By Kate Tasker
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Put 40 digital archivists, programmers, technologists, curators, scholars, and managers in a room together for three days, give them unlimited cups of tea and coffee, and get ready for some seriously productive discussions.
This magic happened at the Born Digital Archiving & eXchange (BDAX) unconference, held at Stanford University on July 18-20, 2016. I joined the other BDAX attendees to tackle the continuing challenges of acquiring, discovering, delivering and preserving born-digital materials.
The discussions highlighted five key themes to me:
1) Born-digital workflows are, generally, specific
We’re all coping with the general challenges of born-digital archiving, but we’re encountering individual collections which need to be addressed with local solutions and resources. BDAXers generously shared examples of use cases and successful workflows, and, although these guidelines couldn’t always translate across diverse institutions (big/small, private/public, IT help/no IT help), they’re a foundation for building best practices which can be adapted to specific needs.
2) We need tools
We need reliable tools that will persist over time to help us understand collections, to record consistent metadata and description, and to discover the characteristics of new content types. Project demos including ePADD, BitCurator Access, bwFLA – Emulation as a Service, UC Irvine’s Virtual Reading Room, the Game Metadata and Citation Project, and the University of Michigan’s ArchivesSpace-Archivematica-DSpace Integration project gave encouragement that tools are maturing and will enable us to work with more confidence and efficiency. (Thanks to all the presenters!)
3) Smart people are on this
A lot of people are doing a lot of work to guide and document efforts in born-digital archiving. We need to share these efforts widely, find common points of application, and build momentum – especially for proposed guidelines, best guesses, and continually changing procedures. (We’re laying this train track as we go, but everybody can get on board!) A brilliant resource from BDAX is a “Topical Brain Dump” Google doc where everyone can share tips related to what we each know about born-digital archives (hat-tip to Kari Smith for creating the doc, and to all BDAXers for their contributions).
4) Talking to each other helps!
Chatting with BDAX colleagues over coffee or lunch provided space to compare notes, seek advice, make connections, and find reassurance that we’re not alone in this difficult endeavor. Published literature is continually emerging on born-digital archiving topics (for example, born-digital description), but if we’re not quite ready to commit our own practices to paper magnetic storage media, then informal conversations allow us to share ideas and experiences.
5) Born-digital archiving needs YOU
BDAX attendees brainstormed a wide range of topics for discussion, illustrating that born-digital archiving collides with traditional processes at all stages of stewardship, from appraisal to access. All of these functions need to be re-examined and potentially re-imagined. It’s a big job (*understatement*) but brings with it the opportunity to gather perspective and expertise from individuals across different roles. We need to make sure everyone is invited to this party.
How to Get Involved
So, what’s next? The BDAX organizers and attendees recognize that there are many, many more colleagues out there who need to be included in these conversations. Continuing efforts are coalescing around processing levels and metrics for born-digital collections; accurately measuring and recording extent statements for digital content; and managing security and storage needs for unprocessed digital accessions. Please, join in!
You can read extensive notes for each session in this shared Google Drive folder (yes, we did talk about how to archive Google docs!) or catch up on Tweets at #bdax2016.
To subscribe to the BDAX email listserv, please email Michael Olson (mgolson[at]stanford[dot]edu), or, to join the new BDAX Slack channel, email Shira Peltzman (speltzman[at]library[dot]ucla[dot]edu).
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Kate Tasker works with born-digital collections and information management systems at The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. She has an MLIS from San Jose State University and is a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists. Kate attended Capture Lab in 2015 and is currently designing workflows to provide access to born-digital collections.
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