107. Active Archive Curation and Preservation Management at Scale

Many institutions are now approaching two or more decades as archives whose mission is to maintain the usability, authenticity, discoverability, and accessibility of digital artifacts over the very long term. Their very success in becoming the repositories of very large quantities of digital assets has necessitated a maturing focus on the challenges of developing scalable and sustainable processes, procedures, and technologies for managing that content. This entails the care and curation of both primary content and metadata, including and beyond the processes of acquisition, and, possibly, deacquisition. Over the years, the digital preservation community has focused a great deal of attention on workflows, tools, policies, and procedures for content acquisition and ingest. What of the activities of these archives once content is acquired? As curators of content, what questions have we found we need to ask of the content in our archives? What insight do we gain from asking those question about our ingest processes themselves? What are the “curation” workflows we need to apply to the content that has been through our ingest and acquisition workflows? How do we “scale up” the curation and management of living archives, both organizationally and technically, without increasing the costs of managing everlarger and more complex corpora of content, in support of new and increasing modes of access? This workshop will present the experience of its participants in developing those processes, procedures, and technologies for review and discussion.