Project Update at BPE 2017

Introduction OSSArcFlow: A two-year IMLS grant exploring ... Open Source Software Archival Workflows with BitCurator, ArchivesSpace, and Archivematica Andrew Rabkin (Research Assistant) Ph.D. student, UNC School of Information and Library Science rabkin@unc.edu OSSArcFlow's purpose is to investigate, model and test a range of workflows for libraries and archives to curate born-digital content. We hope to describe best practices for digital curation in ways that are useful for experienced practitioners as well as complete newbies.

Research Questions How can institutions combine tools to support workflows that meet local institutional needs? How can institutions implement “handoffs” between systems that perform different functions on the same data?

Project Team The project is led by Katherine Skinner and Sam Meister at Educopia, and Cal Lee at UNC. We're working with Lyrasis (ArchivesSpace), Artefactual (Archivematica), and the BitCurator team at UNC as well.

OSS Systems Forensic disk imaging File system analysis and reporting Identification of PII Supports core collection management Authority control Event tracking & reporting Lower barrier to digital preservation Standards compliant - OAIS+ Microservice approach BitCurator - digital forensics ArchivesSpace - Collection management and description Archivematica - Automated OAIS-compliant digital preservation actions

Partner Institutions and more! academic libraries public libraries Academic libraries with large, well-established digital preservation programs: Stanford, Duke, and MIT … Academic libraries with smaller digital preservation programs, like Mount Holyoke Public libraries including NYPL and DCPL And two places that are unique in the grant: The Kansas State Historical Society, and the Odum Institute here at UNC Technology-wise, the Kansas State Historical Society and MIT are a little different. Uncovering what they have in common is a big part of the grant.

Project Timeline Year One ... … Year Two done! now next soon and then Data gathering: What are current digital curation workflows? now Analyze the data and create representations of the "as-is" workflows next Create aspirational workflows and development goals soon Develop and test new tools and aspirational workflows and then Iterate and disseminate! … Year Two First phase: gather information information through surveys, interviews, and examination of internal documentation - artifacts - provided by the partner institutions. No budget to do site visits = no in-person contextual analysis. Now: analyzing the info and creating models: Narrative workflows Step-by-step tabular workflows Activity diagrams I'm responsible for creating the activity diagrams. Very few precedents in archives world for visually modeling workflows How can I represent what happens at 12 different organizations in a way that's useful to everyone?

Written Workflow Representations Procedural Narratives ... Tabular step-by-step details ....

Visual Workflows (UML Activity Models) We're also creating visual workflows which are essentially UML Activity Models. We've found that the formal constraints of creating an activity model have helped us clarify some of the many decision points in the curation cycle. Also, it's challenging - a lot of digital curation isn't linear! (Ingest, create access versions, go back and re-ingest based on what you find)

Some Preliminary Findings ... Every institution is unique, but our problems aren't! Some tech-related challenges: Digital curators work with tools from dozens of vendors and developers, across multiple filesystems, in countless formats. There's no "Swiss army knife" of digital curation tools Too many manual processes, too much "data massaging" Output from System A doesn't work as input to System B Nobody has the 30,000-foot view It's hard to manage digital collection management

Some More Preliminary Findings ... Some cultural challenges: Workflows evolve quickly and digital curation has a steep learning curve Here's a photo of a chair and there's a tree ... Laws, policies, organizational cultures, and available resources all influence curation decisions From lawyers to Help Desk techs, everybody has a say Iteration is a challenge … this is supposed to be a digital curation cycle, right? Curation is dynamic, but tools can encourage lock-in P.S. It's not just you … digital curation challenges everybody! As a few of the interviewees said, "Wow, this is kind of like a therapy session for digital archivists!"

Questions We're Asking How can we create more "handshakes" between existing OSS systems? What are the key pieces of information in the digital curation cycle? When is each piece of information created? How is its accuracy verified? When and how is it used? What are ways to make workflows and information ... reusable across systems? machine actionable? quality assured? efficient at scale? Where in the curation cycle do new features and activities best fit? What could a modular approach to digital curation look like? To go back to the chair metaphor, we're not creating the tree or the hammer, but we're building the workbench and the pegboard. Twenty or thirty years ago, digital curation was in its infancy. The work being done was one-off, project-based work figuring out what was possible and what was desirable. For the last decade or more, we've been mostly in an artisanal, boutique period of curation, with each institution figuring out digital curation largely on its own. Now, we're entering a new phase, one where we're focusing not just on the outputs of our work, but on the methods we use to get those outputs. In other words, digital curation is ready for some best practices!

https://groups.google.com/a/educopia.org/d/forum/ossarcflow_publi c Project Webpage: http://educopia.org/research/ossarcflow OSSArcFlow Listserv: https://groups.google.com/a/educopia.org/d/forum/ossarcflow_publi c