Born-Digital Archives Tool Kit

Transfer Records to the USF University Archives

This is a simplified document to be used by USF colleges, departments, faculty committees, staff committees, and official offices. Student clubs are not included, as they maintain the intellectual property over their materials which need to be negotiated as a separate donation. 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. 

Files submitted for the University Archives will be evaluated to find its best home at the USF Libraries by the Curator for Digital Collections to assess for duplication and to ensure they meet the best practices outlined below. Please review the full USF Libraries’ Born-Digital Acquisitions Policy for a review of the full process. 

1. Prepare the digital files.  

Good Fit for Special and Digital Collections 

• Digital photographs  

• Data sets [1] 

• 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• Unpublished writing by the creator that meets the criteria of the collecting areas above and reviewed by the subject area archivist/librarian for research value  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 collections [2] 

Good Fit for USF Libraries Repository online  

• Copies of published faculty work 

• USF theses or dissertations 

• Large research data 

Materials that are not a good fit for the digital collections or repository include copies of research files including file PDFs of published articles or webpages created by others, such as print outs from websites or articles. Other materials that might be better housed elsewhere include third-party data sets available through other platforms, regardless of copyright, student work, sensitive materials that may violate privacy, and materials created by minors. 

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. 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.  

Long-term harvesting or web scraping agreements may be accepted for USF archives or considered on rare occasions for close partnerships and should be discussed with leadership in Special Collections. 
 

2. Redact or remove files that have personally identifiable information.  

a. This includes home addresses, social security information, items that can cause potential embarrassment or adverse effect to reputation and financial standing or other materials that you would not want discoverable on the internet.  

b. USF may choose to further redact materials when private personally identifiable information such as a social security number is discovered.  

3. Use a file naming convention, when possible. 

Below is a suggest naming schema that can be adapted depending on the record types. Replace “CollegeName” with your department’s shortened name. Do not use any characters that are not in the standard Latin alphabet. Do not include any spaces. Use camel case (ex: ThisIsCamelCase) to distinguish separate words in a file name. 

Sample Format: College_DepartmentName_YEAR_ShortName 

Example: CAS_History_1994_StrategicPlan 

4. Upload files to Box via the File Request form.  

a. You will see your upload process, but you will not be able to see your files after upload is complete. 

b. File Request: https://usf.app.box.com/f/d9fbf7a2498a462d975b8c9a88efc821 

After uploading, you will see a confirmation screen. Processing and uploading of new collection materials may take several months to process and be available online. If there are any urgent requests or uploading errors, please contact Amanda Boczar, Associate Director for Digital Initiatives (amandaboczar@usf.edu). 

FOOTNOTES

[1] Library staff may determine that faculty-created data sets more appropriately fit under the Digital Commons Data repository managed by the data management staff at USF Libraries and will work with that team to ensure proper archiving. 

[2]  Audio-visual materials will be assessed for inclusion in the USF Oral History Program collections.