88 · Survey Results: Survey Questions and Responses
The processing and management of born-digital materials is currently done on an ad hoc basis. We are working to
create procedures and policies to institutionalize our practice but there is little literature to use as a basis for this.
This survey is very timely as we have had two recent potential donors want to give born-digital material to the South
Carolina Political Collections (SCPC) archive and the special collections librarians have begun talking about these very
issues. We are in the early stages of creating policies and strategies for preservation and access, but we know we need
to. SCPC has already acquired a fair amount of legacy media and electronic files, but the South Caroliniana Library and
Rare Books are not far behind in collecting born-digital materials as well.
We are acquiring digital content, but not in great volumes: a few primarily analog collections have come in with floppy
disks, CDs, etc., we have received a few born-digital photograph collections, we preserve some born-digital university
records (including photographs) and community publications, we work with ETDs, and we have preserved some
community-related web content via Archive-It.
We are at the early stage of development in terms of process flow and content management. Very little has been
operationalized. Different types of born-digital material (e.g., e-archives, web archives, research data, audio and video
oral histories) have different requirements, staffing needs, timetables, etc., and will necessarily have different workflows
and ingest routes.
We are currently building the IT staff capacity to help support the digital library/archives initiatives.
We are currently in a transition phase. We have newly created positions and new hires (e.g., Digital Archivist) brought in
to more pointedly better address issues/challenges of collecting, managing, preserving, and delivering born-digital and
digitized content.
We are farther ahead working with materials in the digital repository than working with archives and special collections.
Archives and Special Collections was not part of the digital repository development or the selection of materials to place
there until very recently.
We are in the process of moving management of our digital collections as a series of separate projects to a program-
based coordinated approach across the institution. Institutional archives are collected and managed through the Office
of the Librarian.
We are still in the very early stages of determining how to manage born-digital materials. This survey has provided much
food for thought.
We have begun planning for everything mentioned in this survey, but have really only begun implementation. I’ve
answered the questions based on what our plans are, but in many cases we have not actually completed implementing
these plans.
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