The University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) Special Collections and Archives (SCA) holds a variety of born-digital content, including content on removable media in a wide array of formats from 5.25-inch floppy disks, to Zip disks, to DVD-Rs. Preserving this content presents a unique set of challenges, particularly as hardware and software become outdated seemingly as soon as they are introduced. For many institutions, limited funding and resources only compound these issues. This presentation is a case study of our institution’s flexible, patchwork, and at times ad-hoc approach to meeting our project needs. It also includes suggestions for alternative approaches that we did not take, but that have proven useful for other institutions.
In October 2018, SCA created a grant-funded Digital Curation Fellowship position to address the challenges of providing long-term, sustainable access to born-digital content on legacy media. With guidance from the Head of Digital Archives & Stewardship, I have developed policies and procedures for imaging, extracting metadata, and providing meaningful and sustainable access to these materials. Working through our massive backlog, I have experimented with various free and inexpensive tools to fulfill different functions, as many other institutions with limited staffing and resources must do. While we initially had plans in place for the various stages of this project, we quickly realized that these plans needed to be adapted when faced with reality.
In this presentation, I will describe our project's development from beginning to end and outline what we hope to accomplish in the future. There have been roadblocks and challenges along the way, but a number of hardware and software solutions, coupled with research and participation in workshops and conferences have provided a solid footing for the successful development of this project. I will provide information and recommendations to other memory institutions with limited financial and personnel resources are thinking about undertaking their own digital preservation initiatives. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to meeting digital preservation needs, keeping an open-minded approach and being willing to discover and experiment with different options can go a long way to finding and implementing adequate project solutions.