Changes

In this talk, members of the inaugural Boston cohort of the National Digital Stewardship Residency will discuss one piece of our digital preservation test kitchen: our stabs at creating digital workflows that will (hopefully) help our institutions turn digital preservation projects into programs. Specifically, we will talk about how difficult it is to create a general and overarching workflow for digital preservation tasks (e.g. ingest into repositories, format migrations, etc.) that incorporates various technical tools while also taking into account the myriad and unending list of possible exceptions or special scenarios. Turning these complicated, specific processes into a simplified and generalized workflow is an art. We haven't necessarily perfected that art yet, but in this talk, we'll share what has worked for us -- and what hasn't. We’ll also touch on the importance of documentation, and achieving that delicate balance of adequately thorough documentation that doesn’t pose the risk of information avalanche. These processes often create more questions than answers, but we'll share the answers that we (and our mentors) have found along the way!

* Rob Sanderson, azaroth@stanford.edu, Stanford University Libraries