Have you documented workflows for your digital content?

Owned by Kari Smith
Last updated: Apr 29, 2024
4 min read

Documenting workflows is essential for sustaining your collections. Capturing and creating the required documentation is on-going activity that requires time and thought, and is invaluable.

Even if your organization is or will be using software like ArchivesSpace, Archivematica, and BitCurator from a service provider or that you manage locally, you need organizational workflows to see how that technology fits into your organization’s work and practices.

Your cumulative documentation of digital content management workflows, including current and desired states, will help you to manage changes over time as your workflow and related tools and services evolve.

Developing workflows requires that you gather information about all activities in your archives wherever they occur. As you have those discussions, you may notice that people quite naturally tend to know only the part of your overall archives workflow that they work on and that people have different ways of perceiving workflows. They may understand workflows as:

  • descriptions of practice and procedures that take the form of a narrative or a sequence of procedures;

  • the automation of repetitive tasks using software and tools; or 

  • graphic representations or illustrations that may be captured using various kinds of diagrams.

All of these ways to understand and document workflows are valuable as part of comprehensive digital preservation documentation. You will need to develop a combination of these forms as you go along to create a complete set of documentation.

Example: DPM Management Tools: Digital Content Workflows:

The DPM Workshop’s Digital Content Workflows may be helpful in documenting your local workflows and aligning them with TDL’s DP Storage and other services. The workflow example from the Digital Audio Music Project (DAMP) at MIT Libraries illustrates how to apply the principles from the DPM workshop to your situation. The high-level Workflow includes three lifecycle-based and interconnected workflows that comprehensively cover digital collections, including:

  • Managing Physical/Analog

  • Transforming Physical/Analog to Digital

  • Managing Digital

    ManageDigital_Lifecycleworkflow.jpg
    Manage Digital from Content Life Cycle Management: High-Level Workflow. 2015. DPWorkshop.org

The DPM resource includes examples of how you might document your own workflows from high-level to detailed diagrams, steps, and descriptions. Your organization will choose the phases and timeframes that work for you to develop your workflow documentation. Once (or as) you have documented your organizational workflows, you can use the documentation as a basis for discussions of and planning.

These are the sections of the detailed documentation from the DAMP Project:

  • Summary (description of the workflow stage)

  • Roles (who is involved in the Stage)

  • Inputs to the Stage (what outputs from previous Stages come into the Stage)

  • Actions (what steps / activities occur during the Stage, both optional and required)

  • Outputs from the Stage (products from the Stage that become inputs to next Stages)

  • Notes (e.g., context, to-do items) 

  • Tools (both current and desired)

  • References (to other documentation, examples, etc.)

  • Use cases (links to use cases for content types)

  • Previous Versions (links to drafts and older versions)

Benefits of your workflow documentation to justify spending the effort to develop and maintain the documentation:

  • helps demonstrate compliance with digital curation and preservation standards

  • helps address semantic confusion (e.g., saying the same words and meaning very different things) within your organization as you work through the stages, steps of each stage, then test the workflows

  • enables consistency as production scales up (more people can do the same things in the same way repeatedly) supports training practices for new staff

  • encourages workflow improvements, both organizational (e.g., simplifying steps) and technological (e.g., highlighting where software tools would be helpful)

Suggestions for documenting your workflows:

  • make iterative drafts of the diagrams and text available to the workflow documentation team and then more broadly as drafts are reviewed and finalized

  • allow the diagrams and the explanatory text for each stage to each demonstrate their value, not either diagrams or text, but both

  • use available design tools, whatever is familiar and/or supported locally - don't get distracted by how to create the diagrams

  • use generic labels for functionality in the steps so that software tools and other technologies can be inserted and changed as needed without requiring updates

Useful Resource: OSSArchFlow

The OssArcFlow project documentation has some great examples that might align with your organization’s collections, needs, and approach.

https://educopia.org/ossarcflow-guide/

Question for your team/organization: How do your local workflows align with TDL DP Storage and other DP services? Members: contact TDL for more information and assistance. 

Source: Adapted from DPM Workflow Management Tool developed by the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop: DP Management Tools. See the DPM Workshop website link for full provenance information about DPM’s Workflow example, including detailed diagrams and descriptions, and alignment with the DPM’s Five Stages, and related resources. 

Related Resources:

This is a joint initiative between TDL Digital Preservation Services and the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop and Global Archivist LLC. Dr. Nance McGovern and Kari Smith 2024.

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