Accessioning and Ingest of Digital Records

Perhaps your institution has found itself in a situation where a prominent donor has offered a trove of significant Office documents and digital photographs stored on a hard drive; or, an important department is ready to transfer records of long-term value from a file server to the archives; or, a professor drops off an external hard drive and DVDs with video footage from a symposium featuring nationally recognized participants.

If you were unprepared or unsure of how to handle such a donation, this course will introduce you to basic policies, resources, and procedures that will enable your institution to successfully accession and ingest common born-digital materials (Office documents, PDFs, images, audio, video, and email).

In this context, “ingest” (as outlined by the Open Archival Information System Reference Model) encompasses “accessioning” in its traditional sense (i.e., “to take legal and physical custody of a group of records or other materials and to formally document their receipt”) but includes additional steps to validate the transfer and make the content suitable for long-term preservation. The course will focus on working with "born digital" archives (i.e., content that originated in a digital format), but core concepts and strategies will be applicable to digitized surrogates of physical and analog materials.

NOTE: Links to software will be included in registration materials. Participants are encouraged to pre-install applications and will be invited to attend office hours with instructors prior to the course to attempt to resolve any issues. Students will have the opportunity to participate in hands-on activities as part of the course, but instructors will have limited ability to troubleshoot during the class.

Previously titled Accessioning and Ingest of Electronic Records