Introduction
This application exists primarily to simplify and standardize the transfer and accessioning of digital records. As archives begin to hold more digital material, it is becoming important to digitize the workflows involved in maintaining the archives. A large amount of records created nowadays are “born-digital,” material that was created first in digital form. This app facilitates the process of sending digital records to an archive, as well as packaging the material and its associated metadata in a standardized way for archivists to view.
This application makes use of two specifications:
BagIt is a file packaging specification that describes a way to securely package a number of files and their associated metadata. In this project, we are using the Python implementation of BagIt, bagit-python.
The Canadian Archival Accession Information Standard (CAAIS) aims to standard the metadata supplied for an accession. The main submission form in this app contains many of the fields in that specification, some have been given a new name in the form to make it easier for a user to understand, but the metadata and reports generated all use the fields in CAAIS verbatim.
What Does this App Do?
For users, this app provides a multi-page submission form with CAAIS-oriented fields and a file upload space to facilitate sending records to an institution. Users also have a profile page where they can:
See their past submissions
Create and view submission groups
Load partially completed “in-progress” submissions
Update their password
Export their submissions in HTML or CSV form
For archivists and other administrators, there’s an administrator website with a number of useful functions for managing the records sent to the institution by donors. Admins can:
Export submission metadata and files as BagIt-compliant Bags
Generate submission reports in HTML or CSV form
Assign accession identifiers to submission metadata
Control the terms users can enter in the form
Manage user accounts