Expedited Digital Appraisal for Regular Archivists: An MPLP-Type Appraisal Workflow for Hybrid Collections

Abstract

While conducting a project at a German state archives, the author developed a simple, generalizable workflow to appraise hybrid collections. The More Product Less Process (MPLP)-type workflow offers ways of reducing (where possible) the number of digital carriers that have to be migrated (migration takes 10–20 times longer than appraisal), that have to be handled and how often, and that have to be appraised qualitatively, as well as ways of reducing staff participation and thus the need for tracking complex metadata for un-appraised DCs. The workflow provides a logical mix and progression of appraisal approaches, it specifies when archivists need to be involved, and indicates how decisions about pragmatic, process-related issues will speed up, simplify, or complicate the appraisal.

Keywords:

• MPLP appraisal workflow
• hybrid (analog and digital) collections
• digital appraisal
• digital processing
• regular archivists

Notes

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge the Research and Publication Committee of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, which provided support for the completion of this research.

I would like to thank Corinna Knobloch, assistant head and digital archivist of the State Archives Ludwigsburg, without whose knowledge of holdings and procedures and invaluable assistance. I could not have completed this research project.

Notes

1 State archives Ludwigsburg, Section 5 of the Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg.

2 In appraisal, archivists determine whether records have sufficient value to be retained permanently. Appraisal methodologies include content, context, use or functional analysis, documentation strategy, fat file appraisal, format, and macro and micro appraisal among others and are applied at different levels of the hierarchy, i.e., the record creator, series, or file level. For analog materials, processing consists of arranging, describing, and housing materials. For digital collections appraisal may be the primary intervention and possibly the only major step in digital processing before files are preserved and stored; digital search functionalities and resorting of files and folders with a click of the mouse may eliminate the need for many traditional arrangement and description tasks; for a short discussion, see Susanne Belovari, “Expedited digital appraisal for regular archivists: an MPLP-type approach,” Journal of Archival Organization, 14, no. 1/2 (2018): 2–3. DOI: 10.1080/15332748.2018.1503014.

3 Many older DCs have detailed and indicative titles, dates, descriptive metadata on the carrier, its case, and on its paper inserts. These may be a holdover from analog record keeping traditions. When DCs had very limited storage extent, record creators needed a large number of them for storing records and had to use labels to differentiate among carriers (e.g., floppy disks, CDs, DVDs; USB sticks usually cannot be labeled). Modern, large digital storage containers such as hard drives (akin to physical rooms containing a large volume of analog records) contain various types and a high volume of digital content. Because labels cannot meaningfully summarize this kind of content, many record creators rely on labeled digital folder structures therein; this depends, of course, on their digital sophistication and record keeping habits.

4 A hybrid collection containing a group of DCs found in a drawer e.g., presents fewer appraisal/processing challenges because original analog folder context does not have to be tracked for later appraisal. Based on personal observations, the first type of HCs appears to be more typical for institutional records in which relevant records are kept together. The second type of HC seems more common among personal papers, where individual record creators tend to keep their various DCs in a drawer or box for instance, see no functional need to file them within their analog papers, and migrate them as-needed to newer carrier formats.

5 Philip C. Bantin, “Strategies for Managing Electronic Records: A New Archival Paradigm? An Affirmation of our Archival Traditions?,” Archival Issues 23, no. 1 (1998): 17–34.

6 Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, “Recommendation for Space Data System Standards: Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS),” Blue Book (January 2002), https://siarchives.si.edu/sites/default/files/pdfs/650x0b1.PDF (accessed May 1, 2019); see related observation by Jinfang Niu, “Appraisal and Selection for Digital Curation,” International Journal of Digital Curation, 9, no. 2 (2014): 65–82. The Bentley Historical Library Digital Processing Note (December 12, 2013), https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/93344 (accessed April 24, 2019) does not address digital appraisal nor did Alistair Tough and Michael Moss (eds.), Record Keeping in a Hybrid Environment: Managing the Creation, Use, Preservation and Disposal of Unpublished Information Objects in Context (Oxford: Chandos Publishing 2006).

7 Terry Cook, “‘We Are What We Keep; We Keep What We Are’: Archival Appraisal Past, Present and Future,” Journal of the Society of Archivists, 32, no. 2 (2011): 173–189.

8 Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (Paradigm), Workbook on Digital Private Papers, 2005–2007 (accessed 2 January 2008), http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook (accessed July 17, 2019).

9 Terry Eastwood. “Appraising Digital Records for Long-Term Preservation,” Data Science Journal 3 (30 December, 2004): 202–208; see also Terry Eastwood, “Digital Appraisal: Variations on a Theme,” (Keynote Address for the Conference on Appraisal in the Digital World, Rome Italy, November 15–16, 2007), http://www.interpares.org/ip2/ip2_dissemination.cfm?proj=ip2&cat=pl-conf (accessed April 30, 2019).

10 Quote p. 315, in: Ross Harvey, Dave Thompson, “Automating the appraisal of digital materials,” Library Hi Tech, 28, no. 2 (2010): 313–322, https://doi.org/10.1108/07378831011047703 (accessed April 24 2019).

11 Batin (1998):18.

12 Quotes p. 24 and p. 15 respectively in: Cox, Richard J., “Appraisal and the Future of Archives in the Digital Era,” in The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping: A Reader, edited by Jenny Hill (London: Facet, 2011), 213–237.

13 Cindy Shein, “From Accession to Access: A Born-Digital Materials Case Study,” Journal of Western Archives 5, no. 1 (2014), Article 1, http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/westernarchives/vol5/iss1/1 (accessed April 30, 2019).

14 Quote: p. 176 in Mark A. Greene, “MPLP: It’s Not Just for Processing Anymore,” The American Archivist 73 (Spring/Summer 2010): 175–203. I want to thank Elaine Penn for pointing me to Greene’s 2010 article, her 2019 conference paper beautifully lays out Schellenberg and Greene’s arguments for appraisal and MPLP, respectively; see Elaine Penn, “Appraising Digital Records, or Swimming in Treacherous Schools,” and Susanne Belovari, “Simple and Expedited Digital Appraisal/Processing – Two Projects with the German State Archives,” Ludwigsburg (2016–2018), both presented at the panel, Session 6: Appraisal in the digital world: new approaches? ICA-SUV Annual Conference, Appraisal in University and Research Institution Archives, Dundee, 2019.

15 Dennis Meissner, untitled paper, session #501, Society of American Archivist Annual Meeting, Austin, Texas, August 2009, cited in Greene (2010): 176.

16 Quote by Greene p. 181, section on privacy concerns pp. 195–199, and Ham’s quote on p. 178, all: Greene (2010); original quote by F. Gerald Ham, Selecting and Appraising Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 1993), 72.

17 For early case studies see for instance Sarah Kim, Lorraine A. Dong, and Megan Durden, “Automated Batch Archival Processing: Preserving Arnold Wesker’s Digital Manuscripts,” Archival Issues 30, no. 2 (2006): 91–106, as well as Shein (2014) and her extremely useful discussion of processing a digital oral history collection in the Getty Institutional Records and Archives. Because the archives had solicited the materials, appraisal consisted of solely removing obvious duplicates. While Shein mentions the ‘hybrid’ nature of their collection in which the only analog materials were duplicates of digital interview transcripts, she calls it a ‘born-digital materials case study.’

18 Digital Preservation Coalition, Digital Preservation Handbook (2nd ed. 2015), http://handbook.dpconline.org/ (accessed April 30, 2019), in particular the section on Acquisition and Appraisal and its decision-making tree.

19 Quote p. 30 in: Victoria Sloyan, “Born-digital Archives at the Wellcome Library: Appraisal and Sensitivity Review of Two Hard Drives,” Archives and Records 37, no. 1 (2016): 20–36, DOI:10.1080/23257962.2016.1144504.

20 eabh [sic] in cooperation with BNP Paribas and Banque Lombard Odier, “Appraisal in the digital Era: Workshop,” BNP Paribas (Paris 2017), http://bankinghistory.org/wp-content/uploads/AppraisalDigitalEra_SLIDES_LD.pdf (accessed April 24, 2019).

21 Quote page 9, University of Westminster report funded by a jisc grant, “Research Data Shared Service (RDSS) Digital Preservation – Records and Archives Management Pilot Programme” (July 2018), http://recordsandarchives.westminster.ac.uk/rdss-digital-preservation-pilot-report/ (accessed July 11, 2019). For MPLP reflections regarding large digital collections, see, e.g., Bloggers! The Blog of SAA’s Electronic Records Section, “Digital Processing at the Rockefeller Archive Center,” https://saaers.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/digital-processing-at-the-rockefeller-archive-center/ (accessed September 28, 2017) which suggests moving digital processing from digital archivists into the hands of ‘regular’ archivists; Library of Congress, “More Product, Less Process for Born-Digital Collections: Reflections on CurateCamp Processing,” Guest blog of Meg Phillips, https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/08/more-product-less-process-for-born-digital-collections-reflections-on-curatecamp-processing/ (accessed September 28, 2017); Belovari, Susanne and Corinna Knobloch, “Rasche und einfache Bearbeitung digitaler Sammlungen [Fast and simple appraisal of digital collections],” Nestor Thema 08 (2017), 3 pages. (Nestor: network of expertise in long-term storage of digital resources in Germany, urn:nbn:de:0008-20170726160442200-2816802-5); a conference PowerPoint of both projects is available at https://www.ica.org/en/suv-annualconferences/suv-2019-conference.

22 Scattered across analog units, the content of DCs is un-appraisable before transfer to a repository (in contrast to hard drives which easily can/could be inspected before transfer). Such HCs represent chaotic records situations as defined by Geof Huth, “Module 14: Appraising Digital Record,” in Appraisal and Acquisition Strategies, edited by Michael J. Shallcross and Christopher J. Prom, (Chicago: Society of American Archivists 2016): 7–68. Huth provides a good overview of digital appraisal, but does not address the appraisal of hybrid collections.

23 Documenting an early SAA panel consisting of three presentations about hybrid collections, the 2008 blog only once references appraisal, namely the decision to not accept emails because the donor agreement did not “include an option to selectively accept (or weed) what was given.” In: Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, “SAA2008: Preservation and Experimentation with Analog/Digital Hybrid Literary Collections (Session 203),” September 6, 2008, http://www.spellboundblog.com/2008/09/06/saa2008-preservation-and-experimentation-with-analogdigital-hybrid-literary-collections-session-203/ (accessed July 23, 2019).

24 For example: chapter four, “Appraisal and Disposal,” of the Paradigm’s Workbook on Digital Private Papers (2005–2007) barely refers to hybrid collections. The relevant few lines only discuss the likely analog/digital duplication in HCs, proposes to audit for such duplication(!), and lists the only other factors to be considered: arrangement, proportion of analog materials, and analog/digital relationships.

25 Karola Brüggemann: Vorschläge für eine Binnenbewertung von Hybridunterlagen der Staatsanwaltschaft Stuttgart (48. Wissenschaftlicher Lehrgang Marburg, 2015). Internal projects by Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: Susanne Clauß, “Bewertung von Hybridunterlagen der Staatsanwaltschaft Stuttgart anhand des Bewertungsmodells von Karola Brüggemann (November 28, 2016); Andreas Weber, “Fallbearbeitung zu den Hybridakten im Bestand EL11 – Landeszentrale Politische Bildung,” (November 25, 2016); Benjamin Zech, Hybridunterlagen: Datentechnische Auswertung von Bestand EL 317 V, powerpoint, February 6, 2018, and Benjamin Zech, “Hybride Justizakten – wie groß ist der Mehraufwand im Archiv?” Nestor Thema 11, http://files.dnb.de/nestor/kurzartikel/thema_11-HYBRID.pdf (accessed May 2, 2019).

26 Brüggemann’s suggestion to find possible duplicates by comparing analog with digital content, for instance, is as far removed from MPLP type approaches as are item-level inventories and descriptions.

27 Archivists have always appraised at various levels; see for instance the Society of American Archivists, “A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology,” https://www2.archivists.org/glossary (accessed April 22, 2019); Terry Cook, “Building an Archives: Appraisal Theory for Architectural Records,” American Archivist 59 (Spring 1996): 136–143; or Heather MacNeil and Terry Eastwood eds., Currents of Archival Thinking, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, Cal.: Libraries Unlimited 2017), in particular the chapter by Fiorella Foscarini, Archival Appraisal in Four Paradigms, 107–134.

28 Experimenting with HCs and DCs quickly demonstrated that DC labels and inserts are too extensive to be accurately represented in file titles. That means the metadata for unprocessed DCs has to be tracked in a spreadsheet. As an alternative to creating such temporary spreadsheets, I experimented with photographing DC labels/inserts, storing the images with a DC’s migrated files, and then referring back to the photographed labels during qualitative appraisal of files. This was a failure and did not save time. There were too many steps and complexities involved for this approach to be practical: e.g., getting a digital camera, taking images of labels/inserts, uploading and then labeling the image files (there may be several images for one DC and its many labels/inserts), moving image files to the folder of the carrier’s migrated files, keeping label images open during appraisal, trying to decipher label details, and not getting confused between label/insert images and migrated digital files, particularly if one works with only one computer screen.

29 Iterations of this sequential process are certainly possible. For instance: scanning retained files, you may consider an additional qualitative appraisal in a fifth stage because e.g., too many videos of similar topics have been retained. If you do not worry about the analog context of these digital files, you could choose some qualitative appraisal format criteria (e.g., video file format and content) and then appraise their content. This scenario seems more likely when an archivist appraises a large number of DCs and therefore misses redundancies in format, subject matter, content etc.

30 It is assumed here that particular folders, series, or RCs contain DCs of related content and that we can evaluate carriers by knowing something about the unit within which they were found. This is a normal and usually realistic assumption in the analog world and one that I also verified for each HC. When we assume that analog photographs located in a folder are related to its content, we normally do not spend time to further identify or move photographs to other folders, an action that would also go against original arrangement.

31 To reduce labor, one could leave ‘non-archival’ DCs in respective analog folders and simply note the appraisal decision in the finding aid. Otherwise, locating and pulling non-archival DCs may require going through dozens of analog boxes – which was the case for one trial HC.

32 In the trial collections, a number of carriers could not be opened because they were either too old, damaged, or got stuck. An appraising archivist may decide to undertake repeated migration efforts if e.g., the title of a DC indicates possibly unique content.

33 For an example of how to qualitatively appraise a large digital collection, see Belovari (2018).

34 TSP’s good performance is likely related to the fact that the company jamsoftware is a Microsoft Partner/Gold Application Development, Intel Software Partner, and Embarcadero Technology Partners on the basis of which it receives file and software specifications in advance. TSP already scans mobile applications but does not work with Apple computers.

35 For similar reasons, one archivist usually appraises all analog materials of a record creator or a large series. To ensure further consistency, the physical and digital appraisals ideally occur as close to each other as possible.

36 Analog processors can flag where DCs are located in a box by inserting long, uniquely colored paper slips in respective folders – there is no need to label the slips. Using convenient acronyms, the location of DCs is then noted in the draft finding aid so that they can be quickly located during digital appraisal.

37 Here, metadata is considered temporary because some or all of the migrated DCs may be appraised as non-archival and metadata and files will be discarded.