Ok, enough of the Justin Timberlake references. But as someone rightly pointed out yesterday in the Manuscript Repository section meeting- born- digital is where the action is. I’ve heard this as a persistent theme throughout the entire SAA conference this year. For example, there’s a small ad hoc group “Born Digital Acquisition Group” that is made up of archivists from the US and the UK who have come up with case studies of how to acquire digital records in manuscript repositories. They have identified several components to help archivists with the acquisition process:
1. Pre-acquisition appraisal (just like we do for paper records)
2. Acquisition process (varies for every institution)
3. Post acquisition processing plan
4. Transparency of workflow to both donor and staff
5. Written policies regarding privacy and ownership of born digital archives
6. Training for staff to uniform processes
These steps or considerations helped me to clarify some of my work practices. I haven’t seen too much born digital material yet, but at the end of the month will begin working with a local church, whose members want to add to their exisiting paper collection. They want help identifying what digital files to keep, how to store them, how to name them and how to transfer them to our repository.
The larger lesson I took away from the sessions and discussions about born digital was that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel to manage born digital records. We still must appraise them for current or future value, we must weed content, we must work with donors to ensure the authenticity of their records and we must work to share this content with the public.