Hello from Janesville! My name is Kristin Arnold and I am the archives manager at the Rock County Historical Society (RCHS). This summer, we have the pleasure of hosting Sam Steingraeber from the School of Information Studies at UW-Milwaukee.
We are so fortunate to be able to participate in CCDC for a second time. Last year, we focused on a specific collection—our oral histories. But this year we’re taking a step back and looking at the role of digital preservation throughout all our digital collections.
Before we can start activities like fixity checks or renaming files, Sam and I discovered that we need to get a good grasp of the digital materials we already have! Many of our digital items have been digitized on an ad hoc basis and stored in various locations on our main server. That same server also stores our administrative and research files, making it difficult to distinguish the collection items from the other digital files. It has been great to have Sam look at our organization scheme with fresh eyes and create a new file structure with our digital preservation needs in mind.
After recommending a new file structure and identifying which of our digital materials are actually collection items, Sam was able to develop an inventory. This has been a great exercise because I learned more about what had been digitized prior to my time at RCHS. Something as simple as an inventory can help ensure continuity and efficiency in digital preservation.
Getting started in digital preservation can be very difficult. The sheer amount of materials in an unfamiliar file structure at RCHS has been overwhelming. It may not sound like fun, but having Sam take a closer look at the files on our server and analyze its organization scheme has paved the way to other digital preservation activities.
Now that we’ve got a better structure in place, we can think about how to ingest incoming digital donations (Sam’s current project), which will lead to things like fixity checks and standard file names. I’m excited to see where we’ll be at the end of the summer!
Janesville, Wisconsin
Visit Curating Community Digital Collections for more information about this project.
This project is made possible by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, #RE-85-17-0127-17
