MIT Libraries

There have been a lot of really good and relevant publications recently that we’ve been reading and referring to in our on-going development of our digital archives program.  In this post, I am calling out a few of the ones I’m referring to most often.

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.”