Deposit Service: our first service up and running!
13 October 2022 was a milestone for our team: it was the soft launch of the Cambridge University Libraries’ Deposit Service. This is a proud moment and one for us to celebrate.
The Deposit Service is the first service to be delivered by the Digital Preservation Programme, and it is also the first cloud-native service to be built from the ground up by an in-house team at Cambridge University Libraries.
I am writing this blog post from my perspective as the Product Owner for the Deposit Service. In my role as Product Owner, I liaised with users of the service and the development team to create and prioritise requirements and communicate feedback, created user documentation, provided training to archives colleagues. I also navigated guidance around data protection, where I drew upon my experience working as an archivist. There will be more detail (e.g., providing technical information) in forthcoming blogs written by other members of the team.
Why start here?
Archivists at the University Library (UL) have been collecting digital materials as part of archival collections for over fifteen years. This work has been historically carried out on an ad-hoc basis using a variety of deposit methods and ‘temporary’ storage solutions, including receiving materials via email and, more recently, using internet-based file sharing services, such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
Up to now, there has been no single identified service that depositors can use to securely send their materials to the UL over the web. The need to collect born-digital archives pre-dates the creation of services to support the preservation of and provision of access to them and in common with many other collecting institutions, there has not been a specific decision to collect digital formats because decisions to collect archival materials are based on criteria of content, not format.
It makes sense for the programme to start here: to support CUL’s mission to acquire as well as make discoverable and accessible world-class information resources, there is a pressing need for archivists to be able to securely take in a variety of digital materials from depositors. The Deposit Service will enable archivists and Digital Preservation team members to view digital materials and to collect and create metadata about them that can be integrated with metadata in the Archive Management System (AMS). Meeting these demands will deliver immediate and appreciable benefits to the organisation and to internal and external stakeholder groups.
Requirements for the Deposit Service
To start drawing together requirements for the Deposit Service, the Digital Preservation team reviewed the research into requirements carried out during the Digital Preservation Oxford and Cambridge project (2016–2018), that was funded by the Polonsky Foundation, to determine which requirements were still relevant. The team also reviewed lessons learned from implementing the Archive Management System (AMS) and from setting up a temporary workflow to rapidly collect digital materials created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic by members of the University and wider Cambridge communities. The next step was to produce an updated set of requirements to inform design and development work, as well as to establish which requirements would be essential.
Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
To deliver a solution that stakeholders can use early on, the programme uses the concept of an MVP. The aim of this approach is to avoid lengthy and potentially unnecessary work, with developers iterating on versions and responding to feedback from users to challenge and validate assumptions to ensure a closer match with requirements. An MVP will also enable digital collection materials to be submitted to a preservation workflow as early as possible, while incremental improvements can continue to be made to meet more complex use cases.
Data Protection and digital collections
A Data Protection Privacy Impact Assessment (DPIA) was carried out in conjunction with the University’s Information Governance team to ensure that the Deposit Service (as well as other services delivered by the Programme) will be compliant with data protection legislation.
Data protection guidance for users was also added to the Deposit Service to explain how we use and look after personal information about users of the service, and the personal information about other people that is (or could be) contained in the digital materials that users give to CUL. CUL preserves its collections for long term public benefit, so it is permitted to process personal data (including special category data) where necessary for archiving purposes in the public interest.
Working with stakeholders: the Born-Digital Archives Working Group
Embedding digital preservation activities and new processes and workflows into the day-to-day work of archivists at the UL will involve significant changes to current ways of working. To engage the archive team with this process from the start and to help build confidence with born-digital archives, a Born-Digital Archives Working Group (BDAWG) was established, and I am chair of this group. The group includes members of the Digital Preservation team as well as archivists from across the UL and areas of the University who have significant expertise in different types of archival materials–including personal papers and institutional records–and in negotiating with depositors.
Accessioning is the first step in the archival process at CUL: it is the point when archival material is transferred into custody and an archivist first establishes intellectual (and often physical) control over the material. Discussions about accessioning archives in the BDAWG revealed a wide range of current practice that is driven by responding to preferences and circumstances of donors or depositors. Multiple depositors can be involved in individual accessions and some accessions are deposited incrementally over periods of months, even years. The complexity of current practice can sometimes involve archivists in unnecessary and time-consuming labour: it can be almost as time-consuming to accession an extensive collection as it is to accession an individual item.
Five deposit scenarios, each reflecting the information that archivists had shared about current ways of working and types of digital materials in scope for deposit, were drawn up. The scenarios were:
- A transfer of administrative records by multiple University staff members.
- A theme-based/artificially created collection (e.g., the Covid-19 Collection).
- Materials that are deposited prior to appraisal to determine whether they are suitable for adding to the Library’s collections.
- Hybrid donation (of digital and analogue materials) as an addition to an existing collection.
- Materials that have already been accepted using temporary solutions.
For each of the five scenarios, a simple workflow was proposed based on using the MVP for the Deposit Service. The feasibility of implementing the workflow was discussed, and these discussions helped to confirm that the MVP will be sufficiently flexible to accommodate the archivists’ most pressing needs.
The BDAWG has shown benefits beyond determining requirements for the Deposit Service. It has helped to build connections across different areas of expertise in the UL and close gaps between departments. In designing the Deposit Service for digital collections through discussion with the stakeholders, opportunities to improve or simplify existing practice were identified collaboratively and have demonstrated how preservation thinking should be considered within a larger collection management context.
User Acceptance Testing
The MVP was ready for testing at the end of July 2022 when I carried out first round of user acceptance testing (UAT), drafted guidance for internal and external users and identified a set of issues. Most issues with the Deposit Service website were easy to resolve and fell into two categories:
- usability issues connected with navigation
- cosmetic issues about the wording, size, and placement of text
By 19 August, the Deposit Service MVP was ready for testing by a larger group of representatives of the BDAWG and the Libraries’ Accessibility and User Experience Teams. The group tested the site and reviewed the documentation. Overall, the feedback was very positive as the testers found the design and look and feel of the site clear. Suggestions for improvements included straightforward changes to improve accessibility (e.g., adding ALT tags to buttons and left-aligning text in columns) and user experience (e.g., moving help button to the top right of the screen).
In total over fifty changes were made to the Deposit Service and supporting documentation following UAT. These have cumulatively made a big improvement. Some issues raised (e.g., enabling depositors to transfer directories containing multiple files) are more substantial both in terms of the improvements they would deliver and the amount of development work that would be required. These suggestions are all recorded and will inform consideration of future requirements.
Deposit Service next steps
In future blog posts we will share more information about what we are learning from taking in digital archive collections. This is likely to include feedback on work liaising with depositors about the content of their collections and designing metadata templates to secure high quality metadata knowledge about how the digital materials were originally created, used, and managed. The metadata will provide essential context to ensure that the files can continue to be understood and used and we hope that using templates to capture it will make it easy to ingest the data into our AMS. We’ll also soon be sharing more details of how we developed and built the service on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.
And finally …
A massive thanks to everyone involved in the Deposit Service — all those involved in the Digital Preservation Programme, colleagues from the BDAWG, the Department of Archives and Modern Manuscripts, User Experience, and Accessibility teams.
