Friday afternoon I went to a session on electronic records.
As a former staff member at Mount Holyoke College’s Archives and Special Collections I was interested to see what progress they’ve made working through their electronic records grant issued by the NHPRC for the 2011 year. The grant is up this December and Leslie Fields the electronic records archivist hired to complete the project presented on her experiences moving toward a sound retention and preservation policy and workflow.
In her grant proposal, archives director, Jennifer King chose to focus the project on the following records groups:
Board of Trustee meeting minutes
Faculty meeting minutes
College’s course catalog- now only published on-line
Office of Communication’s News and Events stories.
As of now Fields has put the following workflow into place:
1. Transfer selected files electronically into a network drive and folder using a transfer form developed at Tufts for their faculty and staff.
2. Using Archnet (a server space for electronic records) which sends an email to archivists when files are added, represent the physical stacks. Each records group has its own file structure down to the folder, file and item level.
3. Virus scan and check sum is generated.
4. Then using Duke University’s Data Accessioner– a digital object and XML file are created.
5. Through collaboration with the Digital Assets and Preservation Services Department DAPS uses Dspace to provide public access to the digital objects.
Of course, Fields went into tremendous detail during her presentation and her slides will be made available on MARAC’s conference SlideShare account in the coming weeks.
I’ve gone to several sessions that addressed electronic records and born- digital records, but for the first time I felt more hopeful than discouraged.
As Fields stated at the beginning of her presentation, it’s better to do a little bit than nothing at all.