stuff - Put stuff somewhere - Keep stuff safe & Show stuff to people".  Ellie talked through the development at LSE from a risk analysis perspective to get institutional backing to then moving on to actually doing it - the latter sentiment being one of the mantras for the day. Grant talked about his work with digital content - much of it digitised rather than born-digital but now occupying an eye-watering 67TB (both LSE and Hull have about 120GB of born-digital material).

Practical First Steps
The four of us then gave a short presentation offering some practical tips; I looked at conducting a survey to identify material already held in the archives and how this often meant the media had been accessioned but not the contents! Chris shared the experiences at Wellcome of 'Dealing with depositors', Ellie looked at 'Handling born-digital material' including accessioning, virus check and other stages at LSE and Grant talked about 'Issues around File Formats' highlighting a number of challenges and suggesting strategies that could be adopted.

Questions and Answers

The day also included two question and answer sessions designed to get delegates talking about the particular aspects and issues of concern to them. Questions touched on a range of topics including depositors, DRAMBORA, how to approach hybrid collections and depositor agreements. We also heard of work being conducted in a number of local authority archives and hopefully they will share their work and experiences with colleagues in the near future.


Demonstrations
Delegates were split into four groups and given demonstrations on using Karen's Directory Printer, DROID and also using FTK Imager with a write-blocker to read a PC hard drive (from my garage) the fourth diversion was a look at two different born-digital scenarios for delegates to consider how they might respond.

There was common agreement on the need to do something, and widespread acknowledgement that there wasn't a single solution or approach. Wellcome, LSE and Hull were all looking at the issue of bulk-ingest into repositories whilst retaining the relationships between files as represented through an often complex series of folders. It so happens that at Hull one of our developers is looking at this very issue so I hope to have an update on this in the next few weeks.

A key theme of the day was collaborating and helpline colleagues and in this spirit all of the presentations are now available on the Hull History Centre born-digital archive pages - thanks to all of the speakers for making this an interesting and informative day.

Update on the Donor Survey

As our readers may recall, this past July, the AIMS archivists created a donor survey for born-digital archives. My colleague, Peter Chan, wrote fairly extensively on its origins and purpose; please go here to read up on the background of our survey.

A few months have gone by and the archivists have had the opportunity to think more about how we envision the donor survey fitting into both shared and institution-specific born-digital workflows. First of all, we all agreed that we wanted to move away, as much as is possible, from continuing to create paper-based forms and records regarding donors and content. Moving the donor survey to a web-based tool, complete with an SQLLite database back-end, seemed to be a good way to start (for technical specifics, please see Tom's forthcoming entry regarding the web form - coming up next!). In the web-based survey, we deliberately included a space for the archivist to record comments for each question and answer on the survey. We realized that by creating a place for the archivist to record their findings and/or elaborate on what was recorded by the donor/owner of the personal archive, we could make the process of determining the scope of the personal archive for transfer that much more transparent. As one of our senior archivists on the project pointed out, it's as important to know what was excluded from transfer and why as to have a trail of documentation as to what was transferred and why (especially if the processing of the collection follows many months later!). We hope that adding this feature to the survey will help with the recording of that process in a centralized location and perhaps serve as the digital equivalent to a donor file.

As to how the donor survey fits into our shared and institution-specific workflows, that is still a work in process. Generally speaking, it is intended that the data collected from the survey could be mapped to a submission agreement, which, in turn, would then be part of the SIP (submission information packet). We also intend to map portions of what had been collected from the survey and submission agreement in Archivists' Toolkit and Calm (collection management software from the UK) to form an accession record. Ideally, we want to have to enter/create data once and have it re-purposed as often as is needed throughout our workflow.

We invite you to test out our web survey and to give us your feedback. In our next entry, Tom will be posting a description of the technical side of the survey web form and he'll include a link for access. Other folks have been working on other versions of surveys for electronic records as well. If you're not already familiar with Chris Prom's blog, Practical E-Records, get a readin'. Chris recently posted a version of a donor survey; check it out here.

Liz Gushee
University of Virginia

Surveying Born Digital Collections

The idea of creating a survey form was initiated by Glynn Edwards (my direct supervisor) at Stanford in May. Glynn would like to have something to guide the discussion of collecting digital material from a donor in July. She started with the Paradigm records survey (published by the Bodleian Library, Oxford University) and asked people at Stanford for comments. After gathering the comments, I posted the revised survey for the AIMS team to discuss. The main comment was the donors (mostly technical non-savvy) might not be able to understand all the technical terms. I have to thank Michael Forstrom at Yale University for sharing his revision of the Paradigm survey which avoid the use of technical terms.

The main difference between the original Paradigm records survey and the AIMS Digital Material Survey are:

1. Additional technology questions (e.g. web based backup, mobile device, social networking sites, document sharing sites, etc.)
2. Division of the survey into 2 parts: Part I is designed to be a prompt sheet for phone / face-to-face interview with donors by curators / digital archivists. Part II is to be filled out by digital archivists regarding technical details of the tools used to create digital material.
3. Usage of non-technical terms.

I think the survey should be sent before the actual interview as "something for the donor to start thinking about". If the donor is willing to reply before the interview, it helps the digital archivist to prepare as well. In fact, I sent the survey to a donor in July and she replied before the interview mentioning that she used Eudora for her emails. Since I was not familiar with Eudora, the answer helped me to get prepared for the interview as well.

Finally, I have to thank Susan Thomas, project manager of the Paradigm and the futureArch project, for her comments on the AIMS Digital Material Survey and her sharing of the experience in using the Paradigm records survey.

We would like to seek your comments on the survey as well. If you are going to discuss with donors on personal digital archives, why not download the survey and give it a try. Even if you are not collecting personal digital archives in the near future, take a look and tell us what you think.

Click below for the survey:
AIMS Digital Material Survey– Personal Digital Archives