March 25, 2025

The Drexel University Archives’ most recent accessions this year reveal a significant trend — almost all have been born-digital! So, what exactly does “born-digital” mean and what kinds of archival materials constitute this format? Rachel Weidner, Drexel Libraries’ Communications Specialist, recently sat down with Matt Sherman, Digital Curation Librarian to get the answers.  

In the brief interview that follows, Matt explains general accession practices, specific workflows and new challenges in the digital landscape. He also speaks to the importance of collecting and preserving Drexel University’s digital materials and the impact these records have on critical research and future knowledge building. Responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: What does a digital archivist do? What do you collect?

I do a lot of different things at Drexel, though the majority of digital-related things from Drexel University Archives fall under my responsibility. So, things like managing online digital collections, digitization projects and requests, web archiving, digital archives, digital preservation, helping troubleshoot our various systems, and helping to develop, refine, or document workflows and processes to support that work.

We collect a wide range of materials from within our collecting scope, which includes materials related to the history of Drexel University, activities of the University and the campus, student life, as well as materials related to the Drexel family. I’ve not worked much with the Drexel Family materials outside of some digitization, but I have worked with various materials related to Drexel University.

Q: Can you define “born-digital” in your own words?

When we talk about born-digital records or items, we are referring to materials that were first created in a digital format, even if they are later put into a physical or analog form. So, the printout of an email is a physical copy of a born-digital item, because the email started its life digitally. But this doesn’t refer to things that started out as a physical or analog object that was digitized. So, JPGs files created from scans of photos are not born-digital. Basically, the easiest way to think about it is what form the item originally was created in: if it started out digital, then it is born-digital. If it started out physical or analog, then it is not.

Q: What does the workflow look like for a born-digital item?

We receive digital materials either on physical media such as an external hard drive or disk, or through an electronic transfer like a cloud drive or email. We then run a virus/malware scan on the media/files. Once that comes back clean, depending on the format, we either transfer the files to a restricted network drive or we make a disk image of the media and transfer that to the drive. Unless it is a small batch of files, we make a directory map to have an inventory of the files and a picture of how they are organized. Then we run tools to scan for Personally Identifiable Information and get a report of possible privacy concerns. Finally, we document everything in an accession record. Eventually we hope to be able to do more work to process it, like moving files to preservation-friendly formats, etc., but we are still tightening up that workflow. This is generally what it looks like, but different accessions may require different approaches.

Q: What are some challenges when it comes to preserving born-digital records?

In some ways, the challenges are not that different than other archival records – there are always more things to process than time or staff availability. As well as needing to determine what things are worth keeping and what aren’t, though at a larger volume for digital records.

Yet, born-digital records do have more unique challenges. In many ways they are much more ephemeral than analog and physical records. Things on paper can last centuries or millennia depending on conditions and the type of paper. Even magnetic tape lasts a few decades before it demagnetizes. Digital materials though have so many dependencies and possible points of failure to account for.

If a document file was written in MacWrite on a floppy disk in 1988, it will be very hard to access today. It is on a diskette written onto magnetic tape that is probably about halfway through its lifespan, and hopefully it has been stored in a space that hasn’t given it mold. Then you have to have a diskette drive to run it on, but because it is Macintosh, diskettes actually won’t run on a modern machine, even a modern Mac because of the variable speed nature of the disk. So, you need some special hardware or a 1980s or 1990s era Mac to read it. Then you need a copy of MacWrite to read the document file.

Now even if you have all of those things and can read the file, you need to figure out how to get it out of the system and make it readable and accessible to anyone else who doesn't have all of those things. That is just a small example but hopefully highlights the potential fragility of the digital format and the number of dependencies that can be involved in accessing born-digital records.

Q: What’s on the horizon for the Drexel University Archives and the Digital Curation Librarian?

There is always more work to do, and some of it will depend on what materials come to us or we are made aware of. A big ongoing focus for us will be trying to document the Academic Transformation initiative that the University is currently undertaking.

We have already started accessioning the available Drexel Official Policy Catalog from SharePoint and the records from the Faculty Senate SharePoint, and we will continue that process as more records become available. We are still figuring out how to capture the Academic Transformation SharePoint site as our normal system does not have access to that.

We also have an ongoing project of preserving the University-wide emails of the President and Provost Offices and are considering if we should expand that project to include other units and how to do that in a sustainable way. We have had an ongoing web archiving program since 2009, and thankfully it is partially automated, but we do have to update things from time to time. We also have plans to make more items available in our digital collections and specifically are working on adding nearly 400 early Drexel Institute photo scans online this year as well as a variety of other Drexel documents.

Q: What’s your favorite collection?

That is a tough one; there is plenty of fun stuff so I will give a slightly bifurcated answer. My favorite collection right now for digital collections is the Early Drexel photos because it is super interesting to see how similar and how different things were over a century ago. There was a blacksmith forge in the Main Building! Only a little of that is online right now but more is coming soon.

From the born-digital collection perspective, I have a love/hate relationship with the collection of 80 Mac disks from the Breslin administration in the early 1990s. They were incredibly hard to do anything with, but we were able to work with colleagues in the College of Computing & Informatics to actually run them on the Macs they have in their computer history exhibit and make disk images that we can access on an emulator. We still have more work to do to figure out how to access all the data, but I have a fondness for it as it was a great experience being able to take something that is 35 years old—something no one could do anything with for the last 20 years--and actually read the records.

For more information on these materials or to learn more about digital records management, contact the University Archives at archives@drexel.edu or visit www.library.drexel.edu/archives.