3 Replies to “DC Public Library: the Washingtoniana collection”
It sounds like the staff involved with the Washingtoniana collections are doing a really great job thus far with meeting the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. I’m pleased to see that they’re using Preservica to preform fixity checks periodically on files, that they already keep two sets of drives onsite, and that they already have such a high NSDA level reached for information security. It looks like they’ve already taken some really big steps in the right direction!
You bring up a point that has come through in a handful of these other surveys (including my own): how do we work these steps into existing workflows? It sounds like the Washingtoniana collections & DCPL need help figuring how to integrate digital preservation strategies into the born-digital workflow, in particular. With regards to the “documents, emails, websites, data, and even government documents” – are they thinking of these materials as separate entities, or do they all fall under the same “born-digital” umbrella?
Certainly hiring Lauren Algee and Paul Kelly demonstrated a committment towards digital preservation as they were mostly hired for their knowledge in that regard.
You have an excellent point about the difficulties of integrating preservation strategies into workflows. Much of the difficulty hear comes from DCPL being such a large organization I think. To some extent each library in the system and even different sections within a library can work very differently from other sections. As such, it may be difficult to develop a workflow which would be adopted that would allow the majority of institutional files to find their way into the digital repository.
As for the questions on whether they think of them as seperate entities, well they seem to think with a certain granularity, as evidenced by their separation of A/V, institutional documents, website archiving, and digitized objects in their discussion. A large part of what I’ve been discussing with them however is development of workflows for some of these materials so I hope they will be able to improve in that regard.
It sounds like the staff involved with the Washingtoniana collections are doing a really great job thus far with meeting the NDSA Levels of Digital Preservation. I’m pleased to see that they’re using Preservica to preform fixity checks periodically on files, that they already keep two sets of drives onsite, and that they already have such a high NSDA level reached for information security. It looks like they’ve already taken some really big steps in the right direction!
You bring up a point that has come through in a handful of these other surveys (including my own): how do we work these steps into existing workflows? It sounds like the Washingtoniana collections & DCPL need help figuring how to integrate digital preservation strategies into the born-digital workflow, in particular. With regards to the “documents, emails, websites, data, and even government documents” – are they thinking of these materials as separate entities, or do they all fall under the same “born-digital” umbrella?
Certainly hiring Lauren Algee and Paul Kelly demonstrated a committment towards digital preservation as they were mostly hired for their knowledge in that regard.
You have an excellent point about the difficulties of integrating preservation strategies into workflows. Much of the difficulty hear comes from DCPL being such a large organization I think. To some extent each library in the system and even different sections within a library can work very differently from other sections. As such, it may be difficult to develop a workflow which would be adopted that would allow the majority of institutional files to find their way into the digital repository.
As for the questions on whether they think of them as seperate entities, well they seem to think with a certain granularity, as evidenced by their separation of A/V, institutional documents, website archiving, and digitized objects in their discussion. A large part of what I’ve been discussing with them however is development of workflows for some of these materials so I hope they will be able to improve in that regard.