Packaging Your Digital Content: Digital Records Collections
- Kari Smith (Unlicensed)
- Nancy McGovern (Unlicensed)
Overview: Organizing your digital material for storage can be important when you either need to add files or when you need to retrieve files. For most collections, there is some structure whether that was put in place by the producers or by the archivists or librarians.
Preserving digital records collections combines the existing archival practice of validating, compiling, describing, and storing the records along with the additional digital archives practice of validating, identifying file formats, identifying file versions, capturing file names / IDs, and packaging the digital records for digital preservation. Consider using Radical Collaboration as a method for having these discussions.
Example: Digital Records Collections
An organization’s Board meets monthly. According to the approved records schedule, all Board meeting Agendas, Meeting Minutes, and Handouts are permanent records and scheduled for transfer annually to the organization’s archives for preservation.
Because there is a lot of activity in the Board offices, the administrator asks if they can transfer the records every two months. When the digital records are transferred, there are printable versions, digital versions for the Board’s tablets, and the final version of the files in the original file format. The records schedule indicates that the permanent records are the ones that the Board uses during the monthly Board meetings. With the records manager and the Board administrator, the archivist decides to accept the digital versions for the Board and the final file version in the original file format.
What is considered the copy of record? If it is the version that is a PDF file, you may need to consider also preserving the version in its original file format. See Recommended Formats Statement – Datasets | Resources (Preservation, Library of Congress)
Use PAIMAS to guide your negotiation with the Board administrator about how the digital records will be transferred, what metadata will accompany them, and what responsibility the digital archives has in validating and creating an Information Package for digital preservation. See the info box below.
Develop transfer workflows that can be automated and utilize forensic methods and digital archives practices that lead to packaging your digital records for digital preservation.
OSSArcFlow: Investigating, Synchronizing, and Modeling a Range of Archival Workflows for Born-Digital Content.
How will you package the records when they are transferred every two months? Will you hold the files in a ‘temporary storage’ area? Or will you package and transfer to digital preservation storage semi-monthly and identify the records as a series using the OAIS AIC concept?
In the context of digital records, remember that archival practice may overlap with digital archives work for digital records and has its own domain expertise to assist with preservation packaging. Archival terms are often used differently by other domains, so remember to ask questions as a way to build understanding and develop working definitions. Referring to 'An Archival View' in the Radical Collaboration issue of Research Library Issues (RLI 296) may be helpful, especially if packaging digital records is less familiar at your organization or you are getting started with them.
Reviewing this from the FAQ may be helpful: TDL DP Decision Tree FAQ | Why does it help to disambiguate ‘digital archives’ and ‘digital preservation’
For comparison and to assist with cross-domain packaging discussions , these are the working definitions from the Digital Archives and Preservation (DAP) Framework:
digital archives refers to all the activities organizations or individuals required in real-time to appraise, acquire, process, describe, secure, and make available specified digital content;
digital preservation refers to all the activities organizations or individuals engage in over-time across generations of technology to ensure the long-term readability and usefulness of specified digital content.
Question for your team/organization: Are your digital records ready for packaging? TDL members contact TDL for more information and assistance.
Source: Using approaches developed by and for the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop curriculum and resources. See the resources below for additional information, examples, and current information.
Related Resources:
Smithsonian Institution’s Recommended Preservation Formats for Electronic Records
Radical Collaboration (Research Library Issues RLI 296) (video) Includes: Introduction (with concepts and model), An Archivist’s Perspective, and Forward Together
PAIMAS - Producer-Archives Interface Method Abstract Standard
Guide to Documenting Born-Digital Archival Workflows, OSSArchFlow 2020
This is a joint initiative between TDL Digital Preservation Services and the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) Workshop and Global Archivist LLC. Dr. Nance McGovern 2024.