Starting with the Digital Doesn’t Make it Easier

Developing Transparent Born Digital Acquisition Policies for Archives

Abstract

 
As organizations continue to overwhelmingly abandon all forms of paper-based record keeping, libraries are still adapting to increased offers of born digital archival donations. Simple misunderstandings or disconnects between the units facilitating donations and maintaining born-digital collections creates pain-points for donor relations and can result in a lack of transparency over how their records may be processed. To facilitate better donor transparency and cross-area collaboration over born digital records, Special Collections and archives need comprehensive policies and shifts in training and collaboration paradigms. This paper analyses the intersections of born digital archiving, collection development polices, donor relations, human-supported AI tools, and digital records education within American academic libraries to propose a functional toolkit for born digital acquisitions. Unrealistic expectations of collection processing, retention, growth, and publication onto openly accessible platforms can quickly overwhelm a libraries’ digital collections’ team due to size, need for digital forensics work, copyright limitations, or other capacity-related issues. Intertwined within this discussion is an additional discourse over the need to carefully curate our digital spaces not only for practical cost reasons, but due to the environmental costs of massive data storage solutions. Through an analysis of the elements stated above, the paper will reflect on the need to integrate born digital materials into archival acquisition procedures and provide practical solutions to meet this need.