Paper Requirements and Structure

Overview

Your final paper is an opportunity to fully articulate your Plan and demonstrate how you have applied digital archiving/preservation principles learned throughout the semester to a “real-world” archive.

This report should build on your abstract submission, expanding on the critical components of your project, including selection rationale, digitization workflows, access strategies, and long-term sustainability considerations.

The final paper should also align with the structure of your presentation, ensuring that you can clearly communicate your project’s goals, challenges, and impact.

General Requirements

  • Length: 10–12 pages of text (not including required appendices and bibliography)
  • Formatting: Double-spaced; maximum font size 12pt
  • Citations: Use any citation format, as long as you apply it consistently. Your paper should reference relevant readings and resources from the course, or from your own research. You should include a bibliography. - Visuals: I will require at least one (or more) visuals, such as a mockup or workflow. Visuals should be included in your paper’s appendix.

Paper Structure

The structure below represents my grading rubric. What this means is, though you do not necessarily need to emulate this structure and sequence exactly, it should show to you what I will be looking for when I review your work.

1. Introduction

This could include a high-level overview of:

  • The problem or goal your Plan addresses
  • What collection/materials your Plan addresses
  • Summary of your proposed approach and expected outcomes

2. Rationale

Explain why your institution is prioritizing this collection over others. Consider:

  • Long-term impact or benefit on research, researchers, students, patrons, teaching, public programming, social movements, deliberately marginalized people and their histories, or anything else
  • Circulation and usage statistics and how your Plan may increase engagement
  • Physical fragility of materials and how digital surrogates may reduce their wear and tear
  • Increasing institutional compliance with national preservation standards
  • Alignment with overall institutional goals and priorities

3. Stakeholders, People doing the work

List staff, departments, or external partners involved in your project. For each, specify:

  • Their role and responsibilities; how each staff will contribute to the project’s success and sustainability
  • Staff and skillsets required to do the work (this might include engaging with specialized vendors to do specialized work like digitization)
  • Workspace and technical setup; what equipment/tools/programs are needed if the work is to be done onsite.

4. Scope & Inventory

Provide a summary of your collection’s form and extent.

  • Describe the collection as a whole (formats, volume, content types)
  • Describe the materials within the collection that will be worked on and made accessible online
  • What might be out of scope (e.g., commercial recordings, duplicate materials)

5. Selection Criteria/Prioritization

Describe why these materials are being chosen and prioritized for access. Consider:

  • Format and condition
  • Copyright and legal restrictions
  • Dependence on specific and/or obsolete hardware/software to play or render contents
  • Institutional priorities or legal obligations
  • An upcoming event or milestone to which this work might speak to or support (repositories often use events like this to spur work and drum up funding)
  • Bolstering usage of materials
  • Addressing and managing archival backlogs

6. Preservation Approach

Describe your methodology and cite national standards and best practices where applicable. If you depart from existing practices, explain why and how your approach remains interoperable. Consider:

  • Your chosen institution’s setup: you can choose to go with their approach, which is fine, but I would like you to justify this. What about their setup/policy/practice aligns with your Plan’s vision?
  • You may diverge from how your chosen institution would normally approach this work. You may, in this case, look to other institutions’ policies and practices for inspiration. In this case, you should justify what your chosen institution might change or implement to support your Plan.

7. End-to-End Workflow

Outline the full workflow for your project, covering:

  • Appraisal, acquisition and accessioning/transfer
  • Archival processing/description (though you will be working with already-processes materials, it is likely that the finding aid may require updating once materials are made available online)
  • Digitization (in-house and/or vendor-based)
  • Packaging materials for submission; Ingest and creation of AIPs and DIPs
  • Long-term storage systems, backups/redundancy
  • Additional processing (optical character recognition, auto-transcription/translation, normalization, quality control, rights clearance)
  • Long-term preservation strategies (fixity, disaster planning)

Ensure this section aligns with any visualizations/diagrams/workflows in the appendix and in your presentation.

8. Discovery, Access & Use

Explain how users currently access materials at your institution. Here you may identify successes of the current systems, and/or limitations (e.g., discoverability, user experience, metadata structure, interoperability across various online systems). Compare access models at other institutions and discuss how similar approaches could improve your institution’s access strategy, or suggest improvements to the user experience, features, and functionality.

9. Technical Specifications & Standards

  • Software and hardware: Identify tools used in your Plan’s workflow
  • File formats: Define submission, preservation, and access formats for your selected materials
  • Resolution and sample rates: Outline minimum standards for digitized files based on the institutions’ policies/practices (or suggest your own based on national standards)
  • Quality control: Describe how files will be assessed after transfer or digitization
  • Metadata: Identify schemas for descriptive, administrative, preservation, technical, and access/catalog metadata
  • Access platform: Explain how users will interact with the collection as far as platforms, viewers
  • Rights and restrictions: Discuss potential copyright or privacy concerns

10. Front-End Experience

Describe who your intended users are and how they will engage with the collection. Consider:

  • User characteristics and needs
  • Features that will support discovery and access
  • Format-specific requirements (e.g., viewers/playback platforms for specific formats)
  • How the digital experience will replicate or enhance the physical experience

11. Anticipated Challenges

Identify potential obstacles and how you plan to address them, including:

  • Material-specific challenges
  • Workflow or policy gaps
  • Budget and resource constraints
  • Technical limitations
  • Sustainability concerns
  • Resourcing/staffing up/skilling up
  • Legal or rights-based risks
  • Gaps in policy or practice

Appendices

Include the following supporting documents:

End-User Experience Mockup

  • Your mockup should serve as a visual guide to how users will search for, discover, and otherwise view/interact with your selected materials. Suggested structure:
    • Initial search: Show how users will first initiate a search for your materials. Will this be through the finding aid portal itself, through some other discovery layer, or something else?
    • Filtering/sorting Results: What do your search results look like? How will users narrow down results to find your collection materials? Show any dropdown menus, checkboxes, sidebars/facets, or filters.
    • Individual Page: Provide an example of a page that displays the digitized material in detail. What features does the viewer give you, and how can the user interact with the materials.
  • Suggestion: Use screenshots, and then Google Slides or an image editing program to annotate.

This Mockup will be central to your Presentation, where you will discuss features and functionalities of your access portal

Workflow Diagram

  • A diagram mapping out your workflow from digitization to access
  • Ensure it visually aligns with your workflow narrative

Submission Details

Your final paper is due [TK 1 week before grade submission deadline] (date to be confirmed based on the academic calendar).

Please submit your paper via the Assignments section in Brightspace.