Electronic Records Resources, Projects and Tools

This week I want to point you to a few institutions or projects that have done some really great work and could help you to get your born digital archives off the ground or move it forward from a current stumbling block.

The Bentley Library at the University of Michigan has provided access to its digital curation workflows, procedures, and user manuals in a single easy to access web page. Because of the way it is set up, not only can you read and download the Bentley’s current procedures, you can see the evolution of them. So even if you cannot consider borrowing the current workflows for your own organization, you can see where the Bentley started and consider emulating its starting point.

PowrrBannerBlue1In July at Digital Preservation 2014, I heard Jaime Schumacher from Northern Illinois University on a panel entitled Community Approaches to Digital Stewardship. She was speaking about POWRR, a project that she worked on along with personnel from the libraries at Chicago State University, Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan University, and Western Illinois University. I found the project inspirational in that it’s a group of medium and smaller institutions banding together to harness the economies of scale available to large institutions.

Finally, I want to highlight two of NHPRC’s grant projects. EPADD (Email: Process, Appraise, Discover, Deliver) is an open source tool that will allow repositories and individuals to interact with email archives before and after they have been transferred to a repository. In fact, there’s a beta site so that you can explore how the tool works, give the project feedback on your experience, and decide whether you might be able to integrate it into your institution’s work flow. PERTTS (Program for seri_logo_002_colorElectronic Records Training, Tools, and Standards) is a gateway site developed by the Council of State Archivists as part of its State Electronic Records Initiative. The site has a long list of resources that you could consider, and as the site is developed there is space for commentary by users on the usefulness of the resources.

What are your favorite new projects, tools or resources?

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