Born-Digital Archives Tool Kit

Born-Digital Archives Acquisitions Policy

USF Libraries Special Collections will considers acquisitions of born-digital materials in alignment with the USF Libraries Special Collections' Collection Development Guidelines. Collections within the USF Libraries Special Collections Strategic Collecting Areas will be considered for acquisition. Materials may be donated via physical media or cloud storage. University Policy 10-208 describes how the Archives of the University of South Florida collects, preserves, and provides access to a variety of materials that document the administrative and intellectual history of the University of South Florida. 

The subject area archivist, curator, or librarian should perform a preliminary review of the material with the donor to ensure materials are originals, related to their subject area, and contain research value. Items on formats that cannot be easily read may be accepted if the archivist has a strong interest in the content, however, they may be returned or disposed of if the materials are found to not be relevant.  

Physical media can only be maintained under special circumstances were the media type itself is significant for understanding the records, for example, samples of media types including Beta or cassettes for teaching purposes, or if the materials deemed of extremely high significance and the media is stable.  

Material Types That Are a Good Fit

The following list includes examples of born-digital materials of interest to digital collections, provided the items are either in the public domain or material for which the donor holds copyright and has granted USF Libraries permissions via a signed Rights Release: 

• Digital photographs 

• Data sets1 

• Original digital models or renderings 

• Newsletters and memos from organizations 

• Unpublished writing by the creator that meets the criteria of the collecting areas above and reviewed by the subject area archivist/librarian for research value 

• Original websites or online educational resources 

• Audio-visual collections2 

The following items will be routed to our Digital Repository team: 

• Copies of published faculty or student work 

• Copies of USF theses or dissertations 

• Large research data sets that fit on Digital Commons Data 

File and Media Types We Work With

USF Libraries Special Collections accepts donations of born-digital materials in a variety of formats, including cassette, VHS, DVDs, CDs, external hard drives, hard drives, flash drives, SD cards, 5.25” floppy disks, 3.5” floppy disks, and cloud storage (Box, Google Drive, Dropbox). Some film and photographic negative formats may not be accepted due to the risks they pose to other collections and should be carefully assessed by the archivists managing the donation.  

While many digital formats are accepted, donors should be aware that USF Libraries may not be able to recover and preserve all formats or file types. Obsolete media formats may need to be outsourced for recovery at the cost of the donor. If necessary, this should be discussed during the donation process.  

Long-term harvesting or web scraping agreements may be accepted for USF archives or considered on rare occasions for close partnerships. 

Assessment and Organization

Born-digital archival collections will be assessed and appraised for relevance prior to their acceptance. It is strongly recommended that the Digital Collections Curator be included in conversations with donors regarding their digital files. Born digital collections are expensive. They often require additional specialized staff time, data storage, and formatting. They may require time-intensive curation. 

Born-digital archives will be evaluated for reprocessing, rehousing, reformatting, weeding, and online dissemination using a similar process as physical archives with additional attention to issues related to risks tied to file format, proprietary formats, and potential for file corruption or loss. File names may be edited or changed to better indicate the contents of the files and facilitate working with the digital records unless original order is determined to be a critical element of collection organization. However, if original file names are incompatible with USF Libraries’ hosting requirements, they may be changed and a copy of the original naming will be maintained via a README.txt file associated with the collection. 

While it is not always possible or logical for archival collections, donors using USF Libraries as a records repository may be asked to follow a file naming schema, redact their records for personally identifiable information or privacy concerns, and remove access restrictions. 

Attempts will be made to meet donor requests concerning digital files, but due to the dynamic nature of media and file obsolescence, requirements of USF cloud and repository storage, and other shifts in our services, the Libraries will curate materials as necessary to maintain workflow efficiencies. Files may be considered for weeding following industry recommended records retention rules for things like financial records.  

Access

The Director for Special Collections, Associate Director for Digital Initiatives, and the Copyright and Intellectual Property Librarian, in line with departmental policies and best practices, will determine which collections may be placed online and which can only be used for local access.  

The timeframe for preparing born digital archives for use by patrons varies widely and may depend on the state of the digital files upon donation and the queue of existing projects and shifting faculty and student priorities. Reformatting of born-digital objects may require additional processing time. Metadata will be generated prior to uploading of collections. Artificial Intelligence enhanced tools may be used to support metadata creation in ways that fall within the privacy parameters of the library.

Disposition of Physical Media

Following the reformatting of donated physical media into cloud storage, the decision over the return, maintenance, or deaccessioning of the physical storage media will be determined and coordinated by the archivist following guidance prepared by the Director of Special Collection and the Archives Librarian. Considerations for retention of the physical media device includes its rarity, research value as a media type, and stability. The Digital Initiatives team can provide insight into the significance and stability of the media types, as necessary.