Digital Practice Statements

After an initial scan of the MIT Institute Archives policies and practices, we drafted and worked on digital archives practice statements that allow for and guide us in our work with born-digital and digitized collections material.

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]

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Engineering the Future of the Past … digital archives at MIT

Engineering the Future of the Past is the new Blog of the MIT Institute Archives to share information internally and externally about what we are doing in the sphere of acquiring, managing and providing long-term access to born-digital, hybrid, and digitized collections.

We are engineering — problem-solving and building — the future of our past, which is recorded in MIT’s archival and manuscript collections.

Kari Smith joined MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections in December 2011 as Digital Archivist in a new position funded by the Provost. We have been busily engaged in establishing “interim” policies, practices, workflows, technical infrastructure for acquiring, managing and preserving born-digital archival material and digitized special collections and records.

This Blog will be a means of communicating what the MIT Archives staff are doing with digital archives and how we are testing, implementing, and iteratively building our digital program. Check out this Wordle with topics that you will read about in this Blog about over time.

MIT Digital Archives Blog wordle

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