Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories, released on MediaCommons Press, January 2013.  Read the Publication
Born Digital is a great publication that provides guidance and lays out responsibilities for donors, dealers, and archival repositories involved with archiving digital material.  The cast of authors is superb and they brought together their accumulated experiences and knowledge into a very useful handbook.  The audience for Born Digital includes creators of digital content who are interested in donating material to an archives, third-parties with custody of digital material who are engaging in discussions of archiving material, and archival repositories who are engaged in negotiations and the tasks involved with transferring born digital material.

Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Reports, 2013 issues

• 13–3: Preservation Metadata (2nd edition) by Richard Gartner & Brian Lavoie
• 13-02: Preserving Computer-Aided Design (CAD) by Alex Ball
• 13-01: Web-Archiving by Maureen Pennock

British Library’s Digital Preservation Strategy 2013-2016  here
Mo Pennock is the lead author of the BL’s digital preservation strategy that they’ve made publicly available.  As noted on the BL webpage hosting the strategy, “Digital preservation is a lifecycle concern and an organisation’s shared responsibility. Our digital preservation strategy (2013 – 2016) recognises this and implements a cross-directorate governance structure to ensure it can be achieved. This is not a strategy for the digital preservation team alone, but a strategy for the whole library.”

Walk This Way: Detailed Steps for Transferring Born-Digital Content from Media You Can Read In-house, by Julianna Barrera-Gomez and Ricky Erway, OCLC Research  Download the report
“The report collects the assembled wisdom of experienced practitioners to help those with less experience make appropriate choices in gaining control of born-digital content. It contains discrete steps with objectives, links to available tools and software, references and resources for further research and paths to engagement with the digital archives community.”

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.

These statements are at the Institute Archives unit level, that is, they are not high level Library policies but rather statements that build upon or clarify existing MIT policy and give guidance for staff actions.  They will be useful for connecting into the digital preservation framework at MIT.

Over time we will be defining and documenting additional statements and following other unit- and library-level policies.  For now, we consider these a step forward towards our documentation and transparency in establishing our capacity and practice for digital archives at MIT Libraries.

M.I.T. Institute Archives & Special Collections:  Practice

[post updated 2013-11-14]