Developing a Robust Migration Workflow for Preserving and Curating Hand-held Media

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, robust workflow for migrating and preserving large collections of hand-held media, addressing physical degradation, metadata recording, and data stabilization to facilitate digital preservation.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive migration workflow, including hardware, software, and metadata strategies, for large-scale preservation of hand-held media collections.

Findings

Stabilized over 16 terabytes of data.

Developed scalable processes for handling thousands of data-carriers.

Experimented with disk copying robots and metadata definitions.

Abstract

Many memory institutions hold large collections of hand-held media, which can comprise hundreds of terabytes of data spread over many thousands of data-carriers. Many of these carriers are at risk of significant physical degradation over time, depending on their composition. Unfortunately, handling them manually is enormously time consuming and so a full and frequent evaluation of their condition is extremely expensive. It is, therefore, important to develop scalable processes for stabilizing them onto backed-up online storage where they can be subject to highquality digital preservation management. This goes hand in hand with the need to establish efficient, standardized ways of recording metadata and to deal with defective data-carriers. This paper discusses processing approaches, workflows, technical set-up, software solutions and touches on staffing needs for the stabilization process. We have experimented with different disk copying robots, defined our metadata, and addressed storage issues to scale stabilization to the vast quantities of digital objects on hand-held data-carriers that need to be preserved. Working closely with the content curators, we have been able to build a robust data migration workflow and have stabilized over 16 terabytes of data in a scalable and economical manner.