If all goes according to plan, you’ll see a number of software reviews emerge on this site over the next several weeks, as I work through applications that might be suitable for various parts of an archival workflow for electronic records management. Basically, I’ll be using the software as I attempt to work with my test record sets.
While I don’t intend any of these reviews to be the last word regarding any of the projects (after all, it is much easier to be a critic than a performer), I do think that the process of formally ranking the usefulness, etc of various software is a helpful exercise. To that end, I put together a very brief description of my software evaluation criteria, about half way down this page.
While putting these criteria together, I also reorganized my ‘resources’ pages for software and tools into the following categories:
- Ingest (Preservation Planning, Capturing Records, Organizing Records, Characterizing Records, Transforming Records, and Submitting Records)
- Storage/Management
- Access/Dissemintation
- OAIS/TDR Systems
It’s worth noting three things about this list.
- First, I’m trying to take a fairly expansive view of the types of tools that will be needed to effectively manage electronic records. That includes some of the more obvious things like checksum generators and file identification tools, as well as migration software. But I also threw things like file managers, de-duplicators, and renamers into the mix, since they would be essential if reorganizing files.
- Second, as I fill out the ‘recommendations’ section of my blog, I’ll list the tools that I think are most practical for archivists at a smaller repository in that section. In other words, the Resource section is a more complete list of tools than what goes under the recommendations.
- Third, the list is nowhere near complete. It would, of course, be impossible to provide a complete list of tools in one of these areas, much less
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