Last year I chose to use my DoDA post to broadcast my former
institution’s ideas about communicating what digital archives are to the
public. This year, I have a new job at Penn State as Digital Records Archivist.
This job didn’t exist before, and we’re still trying to figure out what it’s
going to be. But we have a lot of irons in the fire here, so I’ll stick to the
theme of talking about what my ‘day of digital archives’ looks like.
I think it surprises some people to hear that I find my average
day to be distinctly non-technical, but it shouldn’t. And I’m okay with that. I’ve
found that what interests me most about the work is the challenge of figuring
out how it all fits together, how it blends with the other work of archives, and
how the overall work of the institution can be reimagined and modernized.
A lot of what I am doing at my current institution is
capacity building: forming policy, trying to locate and implement best
practices (which can and should be institution-specific), researching and
reading work being done by others, experimenting with free tools, and just
dialoguing with other staff about challenges and issues. A significant and
persistent challenge is trying to align a developing electronic/born-digital
records practice with our institution’s established practices, which includes
trying to both mold digital practice to legacy practice and recommending ways
in which legacy practice might be modified to suit new digital realities.
For example, this morning I have spent a little time working
on my long-fermenting ingest workflow for electronic records. This workflow
needs to address not only the particulars of what we might call ‘digital
processing’—how we transfer material from some kind of external digital media
to network ‘dark archive’ storage, how we store that transfer (discreet files
or disk images or both), what metadata/manifest information we attempt to
extract, and how we document this activity—but also how the media flows to the
digital archivist in the first place, and what becomes of it afterward. We have
to setup policies and practices that govern the separation of media from
collections, how the media and the work we do with it is documented in
Archivists Toolkit (as well as how it is documented there after ingest), and ultimately how it is incorporated into
arrangement and description activities. Perhaps the biggest challenge I face
right now is figuring out just how to provide access to the material should a
researcher stumble across some record of it in the library catalog or finding
aid platform. Actually, this thing is pretty much done, but I keep tinkering.
A lot of what I am doing is just traditional archival work
cast in a different light. The next task on my list this morning is, well,
appraisal. Penn State recently contracted the services of Archive-IT, and we’ll
soon be using their crawling services to strategically capture university websites.
Despite being published and disseminated through web technologies and
platforms, Penn State University websites are subject to the same
considerations as other university records. They exist within record groups and
are potentially subject to retention schedules.
In preparation for this project, we secured a list of
sub-domains on PSU.edu from central IT, and have been visiting the websites on
this list to determine an originating department (provenance), look for sites
from departments that fit the collecting priorities of the university
archivist, try to determine how frequently the site updates (an ongoing
process), and record some descriptive information about the sites in advance.
Our initial collecting priorities will focus on sites related to the
administrative units, colleges, and commonwealth campuses, but future phases of
collecting will seek broader documentation of university work, culture, and
life. As Mike Shallcross stated in his excellent case study on archiving the
University of Michigan’s websites:
While reviewing
Michigan‘s online resources, archivists were keenly aware of the extent to
which websites help confer credentials (from the recruitment of students
through their graduation), convey knowledge, foster socialization, conduct
research, sustain the institution, provide public services, and promote a
distinctive culture.
Increasingly, the kind of content Mike refers to above is
being delivered through multimedia (primarily video), social websites, and
cloud-based services (universities are increasingly using YouTube, Flickr, etc.
to host content). Future appraisal and planning won’t necessarily be more
complex; we’ll just have a larger landscape of material to examine. It won’t
necessarily require special training or technical skills; it just requires an
awareness of institutional uses of technology and methods for delivering
content that should be collected by the repository.
Finally, I’ll take a little time later today to start
preparing for a talk I’ll be giving at this year’s Digital Library Federation
Forum in Denver. My position as Digital Records Archivist was written into a
Mellon personal scholarly archiving grant that was awarded before I started at
Penn State this past May. The project is
“an ethnographic study of faculty behaviors and articulated needs central to
robust scholarly creation and successful navigation of the personal archiving
and information management process.” From an archival point of view, the study
should provide some insight into the personal digital habits of faculty and the
technologies used to support and share their research. We’ll be collecting data
through surveys, interviews, an on-site observation, and hopefully, for my
part, I’ll be able to identify patterns that can help inform acquisition
and management approaches to born-digital material (see the post earlier today, "What's in a File Name?"). This has been an interesting
collaboration between various information professionals—I will be presenting
with the lead investigator, an Educational and Behavioral Services Librarian, as
well as an ethnographic researcher—and I think it speaks to the ways in which
archival work in the digital age is inevitably going to be cross-disciplinary.
And by the way, thank you, Gretchen, for putting this together again!
-- Ben Goldman, Penn State University
