Refreshing Concordia's Archival Publication Collection: Making Digital Preservation and Access Work Together

John Richan, Digital Archivist, Concordia University Archives

During 2021 Concordia University Records Management and Archives (RMA) undertook a project to migrate over 2,100 digitized issues from the University’s archival publication collection to Archivematica and the Internet Archive. This presentation will provide a workflow overview and highlight different processes and tasks that were successfully completed. Furthermore, this presentation will review both challenges and successes that arose during the course of the project. Between 2014-2020, this digitized collection was stored internally across multiple locations and had become difficult to manage, while public access was granted directly through the RMA website. This reality posed numerous challenges for both archivists and researchers. For archivists, this collection and associated metadata were not being properly preserved according to digital preservation standards. For the research community, information was often difficult to discover, browse and search. The two primary goals of this project were ultimately achieved in late 2021. The first objective was to organize files, weed duplicates, and ingest the collection into the digital preservation system, Archivemaica. By reaching this first objective it guaranteed this collection was packaged and stored in a standardized way based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Reference Model. The second project objective achieved was the uploading of the collection to the Internet Archive along with corresponding metadata. By having this collection publicly accessible on the Internet Archive, it allows RMA to open new discovery, search and access pathways for researchers at Concordia and beyond. By re-imagining projects, such as this one, to promote both digital preservation and access at the same time RMA continues to fulfill its mission of preserving and making accessible the history of the University and supporting research to the wider community.

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