ARKIVA The Digital Archive of the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland Jessica Parland-von Essen

The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland »Scientific society founded in 1885 »Publishes research literature in humanities »Research library with book history as speciality »Documents Swedish culture, language, history and traditions in Finland »Archives different kinds of material, documents, photographs etc. »Research in Swedish history and culture in Finland »Funds research and several prizes »Arranges seminars and lectures »One of the large managers of public funds in Finland »Ca 100 employees, mainly in Helsingfors and Vasa

The Digital Challenge »The amount of information »The continuously changing and ephemeral character of the material »The quality of metadata »The multiplicity of formats and standards »Questions of copyright and integrity

Digital materials in SLS »Digitised material –Sound (music, interviews) –Photographs –Documents –Film and videotape »Born digital material –Photographs –Sound –Video –Web –Databases

Digital materials in SLS »A lot of different kinds of material are produced by the normal activities in house »Some material is also actively collected »Donations are still small but expected to grow immensly in the future

Arkiva

Digital archive of SLS »Arkiva was founded in 2008 »Today part of the Information department »Internal service responsible for digitising and preservation of digital material »At the moment six employees »Uses international standards like OAIS and PREMIS »Decisions are taken by a large body consisting of persons from the different archives

Collections in Arkiva »The Archives of History and Literature »The Archives of Folk Culture »The Archives of the Swedish Language »The Library »The Ostrobothnian Archives of Traditional Culture »FMI Folk music institut »The Research Archive »The Administrative Archive

Strategies for Arkiva »Visibilty »Openness »Trustworthyness »Cooperation

Methods of work »Focus on quality of metadata »Thorough documentation »Competence »Good planning and sufficient resources »Transparency »Participation in several cooperative projects

Arkiva »All types of digital material in the same system –Several different processes for ingest and access have to be planned and documented for different materials depending of type and amount »Preservation first priority »Relational database, records –Intellectual entities –Digital objects –Measures –Technical metadata –Digitisation process

The structure of the database Main tables: »intellectual_entities: descriptive metadata »digital_objects: contains technical and administrative metadata »events: records for provenance »samlingar: collections »digitization_profiles: contains information about digitisation »informanter: information about informants

Managing versions and relations »Intellectual entity vs. digital object »dcterms_isPartOf »dcterms_isVersionOf »dcterms_isReferencedBy »dc_source »Dcterms_hasFormat »DCterms_hasVersion »premis_formatVersion »Also relationship table for derivation, dependency and structural relations Intellectual entity Digital object Digital object Collection Physical object

Cooperation »The National Digital Library –Especially its subproject for preservation PAS »Dublin Core mapping for small archives »Europeana

Technical challenges »Lack of ontological structure –Time –Geography »Lack of name identifiers (international register needed) »Technical metadata standards under development »Dependency of proprietary back up software with closed source code »METS-exports still need some manual work »Accepted videoformats are difficult to handle »Database preservation and even text cause some confusion »Creation of technical and other metadata for donated born digital- material

Questions »How can we handle different levels of ”entity”? (Events?) –Conference –Session –Presentation »How would a CRM-like structure support multiple levels of digital and physical versions? »The same P:s and E:s don’t always apply to different versions or manifestations? »Are preservation/digital curation events different from historical events? »Good quality of metadata and standardisation are crucial for good usability