Digital POWRR Institute

 Jaime Valenzuela is the Archivist and Scholarly Communications Lead at the Cracchiolo Law Library at the University of Arizona. In this guest post, he writes about his recent experience attending the Digital POWRR Institute on building digital collections and how it applies to his work in an academic law library.

I am a solo archivist at the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library and my responsibilities include documenting the life of the law school. Preservation is included in that responsibility so that others may access that life in its many forms in the future. Much of that life is now being produced or captured digitally. For a law library fortunate enough to find itself responsible for documenting its history, digital preservation is a key piece of responsible stewardship. 

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to attend the Digital POWRR (Preserving digital Objects With Restricted Resources) Institute at the University of Arizona. The Institute is designed for librarians and archivists to build skills for curating and preserving digital collections under the tutelage of Digital POWRR project staff. Topics of lecture and discussion included digital preservation policy, storage solutions, hardware obsolescence, and integrity. 

One of the best aspects of the Institute was the “Walk the Workflow” demonstration of a digital preservation tool called DataAccessioner. This open-source tool is designed to create a copy of the files that live on external media to a new file location such as a shared network drive. Important features of DataAccessioner include the ability to enter descriptive metadata following the Dublin Core metadata schema and the creation of checksums of the file being migrated from one location to another.

To actively participate in the demonstration, I downloaded and installed the latest version of OpenJDK (a freely available version of java) and a legacy version of DataAccessioner to my personal laptop. For tool testing purposes, I choose to use my personal laptop to bypass any administrative privileges associated with my institutionally owned work laptop. With software installed, I used pre-selected files shared with all Institute participants to use during a live end-to-end demonstration of the workflow. The workflow was also distributed physically allowing for a secondary form of instruction and to serve as documentation for use in the future. Screenshots were included in the documentation, and the files that participants used were the same files used in the demonstration. With the help of instructors, I was able to successfully create duplicate copies of the material I worked with. Having the opportunity to test drive a tool such as DataAccessioner under the guidance of instructors was the highlight of my Digital POWRR experience. 

Another great take away from the Institute is the “POWRR Plan.” The POWRR Plan is a personalized and actionable preservation plan that attendees work on in consultation with POWRR instructors to take home to their institutions allowing attendees to use some of their new found knowledge and take action. The plans include both short and long term goals that span form one month to twelve. 

One of my short term goals within my POWRR Plan was to properly document the digital objects under my stewardship. Using an existing internal LibGuide created for the purposes of documenting library workflows, I included a section titled “Digital Material: What it is and Where is it Stored?” One of my long-term goals is to create a statement on preserving digital collections at my law library. Having such a statement will help ensure that digital preservation is a part of my law library’s core philosophy within archives and special collections.