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.”

While Mike’s presentation focused on digital images and digitizing to digital image files, I took a broader tack and talked about records management in context of personal files and as the lead into personal archiving.  Presenting at MIT Libraries is interesting because we get a variety of attendees – Librarians, Institute staff, faculty, graduate students, and general public.  There are many good resources if you are interested in knowing more about personal digital archiving to include information about digitization, description, deciding what to keep, and how to best store and protect your digital content for the long-term.

Some Resources for Managing Digital Material and Personal Digital Archiving

• —Personal Digital Archiving, Library of Congress website
• —“Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving” a compilation of posts related to personal digital archiving from The Signal.
• —Born digital: Guidance for Donors and Dealers and Archival Repositories
• Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines
• Personal Digital Estate Planning blog post from Library of Congress, The Signal
  
  —Tagging and Finding Your Digital Files, an MIT Libraries Resource Guide
  Store and Protect Your Digital Files, an MIT Libraries Resource Guide
  MIT IS&T website, especially the Secure Computing resources

Shared here [PDF files] are our latest working-drafts of templates, visual process flows, written workflows, and task guides. We welcome your feedback and comment. These are created under a CC-BY-NC license as product of the MIT Libraries, Institute Archives and Special Collections staff.

Digital Archives Transfer and Ingest workflow Guide

On-Site Data Transfer Documentation
Form for collecting information about on-site transfer of digital content.

README_template for Digital Archives Processing Tasks

Process Flow Diagrams for Digital Archives Transfer, Validate, and Ingest
Transfer Process Flow diagram
Validate Process Flow diagram
Ingest Process Flow diagram

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.

• USB drive and CD disk with basic software tools such as Karen’s Directory Printer and FTK Imager
• Power strips (2) with 6′ cords
• Sticky notes (to place on machines and media for temporary identification)
• USB port with extra slots (esp. for external HDD that require two)
• Digital camera (for taking images of the equipment, set up and other visual documentation)
• External HDDs (more than one can help speed the over all transfer time for multiple machines)
• 3.5 floppy drive (USB connection)
• Extra cables for computer and monitor power (for older machines that might be decommissioned)
• Ditto for mouse and keyboard with pin connectors
• Apron (for basic protection from dust on the floor you are likely to be crawling around on!)
• Work gloves for handling / carrying equipment and machines, especially out of closets and down staircases.
• Also, a note to remember to not wear wool and to wear rubber soled shoes on the day of file transfer to reduce the amount of extra static charge that might build up.

This list will grow and adapt as we are involved in more field activities.  If you are engaged with digital archives file transfers in the field do you have a list to share?   [original post Dec. 03, 2012)

UPDATE:  February 3, 2013

Thank you to my colleagues who have suggested adding these items to the Kit:

• Informational leaflet describing general procedures for acquisition and appraisal
• USB to PS/2 adapter – So to only have to pack a USB mouse and keyboard
• External USB Zip drive
• Flash media reader – getting one that handles a lot of different media types really increases capabilities

• Pencil & notebook
• Business cards that can be left with the donor\creator as contact details
• Copies of all possible forms that a donor creator may have to sign/complete, e.g. transfer agreements.
• This might be a bit out there but a copy of a Knoppix CD/DVD to more safely probe  MS Windows machines. Assuming they have a CD/DVD
• A disclaimer that the donor/creator can sign agreeing to you working with their computer. (This one sounds a little scary but I suspect it’s useful)
• Additional USB ports — the powered variety, just helps to run multiple USB devices
• Finally, promotional material about your library/archive. This will give the donor/creator a good impression of who you are and the material and users you have.  Never hurts to do a little promotion!

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.