Donor involvement in the packaging and transfer of born-digital material: A case study of the National Library of Ireland

Abstract

This paper describes the methods used by the National Library of Ireland to determine how donors and depositors could take a more active role in packaging and transferring born-digital archival collections. The process was driven by a list of requirements and principles that evolved throughout. Three case studies are presented using different tools and workflows for packaging collections. Each case study results in more refined requirements, ultimately leading to a preferred approach of using DART by the APTrust as a packaging tool. The key findings of these case studies are that it is preferable to involve the donor in the process of packaging collections for transfer, as the generation of checksums adds to the integrity of the process. Packaging the file in a container format, such as tar and ZIP, can also preserve fragile file-system metadata that could be lost or altered, such as date values and file names. Finally, the case studies show that the packaging phase within a transfer reduces the significance of picking a specific cloud transfer tool, as the package should be in a state where cloud service intervention cannot occur. The package can be validated to ensure that the contents are identical to what is stored in the donors’ system. These findings fulfil a short-term need for robust transfer processes, and they lay the groundwork for requirements for a more advanced system, suitable for scaling up digital transfers.