Scope: Digital Archivist and Curator

Contact: Emmeline Evans Kaser 

Unit: ATS

Date last updated: March 2025

Date of next review:

Pre-Accession Appraisal 

Curators should work with donors to understand the content and basic properties of their born-digital material. Ideally, the majority of appraisal will happen before the files are transferred to CUL.

It is helpful to keep in mind that born-digital materials require ongoing maintenance that goes far beyond initial processing, arrangement, and description. Digital preservation includes (but is not limited to) regular authenticity checking, format monitoring and format migration, as well as the maintenance and migration of digital preservation systems. 

Questions for Donors

• How much digital material is there? Can you provide any information about the volume (MB/GB/TB) and the number of files? 

• Where are the files currently stored?  

• • On pieces of physical media, e.g. hard drives, CDs, floppy disks? If stored on media, as about the number and type of media (e.g. an album of CDs, 2 hard drives, etc.) 

• • In a cloud storage account, e.g. Google Drive, Box, OneDrive?  

• • If anything is stored on a device (e.g. a laptop, tablet, or phone), ask that they copy the files to a hard drive or cloud storage account. 

• Do you know the approximate dates when the digital files were created?  

• • What kind of device were they created on? (PC/Mac/tablet/phone/digital camera/etc.) 

• Are there any restrictions on the digital files? 

• • Are you aware of any sensitive information (information that should not be made available to the public for legal/confidentiality reasons, because it contains private cultural knowledge, and/or because it poses a personal or financial risk to an individual like SSNs, credit card numbers, login credentials, bank information, etc.) that could impact our ability to provide access to the files? 

• Do you know of any unusual formats in the files?  

• • If so, can you provide the names of the software or devices that created the files?  

• For hybrid collections: do all or part of the digital materials duplicate the paper materials?  
  

Using the Airtable Pre-Accession Form 

Every new accession containing born-digital material must have an accompanying pre-accession form filled out. If the collection is hybrid (a mix of paper and digital), the curator only needs to fill out one form for the whole accession – each form contains fields for describing both analog and digital components.  

• Pre-accession form

If the “Digital material present” field is selected (“Yes”), then the Digital Archivist will automatically receive an email alerting them that a new digital accession has been added. 

If you have any questions about the digital-related fields on the pre-accession form or would like assistance filling it out, please reach out to the Digital Archivist, Emmeline Evans Kaser, via email or Slack.