Presentation Talking Points:

• The Roles and Responsibilities of all archivists also hold true for digital archivists
• Prerequisite knowledge and experience for a digital archivist may include additional technology and technical skills
• Digital Preservation is likely to be included in the responsibilities of a digital archivist
• Defining the role of digital archivist across our profession can differ widely
• At MIT the digital archivist’s role includes: increasing the Institute Archives capacity to ingest, appraise, organize, store, protect, and provide access to digital material (digitized and born-digital)
• The role is dedicated to implementation, strategic planning, and building a knowledge and skill base for managing digital material specifically within the Institute Archive and Special Collections and for the MIT Libraries generally.
• Roles and Responsibilities of the digital archivist include those in the following areas:
• Donor Relations
• Preparing for Ingest
• Manage and Protect
• Integrate Digital into Practice
• Access and Use

My presentation slides are attached to this posting.  Please take a look — I’m glad to hear your comments.

Working with donors, both for personal and administrative collections, always involves negotiation and appraisal of the material.  What we have noticed first-hand has been reported by many other institutions.  That is, donors of digital content have more concern regarding rights and access to their digital files than to their paper files.  In some part, this may be because often the content of digital files is unknown.  Issues related to opening files on carrier media, lack of appropriate drives or software, and general vagueness around what might be on that pile of CDs or diskettes bubble to the surface perhaps more reactively than concern of what might be in the box of paper and slides that hasn’t been opened in ten years.

During the negotiation phase we have been actively using some of the digital content-based interview questions suggested by the AIMS white paper, the PARADIGM project, and created through a joint Harvard-MIT library project.  Based on our experiences, we are starting to put together language for use during donor negotiation that addresses pre-acquisition appraisal tasks for digital files.  This language includes the types of tasks the Institute Archives and Special Collections staff will undertake, and notes both donor and Institute Archives and Special Collections’ obligations during this process.

Examples of donor obligations include:
·    keeping all of the files until official (and successful) transfer has been completed
·    providing access to any computers and accounts that hold files, and
·    providing account names and passwords when necessary for file access.

Examples of Institute Archives and Special Collections obligations include:
·    safeguarding any account and password information
·    keeping an inventory of the files and controlling access to them during appraisal, and
·    using best practice to clean-up the digital footprint for any files not transferred to the Institute Archives and Special Collections.

We know that as our knowledge of the concerns and challenges grows with more donor interaction so will our language and guidance documents.  We anticipate this to be an area for development within our documentation and our procedures.