The No-Nonsense Guide to Born-Digital Content

Heather Ryan & Walker Sampson

Libraries and archives of all sizes are collecting and managing an increasing proportion of digital content. Within this body of digital content is a growing pool of ‘born-digital’ content: content that has been created and has often existed solely in digital form. Providing continued, sustainable access to a wide array of born-digital content is a challenge for libraries and archives, particularly because of the broad and highly technical skills needed to build and sustain born-digital content management workflows.

The No-Nonsense Guide to Born Digital Content provides an entry level how-to guide that aims to help ease inexperienced students and practitioners into this area. It explains step by step processes for developing and implementing born-digital content workflows in library and archive settings of all sizes and includes a range of case studies collected from small, medium and large institutions internationally. Coverages includes:

• the wide range of digital storage media and the various sources of born-digital content;
• an overview of digital information basics; 
• selection, acquisition, accessioning, and ingest;
• description, preservation, and access;
• methods for designing and implementing workflows for born-digital collection processing;
• a comprehensive glossary of common technical terms; and
• strategies and philosophies to move forward as technologies change.