The Upper Midwest Digital Collections Conference (#umdcc25) and the Minnesota Digital Library Annual Meeting (#mndiglib25) will be held jointly on May 6–7, 2025. It will be an in-person event held in Saint Paul, Minnesota at the Union Depot.
The American Philosophical Society’ collection contains over 6.8 terabytes of digital records as of a 2019 survey, with that number growing ever presently. With the endowment of two digital archivist positions, the Society is looking into ingesting and making available this backlog and digital records that are coming with newer acquisitions. Part of this goal is to see what has already been done in regards to how institutions organize and represent born digital materials in their finding aids. This was a task that was given to me early on when I started as an Assistant Digital Archivist. This presentation aims at discussing the process and results of looking at 6 different institutions published guidelines for born-digital description. I examined the different metadata elements they recommend, their respective changes when it comes to born-digital materials, and how they could be applied to the APS’ own processing manual. I also will talk about how, as a new professional, this job and tasks affected me and how I view this job. Finally, there could be talk of my research and tests of using the complex digital object feature in ArchiveSpace to represent born-digital records that have a complex hierarchical structure, a feature that has been present in Aspace for some time but not been used by any institution to my knowledge. This talk can benefit others who work with these types of materials, and develop a conversation about how to best approach their description and representation.
