This session will present practical workflows for processing and preserving new, born-digital collections of challenging proportions from ever-evolving sources to make them meaningfully accessible.
Last year, the University of Kentucky Libraries Special Collections Research Center received the offer of a donation of 4,500+ videos. They arrived in the form of the university’s primary institutional YouTube Channel. In addition to addressing a number of appraisal questions, the process of accessioning the video collection gave insights into challenges surrounding cloud migrations of this scale, Google Takeout metadata, and file format remediation.
At the University of Minnesota Libraries Archives and Special Collections, recent challenges included collections with a thousand or more optical disks and accessions of files created and stored in Google Drive. While the former was a familiar media format, the number of disks involved made previous workflows unfeasible. In the case of cloud storage, new complications arose based on file size and the number of creators or file owners involved. Both cases required new approaches and new procedures just to ingest.
Presenters will share their solutions and their problem-solving processes. Although both examples are from large academic institutions, they will present lower-cost tools, free tools, professional collaborations, and the methods and advocacy that allowed this work to be completed affordably in-house without the expense of outsourcing the work to external vendors.
Speakers Andrew McDonnell, University of Kentucky (Session Chair) Lara Friedman-Shedlov, University of Minnesota
