Three Copies and the Truth! A Riff on Parsimonious Preservation from the Music City

Abstract – “Three chords and the truth” has long described country music’s elegant simplicity and emotional resonance. Inspired by this ethos and Parsimonious Preservation, Vanderbilt University’s Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) has developed a streamlined, scalable digital preservation ecosystem. It uses a minimal identifier schema based on the intellectual arrangement of archival finding aids from ArchivesSpace, integrated with AWS S3. The format-agnostic system supports everything from born-digital files to digitized 16th-century books. S3 file prefixes flow directly from the schema, enabling precise, index-free retrieval. The ArchivesSpace Digital Objects module ties everything together—linking descriptive metadata, digital surrogates, born-digital items, access and preservation copies, extended metadata, and eventually IIIF manifests. This approach shows how simplicity can drive sustainable, interoperable preservation.