SPEC Kit 329: Managing Born-Digital Special Collections and Archival Materials · 189
Yale University
Beinecke Rare Book &Manuscript Unit, Processing Manual. Electronic Files
in a writing series, place a dummy folder for an electronic draft (see “Hotel Christobel”
example in section 5.6.7.6) in the sequence of materials relating to the title.
Other types of text files can be treated the same way, placing them in the appropriate
intellectual and sequential location of related files.
5.6.5.2 Snapshot Accessions, Computers, External Hard-drives
When dealing with digital records acquired directly from record
creators through snapshot accessions or on retired media, such as computers (and
possibly external hard drives), respect context and original order as recommended in
the "Paradigm Exemplars for Arrangment," Workbook of Digital Private Papers,
available at http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/workbook/cataloguing/ead-exemplars.html.
5.6.5.3 Special Cases
Some electronic files may not lend themselves to the management and access strategies
outlined above. In these cases, other strategies may be desirable or necessary to provide
staff and research access to the files.
For difficult-to-access files, files prone to corruption, and relational files, it might be
preferable to print a copy of the file, rather than rely on the electronic copy, for reference
and research use. These copies would go into the archival boxes just as Preservation
Photocopies do, and would be clearly marked as printouts from electronic files.
For relational files, such as databases and hyperlinked documents, it may be better to
recreate a mini-environment with the original software. For example, a suite of web
pages could be copied to a folder that also contains a simple version of an HTML
browser. Or a database file could be coupled with a viewing version of the database
program.
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