Hydra archival vertical solution discussion

Owned by Bill Branan
Jun 16, 2017
3 min read

Archives breakout

Present: Karen Cariani (WGBH), Anders Conrad (Royal Library), Will Cowan (Indiana), Chris Awre (Hull), Ben Goldman (PSU), Mike Friscia (Yale).  It was noted that RockHall also has an interest in this area.

Who is doing what?

  • WGBH – preservation repository, DCE building this for born digital media.  Open Vault being transferred to Hydra, but separate repository and separate content model.  Would like them to be the same.
  • Royal Library – re-factoring whole digital library infrastructure, including digitisation, digital legal deposit, deposits from authors and others.  The developemnt has highlighted the possiblity of offering preservation capability as a paid service within Denmark for others.  They need to tie in with the National Archive bit repository. They are focusing on an archival/curation repository and dissemination repository, but no dark archive (found to be too impractical).  Security an issue – need to hide some materials.
  • Indiana – lots of existing solutions for different types of content, Avalon is main Hydra work at the moment.  Solution for EAD finding aids needed.  Also interested in how to deal with born digital content.  Chicken and egg on ingest/metadata collection timing (HydraDAM favouring ingest and then bulk metadata load – matching content to metadata an issue, potentially)
  • Hull – IR in place (Hydra@Hull).  Looking at separate workflows for archival processes, although undecided on whether to create a completely new repository for this (prefer concept of multiple heads onto one repository).  Interest in primarily in born digital, plus working with depositors as part of collection building/development.
  • PSU – Archives processes are not dissimilar from print to digital - take shit and turn it into something useful ;-).  Can take files as they are given, and accept them as they are.  Need arrangement and description capability to maintain and describe original state.  Working on ArchiveSphere – deposit by archivist only at the moment.  File variants can be shifted to another repository for access, potentially.  Phase 1 of ArchiveSphere does ingest, plus derivative generation.  Looking at Archivespaces integration to save effort.  Interested in connecting with other digital archivists to help shape developments.
  • Yale – doing one repository for everything, including secure items (managed at very fine granularity using their own XML information.  This is their Ladybird system).  Lots of inheritance and overwriting of permissions to give different options through a hierarchy.  Useful for embargoes (a common issue).  Also includes EAD.  Separation perceived between obsolete materials and emulation, and ongoing born-digital materials.   Aim to be more dynamic in processing all these materials.

What can we do within Hydra to make things better?

  • Share and compare areas of activity so we make sure we are on the same page.
  • Create use cases – build on AIMS use cases – develop moderated use cases hanging off Hydra pages based on individual use cases (akin to AIMS)?
  • Who else from the institutions needs to be involved, or could usefully be got involved?
  • Potential use cases discussion
    • Depositing legacy materials on obsolete media, depositing disk images, batch ingest, single item ingest, self-deposit
    • Note that these are ingest use cases, is it useful to list uses cases generically around ingest, preservation, cataloguing/metadata, discovery, re-use?  Also PREMIS implementation (part of metadata maybe).
    • Need to call other functions as needed through workflow, accepting that different organisations will use this ability to call fucntions at different times.
    • Derivatives generation – commonly thought as being part of ingest workflow.
    • Batch-attach – batch ingest content and batch ingest metadata alongside, attaching the two.  Aggregate metadata, individual metadata, integration with other systems to extract metadata
    • Add metadata, edit metadata, verify/authorise metadata – not delete!
  • How do we make this real and facilitate Hydra community development in this area?  Generate use cases and highlight who is addressing each one of these to share experience and activity on the ground.
  • We need to generally find a way of sharing the functionality our different heads offer.  This can inform gemification to provide alternative building blocks.
  • Use DLF Hydra/Archivespaces meeting in November 2013 as the target to complete this gathering of information to inform the discussion.

Actions

  • Share AIMS use cases as a reminder and to ensure we are building from these, not duplicating them (CA) - end of September
  • List use cases in Hydra wiki - first week in October
  • Exchange information on who is working on which use cases - end of October