Session 3C | I solemnly swear I will finish this project: Tackling a long-term digital preservation project

In the fall of 2020, the Special Collections & University Archives at Texas Woman’s University embarked on its first ever born-digital processing and digital preservation project in an effort to collapse and preserve an over 60 cubic foot collection of born-digital University Archives photographs stored on roughly 4,500 CDs. The project began in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic that had many students and staff telecommuting, and over a year later the first phase of the project is coming to an end with phase two already underway and phase three on the horizon. To date, over 600 GB and 80,000 files have been extracted from the digital media in the collection.

The project is multifaceted including born-digital processing, physical processing, digitization, finding aid creation, stakeholder access point creation, and weeding. During the course of this project a number of stumbling blocks and questions were presented- Can we do this from home? What equipment do we need? These discs are not reading, what do I do? How do we create a finding aid for this collection for Special Collections staff? What do stakeholders need from this project? How do I work on this massive project when I have so many other projects to complete? Oh no, now we are out of server space!

This presentation will discuss creating remote projects, adaptability when working with different stakeholders, managing long-term projects, and digital preservation tools for processing CDs.