Summary

The purpose of this manual is to provide an informative and practical guide to digital archiving for CSOs working in transitional justice and human rights, both those beginning this process as well as CSOs working to maintain and develop their digital archives.

To address the growing need of CSOs for information resources, capacity building, and networking in the field of digital archiving, in 2021, five organizations—members of the GIJTR consortium—initiated the project “Supporting CSOs in Digital Archiving.” This manual is a result of this project. It was conceptualized, devised, and developed on the basis of research, exchanges, and knowledge gathered throughout this two-year project. The manual is grounded in, and built on, the experiences and insights of more than 40 CSOs from 24 countries that provided their input and participated in this project.

For CSOs that have gathered or obtained invaluable collections of materials that are—in archival terms—undefined, unorganized, and therefore unusable, transforming these collections into proper, usable, and sustainable archival collections becomes a necessity. When these archives contain physical material that needs to be digitized, born-digital, or both, achieving this goal will require an organization to embark on the process of digital archiving.

This manual provides a guide for the development of a digital archive, starting from the decision to create a Digital Archiving System through its establishment and development to its continuous change, adaptation, and maintenance. It applies the Digital Archiving Life Cycle Model, which reflects the key characteristic of digital archiving: its circular and continual character, a cyclical process in which stages follow one after the other continuously, without an end point, like hours on the clock. A new cycle begins at the end of the previous one, starting a new iteration of a digital archive development. The Life Cycle Model also draws attention to the need for taking action and actively managing a digital archive throughout its life cycle and presents the wide scope of responsibilities involved in the digital archiving process.

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Planning and Organizing Stage

As a first step, we need to develop a General Plan, which will define the Guiding Principles of the archive, as well as address key organizational, technological, and resources-related issues that will be encountered throughout the digital archive’s life cycle. The Guiding Principles are defined based on responses the organization gives to a set of core questions, such as, What needs to be preserved? Why? Who will use it, and how?

The General Plan needs to be complemented with the creation of an Identification Inventory, selection, organization, and description of the material we want to preserve. This is because any further decision or action in the process will rely on information about the format, amount, scope, size, topic, or other characteristics of the collected material for preservation, as well as its ability to identify, manage, and locate groups or individual items.

To round off this stage, we will need to plan, design, and select our future Digital Archival System—a digital repository and content management system that will be hosting our archival content. A Digital Archiving System consists of hardware and software elements, which we will need to carefully select at this point, given that their characteristics will affect other important aspects of our digital archive.

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Digitization and Preservation Stage

The second stage includes a group of digitization, description, preparation, and preservation actions, which all lead to the process of ingesting our digital material into a Digital Archiving System. These actions are separate but go hand in hand, as they are interrelated and need to be well-coordinated. Digitization of any physical material needs to be done in sync with the decisions on how these objects will be described (i.e., which information, or metadata, about them needs to be captured in the digitization process). It is similar with born-digital material, as its metadata needs to be selected as well.

This is followed by a number of actions aimed at proper preservation of the archive’s content by maintaining its integrity and credibility (i.e., ensuring that the objects are not compromised and any changes made to them are recorded). The material, both digitized and born-digital, is then ingested into the Digital Archiving System and onto the storage media. In this process, the content and its descriptions—its metadata—are captured and stored in the Digital Archiving System. Additional checkups are then performed and backup copies are created and stored separately.

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Access and Security Stage

Providing access and data security is the main task in the third stage of digital archiving. These two separate functions are interrelated and need to be kept in balance to provide for the optimal effect—the widest possible access to be provided—while maintaining data safety and protection. This includes protection of any private, sensitive, or copyrighted data, but also measures to provide for safety of data and storage systems against physical harm and cyber-threats.

Providing wider access (e.g., by making a digital archive accessible through open databases or online platforms) will pose an additional set of data security issues compared with providing access to a closed group of users. Similarly, different items in the digital archive may require varying levels of protection and controlled access. Therefore, appropriate levels of access need to be defined for different groups of users in relation to different parts of the archive.

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Maintenance Stage Maintenance through preservation and migrations—these are the actions that dominate the fourth stage of digital archiving. Once the digital archive has been designed, set up, and populated—its data preserved, secured, and made accessible—all these functions need to be maintained and monitored and the content and the system need to be managed and eventually migrated and transformed. Regular maintenance checks need to be performed on the data (to ensure its continued integrity and credibility as well as format usability), system (to provide for continued security and open access), and hardware and software technologies (to ensure their proper functioning and act timely when they need to be migrated or transformed to prevent them from becoming obsolete).

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A new iteration of the digital archiving process begins.

The manual argues and describes why and how it is possible to build and maintain a digital archive scaled to any organizations’ capacities, even when initial resources and knowledge might be modest. The main initial and main resource the organization will need to have in excessive amounts throughout the process of building a digital archive is a strong commitment, along with persistence and a willingness to address a variety of challenges.

Funds can be raised, capacities can be built, networks of partners and donors can be created—and there is a pallet of possible resources a CSO can draw on in developing their digital archive. Developing a Resourcing and Fundraising Plan allows for the creation of a realistic, time- and resources-wise feasible framework for securing the necessary funds, capacities, and technologies for developing a digital archive, both in terms of immediate steps and in the long term.

Developing an Outreach Strategy, including goals, beneficiaries, and a plan of activities, and conducting extensive outreach efforts is not only a way to achieve our activism goals—be it to inform, educate, raise awareness, or seek truth, accountability or reparations—but also a way to make them more feasible and attainable. An archive with a bigger presence and impact in the community, with wider visibility and credibility, will be more likely to engage a whole range of actors necessary for its long-term sustainability. This includes experts, users, CSOs, and other partners, donors, teachers, students, universities, supporters, mentors, journalists, and others who can and need to contribute to a digital archive’s successful creation, maintenance, and development—to its continuing life cycle.

The difficulties along the process of creating and developing a digital archive are many and require patience, perseverance, and the readiness of the organization to invest substantial resources and effort—and progress should be measured in small steps. Yet, given that the goal of preserving the painstakingly collected material and giving life to the memory it records is so important and valuable that the trade-off is clear, the seriously challenging process of digital archiving is well worth taking for any CSO with an invaluable archive to preserve.