This past week, the Artefactual team of Peter Van Garderen, President/Systems Archivist, Evelyn McLellan, Systems Archivist and Austin Trask, Systems Engineer made a site visit to Rockefeller Archive Center to install the 0.9 version of Archivematica. This beta version of the open sourced digital preservation system will allow us to preserve and maintain our backlog of born digital and digitized records.
To test the functionality of Archivematica, the DTeam will begin pilot testing donors’ digital materials and processing digitized project materials. The donor test cases will include the Ford Foundation’s 20,000 pdfs of unpublished reports, and the Commonwealth Fund’s grants database. Donor transfer agreements and rights permissions are being drafted for these pilot cases. These donor test cases are slated to begin sometime in fall 2012 prior to Artefactual’s return in November.
The backlog of digitized projects that are being run through Archivematica includes the Foundation for Child Development’s microfilm digitization project, the Rockefeller Foundation Officer Diaries, Rockefeller Brothers Fund annual reports and many others. Using these digitized projects as first-use cases for Archivematica’s initial production will allow us to determine what usability improvements are needed in future Archivematica releases in order to build out the best possible functionality for a digital repository.
Artefactual is hard at work figuring out the kinks of email archiving. This functionality will be available for us to test in later versions of Archivematica.
We have made real progress on our PREMIS rights statements for the digitized collections that are in the pipeline for ingest into Archivematica. Consolidating these rights statements for our collections is an essential part of making the digital records available for use. We are using this rights module to attach donor and copyright restrictions to the digital records that are processed through Archivematica.
Web archiving is now being done by Archive-It. Archive-It is a web-based subscription service that captures digital content such as our website and donor websites, to preserve institutional memory and history. Archive-It will crawl the chosen websites; the content that it captures is stored in a Web ARChive (WARC) file. The WARC files that are created from these crawls will then be preserved in Archivematica. This topic will be discussed in further detail in future Dblog posts.
Before Artefactual returns in the late fall/early winter, we will begin to organize workflows for creating digital object records in ATReference for legacy, digitized and newly accessioned born-digital records. This effort will help set up decisions and policy making standards regarding necessary levels of description needed for Archivematica and ATReference integration. When Artefactual returns to RAC, they will upgrade Archivematica again and integrate ATReference and our web access component, XTF into one seamless digital content management workflow. Thanks Artefactual for all your hard work!
Finally, a big thank you goes out to Bob Battaly for the time he has invested in researching Rockefeller Archive Center’s rights issues regarding all of the current digitization projects, and Lee Hiltzik for helping to identify rights and access restrictions for the Foundation for Child Development microfilm digitization project.