Integrating Born-Digital into Archival processing workflows
As digital preservation becomes a significant feature within archives, the differentiation between “digital archivist” and “archivist” is blurring. With this in mind, Special Research Collections (SRC) at UC Santa Barbara is removing "digital" as a premodifier, not viewing born-digital processing as a separate unit but an embedded mechanism for all archivists to process collections. This shift includes a reinterpretation of building a born-digital program where archival processors lead in developing born digital policies and workflows as well as processing born-digital media themselves. This project aims to solve the issues of incorporating digital preservation holistically into SRC’s existing processing procedures, confronting the larger challenges of implementing total end- to-end digital archiving, while maintaining sustainability. The presentation will outline how we’ve developed our proposal for such integration as well as our steps in developing a born-digital component to our everyday archival procedures.
