Digital Preservation at Wellcome
By: Alex Chan
Tags: Archive, Technology, Digital Preservation, Museums, Digitization

Production

The production process varies at Wellcome, depending on whether we are considering digitised or born-digital files. Digitising means creating a digital representation of a physical object: for example, scanning a page or photographing a book. A born-digital file is one that started life as a digital file: maybe a Word document or a web page.

Let’s consider each in turn.

Digitisation

We have a lot of experience at Wellcome with digitisation: we’ve been digitising the collection for over a decade, and we have 40 million images.

How do we choose what to digitise? We have a long-term digitisation schedule, for parts of the collection we want to digitise — often planned years in advance. We also have capacity for ad-hoc digitisation. If a researcher in New Zealand wants to see something from our collections, they can ask for that to be digitised specially, and we can try to accommodate.

So we know what we want to digitise, and we’ve picked it off the shelf — how does the digitisation happen? There are a couple of streams:

We have a contract with the Internet Archive, who scan our bound, printed books. They have specialist book scanners that mean they can scan very quickly.

We send audiovisual material (VHS tapes, audio cassettes, etc.) to R3Store.

TownsWeb work on-site at Euston Road and help to digitise our paper archives.

We’re lucky to have a team of in-house photographers, who handle anything that needs extra care — maybe it’s fragile, bulky, or even radioactive. They work closely with the conservation team.

Now we have a pile of images, and we need to add them to the catalogue. We use a workflow manager called Goobi, made by Intranda. It collates metadata and OCR, adds checksums to the files, and spits out a bundle of images, METS (metadata) and ALTO (OCR data).

A screenshot of Goobi, from Intranda’s website.

Born-digital

Born-digital archiving is something newer for us at Wellcome: it was the new shiny a few years ago, and we brought in lots of material. Now we’re starting to think more carefully about how we want to do born-digital archiving, how we’re going to catalogue it, and so on.

Suppose somebody offers us some files — we start by assessing them. Are these files a good fit for our collection? If they are, we’ll transfer them to Wellcome, and go through them in more detail. This is a more thorough analysis, where we’re looking for files that might need extra work before we can make it available. For example, PDFs of medical research are easier to present than something that’s password-protected.

To prepare the files for ingest, we are about to start using Archivematica, an open-source digital preservation system made by Artefactual. It does a lot of automation for us: virus scanning, generating metadata and checksums, deleting .DS_Store and thumbs.db files that we don’t care about, and it spits out a bundle of files and metadata.

A screenshot of our Archivematica instance.

That gives you a brief overview of our production process, both digitised and born-digital.

At the end of this process, we have a clutch of files and metadata, but nowhere to put them. Where do keep these precious things? Let’s talk about storage.