Diary of a DAS Student

Class No. 3: Digital Curation: Creating an Environment for Success

2012-01-30T15:56:00.001-05:00

Earlier this month I attended "Digital Curation: Creating an Environment for Success" taught by Jackie Esposito, University Archivist and Head of Records Management Services at Penn State University. The workshop was held at the Harvard Business School which, with its beautiful campus and fancy cafeteria, isn't a bad place to spend a day. After my last course, which discussed the basics of digitizing analog archival material, the content of this course represented a return to the concerns surrounding born-digital material.

The recurring theme for the day was that doing digital curation is like eating an elephant; you have to break it into pieces in order to manage it successfully. I think the other main theme of the class could be used to extend the metaphor: an elephant, once broken apart, is best eaten with friends, meaning that digital curation cannot be managed by one archivist alone. Partnering with the right people within your organization, including records creators, budget writers, and IT experts, is key to your success.

As I've done for my two previous classes, I'll list the points that stood out most for me in this course:

The format may change, but the function does not , meaning a record is still a record regardless of its format. This reinforces the idea that our archival skills are still applicable in the digital world.
Though the same archival processes apply to electronic records, the window of time in which we must gain intellectual control over them is smaller. Whereas a box of paper can sit on the shelf for decades, a born-digital accession may only last a short time - something like 5 years - before the media becomes obsolete and inaccessible.
As the permanent caretaker of the records, you can define the formats you are willing to accept.
When forging relationships with others in your institution, don't scare them by talking about all of the horrible things that will happen to your institution's records if they aren't managed correctly. Scaring people does not work. Instead, make them feel comfortable and work to convince them of the benefits of what you are trying to achieve.
Know what your priorities are, and make them manageable and measurable. Also, have frequent parties to celebrate your victories, no matter how small. If you have students on staff, feed them often.
NEVER use the word "project." Instead, use the word "program," which implies permanence.
If your public access interface doesn't look and act like Google, nobody is going to like it or use it.
Don't reinvent the wheel - other archivists have done these things already, so borrow from them, collaborate with them, and generally draw on the experience and expertise of your colleagues.

Though the material in this course was mostly theoretical to me, I really enjoyed it, mainly because I found Jackie to be an extremely engaging instructor. One note, though: this is classified as a Foundational DAS course, whereas to me it seems more suited to the Tactical and Strategic tier. Foundational courses focus mainly on "the needs of practitioners—archivists who are or will be working directly with electronic records," while Tactical and Strategic courses are meant to focus on "the skills that archivists need to make significant changes in their organizations so that they can develop a digital archives and work seriously on managing electronic records." As the course title indicates, this was geared towards archivists who actually have the power to change the environment at their institution and who are responsible for implementing an electronic records management program rather than (or perhaps in addition to) working hands-on with the actual records.

I welcome any and all comments on this course or the DAS program in general, and as always, thanks for reading!

Class No. 2: Thinking Digital: A Practical Session to Help You Get Started

2012-01-05T13:18:00.001-05:00

On Tuesday I began the new year by taking my first DAS course presented as an on-demand webinar: "Thinking Digital...A Practical Session to Help You Get Started," taught by Jessica Branco Colati and Greg Colati. This is one of the Foundational DAS courses, and it serves as a good overview of the decisions we make as creators and stewards of digital content. Unlike the first course I took, this was more focused on the digitization of traditional archives than on born-digital records.

The course was organized by the kinds of choices digital archivists must make about quality, metadata, management, storage, preservation, and delivery. Without repeating all of the information in the course, I'll just list the highlights as I saw them:

High quality digital objects adhere to five established principles: interoperability, reusability, sustainability, authenticity, and scalability. Better quality requires more time, more storage, and better equipment, but it also allows for a wider variety of uses. We should create the best quality digital objects we can afford now so that we have greater flexibility later.
Metadata allows for the identification, management, access, use, and preservation of a digital object. There are several different types of metadata: administrative, descriptive, preservation (including technical), and structural. Metadata should support local needs, but should also be standardized in order to enable interoperability. Controlled vocabularies should be supported. Keep in mind that metadata is never truly finished - there will always be changes or updates to make, or new information to capture.
The management of digital files must include all derivatives of the original object (and there could be hundreds) as well as the metadata about that object. Management must be built into your digitization workflow; it should not be a separate activity. There is no one digital asset management system (DAMS) that will solve all of your problems - you will most likely need an array of systems to accomplish all of your goals. In any DAMS, web delivery is only a small piece of the puzzle despite how important it is to users and probably to your management.
Storage choices will depend on the choices about quality you made earlier - the higher quality files you have, the more storage you will need. While storage may be getting cheaper, back up and preservation services are getting more expensive. It might be best to consult an expert when it comes to storage.
Preservation starts at the point of creation of a digital object, which is also the point at which the creators of digital content probably don't want to be bothered with questions about preservation, so it's on us as archivists to maintain the focus on preservation concerns. The first stage in a successful preservation plan is simply to acknowledge that digital preservation is important (much like the first step in overcoming addiction is to acknowledge that you have a problem, I suppose).This is as far as we've gotten, to be honest, but we hope to move onto the next stage soon, which is to take action.
Delivery involves both discovery and access. Discovery is based on the indexing of your metadata and/or the full text of your scanned documents. Access is how users interact with your digital objects once they are discovered - are the objects simply viewed, or are they able to be manipulated or extracted by the user?

The first point the instructors made before delving into what I described above was that the skills we already have as archivists can be easily adapted to the digital environment. I find that this is particularly true when it comes to the following:

Planning and prioritizing digitization workflow. This is no different from planning and prioritizing our processing workflow, and should be done in the same systematic way.
Creating descriptive metadata. Descriptive metadata is archival description, which means that we already know how to create it, and also that our finding aids are full of preexisting descriptive metadata.
Managing and preserving digital assets. We manage our physical holdings, whether through the use of a database or a paper shelf list, and we are responsible for their long term preservation. This is true of digital files as well, whether they are born-digital records or digital surrogates of physical objects. Though digital files do present some specific challenges that will require more technical knowledge than we may start out with, the fundamental responsibility is the same.

One final comment: the on-demand courses are available for two months once you register for them, which is very convenient, but it turns out that this flexibility actually made it difficult for me to find the time for it when there are so many other things that require immediate attention. I registered for this webinar back in November, and I was lucky to complete it just before the two months expired. I do plan to take additional on-demand courses, but in order to thwart my inner procrastinator I will try to schedule a specific day for them as if I were taking them live.

I will be taking another Foundational DAS course, "Digital Curation: Creating an Environment for Success" on January 18th in Boston, so I'll be posting again in a few weeks. Until then, thanks for reading!

Some thoughts after last night's SCoSAA panel

2011-10-27T15:15:00.000-04:00

Last night I participated in a panel about emerging standards in archival description sponsored by the Student Chapter of the Society of American Archivists (SCoSAA) at Simmons College. Kate Bowers, one of the other panelists, gave a great talk about integrating physical and born-digital archival records at the Harvard University Archives that reminded me of the Managing Electronic Records workshop I took a few weeks ago. She talked about maintaining the continuity of records, regardless of format, explaining that the web pages and tweets of today serve the same fundamental purpose as the broadsides and other ephemera of past centuries, just as the course catalog that exists today as a complex database is still the same basic vital record of the University that the simple print version used to be. I found that idea somewhat comforting; electronic records seem less mysterious when viewed as continuations of existing records series that can be described using the archival knowledge we already have at our disposal.

It struck me that we all touched on how our work as archivists - particularly where access to digitized or born-digital material is concerned - now involves other professionals, particularly from the IT field. Though we may not be IT experts ourselves, we need to understand their world enough to be able to communicate our needs effectively. Our role as archivists is to help design the tools we need by articulating the functionality we want, and by continually coming up with new ideas to make our metadata do more for us and for our users.

Class No. 1: Managing Electronic Records in Archives and Special Collections

2011-10-18T21:24:00.000-04:00

I traveled up to Dartmouth College last week to take my first DAS course, Managing Electronic Records in Archives and Special Collections. This is a two-day "Transformational" workshop from the fourth tier of courses in the DAS curriculum (the other tiers are "Foundational," "Tactical and Strategic," and "Tools and Services"). Only one Transformational course is required for the DAS Certificate.

The course was taught by Tim Pyatt from Penn State and Michael Shallcross from the University of Michigan, both of whom have a great deal of real world experience with electronic records. It was very well-attended, mainly by archivists working in college and university settings, though there were several NARA representatives as well. The participants included lone arrangers who have been tasked with starting an electronic records management program from scratch, managers who wanted to know how to support their staff in such an endeavor, a vendor who works to create software that will manage electronic records, and curious archivists who have little to do with electronic records in their current positions but were interested in learning about managing them nonetheless. I fell into this latter category, and thus remained more of an observer than an active participant in the workshop.

The majority of the first day was dedicated to learning the basic components of an electronic records program and the issues that we face as we try to manage these records, followed by some group discussion of three case studies that we had been assigned to read prior to the workshop. The second day was more hands-on; we got to play with some open source programs used for things like creating and verifying checksums, archiving web sites, creating disk images, and discovering and managing file formats. The instructors shared a lot of great information, but the major points that I came away with were these:

When preserving an electronic record, consider what you are trying to preserve - the appearance of the record, or just its intellectual content. This may vary based on the nature of the record and the resources you have available.
Implementing a comprehensive electronic records management system all at once is unrealistic; it is better to take it on piece by piece, keeping in mind that doing something is better than doing nothing.
Though storage is indeed getting cheaper, it is very important to stress to your institution that storage is a perpetual, ongoing cost, not a one-time expense. Electronic records must be preserved forever, just like our physical holdings.
Without proper management, electronic records are a preservation nightmare; the lifespan of acidic paper is an eternity compared to the lifespan of most electronic records. Though it may be more exciting to digitize analog records, the more pressing need is to preserve information that exists only in electronic form.
Donated hard drives will often contain files that the donor thought were deleted, but are actually recoverable. What to do with those files is an interesting question.
Whenever possible, provide guidance related to file naming and organization practices to members of your institution. If they follow your advice, your job will be infinitely easier when their records end up deposited in your archives.
Take a digital photo of original physical storage media and store it with the metadata about the records they contained.
Make friends with your IT staff, if you have one.
A delivery system is not the same thing as a preservation system. No single program takes care of the entire electronic records lifecycle, but for now Archivematica comes the closest.
Providing public access to electronic records presents some major challenges, and it will be very interesting to see what creative solutions archivists come up with in the next few years.

I'm not sure how much of this knowledge I can apply right away, but I do feel like I have a better understanding of the challenges involved in dealing with the born-digital records in our collections, and of some of the software solutions that currently exist.

First things first...

2011-10-17T19:40:00.000-04:00

When the Society of American Archivists announced the creation of its Digital Archives Specialist (DAS) Curriculum and Certificate Program earlier this year, I couldn't wait to learn more about it. As a Digital Archivist who has learned most of my technological skills on the job rather than in a classroom, it sounded like the perfect way to continue my professional education. When the SAA Education Committee came up with the idea to find an archivist who would take the required DAS courses, (hopefully) pass the quizzes and comprehensive exam, and blog about the whole experience, I happily volunteered.

Though the Digitization Unit at the JFK Library is focused primarily on the digitization of analog archival material, I believe that the preservation and management of born-digital records is something with which all archivists should concern themselves. And though our collections date mainly to the mid-twentieth century, our backlog does contain materials generated more recently, most notably within the voluminous papers of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Just today I learned of a mysterious circular piece of computer hardware (I'm told it resembles a container used to transport a cake) that was sent to us with one of the Senator's accessions. What is it? What information does it contain, and how will we access it? How can we move the information somewhere else, and how will we preserve it? And finally, how will researchers access it? Hopefully by the time I've completed the DAS program, I'll be ready to answer questions like these. Until then, the mysterious circular object, along with many others like it, will remain on a shelf in our stacks, its nature and contents hidden, edging closer and closer to irretrievable obsolescence.