Preservica workflow draft

[aad...@fastmail.com]

Dear all,

I’m developing a workflow for processing born-digital materials at my institution and I was hoping to get feedback from this group on my working draft.

A few things:

1)      I’m at Cal Poly Pomona and we have no digitization or born-digital policy in place yet; we are starting from scratch.

2)   I've written this with hybrid collections in mind.

3)      We are hopefully getting Preservica in January 2017.

4)      I am a little familiar with accessioning using tools like FTK imager and Bag-It on non-networked PCs to prepare for ingest into a repository, but have very little hands-on experience. It seems that Preservica is an all-in-one tool that will do the all ingest and processing steps, including virus scan. So is it safe to assume we will be able to accession files on a networked PC using Preservica and Preservica’s virus-scanning capabilities will prevent any bugs from getting into the network?

5)      Since my experience is with FTK imager, I’ve used the terms “disk image.” When using Preservica would it be more appropriate to just say “copies”?

 

Thank you in advance for any and all advice!

Alexis Adkins

Archivist

Special Collections and Archives

California Polytechnic University, Pomona

 

Section 4.3: Born-Digital Materials 

Born-digital materials on physical media within the collections will first be evaluated using a dedicated workstation. The workstation will be a non-networked PC installed with open-source disk imaging software and various media drives installed with write-blockers as needed. If the media is empty or contains only duplicates of analog materials already in the collection (for example, the digital version of printed-out documents), the media will be deaccessioned. If the media has unique information that should be retained, we will create a disk image of it at the workstation. A disk image is a copy of all the contents—including deleted content—and file structure on a media storage disk or drive. 

We will use the disk image to assess and process the files to ensure that the original data remains intact. The disk image will be saved on the workstation and named according to the collection from which it was removed.  The files will be run through a virus scan (the workstation will be occasionally connected to the network to allow virus signatures to update) and we will begin to generate descriptive and technical metadata, including a file directory and checksums or hashes, at the workstation. Finally, we will create an accession report of steps taken throughout the process and the disk image, metadata, and accession report will be saved in a project folder on the workstation. This project folder of master files will be ingested into Preservica as a preservation copy.

 A working copy of the files will then be created using Preservica for arrangement and description. Using the working copy, the Archivist will rearrange, rename, and weed the files as needed. The Archivist will then create an Archival Information Package (AIP) containing the Content Data Object (the archival file) and associated metadata that ensures its accessibility and preservation. The resulting digital object will be added to the collection finding aid using ArchivesSpace.