Describing Records Before They Arrive: An NDSR Project Update | The Signal

At the American Institute of Architects, the AIA Archives is building a digital repository for permanent born-digital records that capture the intellectual capital of the AIA, or have continuing value to the practice of architecture. In a story that is probably familiar to many readers, the AIA has important digital records that are not currently stored in a central repository, and that are subject to accidental deletions or movement on the AIA’s shared drive. The challenge for our team in the archives is to find and identify these records and provide the AIA with a repository system that will do all of the following: preserve the records, be flexible enough to support the AIA’s changing information needs, and be simple for AIA staff to use in order to deposit their own digital records into the repository.

The project includes interviewing departments to determine the permanent digital records that they produce, choosing a repository system, and implementing the chosen system based on our requirements and the information we’ve gathered from our interviews. We’re in the process of department interviews and settling on our final system requirements, so this blog post will focus on one of the design principles behind how we plan to implement our repository. The main concept driving the design of our repository is “describing records before they arrive.”
http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2015/09/describing-records-befo...