Case study: Hybrid and born-digital processing at The New School

Abstract

This case study compares the processing of two collections with born-digital content at The New School Archives and Special Collections. One of the collections, the Parsons School of Design School of Fashion records was hybrid, containing both analogue and born-digital content; the other, the Laura Auricchio faculty and administrative files, was entirely born-digital. Decision points and challenges encountered in processing these collections may prove useful to others in similar scenarios, and offer examples of the tension between aggregation-orientated archival arrangement and description, and item-level digital preservation. For each collection, an imperfect solution was arrived at to resolve this tension, with one more successful than the other. Success in this instance represents an approach that can be replicated for other collections, and that leverages extractable born-digital metadata and the existing arrangement of files to reduce overall processing time.