It is highly unlikely that you will have to ingest materials, even digital materials. As collections come in, they are accessioned and ingested by the archivist that receives them. 

But it is important for you to know how collections come in, where they live, and how to add your own packages. You will need to ingest if you capture born-digital material and need to add it to a preexisting collection. For example, an accession may include a thumb drive whose contents will need to be imaged/captured and added to our repository of digital materials. 

Ingesting scans of paper materials, digitized audio or video content, or born-digital materials, places them in a consistent storage with a backup. This prevents files from getting lost or accidentally deleted and ensures that they will be managed overtime. When materials are accessioned, they create a collection level folder within the “backlog” folder of “SPE_Processing”.

This collection folder contains, at the first level, individual collection packages that correspond to their specific accession. Collections that contain multiple accessions, with multiple born digital or digitized materials, will have multiple packages but those with a single accession will only have one.  

Note: At the end of the digital archival process, the “Package AIP” step will package and move the entire collection folder to the AIP, meaning every package folder within the larger collection folder. All package folders must be ready for packaging at the point of the “Package AIP” step. 

Within each package are three folders, “derivatives”, “masters”, and “metadata”.

The “masters” folder contains a copy of the materials as they are donated to us. The SPE_Processing Folder exists in the Submission Information Package (SIP), and a second, read-only copy is created in \\Lincoln\Masters\Archives\SIP in a bagit bag. You shouldn't have to worry about this copy, but this way we always have a second copy of the ingested files in case of errors or accidental deletion. 

The masters folder is most useful for surveying and assessing the collection. It will help you to understand the “original order” (or disorder as we often find) of the materials and help to see if there are pre-existing groupings, duplications, or logic to the current arrangement of the materials. 

The “derivatives” folder is a space for you to work and organize the files from the master folder. You should copy the files from masters, not just move them as you will want the master to remain as close to the original submission as possible. By using the derivatives folder, you can organize the folders by series (if applicable), and then use the bulk upload process to upload your pre-grouped files.

The “metadata” folder is used to hold the metadata that is generated through processing the materials. The data entry sheets for bulk uploading will be stored here, and if any disk imaging or mail bagging (email capture) occurs, the metadata from those processes will be saved here as well.

Within the Processing App, there is a tab labeled “Ingest” with two dropdown options: “Ingest Digitized Material” and “Accession Born-Digital Materials”.

The first option, leads to a webpage specifically for materials linked to a collection that already exists within our backlog folder. Meaning, it has already been accessioned. 

The steps for ingesting digital materials are as follows:

1. Ensure there is a folder within the ingest folder in SPE_Processing with your collection ID (ex: apap000, ger000, mss000). If one does not already exist, make one. 

   1. Path to ingest folder is: \\Lincoln\Library\SPE_Processing\ingest

   2. Files here can have subfolders and any structure that is useful for preserving any meaningful order.

ingest/

    ├─ apap101/

    │  ├─ minutes.docx

    │  ├─ report.pdf

    ├─ ua950.012/

    │  ├─ Issue1/

    │  │  ├─ page1.tif

    │  │  ├─ page2.tif

    │  │  │  ...   

3. Derivatives and metadata files can be added pre-ingest by placing them in subfolders for "derivatives" and "metadata" within the collection ID folder. Note: this means that original files cannot have root directories named "derivatives" or "metadata.

ingest/

    ├─ ua746/

    │  ├─ image1.png

    │  ├─ image2.png

    │  ├─ ...

    │  ├─ derivatives/

    │  │  ├─ image1.jpg

    │  │  ├─ image2.jpg

    │  │  ├─ ...

    │  ├─ metadata/

    │  │  ├─ image_list.csv

    ├─ ...

2. Enter the collection ID into the Ingest tab of the processing app, and click “Submit” 

3. Checkout the log to see if the ingest was successful or had any errors.

Results of Ingest

• Files will be packaged into a SIP bag here: \\Lincoln\Masters\Archives\SIP\<collection ID>\<package ID>

  • You cannot edit or access these folders, so feel free to work with the folders and files in the backlog in a way that best aligns with the collection. You can always ask Greg to restore the package back to its original condition/replace files should you need to

You should not be working with new born-digital materials that haven't been accessioned in ASpace yet.