 Welcome, everyone. We're going to get started in just a moment, but people get settled in. In the meantime, feel free to let us know in the chat where you're joining us from. I'm joining you from an overcast Toronto, Ontario, where we got about, well, we got more snow than I cared to shovel over the last couple of days. So hopefully you're in decent fair weather places. So, okay, we're going to get going. My name is Mike Morneau. I'll be your technical producer and if you have any requirements for assistance at any point in time during today's webinar, I would encourage you to go ahead and communicate with me via the chat at the bottom of the screen. You'll also see at the bottom of the screen is a button called Q&A and you are encouraged to use the Q&A function to ask questions of our presenter, Maggie Downing today, and that way by using the Q&A instead of the chat for questions, it helps facilitate the Q&A portion of the webinar. You'll also see at the bottom of the screen a button that says CC live transcripts. So if you want to take advantage of the closed captions for today's webcast, feel free to click CC live transcript and choose show subtitle. If you want to hide the subtitles, just select hide subtitle. And again, use the chat to communicate with me if you have any text support issues. Otherwise, we'll go ahead and pass things off to our host, Robin Bauer-Kilgo. Go ahead, Robin. Thanks, Mike. First of all, I would like to start to acknowledge that this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Mikosuke and Seminole people and their ancestors, and I pay my respect to elders both past and present. Well, I want to go ahead and welcome everyone to our first C2C Care webinar of 2022. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. This is also the time of year that I don't like talking about the weather, because as many of you know, I'm looking in the Florida Keys, so I'll just say that the windows are open and it's kind of pleasant outside right now. So, but I hope you all are doing well. Well, as I said, this is our first webinar of C2C Care for 2022's Introduction to Digital Collection Management. I'm just going to go through a couple of quick notes about today's program, and I'm going to hand this off to our presenter. My name is Robin Bauer-Kelgo. I am the C2C Care Coordinator, and you just saw Mike Marna, who's our Senior Producer over at Learning Times. If at any point during the webinar, you have any questions, feel free to communicate to us within the chat. We will be here the entire time. Really quickly, if you are new to us, this is our home on the web, connectingtocollections.org. On that website, you will see an entire archive of all of our past webinars. C2C Care has been around for, I think, over 10 years now, so there's quite an archive of webinars out there for everyone to see. There's also an archive of our courses, a link to our online community where you can ask different questions of our C2C Care monitors and experts, and also a resources tab. The resources tab is a great place to look for curated resources on all subjects related to collections care, so I encourage you to go take a look at our website if you haven't had a chance to. We do have an upcoming webinar. We're actually working on our schedule for 2022 right now, and it's really taking shape, but in the immediacy, we do have a webinar coming back on February 24th at 1 p.m. Eastern per the normal. It is called Basis of NAGPRA. During that webinar, we're going to be talking about the NAGPRA process, how it works within the museum collections care scope, and all sorts of fun information. If you are interested in registering for that webinar, I encourage you to go to our website. As always, this webinar program is free. We do one free webinar a month, so if every day of a chance, feel free to go ahead and register for it. We also have two places we live out on social media. One is our Facebook page, and the other one is our Twitter accounts at C2C Care. On both of those accounts, you'll be able to see information about the program, about FAIC, who's our parent organization, and also any news that we have regarding the program. So I encourage you to look at those as well. As Mike said, we are using Zoom webinar today, so just know that we have two ways you can communicate with our presenter if you'd like to. One is via the chat box. The chat box is there to say hello, as you guys are all doing rather well. You can talk about the weather if you like, or anything else you want to communicate, or if you have any technical questions. Q&A box is for questions. So if you have a question for our presenter at any time during the program, I encourage you to use that Q&A box. It makes it a little easier for us to actually track the questions throughout the program itself. So without further ado, I'm going to hand control this webinar over to our presenter today. Her name is Maggie Downing. Maggie is the Manager of Digital Imaging at CCAHA and oversees all imaging projects at that organization, including digitization and facsimile printing processes. She also provides consultation services on large-scale project planning and long-term digital preservation. So I'm going to stop sharing my screen and hand this over to Maggie, and I will see you all during the Q&A portion at the conclusion of the program. All right, great. Thanks, Robin. I'll go ahead and share my screen now. All right. So thanks, you all. Thank you all for tuning in today. I'll be discussing an introduction to digital collections management. As Robin mentioned, my name is Maggie Downing. I'm the Manager of Digital Imaging at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts. We're located in Philadelphia. We are a regional conservation center focusing on paper objects, including books, photographs, documents, and artwork on paper. And in my role, I oversee all of our digitization projects and provide consultation to clients that want to set up a large-scale digitization program or need a digital preservation assessment. So I look forward to breaking down some of these key concepts in digital collections management and preservation. So today, the topics I'll be covering will be some of the challenges that we face in managing digital collections, some key terms and concepts that you'll encounter when managing digital collections, the importance of metadata in managing digital records, the key characteristics that you want to preserve in a digital record, some policies and procedures that will support digital preservation, some of the basic activities to conduct in managing your digital collections. And at the end, I'll briefly discuss how to conduct a basic self-assessment of your institution and digital preservation at your institution using the National Digital Stewardship Alliance's Levels of Digital Preservation. So the focus of this webinar is on first steps and things to consider when you're establishing a digital collection and a digital preservation program. There's a lot to learn about in this field. So I'm accompanying this webinar with the resources document which Robin will add into the chat. And this will have links to a lot of additional information on the various topics I'll be discussing today. So some of the challenges in digital collections management, a lot of the strategies for caring for digital collections do mirror those that you would take for managing physical collections. But there are some unique challenges that digital collections face. So the first one, perhaps most obvious, is the dependence on technology. It means that we need machines and codes to read and interpret information in digital collections. And these machines and codes are constantly changing, which results in a high risk of technology obsolescence, meaning your file types may become outdated, old hard drives can't be read with newer operating systems, and removable media goes out of style very quickly. You no longer have floppy disks, older connection ports aren't available on newer machines. Even newer computers like the one I'm presenting on today has no CD drive or USB port. They're also susceptible to human error and attacks. So depending on how your records are stored, it may be way too easy to delete something on accident or move it into a folder that it doesn't belong in. So other people can no longer find it. And they are unfortunately vulnerable to hacking malicious data corruption, deletion or leaking. Another challenge is just the sheer volume of digital material that we have. If you're unsure what to weed out of your digital collections, you may feel pressure to keep and preserve everything, which can get unwieldy very quickly. It can seem like you're always running out of disk space or server space when you're starting a digital collection. And if you're working on large scale digitization projects of artwork or archival collections, there's a lot of benefits to projects like that. But as digital collections grow, digital storage also needs to grow along with it. The cameras and scanners that are used to digitize materials are getting better and nicer, which is great, but it's making file sizes that are bigger and bigger. In addition to that, there's also just a lot more information that's born digital. A lot of our correspondence has been replaced by emails, project documents are created digitally and fine art photography and filmmaking is often born digital. So in this presentation, we'll talk a little bit more about how creating a digital file inventory and planning can help you project storage needs in the future. But aside from these perhaps more obvious challenges, I also want to acknowledge the sort of psychological challenges in managing digital records. For one thing, digital collections management can feel pretty abstract in concept compared to managing physical collections. You're not really looking at a room full or a box full of documents. They don't generally appear to be in any immediate danger, even if they may be. And all of that can make it very difficult to advocate for within your institution. They can also feel intimidating, because I know in a lot of institutions, archivists or collections managers or curators or registrars are kind of tasks with digital collection management, but that might not have been part of your training or even a formal part of your current job description. And I'm not saying all of this to scare anybody away from digital collecting efforts, but quite the opposite because by stating and acknowledging these risks and challenges, that allows us to create management strategies that can go a long way in mitigating these risks and challenges. So at this point, I want to discuss just some key vocabulary terms I'll be using and that you'll encounter as you learn more about digital collection management. So first I want to define digital records, which are individual digital items that are part of a collection or archive. So a digital record is something that was created by a machine and requires a machine to make it intelligible by a person. And a digital collection is a collection of digital records that have been selected and managed in an archival environment. And digital preservation is a combination of policies, strategies and actions that are taken to preserve the accuracy, authenticity and accessibility of digital records over time. And we'll discuss each of these throughout this presentation. Next I want to differentiate between digitized and born digital. Digitized material is something that's born analog. This is material that's been scanned or photographed from a physical format, such as a negative or a document or a book. Typically this results in a JPEG PDF format. You may also see this term referred to as reformatted in some of the literature in digital preservation. Born digital is material that was created by software, such as Word documents, InDesign layouts, databases, email. You may print this so it may exist in a physical format, but the original document is digital. And file formats are conventions for encoding data into human readable form. So like the file formats that I mentioned on the previous slide, this can include TIF, JPEG, PDF, but also many, many more. File formats can be proprietary or open. And I'll talk a little bit more about how to select preservation file formats later on. Media refers to where your digital records are stored. So this could be a hard drive, which is disk space on an actual computer, maybe a server, which is a computer system that's used as a repository of data that's shared by a network. So if you're working in an office setting, you may have a local server network where you store your files in a directory that can be accessed by other people in the department or the institution. The cloud basically just means storing content on the internet rather than on a local server or hard drive. A digital repository is similar in theory to a library stacks. These are systems in which digital records are organized and searchable with a specific persistent location so that managers can maintain intellectual control and researchers can find out what they're looking for. And then lastly I have portable or removable media such as DVDs, portable hard drives, USB drives, things like that. It's best to think of removable media as temporary media. A lot of these types are subject to data corruption, but also they can be easily lost or not incorporated into a backup procedure. The next term I want to discuss are checksums and fixity. A checksum is like a digital fingerprint. This is a stream of letters and numbers that change if the bit stream of your file changes. So these are generated automatically using a software tool. It's not something that's done by hand. It's usually a pretty quick and simple process. And a fixity check is an action taken which reviews the checksums of a group of files and checks that the digital file has not changed over time or during transfer. If a checksum of a file has changed because a file has been altered or corrupted, you're notified through a report. And if a checksum has changed, it tells you that something is different in the file. It doesn't tell you what is different in a file. So if you get a report that your checksum is different, the idea would be that you replace it with a backup copy. On the resources document that's here in the chat, there's a link to the digital preservation coalition handbook section on fixity and check sums that discusses some of these tools that are available. And also many of them are free. If you have an IT team with your institution, they may already be incorporating the generation of checksums and fixity checks into their general backup procedure. So I would recommend checking with them. And if not, they may be able to help you set up a workflow for this. The last time I want to discuss is metadata because this supports so much of the work we do in managing digital collections. And I'll send a couple of extra slides on this one. So metadata, the definition is that it's metadata is information that describes, explains, locates, or makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource. So basically, metadata is information that you record about an object or record. So on this slide, the erbarium specimen on the right shows an example of metadata. So we have the actual plant, which would be the information resource or record. And then we also have information about its name, where it was found, and when it's catalog number within a museum. And all of that contextual information is metadata. So the description helps to describe the plant. So that's useful to researchers, the catalog member helps to locate, retrieve, and manage the specimen. A lot of metadata is information that you may already be recording for physical materials, such as mark records, finding aids, things like that. That includes descriptive metadata, which describes the item with fields. One of the standards maybe is Dublin core has fields like title, the subject, the creator, the date, things like that. Administrative metadata, such as copyright and access restrictions. There's also some metadata that's just used for digital records. So an example is technical metadata, which records the scanner or the camera that created the record. The data was created, the pixel dimensions. This is usually embedded automatically into the digital file. Structural metadata records how a file relates to other files, such as whether a file is one page from a book. And then preservation metadata, such as the checksums that we discussed, a history of data corruption or recovery. It could also include information on when files were transferred and a history of virus scans. So metadata is important to all collections, especially digital collections, and that it supports the discovery of the resources through the ability to search electronically. It can also provide valuable insight into your collections and can help facilitate the sharing of resources across multiple institutions, which can allow for new relationships among materials to be discovered and shared. Metadata helps you maintain control over access and restrictions if needed. So for example, you can filter out items that are in copyright or embargoed and choose to make them unavailable on a public-facing website, but maybe have them available on site still to researchers. And lastly, preservation metadata will help you maintain the digital records well into the future. For different types of metadata and different types of collections, there's a variety of metadata standards. These help to ensure that metadata is applied consistently within an institution and across institutions, which will help make all this work you put into creating it all the more useful. So one example I mentioned in a previous slide is Dublin Core. It's a descriptive set of metadata elements like title, date, creator. These elements are broad and generic enough to describe a wide range of resources. Other examples of metadata standards include machine readable cataloging or mark, which is widely used in libraries, and encoded archival description, which has come in archives as a means of creating finding aids. So again, this is a rather quick explanation here, but I have a link on the slide and also in the resources handout to the University of Texas Libraries, which has a great resources resource on the basics of metadata. Okay, so that's it for key terms concepts. Now I want to talk about the characteristics we want to look for and preserve in a digital record. And here I need to credit the Society of American Archivists for this breakdown in these definitions here. So basically there are four features that we want to preserve in digital records. Authenticity, reliability, integrity, and usability. So for authenticity, we want to be able to prove that the record is what it attests to be. Reliability, we want to prove that the record is complete and accurate. For integrity, we want to prove that the record is complete and has been unaltered over time or during transit and usability to confirm that the the record is accessible. So digital preservation is maintaining all of these features over time, and I'll talk about each of these a little bit more. So for authenticity, we're looking again for can we prove that the digital record is what it attests to be. Authenticity can be established by adding all types of metadata, including administrative, technical, descriptive, and preservation metadata. This way we aren't just relying on the file name or a visual inspection. For reliability, we're looking to confirm that a digital record is complete and accurate. This can be established through adding structural metadata so we can know if a digital record is part of a larger group, whether a single file is part of a group of letters, for example. For integrity, we want to confirm that a digital record is complete and unaltered over time and or in transit. This can be established by computing a checksum, using a system that assigns a unique file name to all of the records, avoiding any duplication in file naming, and storing final files as read only so people can't go in and change it final accidentally. And the last characteristic usability, we want to make sure our digital records are accessible. This can also be supported by using a consistent file naming and folder naming standard, creating indexes and inventories of your digital records, and employing a consistent system for search and retrieval, not something that's just a full text search and a search box This could use employee collection management system, digital asset management system, or even just a basic Excel database. So if digital preservation is maintaining all of these features of digital records over time, how do we do that? For one, it's supported by policies, strategies, and actions. Policies are high-level documents that outline basic goals and commitments. They ensure an institutional commitment to digital collections and digital preservation goals, regardless of staff changes and administrative changes. And procedures are documents that outline specific steps to achieve those goals. They ensure efficient workflows with consistent quality, even as staff changes. That way the person that comes into your role after you doesn't feel like they have to reinvent the wheel. Both policies and procedures should be written and stored in an easy to find location. Some examples of policies include a digital collections management policy, a digital collection development policy, a selection policy for digitization, or a digital preservation policy. These can either be standalone documents or incorporated into larger collection policies. It can be combined together in a number of ways. Your policy should have a built-in schedule for a revision. It doesn't need to be super frequent. These are more high-level documents, but should be incorporated to be revised every five to 10 years. Procedures can include digitization workflows or file naming standards, any metadata guidelines, quality control workflows, or workflows for accessioning board and digital records. Procedures should be reviewed on a more regular basis just to make sure they're up to date and are reflecting the actual work that you're doing. So now we understand the goals of digital preservation, some of the policies to support it. So now I want to discuss some of the strategies and actions in preserving digital collections. Over the next slides, I'll discuss what each of these actions should achieve, as well as some tools, strategies, and guiding documents that can help. These activities listed here, they're not meant to be any distinct step-by-step actions. You'll see that they overlap with each other. So for example, you don't have to fully identify every single digital record in your care before you can start creating a formal selection policy for digital materials or before you start working on your digital storage infrastructure. But the key activities here are to identify the digital content that you have, select content that warrants preservation. So not all of the digital files that you may have at your institution need to become digital records and part of a digital collection. Process the selected content by arranging, describing, and preparing it for storage. Storing the selected content and maintaining selected content over the long term through monitoring, migration, and recovery. This breakdown of actions is adapted from the Library of Congress's digital preservation outreach and education, and also digital power, which stands for preserving digital objects with restricted resources. And links to both of those are on the resources handout. So to identify, the step to identify, the goal here is to take stock of the digital materials that are in your care. These digital materials may include digital files, digitized files that have been scanned from physical materials, that may be born digital records that you've acquired from donors, or institutional records like meeting minutes, recorded lectures, or marketing materials. This is a rather social step. You want to talk with anybody who interacts with these materials, including staff, interns, volunteers, supervisors, and your IT team as needed. You don't need any specialized technical tools to begin this process. You can use a simple Excel document or other database tool. And at the end, you'll create a working document that's called a digital asset register. A digital asset register will help guide your planning in the next steps, also inform policies and procedures that you create along the way. It's important to create an inventory of your digital assets to ensure that the full scope of digital materials is fully documented and accounted for. And this register can be, again, in the form of a simple Excel spreadsheet. It should include information about the name of the collection or content, the person or department responsible for maintaining the collection, the size of the collection, meaning how much space does it take up, location of files, are they stored on your server? Do you have some things that are saved locally on computer hard drives or external media? Are any materials kept and managed by partner institutions? If so, you want to make a note of the deposit agreements there and any digital preservation policies that those institutions have in place. You want to make a note of the backup policy and procedure for that collection or content. The different file formats that are in the collection, you can think broadly here. You don't need to go item by item. But if it's mostly image files, you can put TIFFs, JPEGs without going through and creating an item is list here. Retention policy. So if these are on a records retention policy that don't need to be kept forever or looking at your collection management policy for accession records. Any ownership rights and data protection issues. So if you know the copyright, definitely make a note of that. If it's unknown, record that as well. That's important to know. If there's any sensitive or restricted information. So if you manage institutional records, this may include any personal identifiable information or financial information. Record any associated risks. So does the content depend on specific hardware or software and the estimated value of the content. So how easy is it to retrieve? How difficult or expensive is it to reproduce? When you're starting out on creating this digital asset register, again, it's important to think broadly about the full scope of digital materials in your care. And don't get too bogged down in details if they aren't easily discoverable. So try and fill out a little bit of information about each group of digital materials and then you can start to think more granularly about distinct theories. So record what you do now. Fill in the rest as you continue to manage and learn more about your collections. This is a working document that you can continue to add to and edit over time. It doesn't need to be all the way finished before you take your next steps. And again on the resources handout, I included a link to a template for the digital asset register that was created by the Canadian Heritage Information Network that you can use as a starting point. After identifying what you have, you can make more informed decisions about what you're going to protect and manage in your digital collections. So the goal of this step is to identify digital materials that require long-term preservation. This does not necessarily mean to preserve forever, though it can. It can also include digital records like institutional files that you don't have to keep forever, but you do have to keep them long enough to be concerned with changes in user technology or accessibility. This step also doesn't require too much in the way of technology. You want to consult with everyone who uses the digital materials that you've identified and consult the information you gathered for the digital asset register. The tools would be your mission statement, any guiding documents, and your staff knowledge. And the resulting document would be a digital preservation selection policy for your institution or department. So again, this policy can be incorporated into existing documents such as a collection development policy and the selection policy will help inform your digitization procedures and donor agreements for digital materials. If you don't know where to start, selection criteria should support your mission. So when in doubt, look at your mission. Are there collecting areas that are stated in your mission statement? If so, make sure that those are materials are identified and prioritized. Selection criteria should also reflect criteria for physical materials. So if you have a collection development policy or records retention policy for physical records, you can mirror your digital selection policy on that. Do you have any restrictions on collecting or preserving objects in very poor condition? That's also something to think about with digital records as well. There's a lot of risks to digital records if you can't read them or open them, or take them off of the carrier media that they're on. The selection criteria applies not just to the digital materials you've identified already, but also to the creation of new digital content or collecting of foreign digital materials. So consider what you'd like to collect in the future as well. What do you want more of in the collection? What do you want to consider discouraging from entering the collection? You may want to prioritize file formats that are widely adopted and platform independent. So if valuable records are not on a preferred format, find out if they can be migrated and incorporated into your processing workflow. And just to clarify a little bit more about these considerations for specific file formats, you want to prioritize formats that are widely adopted. The idea here is that file types that a lot of people use are more likely to stick around and not become obsolete. More specialized file types are at higher risk. Preservation formats should ideally be platform independent, meaning that they can be opened in different programs. This does not necessarily mean that they have to be completely free and open source. For example, PDF is a file format that's created and managed by Adobe, but there are lots and lots of programs that can open PDFs that are not Adobe products. I'm including two links here also on the resources handout. The Smithsonian document has a helpful table for referencing with recommended formats on a variety of types of different materials, including text, images, video, audio, websites, and data sets to name just a few of those. The next step is to process. And this step is pretty meaty. It covers a lot of a few related activities as well. And processing is done on your selected digital records, as well as new digital records created through digitization or accessioning born digital records. And the goal of processing is to establish the characteristics of the digital records that we discussed earlier, the authenticity, reliability, integrity, and usability. Many actions that are taken on digital records are similar to those for processing physical records. However, physical materials and archives can often be processed after they're accessioned into the collection. But ideally for digital records, you want to start processing before they come into the collection. So you want to understand the properties of the digital files coming into the collection to determine in advance if they can be properly managed long term, ideally before you commit via an accession. The tool selection for processing will vary depending on the scope of your collections, your staff expertise and budget. There's a lot of different resources on tool selections, which I've included a couple links here. If you're at the point where you're interested in starting to implement some of these tools, I recommend reviewing these for more information, a little bit more in depth. And that includes the power tool grid and the digital preservation coalition article on tools. Also on the resources handout. And the resulting documents from the processing step would be any documents like processing procedures, metadata guidelines, donor agreements, and access policies. The basic steps of processing digital records include gathering contextual information, performing a conservation assessment, identifying any access restrictions, arranging the records, describing the records and creating access tools. Most of these steps are supported through metadata. And I'll discuss each in the next few slides. First to gather contextual information, you want to think about how the materials were created and why? How were they previously managed? What's their current context? And what hardware and software dependencies are there? In an ideal world, you can work with the creators of digital files before they're deposited with your collection. But that's often not possible. This step is supported by creating descriptive and administrative metadata. You want to perform a conservation assessment. So once you get the digital files before you incorporate them with the rest of your digital records and collections, you first want to perform a virus scan. You want to identify and validate the different file formats and add these to your digital asset register. Generate a checksum or run a fixity check on existing checksums. Identify any preservation issues, whether the file formats are outdated, whether the media that they're on is obsolete, like can you even open the files from the media? This step is supported by preservation and technical metadata. Also important, you want to identify any access restrictions. So flag anything that has any personal identifiable information, which you would not want to share. And identify the copyright status if possible. This can affect whether you share things freely online or whether you can copy the records. Identify any embargo restrictions from the donor if there's a request, for example, not to make the records available for five years, for example. And also think about any culturally sensitive information, something especially to consider for any religious or tribal materials. Next, you want to arrange the materials intellectually. So first would be to determine whether materials have an original order. With digital records, especially born digital records that may be deposited with your institution, people and institutions manage digital records in so many different ways. Some feel like completely unorganized at all. So it may not be clear how things are, what the original order is, if there is any original order. And then it's okay if you need to change that, but just be sure if you are going to do that to keep a record of the original state that the files are in before you change it. Identify any relationships between groups of materials and rearrange files into series if needed. After that, you want to describe the records through descriptive metadata and record the information that you collected while gathering the textual information, performing the conservation assessment and identifying and arranging the records. This does not need to record metadata at the item level. This could be done at a series or collection level of files. Lastly, in processing, you want to create access tools so people can actually use them and benefit from all of the hard work you've put into it. So to do this, you'll organize the collection information and the metadata you've created to make finding aids online catalogs or online image access or exhibits. After processing, it's important to store your digital records safely. If you have an IT team, you may want to consult them to establish workflows for this step. It's possible these activities are already being conducted or that they can help you figure them out for your institution. So the goal here is to establish and maintain the authenticity and integrity of the records over time. You may use local servers or cloud storage services such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or examples of the big guys. Digital preservation systems or digital repositories like the Internet Archive. On your resulting document will be a storage and backup procedures for your digital records. If possible, you want to protect the authenticity of your digital records by storing them long term before storing them long term by creating a checksum or running a fixity check. If your files don't have checksums, then you can generate them at this point. One basic thing you can do is to protect your digital records is to keep them in a read-only directory on a server so only specific people can change the files. They don't get changed automatically or on accident if they get opened or moved. And one strategy, one key strategy is the three to one backup procedure which calls for three copies of your data on two different media types with at least one copy maintained off-site. So for example, if you have a server with a backup server and cloud storage, then you have three copies on two different media types with one being off-site. Even better if you would be if your backup server is in a different building than your main server. And lastly, you want to, after everything has been processed and stored, if this is an active step, you need to maintain the infrastructure here. Your goal is to ensure the ongoing protection and access to digital records over time. To do this, you'll monitor files and migrate them as needed and also monitor the field of digital preservation. Tools may include fixity tools or for conducting fixity checks on your checksums or any file analysis tools. And the actions that you undertake as you maintain the digital files over a period of time should all be guided by your digital preservation policy. So to maintain your digital collections long-term, you want to monitor the files and continue to perform fixity checks periodically. Perform preservation audits which are sporadic audits just to ensure that processing actions are meeting stated obligations and attest to the accuracy and availability of your digital records. Maintain your technical infrastructure. So perform maintenance on the hardware, software facilities, supplies, and technical components that go into the storage and access. You also want to have a schedule for migrating your files. Migration is the conversion of data to the latest file formats or relocation to new storage media as required. So you want to keep track and monitor your backup procedures. Should consider a migration schedule every five to 10 years. You may not need to migrate everything, but that's a good time to assess your files on that thinking of migration. The sustainable heritage network. Oh, sorry, I got ahead of myself. Whatever you do, you want to be sure to track and monitor your maintenance procedures. So you also, like I said, you want to monitor the digital preservation field. You want to review resources, the digital preservation coalition. Handbook is a great resource. The digital preservation coalition also publishes a resource called digitally endangered species which identifies the level of risk for different file formats. The sustainable heritage network offers a lot of online tutorials related to digitization and digital preservation for institutions on lower budgets. The Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts and the Documentary Heritage and Preservation Services for New York also offer a lot of webinars on a wide variety of topics, not all related to digital preservation, but definitely something to keep an eye out for. Lirasis offers free and paid webinars related to digital preservation. And some of the tools that I've mentioned here will have free tutorials available through Lirasis. For more formal training, there's the Society of American Archivists which offers a digital archive specialist certificate and coursework on that. And then as I mentioned earlier in this website, the power, the preserving objects with restricted resources has links to webinars and resources as well. So now that we've reviewed the challenges in digital preservation and some actions we can take to mitigate some of these challenges and managing our collections, I want to briefly talk about a simple tool for self-assessment. So the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, they've published a matrix called the Levels of Digital Preservation. This is a tiered set of recommendation of how to build or enhance a digital preservation program. It references and summarizes all of the things we've talked about over this webinar. And it's a nice lightweight tool for self-assessment to encourage organizations to think about digital preservation at their institution and some short and long-term goals. It covers categories like storage, integrity, control, metadata, and content. And this is an example of what it looks like. So there's four levels of care. One is to know your content, protect your content, monitor your content, and sustain your content. So a great goal for moving forward from this webinar will be to strive for level one for these different categories. So for example, these actions could include putting your content, your digital content into stable storage, having two copies of your data in separate locations, having a document that identifies the storage media where your content is stored, verify it, or generate integrity information through fixity checks and creating checksums, checking your content for viruses, determining who should be authorized to read, write, move, or delete content, creating an inventory for your content, or documenting your file formats. Those are all examples of level one. I like these levels of digital preservation. This is another way of thinking about where you are and what you want to achieve in the future. This can kind of help with strategic planning and digital preservation. So just to wrap up, we covered some of the challenges that we face in caring for digital collections and some steps to protecting our collections. Because of these different challenges, it's important to communicate throughout your institution that caring for digital collections is very hands-on. It's more than just backing up your data. It's an active and ongoing process that requires support over time. Active management of digital collections will greatly reduce the threat of the different challenges we discussed at the beginning of this webinar and to the meaning of their content. The field of digital preservation is always changing as we work towards our goals. It's helpful to periodically assess where we are and what we might take as next steps. So with that, I will wrap up and I have my email address here. And I look forward to discussing the questions. Thanks, Maggie. That was great. And that was such a good overview. This digital asset management, this whole world is such a huge thing unto itself. And sometimes it's good to have these nice overviews to really consider what the projects are, what people use, just even how they've changed in the past five to 10 years. So we have quite a few questions that have already been populating the Q&A box. So I'm going to go ahead and start going through them. You're more than welcome to keep sharing your screen and you can stop sharing. Let me start with, this came in early on and I think this is just another one of those definition type questions. But could you explain a little bit about what Bitstream is and what it means exactly? Yeah, so Bitstream is the stream of numbers that a computer program will interpret to make it readable to a human. It's the ones and zeros, essentially, of a file. And Bitstream preservation will preserve that level of, it will make sure that that does not change, but it doesn't migrate your file to new formats as needed. So that's just, it's the very bare bones of a file. Thanks. Another one is, do you catalog, in quotation marks, digital objects in a museum catalog like you would do physical ones? For example, we have catalog records for physical copies of the school periodical, which is now produced digitally. In that case, yes, I would. If it's something that you had collected in a physical format and it's now in a digital format, I think it would be ideal to continue to collect and manage those files and preserve them as though they were the physical records. Yeah. I think it's so interesting because you and I were talking before the webinar even started and I did my undergrad in the 90s and then I did grad school in the early Os and it's been so interesting. I remember when Bill Clinton was like, let's do this email thing. It was such a revolutionary thing and it's so interesting to think about how we've moved from starting paper to now being so digitally inherent and how we have this duplication effort a lot of times. So it's kind of interesting to hear about how different people have kind of handled it and struggled with this question. So I like all these questions rolling in for sure. Someone asks, is there a reason why the various policies mentioned should be separate from the overall collections management policy or can they be part of that in the selection party, part of the collection plan? Yeah, I mentioned those. They can be standalone. They don't have to be standalone. These can be paragraphs within a larger document. It depends, I guess, kind of on the size and how formal you need to make your policy documentation. Some universities like big universities will have separate documents for each type of thing, but they can all be kind of incorporated together in whatever way makes the most sense for your institution. Yeah, I think that's going to be a bigger question too of how your organization handles policies in general. Do they tend to have more big policies with baby ones kind of added into it or do they like all these little separate policies kind of handling all aspects? So to me, that's more of an organizational question of how your organization handles that entire world, generally speaking. So that's a good question. A lot of people are just asking for if you don't have a good resource for samples. I know that you have quite a few listed in your resources document. We have someone asking for an example of a digital collections policy and examples of procedures that they can use as templates. So do you think that's pretty much covered in your resource document you put together? I believe the procedure policies are. There's a couple examples of policies. Procedures, I don't remember if I have an example of that on the resources, but I can follow up via email. I definitely have some examples. Yeah, that'd be great. And also you can email me at cdcc at culturalheritage.org or even that's a good question to throw up on the community to encourage people. So for sure. How would you classify all the digital photographs we take and or share on social media? Oh, good Lord. Are the digital assets worth identifying on the digital assets register or just one-offs done with your cell phone camera? That's a question for like me personally too. Like how would you classify that? Yeah, that's a good question. I guess the question is focusing on whether to preserve a social media presence of an institution. A lot of places do want that and there's ways that you can download your whole Instagram account and all of your posts and same with Facebook and Twitter. I believe I'm not much on Twitter, but if you're that is a entity that you can archive just like you can archive a website or an email account. But as far as as photographs that you take, like not everything that you're creating should be collected and kind of processed and go through all of this like metadata creation. If you're just taking cell phone snapshots for a reference picture that you are going to delete later, it would be helpful not to have to incorporate that into your digital file storage and your preservation environment because that's just going to clutter things up and add to your file storage needs. This is like a chicken or egg question. If I photo document a painting with a digital camera, is that image considered born digital or is it considered digitization of the object? I would consider that digitization of the object. Yeah, I agree because you're taking a picture of a physical object you hold within your protection. Now if you're being creative and making a new artwork, then that would be born digital. If it's something that you're about to exist, it's its own thing. But if it's just a representation of something in your collection, I would be digitized. Yeah, I would agree with that. This kind of goes around to that too. Should one or how should one distinguish between born digital and digitized files? Do you store them separately? Do you catalog them differently? I think more importantly is where it comes from. If you're digitized records, if you're digitizing things in your collection, you may store those differently. These are access copies or preservation of things that you also have in your physical collection. Born digital, if you're getting born digital donations into your institution, you may catalog those differently depending on the volume that comes in, how they've been organized. So yeah, I think that would be something that you do store and manage separately. I should point out too in the chat, someone said for the social media question earlier, they came across an article from the internet archive, which is an interesting link. So I would encourage everyone to take a look at that link in the chat right now if you're interested in that search. So thank you for posting that. This is interesting too. What have you found to be the primary concerns for the creators of born digital materials as they consider to whom to donate their collections? Can you repeat that one? Yeah, you bet. So what have you found to be the primary concerns of the creators of born digital materials as they consider to whom to donate their collections? So I guess for folks who have these collections that are just digital, what are the questions they come to for when it comes to places to house their collections? So you want to, it's a great thing to establish relationships with the institution or institutions that you may consider donating your records to in advance. You want to, in the same way that you would find a repository for physical materials, you want to make sure it's a good fit as far as content and preservation and you know they're going to care for your materials correctly. But at that point, it would be important to discuss with that institution how they would rearrange your files, how they would make them accessible, how they will, would they migrate your files or would they take just a disc image and let people kind of explore the way you have your files organized. There's a lot of different approaches to taking in born digital files, whether you just preserve them exactly as they were deposited to you or migrating them and making them, rearranging them and making them more searchable in your own collection structure. So those would all be conversations, ideally, that you can have as a donor with the institution before the deposit is done. Yeah, that the big question to me is always migration because you know like it's I feel like I have helped, I've been at the exception of a lot of digitization projects and always it's like okay this will work for like two years. What's going to happen next? You know you hope it's going to be longer than that but it always feels like that's like the migration aspect is always something to like that and like redundancy and making sure if stuff dies that there's a copy floating around somewhere. Like it's like that whole those questions always pop into my head a lot. Yeah and that's another thing that like when you're advocating for your digital preservation program to make that super clear to your administration and your funders that it's not just like okay we got everything into storage and a good file format now let's just stop the funding. It's active and it needs to be like refreshed every couple of years like you said. Yeah this can be a struggle. Um one person said this is kind of I'm sure a lot of people are in this boat so it's my small my small nonprofit organization uses Dropbox to store many of our digital objects. I'm wondering how common this is and how viable is a long-term solution for digital asset management? I think that's pretty common it's if that's a cloud option for for storage. Ideally you want to have something offline as well. And the other thing with the Dropbox I believe that when you download files from Dropbox they are compressed which is an ideal for preservation TIFF file formats. You don't want to compress your files and then reopen them but it's it's not uncommon in Dropbox. It's it's nice that it is on the cloud and accessible from a lot of locations. I would just encourage another offline copy of the data either on portable hard drives if that's if that's the best solution or on a network server. Yeah I mean I know I come across Dropbox I use Dropbox personally but I agree with that that I think that's pretty common and also it's just making sure that the the reference it's not just a bunch of files thrown away somewhere right like there's some sort of documentation that goes along with them. Yeah having an intelligible file structure file naming all of all of that is important wherever you're storing your files. Yeah exactly I have come across so many this is me personally my personal stuff just coming across like folder names and I'm like what the heck is that like just looking at it and I'm gonna like dig down in it and be like okay now I know what I'm talking about. That's what I'm saying if you're like if you wanted to donate those files to an institution and you can't even figure out what's in each folder. Exactly. That is a challenge. Another reviewer says I'm in the beginning stages of reaching out to our IT department for digital collections what are some basic questions you would recommend asking in terms of storage or any other aspects of digital born collections. I would recommend asking what the backup procedures are and how often that they're done. I would recommend asking where files are stored to make sure that there's there's. Totally fun. The world of zoom working from home. It looks like you guys are all putting really good things in the chat. I see some other questions and if anyone else has any other questions feel free to put them in there. Sorry about that. Totally okay. What was the latest question? We were talking about new looks I just flipped it over to the answer file. Oh that they were at the beginning stages of reaching out to the IT department. Yeah and then so asking about storage locations backup procedures and schedules and whether they're incorporating check sums and fixity checks. If they're not then they probably know what that is and see what it would take to to incorporate that. You can see here. Someone asked is the they say is the register the same thing as having a digital asset management system. I think those are two separate things or they're slightly different in my view. Yeah the register is is basically an inventory and a management system is a program that will manage the digital files themselves. So the inventory the digital asset register is is like a spreadsheet essentially identifying different collections and things about that collection but a management system is something much more robust that works to store and and manage the files themselves. Someone going to the previous question we start with someone in the chat says check on how long IT keeps the backups. That is a very good question actually. He is talking to the IT of being like basically you gotta become best friends with your IT. Like you just get to know everything they do. Yeah yeah. Someone did ask just to clarify we are recording this webinar there's also the link to the resources that I put in earlier also has a copy of Maggie's presentation on it so I would encourage you guys to go take a look at that whenever you have a chance. It's just on the Connecting to Collections website in general. Someone posts I'm overwhelmed with trying to choose collections management software for a museum specifically like Pass Perfect, E-Hive. I've read documents regarding how to choose one based on what institutions needs are but it still seems overwhelming. It always does. Is there a better way to figure out which one to use by? I like there's a resource called the collections management system collection and I can't remember if it's on the resources hand out if not I can follow up via email and it's a spreadsheet it can be overwhelming. It is overwhelming but it has a lot of different categories so you can pick things that are important to your institution and kind of narrow things down based on budget different features of the software and then once you get it narrowed down to a few you can put together a request for proposals and send that to the different companies so then you don't feel like you have to just choose something based on what you're reading online but also interact with those companies themselves. One of the best relationships I've ever had is when I've helped set up these kind of programs like just meeting the folks who work at them and really getting like your hands in the programs and working with the folks who work at them is you can build some really great relationships especially those first couple years. Under what circumstances do you digitize physical materials for the purpose of preservation? The only thing that comes to mind is imminent physical deterioration or of course if the item is natively in digital format are there any other circumstances? Well yeah I mean that's like a great way to prioritize materials like things that are on acetate film that's kind of shrinking or brittle newspapers or things that are handled a lot but also preservation scanning of archival records I mean you can have a digital record if there's a fire in your institution or something like that it doesn't have to be something that's the inherent vice within the material is causing it to deteriorate it's just another backup of something in case something happens to the building itself. But yeah I think if you're prioritizing things to digitize that the conservation status is a really good way to start. Yeah I mean and the other thing to consider too is if you have certain media that you hold copyright for and you have the rights for and it can be a money generator if people are constantly asking for certain images over and over again then that would be something else I would consider like if you have a photo archive so again you have to have the rights to don't go crazy don't start selling photos you don't own the rights to but um it's it's that's something to consider as well that might become a priority to people. Totally yeah photos photo collections are great too there can be really engaging they can also like be pretty easy to digitize if you if they're in good collect and they're in good shape you could do a lot and a little bit of time with a little bit of resources and they're very engaging. Someone just put in the chat do you dispose of the material once you digitize it? I would say no you know what I mean. I would most likely no but it depends on on what it is if it's nitrate negatives you probably do want to dispose of them safely if they're paper records that you'll dispose of eventually maybe the digital copy is sufficient until it is on a records retention schedule. Things in a permanent collection I would not recommend tossing. Yeah well and I would add too that when it comes to that particular thing you need to make sure if you are disposing it that your deaccession and your disposal policy is written correctly within your flexions management policy so like if you're just digitizing it and you realize that you can dispose of it make sure that it's it's hammered out within your flexions management policy before you even start considering disposing of things but also that's you know one of the key differences between museums and then if you work at a library because they have fabulous disposal policies that sometimes I think is a museum you wish you had like in many different ways. Yes thank you for clarifying that point. Yeah you bet. Let's see what else we have we still have some questions rolling in. What would you say is the most common mistake when beginning to digitize materials? Oh I would I would say just jumping in and trying to digitize everything just starting at like one end of a room and moving ahead because having a plan in place looking at your whole collection prioritizing what's what's actually important so you're using your money and your time wisely I think just slowing down and and taking a step back and making a plan before just saying I'm going to digitize everything so we have it digitized that's that's that's one thing I get I encounter a lot is advice on digitizing everything and there's a lot of planning that goes into it. If you've been migrating files to new media in our case we have a few generations of CDs don't we all that's my comment. Do we keep the old ones and what can we do instead of this cumbersome process? Our latest digitizations are just on our server two different server locations. Yeah I think I mean it depends I suppose on on your institution and your kind of culture towards keeping things. Some institutions will keep the CDs after they've been my graded. I don't personally don't wouldn't think that's necessary but it depends on your policies your collection policies whether you have in your donor agreement said you will keep it just again like what Robin mentioned earlier just be super clear on what your policy and and approach to getting rid of things is before you go ahead and do that but once it's in a secure environment like on two different backups a server and a backup server you might consider getting rid of the CDs they're taking up a lot of space especially. Yeah for sure um what when you have two file types for one photo like a preservation copytip and an access file jpeg is it important to have for those two files to have different file names what do you think? Well they will have different file names because once the file extension will be tiff or .jpeg so they can have the same beginning of the file name but they'll have different distinct file names just because they have different extensions so that's that's fine and and probably good to have them both have the same first part of the file name. Yeah I know I've seen a hierarchy sometimes that'll have like a folder and then which has one name on it and then within the folder you'll see different versions of the same image I've seen that before I've seen it just in you know a list kind of like what you're saying like you'll see .tiff .jpeg you know what I mean like that way so there's a couple different ways you can structure it for sure. Do paper records count as one of three copies i.e. in the case of object files are there cases in which having a copy of a file in a local server cloud storage in second server off-site are enough to reduce the amount of paper stored in the files. Yeah I guess it depends on on the type of paper we're talking about if we're if these are just administrative records or part of your collection itself um that that's I mean the the two two servers and cloud is great for digital preservation but paper is super stable and safe and if your files are forgotten about your paper will still be there same if something happened for 10 years even if they're on different backups may still be difficult to access them I guess I guess what I'm saying is I'm hesitant to advise people to to toss things even if they have it backed up. I mean it is funny because there I have had certain jobs in my career where um and again I you know we're starting out I was working with you know collections management systems and stuff online and all that but there have been times I've worked jobs that we've gone back to the old registration books like the institution and we have looked it up at the hard copy so yeah I I have a hard time I guess it makes me a museum person at heart I have a hard time throwing away the original records sometimes because I'm just like this might get referenced or we might need this at some point so I do think it's like a consideration to have and also I mean there's there's a chance that something was skipped in digitization especially on a large scale if you're not going through each and every page to ensure that you have a file of each side of a sheet of paper there's a chance that something gets skipped and then if you throw it out then you don't have it yeah exactly um this is again one of the one of those chicken and egg questions if a digital image is provided to a museum of an original image that is not digital is that considered for digital because it was received digitally too or is that something else so you as the institution have received a digital image and that's all you received that's all you've received um I guess you would consider that born digital um but I don't think the distinction there really matters that much because you'll incorporate it and use it in your as like a digital accession rather than a digitized file of something in your collection I've always had a hard time with that when um I've worked at places where people have donated a photo collection and their way of donating it is by giving you the cd of all the photos and that's it and they wanted to hold the originals which I totally get you know what I mean like personally but it's also like a little frustrating as the place who holds it because you're just like cool I got a cd because like what you know I can catalog it it's great for history component but it's like for usage it's it's always a little murky too on like how can we really use these items within our collection you know just to provide accessibility and things like that um some people would ask which this is just the thing I think that would be really cool would be is there an example of a workflow like a video that shows procedures or a video like has anyone done like a video recording kind of showing how the procedures work with digitization and all the processes you kind of outline have you heard of anything like that or seen anything like that well the Society of American Archivists has webinars and courses on um archival processing I don't off the top of my head I don't know of any thing that just has like one video that talks about all of these um but the different resources that I included the Society of American Archivists the Sustainable Heritage Network will each cover each of these different topics and Sustainable Heritage has a lot of great video resources too someone's asking for just recommendations on how you would locate good backup hard drive storage equipment for the offline storage um I would I would kick that to an IT professional um they'll they'll know the latest and and greatest on on that front yeah again make best friends with IT that's my recommendation it's just like get to know that if you work at an institution that has IT just become very good friends with them it's always a good thing to do um if an institution has a CMS such as TMS for their collection would you recommend the stick with the same company's D.A.M. system right and lots of acronyms it's like I work for the government or would it be okay or maybe use another D.A.M. damn software due to it being more affordable so like if someone is selling themselves as like a package deal you know you can handle everything would you recommend that or would you recommend maybe looking for something that maybe meets your needs oh yeah it meets your needs um as long as it can integrate in the way that you need it to yeah yeah now I would recommend in that case this is just me being a registrar as well that sometimes you don't want so many different systems floating around like you don't want like a system that does this you know like five different CMSs operating across your platform it's nice to get everything kind of centralized but I think if you have a specialized collection that really needs something else that your your main CMS isn't supporting it then I would say look for the customizable for sure to match your collection needs and if you are adopting different systems to just create written procedures with screenshots and as much information as possible um because it can be overwhelming coming into a position and people are going to be coming in out of positions um to to learn a whole bunch of different systems so as long as there's written documentation of how things integrate and and what different systems are used for different tasks this is interesting someone says what program would you use to check digital collections from outside sources before adding them to your organization so like is there a digital equivalent for an isolation room I guess before you there is yeah there's um um I can't remember if it's bit curator or something that I'm I'm not thinking of but they you can view the files um kind of um without changing them um you also would want to use a quarantine computer that's offline to to like you would probably want to have like a separate computer to to view any files that's not connected to your network um or the internet to to do that work of the virus checks um and if I remember the the program name I'll I'll send that an email that's that's a thank you for putting that in the q and a because that is a very good question actually I'm just out of you handle that someone has in the chat a right blocker a right blocker yeah that's a that's a tool yeah yeah perfect thank you um there's also a discussion in the chat this is chemistry someone said a chemistry professor told me back in the 80s that cds will not stand up the decades long storage um they're asking about the length of cds now I know probably over a decade ago cci our beloved cci was doing testing to see how long cds and I remember for a little bit gold cds were the standards and people talking about those so I would recommend looking on the cci's website to see if they have anything or updated information on that Maggie do you know of anything about the life of cds right now well yeah when we provide files to clients on on my in my work we usually use the gold cds because they are stable for decades but we're talking about decades with technology uh in 10 years nobody's going to be able to open a cd unless you have really old forensic computer materials so I think that's your biggest bigger risk when whether you're talking about cds degrading but whether you're even going to have equipment that can open them that's a super good point because I know like I have a couple external cd cds drives floating around our house that whenever I need one it's like where is it and I'm always like trying to find it trying to get to hook into my computer it is an interesting thing um so we have a couple more questions that I'm on to throw out and then we'll kind of wrap up today um can you comment on the fact that many digital storage options in the cloud especially do not do not do all the kinds of preservation functions which happen or which people talk about such as fixity checks one has to look very carefully at what is provided and not how one will provide or plan missing functions so do you have any recommendations on that or just thoughts on that well the digital cloud storage like the microsoft azure amazon web services those are just going to provide like the structure um for digital storage and not necessarily incorporate preservation checks um what you want to look for to if you want a system that will incorporate preservation is called a digital repository those are usually a little bit more expensive options but that would store your files and incorporate all of this um all of these steps into into storage but yeah that something again I would I would talk to an IT professional because they'll have the like the literacy to kind of break down terms conditions and specs of different cloud storage options and if you do want to incorporate preservation checks that might be something that is done on your end or your ITs and rather than the final um the cloud storage location excellent um I'll also add that some fabulous people have put the links to the CCI so I was talking about so thank you thank you all for doing that I appreciate that yeah I know CCI they were doing some really cool stuff when I I was out there um just had a conference there of like God must have been over 10 years ago and they were showing us like the testing labs and how they were like putting the CDs through all sorts of craziness just to kind of implement the 50 year length and all that kind of stuff so thank you guys for linking that on there that's great yeah well um do you have any final thoughts for everyone I mean I think again there were lots of earlier in the chat there were a lot of people saying thank you and thank you for presenting this such a huge topic in such kind of a nice way so thank you again for that but do you have any final thoughts for our audience today I'll just um I wish everybody the best and and don't don't be too intimidated to to get started there's a lot of great resources out there and you can do it I don't think um digital collections are going away so I think anyway that we can look at exactly anyway we can look at organizing and kind of setting up the future generations to kind of success with these it's kind of our main goal generally speaking well thank you again Maggie I did put links to the resources the presentation and survey for CDC care in the chat you'll also be receiving an email tomorrow with the survey link I do encourage you to take that survey because we do use the results of it to help plan A for future programs so we really appreciate you guys taking a few minutes to answer it again thank you to Maggie thank you to Mike our folks at learning time thank you to FAIC and IMLS for supporting this program we'll be back at the end of February with basics of NAGPRA so go to our website to sign up for it and we will see you then so thanks again and everyone stay safe talk to you soon