#CILDC : Digitizing Archives

Steven Putt - Woody Guthrie Archives

Woody Guthrie Centennial, 1912-2012

Located north of NYC, from 1940 on.  Is moving to Tulsa, OK.

Guthrie - Artist, political cartoonist, musician, writer 

Lots of stuff, including cassette tapes

Balancing content versus process

- digitize then catalogued

- catalogue then digitize 

Teresa Gray - the Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive of Italian Art

320 boxes of photographers that were purchased in 1967.

Art from 13-20th centuries

Project goals - 

- Need to preserve the collection

- Gather metadata on art objects

- Digitize photographs

- Build database

- Review records for consistency

- Make database available online

In developing the project plan, attacked short term goals first.

- Preservation

- Image sorting

- Numbering images

Long term goals -

- Digitization

- Research and metadata

- Database development

Getting started - 

- Establish workflow

- Set target dates

- Tracking tools

Maintain project consistency -

- Controlled vocabulary

- Formatting guidelines

- Regular communication

- Project manual - detailed 

Michael Ashenfelder - Personal Digital Archiving: Preserving Your Digital Possessions

The rules for preserving paper documents do not apply to the digital world.

Digital objects require specific containers, e.g., USB drives.

Media  can fail and become obsolete.

And what about content in social media sites? 

How do you handle cloud storage?

Personal archiving is a scaled down version of what a library does.

Digital preservation 

1. Identify what you want to save. Get organized.

2. Decide what is most important to you.  Keep the best copies and the originals.  

3. Organize it in a logical way that makes sense to you.

4. Backup your files on two different storage devices.  One copy should be remote in a different geographic region.  Rule of Three works too.

5. Verify your backups.

6. Update the storage media periodically (every 5-7 years).

7. Manage who you want to leave this items to in your estate.

Local public libraries can get involved in teaching about personal archiving.

John Sarnowski - ResCarta Foundation 

Creates software so that organizations can create digital collections. 

Open source. 

They use standard formats. 

The go out to a community and capture the local history.

Suggest starting small and using textual information.

-- when possible use OCR.

Starting small an also means creating audio interviews. 

-- transcribe audio

Once you have the information described, serve it out to the public.  

-- get a web application, like Drupal. 

You want the application to locate objects quickly and easily. 

Open source software is available to search audio.

Over time verify that the files have not changed.  (Checksum)

Find ways to share your content.

And remember that lots of copies keeps stuff safe.