ARKIVA

The Digital Archive of the

Society of Swedish Literature

in Finland

Jessica Parland-von Essen

28.1.2010

The Society of Swedish Literature in Finland» Scientific society founded in 1885

» Publishes research literature in humanities

» Research library with book history as speciality

» Documents Swedish culture, language, history and traditions in Finland

» Archives different kinds of material, documents, photographs etc.

» Research in Swedish history and culture in Finland

» Funds research and several prizes

» Arranges seminars and lectures

» One of the large managers of public funds in Finland

» Ca 100 employees, mainly in Helsingfors and Vasa

The Digital Challenge

» The amount of information» The continuously changing and ephemeral character of the material » The quality of metadata» The multiplicity of formats and standards» Questions of copyright and integrity

Digital materials in SLS

» Digitised material

– Sound (music, interviews)

– Photographs

– Documents

– Film and videotape

» Born digital material

– Photographs

– Sound

– Video

– Web

– Databases

Digital materials in SLS

» A lot of different kinds of material are produced by the normal activities in house

» Some material is also actively collected

» Donations are still small but expected to grow immensly in the future

Arkiva

Digital archive of SLS

» Arkiva was founded in 2008

» Today part of the Information department

» Internal service responsible for digitising and preservation of digital material

» At the moment six employees

» Uses international standards like OAIS and PREMIS

» Decisions are taken by a large body consisting of persons from the different archives

Collections in Arkiva

» The Archives of History and Literature

» The Archives of Folk Culture

» The Archives of the Swedish Language

» The Library

» The Ostrobothnian Archives of Traditional Culture

» FMI Folk music institut

» The Research Archive

» The Administrative Archive

Strategies for Arkiva

» Visibilty

» Openness

» Trustworthyness

» Cooperation

Methods of work

» Focus on quality of metadata

» Thorough documentation

» Competence

» Good planning and sufficient resources

» Transparency

» Participation in several cooperative projects

Arkiva

» All types of digital material in the same system

– Several different processes for ingest and access have to be planned and documented for different materials depending of type and amount

» Preservation first priority

» Relational database, records

– Intellectual entities

– Digital objects

– Measures

– Technical metadata

– Digitisation process

The structure of the databaseMain tables:

» intellectual_entities: descriptive metadata

» digital_objects: contains technical and administrative metadata

» events: records for provenance

» samlingar: collections

» digitization_profiles: contains information about digitisation

» informanter: information about informants

Managing versions and relations

» Intellectual entity vs. digital object

» dcterms_isPartOf

» dcterms_isVersionOf

» dcterms_isReferencedBy

» dc_source

» Dcterms_hasFormat

» DCterms_hasVersion

» premis_formatVersion

» Also relationship table for derivation, dependency and structural relations

Intellectual entity

Digitalobject

Digitalobject

Collection

Physical object

Cooperation

» The National Digital Library

– Especially its subproject for preservation PAS

» Dublin Core mapping for small archives

» Europeana

Technical challenges

» Lack of ontological structure

– Time

– Geography

» Lack of name identifiers (international register needed)

» Technical metadata standards under development

» Dependency of proprietary back up software with closed source code

» METS-exports still need some manual work

» Accepted videoformats are difficult to handle

» Database preservation and even text cause some confusion

» Creation of technical and other metadata for donated born digital-material

Questions» How can we handle different levels of ”entity”? (Events?)

– Conference

– Session

– Presentation

» How would a CRM-like structure support multiple levels of digital and physical versions?

» The same P:s and E:s don’t always apply to different versions or manifestations?

» Are preservation/digital curation events different from historical events?

» Good quality of metadata and standardisation are crucial for good usability

http://www.sls.fi/