These guidelines are focused primarily on hybrid collections, although Scenario B could be modified for use in a fully born-digital collection.
A note on terminology: Ideally, archivists should arrange and describe the born-digital materials and not their storage media. Resource limitations may lead a repository to describe the storage media instead, at least until it can be imaged/processed. For clarity, in these guidelines “media carrier” means either an unprocessed media carrier or the files extracted from a media carrier. A “folder” is a descriptive unit; a “file” is a born-digital file, e.g., a PDF.
A note on Digital Objects: The Digital Object attached to an Archival Object could be a streaming and/or downloadable file. If the described born-digital material is substantial and/or not available online, consider attaching a file manifest as a Digital Object.
Scenario A: Born-Digital Material Within a Physical Folder
Use this approach if a media carrier was located in a paper folder, or if a body of files is placed there intellectually.
- Add an Archival Object (AO) as a child of the Archival Object for the paper folder. The AO could represent one or more media carriers.
- Level of description = File
- Optionally, append “[Born-Digital Materials]” to the title of the AO describing born-digital materials.
- If your repository assigns unique IDs to storage media, enter the unique ID (or range of IDs) in the Component Unique Identifier field.
- Add Processing Information note at the AO level to help researchers understand the relationship between this AO and the parent AO. E.g., Nine floppy disks were originally located in Box 188, Folders 1-4 with the paper materials in “Manuscript draft 1.” Their extracted contents are represented here.
- If this material has a Digital Object (DO), the DO should be attached to the child AO representing the digital material, and not to the parent AO representing the physical folder.
Scenario B: Born-Digital Material Outside of a Physical Folder
Use this approach when born-digital material is integrated into a series or flat hybrid arrangement but is not located inside a physical folder.
- Add an Archival Object (AO) as a sibling of the Archival Objects for paper folders. The AO could represent one or more media carriers or grouping of files.
- Level of description = File
- Optionally, append [Born-Digital Materials] to the title of the AO describing born-digital materials.
- If your repository assigns unique IDs to storage media, enter the unique ID (or range of IDs) in the Component Unique Identifier field.
- Add Processing Information note at the AO level to help researchers understand the relationship between this AO and the parent AO. E.g., Storage media was originally loose in a box and the extracted content has been arranged intellectually.
Scenario C: Born-Digital Material as a Series or Sub-Series
- Series or sub-series title should be “Born-Digital Materials”.
- Use Archival Objects to represent digital materials in whatever quantity makes sense for the collection. An AO could represent anything from a single file to the contents of a hard drive or a digital transfer.
- If your repository assigns unique IDs to storage media, enter the unique ID (or range of IDs) in the Component Unique Identifier field of each AO.
- Add Processing Information note at the series level if needed to help researchers understand the origins of the series.
