Digital preservation is simultaneously a new and old topic. So many libraries and archives are only now dipping their toes into these complicated waters, even though the long-term preservation of our born-digital and digitized holdings has been a concern for a while now. I think it is often forgotten that trustworthy standard-bearers, like the Digital Preservation Management Workshop and The Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Model, have been around for over a decade. The OAIS Reference Model in particular is a great resource, but it can be intimidating. Full implementation requires a specific set of resources, which not all institutions have. In this way, comparing one’s own program to another which is further along in an attempt to emulate their progress is often a frustrating endeavor.
I’ve witnessed this disparity most notably at conferences. Conferences, unconferences, and colloquia can be really helpful in that people are (thankfully) very open with their workflows and documentation. It’s one of my favorite things about working in a library; there aren’t trade secrets, and there isn’t an attitude of competition. We celebrate each other’s successes and want to help one another. With that said, some of the conversations at these events are often diluted with tool comparison and institution-specific jargon. The disparity of resources can make these conversations frustrating. How can I compare our fledgling web archiving initiative with other institutions who have entire web archiving teams? Brown has a robust and well-supported Fedora repository, but what about institutions who are in the early stages of implementing a system like that? How do we share and develop ideas about what our tools should be doing if our conversations center around the tools themselves?
For our digital accession workflow, I’ve taken a different approach than what came naturally at first. I initially planned our workflow around the implementation of Artefactual’s Archivematica, but I could never get a test instance installed adequately. This, of course, did not stop the flow of digitized and born-digital material in need of processing. I realized I was trying to plan around the tool, when I wasn’t even sure what I needed to tool to do. Technology will inevitably change, and unless we have a basis for why a tool was implemented, it will be very difficult to navigate that change.
For this reason, I’ve been working on a high-level born-digital accessioning workflow where I can insert or take out tools as needed (see above). This workflow outlines the basic procedures of stabilizing, documenting, and packaging content for long-term storage. It has also been a good point of discussion among both internal and external colleagues. For example, after sharing this diagram on Twitter, someone suggested creating an inventory before running a virus scan. When I talked about this in our daily stand-up meeting, one of the Library’s developers mentioned that compressed folders may in fact strengthen their argument. Unless both the inventory and the virus scan account for items within a compressed folder, there is actually a risk that the scan might miss something. This is one example of the type of conversations I’d like to be having. It’s great to know which tools are available, but focusing strictly on tool implementation keeps us from asking some hard questions.