Intake of heterogeneous digital archival collections at meemoo: the challenges

Let’s talk about the challenges we encounter at meemoo, the Flemish Institute for Archives, regarding the intake of heterogeneous digital archival collections. More than 180 Flemish cultural heritage, governmental and broadcasting organisations entrust their digital archives to meemoo in a partnership (our content partners). These digitised or born digital archives derive from various sources, are very heterogeneous, consist of multiple (sometimes new or exotic) formats and contain more often than not complex digital objects. An extra challenge is the sometimes limited capacity and digital maturity within these organisations.

How can we organise the intake of these diverse digitised or digital born archives into the MAM of meemoo in an efficient, user-friendly and affordable way? We were in need of a new and improved process for this digital intake which could tackle the above mentioned challenges. In this lightning talk, I would like to present the steps we took, like functional and technical analysis, internal brainstorms, focus talks with our content partners, implementing the E-ARK SIP, etc., and the outcomes. We were particularly looking for a solution regarding the pre-ingest processes, for example cleaning, selecting and structuring the data by our content partners, and the creation of E-ARK compliant SIPs.

To conclude, I will present some lessons learned, give a status update (where are we now) and say something about the next steps (where do we want to be). By September, we will be a lot further than we are now, but I can already say that we will certainly develop tooling for the creation and validation of E-ARK SIPs.

I would afterwards love to hear from fellow participants about their experiences and lessons learned regarding the intake of heterogeneous digital archival collections!