Class No. 5: Standards for Digital Archives

Last week I took a Foundational DAS webinar, "Standards for Digital Archives" taught by Mahnaz Ghaznavi. As its name suggests, this course provided an overview of the many standards that are available for use with digital archives. The underlying theme was that standards are good, and that you should adopt the ones that fit the needs of your institution. The course began with an example of an electronic record that could have benefited from the use of standards: a word processing file created in an obsolete, proprietary format that displayed as a nonsensical mishmash of special characters. Had the file been converted to an open, standard, more persistent format, the information contained in the document could have been retained.

Though sometimes we create our own standards - a local set of topical subject headings, for example -  the best standards are those that are published and maintained by a standards setting body (such as ISO, W3C, NISO, ANSI, or NIST). There are standards to guide us in almost any activity that we engage in as archivists:

• records retention and appraisal (ISO 15489); 
• the ingestion, management, preservation, and access of digital or physical archives (ISO 14721, better known as OAIS); 
• linking objects with their associated metadata (METS);
• capturing preservation data about our objects (PREMIS); 
• capturing descriptive metadata about our objects (Dublin Core);
• migrating our objects into more stable formats (JPEG 2000, PDF/A)
• and making sure our digital objects are stored in a secure manner (TRAC)

Given that it would have been impossible to delve into these standards in any detail within the confines of a ninety minute webinar, I think the instructor was able to convey some useful information about the options that are available to help manage digitized or born-digital archival assets. She advised us to learn from what other institutions have done and are doing, whether successfully or not, and to recognize that digital preservation is a moving target. To implement any of these standards one would need significantly more guidance, but this course can serve as the first step to becoming aware of what is possible.

Because SAA generously allows multiple people to view their webinars for the cost of one registration (though each attendee must pay for his or her examination fee), we had a good-sized audience of full time staff and interns in a conference room at the Library. For our interns, most of whom are current graduate students in Library Science at Simmons College, it seemed like much of the information presented echoed what they've already learned in class. I took that as a positive sign that graduate programs are adapting to our increasingly digital world. Archives students graduating now will start their careers already armed with skills and knowledge that more established professionals must actively seek out (by pursuing the DAS certificate, for instance). Of course it has always been thus, everywhere and in every profession, but my perspective until recently has been that of the recent graduate; now that I have been out of school for almost ten years, I find that I am suddenly among those who must rush to catch up or be left behind.

Class No. 4: Electronic Records: The Next Step

I recently completed my fourth DAS course, an on-demand webinar titled "Electronic Records: The Next Step" taught by Geoffrey Huth, Director of Government Records Services at the New York State Archives. One of my classmates had very recently taken Huth's full day, in-person course on Basic Electronic Records, which is part of the Foundational tier of DAS courses. Though this webinar is part of the Tactical and Strategic tier - the next tier up - it apparently didn't contain much new information that was not already covered in the basic course. Given this, the two courses might be best presented as an either/or choice: the basic course for true beginners, and this webinar for those who already have some familiarity with the issues surrounding electronic records.

The structure of the course mirrored the archival lifecycle, which - as I have learned in all of my DAS courses - is consistent regardless of format: Appraisal, Ingest, Processing and Preservation, Maintenance, Access, and Planning. Though much of the material was familiar, I find that I need to hear this kind of information over and over again before it truly sinks in. I took away the following main points:

• Appraise ruthlessly. It will cost approximately five times more to store a digital file than it does to store a physical object. We cannot and should not keep everything, in the physical world or in the digital world. If you cannot manage or even access the files, if you cannot maintain their original functionality, or if you do not have sufficient metadata to make sense of them, consider whether they are worth keeping. 
• Define acceptable file formats (uncompressed, unencrypted) and external media devices, as well as acceptable methods of transfer for your institution. This way you will have processes in place to handle any electronic records that you receive.
• Make sure that the donor retains a second copy of all electronic files until your copy is verified.
• Always accession electronic records on a quarantined (i.e. non-networked) computer. Run your virus software, wait a month, and then run it again. 
• Preservation options for electronic records include migration, normalization, emulation, and output to some sort of hard copy, generally paper or microfilm. 
• Normalization, which involves converting files to a "normal" format that is open and persistent (PDF/A, for example) the most likely solution. 
• Emulation, wherein the file is never converted to another format, is a less practical choice, as the original environment of each file would need to be perpetually maintained. I see how this is completely impractical, but if you had the resources and the know-how it might be interesting to have a fleet of computers running defunct operating systems and software programs so that records could be accessed as they were originally created.
• Output to paper or microfilm might be an acceptable solution if you've got just one or two electronic files, and if those files are simple word processing documents. If retaining the functionality of a record is important (links in a website or formulas in a spreadsheet, for example), obviously a hard copy is not going to be sufficient.  
• One thing that I found slightly alarming was Huth's assertion that the world, with the exception of the archival community, is turning away from TIFF and toward JPEG 2000 as a standard. Is this true, and if so, what will that mean for digital archives (like JFK's) that are full of TIFF images?
• Access seems like the trickiest piece of this puzzle. Is access provided online, or just in the reference room? If electronic records are closely related to physical records, how do you provide meaningful access to both at once?  
• Just as we should define the formats we will accept when accessioning records, we should define the formats we are willing to provide to our users. It should be up to the user to convert our normalized file into whatever format he or she may require.
• Though our inclination may be to ignore electronic records and digitization, the truth is that if you're not working with the digital world, you're not working in the real world. 
• You can't do everything at once, but do something, and do it now.

In the spirit of that last point, I am going to try to do something with the electronic records that are stored on this device, which was found by my colleague in an unexpected place in our stacks:

First I'll need a quarantined computer with a disk drive that will fit this floppy disk, and then I'll need to figure out what program was used to create whatever documents are stored on it. In this case my guess is that they'll be word processing documents that most likely exist in hard copy in the collection already, in which case this disk probably won't be of much importance to the collection.  However, rather than just sticking it somewhere in the stacks and pretending it doesn't exist (as we did originally), I'm going to use what I've learned in my DAS courses to deal with it properly.

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

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...

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.