Born-Digital Archives Tool Kit

Special Collections donations are increasingly born-digital. Whether donated on a physical hard drive, on a piece of obsolete media, or through cloud storage platforms, digital archives require unique handling and care that differs from standard archives. 

University of South Floirda (USF) Libraries’ abides by the following Born-Digital Acquisitions Policy to manage donations for born-digital collections or materials. 

USF Libraries’ born-digital acquisitions policy is built around the principle of transparency in an effort to provide more efficient services that meet the needs of stakeholders. This toolkit outlines samples and resources to support academic libraries in growing their strategic collections though born-digital donations.

About Born-Digital Archives

Throughout this Toolkit, born-digital archives will be used broadly to describe archival collections that are created or donated in a digital format, or require digital reformatting to access.

According to the UK National Archives, "Born-digital records are records that have been natively created in digital format (rather than digitised from paper records)." In the twenty-first century, most of the documents created on a daily basis fall into this category. Similar to physical archives, managing born-digital records requires balancing several factors like transfer method, available storage, software requirements, encryption, and more. In addition, many file formats finding their way into archives are obsolete or require forward migration support.

How are Born-Digital Records Donated?

USF accepts born-digital donations via disk transfer, cloud storage sharing, or file transfer protocol (FTP). The method of donation is determined as part of the transparent donation process after collections have been assessed and approved by the curator or archivist working with the donor. The goal of the curator and archivist is to always ensure that a donation finds the best home.

Working with Obsolete Media

Records donated on obsolete media devices require reformatting into contemporary digital formats. Obsolete media is likewise costly to maintain and at a high risk of degradation. While useful resources like the Museum of Obsolete Media can provide helpful guideposts on how to prioritize media reformatting, the technological and cost barriers to this work is frequently discouraging for libraries and archives.

USF did a full collection audit of all obsolete media in the archives to determine what types of born-digital content was already in the stacks. This process helped the unit isolate and make determinations on what media was possible to reformat in house (CD-Rs, 3.5" floppy disks, cassettes) and those we needed to outsource (5.25" floppy disks, English Electric LEO KDF9 tape and similar computer data storage).