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Showing posts from November, 2014

A non-archivist's perspective on cataloguing born digital archives

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As blogged in my previous post , earlier this week I attended an  ARA Section for Archives and Technology event on Born Digital Cataloguing and also had the opportunity to talk about some of the Borthwick's current work in this area. I gave a non-archivist's perspective on born digital cataloguing. These were the main points I tried to put across, though some of the points below were also informed by discussions on the day: Born digital cataloguing within a purely digital archive is reasonably straightforward. The real complexity comes when working with hybrid archives where content is both physical and digital The Archaeology Data Service are good at born digital cataloguing. This is partly because they only have digital material to worry about, but also down to the fact that they have many years of experience and the necessary systems in place. Their new ADS Easy system allows depositors to submit data for archiving along with the required metadata (which they can enter b

Born Digital Cataloguing (some thoughts from the ARA SAT event)

First day back to work after my holiday and I am straight back into the fray – no quiet day catching up on e-mails and getting my head slowly back into work mode for me! On Monday I attended an ARA Section for Archives and Technology event on BornDigital Cataloguing and also had the opportunity to talk about some of our current work in this area. It was great to see the event so well attended (the organisers had to find a bigger room due to the huge amount of interest!). This is clearly an important and interesting subject for many archives professionals and it was clear throughout the day that many of us are grappling with very similar issues. Here are some of the main points that I latched on to from the morning’s presentations:   It is important to preserve the directory structure of digital files as submitted into the archive – even if you subsequently move the files into a different structure. This is the equivalent of original order and can give context to the files. End users