Grand Valley State University’s Special Collections and University Archives proactively seeks to expand capacity to curate the complex born-digital materials originating from our faculty, students and student groups. This presentation will highlight three exemplary case studies--The Young Lords of Lincoln Park, the Fei Hu Films records, and The Humans of Grand Valley Project--each of which are collections at GVSU that exemplify our exciting forays into programmatically archiving the personal.

 

More than simply accessioning institutional records, these collections represent the University’s efforts to preserve and promote the distinctive personalities and creative outputs of their donors, as well as the diverse range of actors that they correspond with and document. The materials from these donors tend to come to the archives in disarray, spread out on personal computers and ageing carriers; often found to be esoteric file formats derived from proprietary devices and software; and even occasionally as third-party hosted websites that confront our curators with a range of technical and institutional barriers for web archiving.

 

In addition to providing some very brief background on the collections, creators and content, the presenters will share their curatorial “battle stories” and lessons-learned. They will share candid stories of mixed success with open source tools such as FITS, DROID, Siegfried, ffmpeg, HandBrake, and BitCurator, among others. They will also include a summary of the softer strategies of evaluating collection criteria, performing media inventories, and updating existing policies to address issues of redaction and intellectual property. Finally, the presenters will touch on the process of modeling comprehensive workflows at conceptual levels and assessing the broader institutional landscape to more sustainably support the curation and promotion of personal digital archives here at GVSU into the future.