Born-Digital Reboot Redux

We tried a Born-Digital Reboot once before. Check the date. The timing was bad.

It's not that we've made no progress on improving our born-digital workflows and tools these last two, highly disruptive, years. We just haven't made the sort of progress we had expected going into the reboot of 2020. In the intervening time, we created a new model that will support our anticipated procedures (more on that in a later post), and we've tested several new tools (later posts). Adjacently, we prepared and ingested about 30TB of legacy born-digital and digitized data into our digital preservation system, and even worked on a fairly significant restoration after a data loss (ditto). We also wrapped up work on a large digitization grant.

Now, despite the risk of wandering into "hobgoblins of little minds" or "fool me twice" territory, we're going to give the reboot and writing about it another shot! Over the coming months, we hope to share our evolving thinking and practices as they pertain to:

• Data modeling
• Workflows
• Tools and software
• Description
• Access

The goals remain the same as they were in 2020:

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) [our processing application, DAEV] with other applications, including ArchivesSpace and the digital preservation application we developed since we started using DAEV.

My colleague Shelly Black will be joining me in providing updates. We're both eager (again) to dig into this work and to share our progress as we go along.