Born Digital Reboot

Just a bit over six years ago, we embarked on an initiative to advance our processes for managing born digital archival materials. As that work rolled out, it was documented in a series of News posts by Jason Evans Groth, an NCSU Libraries Fellow who led the initiative. Since then, we’ve processed a little over 2,000 digital archival packages, constituting over 2TB of data.

One of the tools we’ve developed to support this work is the Digital Assets of Enduring Value (DAEV) application. DAEV guides a processor through a session, providing explicit instructions on actions to take; records processor actions and generates files containing preservation metadata about those actions; associates a processing session with an ArchivesSpace archival object record; and creates a digital object record for a session’s archival package and associates it with the appropriate archival object record. We described DAEV in a bit more detail in a BitCurator Consortium Case Study (the NC State Libraries is a new member of the Consortium).

This year, we’re going to be overhauling our workflows--which will mean significant updates to DAEV, too--and we’d like to share that work as we go along. We have three goals for this work. The first is to make our workflows more flexible for the sorts of materials we come across regularly. The second is to automate as much of our processes as possible. The third is to integrate (or further integrate) DAEV with other applications, including ArchivesSpace and the digital preservation application we developed since we started using DAEV.

This is going to be an exciting few months as we redo, update, and extend our born digital archival workflows, and we’re eager to share and reflect on that work as we go along. We’ll be tagging these posts "Born Digital" to ease discovery and aggregation. Hope to have you back on our pages soon!