Archiving a Historic Medico-legal Collection: Automation and Workflow Customization

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) has acquired a historical collection of documents, released by the Food and Drug Administration, specifying the Notices of Judgment (NJs) against manufacturers of adulterated or misbranded food, drugs and cosmetics. These documents, consisting of 70,000+ pages containing more than 65,000 NJs, are to be preserved and made accessible over the long term due to their legal and historical value. We developed a preservation system, named SPER (System for Preservation of Electronic Resources), based on DSpace infrastructure, for archiving and disseminating NJs contained in these documents. For efficiency and cost-effectiveness, we developed algorithms to automatically identify the NJs and extract metadata from their contents, and then have an archivist review and edit the metadata, and ingest the NJs into the archive.