A Unique Arrangement: Organizing Collections for Digital Libraries, Archives, and Repositories

Digital libraries increasingly host collections that are archival in nature, and contain digitized and born-digital materials. In order to preserve the evidentiary value of these materials, the collection organization must capture the general context and preserve the relationships among objects. Archival processing is a well-established method for organizing collections this way. However, the current archival workflow leads to artificial boundaries between materials and delays in getting digitized content online because physical and born-digital materials are processed independently, and digitized materials not at all. In response, this work explores the approach of processing materials in a digitized form using a large multi-touch table. This alternative workflow provides the first step towards integrating the archival processing of digital and physical materials, and can expedite the process of making the materials available online. However, this approach demands high quality digitization and requires that archivists perform additional tasks like matching multi-sided, multipaged documents.