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stabilization.md

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Accessioning and stabilizing born-digital archives

This guide describes CCA standards for accessioning and stabilizing born-digital archival material in whatever form it might arrive at CCA. It includes:

General overview

In general, digital content arrives at CCA in one of three ways: as a network transfer (e.g. FTP, Dropbox, WeTransfer), on temporary physical transfer media (e.g. USB thumb drive, external hard drive), or on original physical storage media. A single accession (versement) may contain digital files that arrived at CCA via any or all of these methods.

The following procedures describe how CCA accessions and stabilizes contents from each of these delivery methods, as well as how CCA ingests the total "raw" contents of an accession into its digital repository once all of the preparatory steps have been completed.

Network transfers

Steps:

  • Staff member who receives the transfer (typically Digital Archivist or Registrar)
    • Notify Registrar and Digital Archivist, as appropriate
    • Zip files and move zip file into a new folder in Processing if accession record has not yet been created.
  • GesCo: Create accession records
    • For exclusively born-digital accessions in the archives, create only a versement record (no versement objet or ARCH records). Include a brief identifying note for the accession in "Description du contenu" (e.g. the name of the Dropbox folder)
    • For Photo/P&D, create groupe or pièce records as usual
  • Digital Archivist: Ingest
    • Add brief descriptive note about content to versement "Description du contenu"
    • Package content as an Archivematica SIP and ingest into Archivematica, following the procedures for ingesting "raw" data.
    • Place a Déplacement request for the files to be localized to Dark Archive.
    • Delete extraneous copies of files from Digital Shipping Space, BitCurator workstations, etc.
  • GesCo
    • Add "Dark archive" as location to accession (e.g. versement) record

Temporary physical media

Steps:

  • GesCo: Create accession records
    • For Archives, create only a versement record (no versement objet or ARCH records). Include a brief note in "Description du contenu" indicating how the files arrived (e.g. "Files arrived at CCA on a 64GB USB thumb drive")
    • For Photo/P&D, create groupe or pièce records as usual
  • Digital Archivist: Ingest
    • Add brief descriptive note regarding content to versement "Description du contenu"
    • Package content as an Archivematica SIP and ingest into Archivematica, following the procedures for ingesting "raw" data
    • Place a Déplacement request for the files to be localized to Dark Archive.
    • Delete extraneous copies of files from Digital Shipping Space, BitCurator workstations, etc.
    • Reformat (erase) media and return to donor, repurpose, or weed as appropriate
  • GesCo
    • Add "Dark archive" as location to accession (versement) record

Original physical media

Note: This is a broad category that might include, e.g., floppy disks, optical media (CDs/DVDs), computers, internal hard drives, backup tape formats such as LTO, etc. For assistance in correctly identifying media types, please see the Computer Media Identification Guide or the UTSA Libraries' Know Your Media page.

Steps:

  • GesCo
    • Create accession records as described below
    • Determine if it is possible to separate digital media on arrival
    • IF YES: Registrar separates digital media from physical materials upon arrival (stored in cool vault shelving) and creates separate versement-objets for the container(s) of digital media.
    • IF NO: Registrar makes note in the “Description du contenu“ field of versement objet records that they contain digital media. This material will then be stabilized according to Media Backlog workflows by the Digital Archives Technician as part of their regular work, or at the moment of processing.
  • Digital Archivist
    • Note: These steps may occur after some delay
    • Oversee disk imaging of media
    • If archive is not immediately going to be processed, package all disk images as a single Archivematica SIP and ingest into Archivematica, following the procedures for ingesting "raw" data
    • Place a Déplacement request for the files to be localized to Dark Archive.
    • Delete extraneous copies of files from Digital Shipping Space, BitCurator workstations, etc.
  • GesCo
    • Add "Dark archive" as location to accession (versement) record
  • Digital Archivist, Archivist/Chef/Curator, Associate Director
    • Note: The policies for this step are being reviewed by Adria Seccareccia, Archivist, in relation to the general weeding policies of CCA
    • During or after processing, Digital Archivist and either the Archivist or appropriate Curator/Chef assess media for artefactual value and confirm with Associate Director, Collection. There are three possible results to this assessment:
      • Media have artefactual value and will be kept permanently at CCA in their entirety
      • Media have artefactual value and a sample will be kept permanently at CCA
      • Media do not have artefactual value and will be destroyed or returned to the donor
    • Any media that are kept at CCA are retained solely for their artefactual value, not as storage media or “backups” of digital files in the CCA collection. The description and arrangement of these objects should be discussed with the Digital Archivist and appropriate Archivist/Head/Cataloguer. Any time media are returned or destroyed, the Processing Archivist make a note of this in the "Appraisal-destruction" text entry field in TMS at the fonds-level.

Ingesting "raw" accession data into digital repository

Once data from all of the network transfer, temporary media, and original media in an accession has been stabilized, the digital component of the accession is ingested into CCA's Archivematica-based digital repository. The aim of this step is to retain and safely store a copy of the data exactly as it arrived at CCA until a processing archivist processes the accession. Note that all files from network transfers or temporary media must be packaged in some time of archive format (zip, tar, rar, etc.), or else Archivematica will change original filenames and timestamps, defeating part of the purpose of the "raw" ingest. At CCA, we typically prefer to package in tar files. Test that the files were successfully compressed and can be reopened, as faulty zip files can result in the loss of collection material. Note also that this step may not be necessary if disk images are to be retained as part of the processed material.

This SIP is composed of all files, archive packages, and disk images in the Shipping Space that correspond to an accession. It is named according to the convention <accession number>_raw, with all punctuation replaced by underscores (e.g., AR2018_0001_raw).

For the ingest of raw unprocessed data, we use the VSP-AMPL-01 processing pipeline. In this pipeline, Archivematica is set by default not to extract packages, examine contents, or normalize any files.

Procedure:

  1. Create a SIP named <accession number>_raw, containing the files as sent by the donor and/or disk images. If an accession has not yet been created in TMS, temporarily store the SIP in the Digital Shipping Space until the accession number has been assigned and a record created in TMS.
  2. Copy the SIP to the VSP-AMPL-01 pipeline using the send_to_archivematica.py script.
  3. (Digital Archivist/Archivematica administrator) Move the SIP to the Automation Tools watched folder for ingest. Follow typical ingest and QA procedures.

Once the accession has been ingested into Archivematica, delete any extraneous copies from the BitCurator machines, Digital Shipping Space, etc. and ask Déplacement to update the location for the appropriate accession records to "Dark archive".