Outfitting a Born-Digital Archives Program

Archival repositories that intend to develop programmatic solutions for managing and preserving born-digital holdings will need to establish a dedicated computer workstation (and related devices) to support responsible capture, transfer, appraisal, and preservation steps. This brief examination provides baseline recommendations for implementing and equipping a dedicated Windows-based PC workstation

A custom EPrints solution for SOAS Digital Archives

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) is undertaking a major digitisation programme for its rich and diverse archives of materials from Asia and Africa. In response to the tender by the Centre for Digital Africa, Asia and the Middle East (CeDAAME) at SOAS in 2009, the University of London Computer Centre (ULCC) proposed and implemented an Open Source E-Prints-based solution for online open access to the digitised materials

Situating Digital Archives

This essay is the introduction to an essay collection about the Middle English Prose Brut manuscript purchased by Dartmouth College in 2006. I consider how the competing pressures of access and preservation condition scholarship in medieval studies. I suggest several analogies between the digital humanities in general, digital philology in medieval studies, and the historical practices of medieval writers: hacking, dark archive, and prosthesis

Context and linking in retrieval from personal digital archives

Advances in digital capture and storage technologies mean that it is now possible to capture and store one’s entire life experiences in personal digital archives. These vast personal archives (or Human Digital Memories (HDMs)) pose new challenges and opportunities for the research community, not the least of which is developing effective means of retrieval from HDMs. Personal archive retrieval research is still in its infancy and there is much scope for novel research. My PhD proposes to develop effective HDM retrieval algorithms by combining rich sources of context associated with items, such as location and people present data, with information obtained by linking HDM items in novel ways

Data-Driven Reporting and Processing of Digital Archives with Brunnhilde

[Excerpt] Archivists are now several decades in to appraising, arranging, describing, preserving, and providing access to digital archives and have developed and adopted a number of tools to aid in specific tasks along the way. This article discusses Brunnhilde, a new tool developed to address one of the first steps in working with born-digital materials: characterizing the overall contents of directories or disks to enable smart evidence-based decision-making in the appraisal, arrangement, and description processes

Digital Archives 101 Workshop

Boise State University librarians Erin Passehl and Amy Vecchione were invited by the 2010 Idaho Library Association Conference Planning Committee to present on the topic of creating digital archives. Idaho is a state that currently lacks a centralized digital repository or consortium and, as a result, there are libraries and historical societies around the state without the training or skills to create digital collections. Yet these organizations have rich collections pertinent to the history of Idaho, ranging from original manuscripts to historic photos

Digital archives. Alcune note

MoRE è un museo nativo digitale in cui si espongono opere, ma anche un archivio digitale in cui si raccolgono ed organizzano documenti, è una piattaforma a molteplici livelli in cui si confrontano differenti modalità di riflessione sulla contemporaneità: attraverso il dialogo con l’artista, il pensiero critico, l’organizzazione dei documenti, la comunicazione e la indagine sul pubblico. In questo intervento si individuano alcuni riferimenti critici che costituiscono un modello di riferimento per il progetto, in quanto riflettono sulla incidenza della dimensione digitale nella trasformazione del museo e dell’archivio.MoRE is a digital native museum where projects of artworks are exposed, and also a digital archive where documents about art projects are collected. MoRE is a multi-layered platform where artists, curators, art historians confront each other collecting art projects, organizing their documentation and defining tools for the communication and surveys on the public. In this paper some critical references are identified, that constitute a model for the project as they reflect on the impact of the digital dimension on the transformation of the museum and archive

Digital Curation and the Citizen Archivist

The increasing array and power of personal digital recordkeeping systems promises both to make it more difficult for established archives to acquire personal and family archives and less likely that individuals might wish to donate personal and family digital archives to archives, libraries, museums, and other institutions serving as documentary repositories. This paper provides a conceptual argument for how projects such as the Digital Curation one ought to consider developing spinoffs for archivists training private citizens how to preserve, manage, and use digital personal and family archives. Rethinking how we approach the public, which will increasingly face difficult challenges in caring for their digital archives, also brings with it substantial promise in informing them about the nature and importance of the archival mission. Can the Digital Curation project provide tools that canbe used for working with the public