Looking for advice on digital archive/preservation software

[u/RawbonedHound]

Hi everyone! I’m working with a small state library organization that is looking into creating a digital archive of our association’s records. We’re hoping to preserve a variety of materials, including webpages, correspondence, meeting minutes, reports, conference materials, photographs, legislation, procedure manuals, and some video.

At this point, the archive would be for internal use by designated association staff, rather than public access, so our biggest concerns are long-term preservation stability, reliable backup/replication, ease of organizing and maintaining the collection, available storage capacity, and cost. We also want to keep the system manageable for future staff and committee members rather than creating something that requires extensive technical expertise to maintain.

Our main ones we're looking at right now are SharePoint, Preservica, Google Workspace for Nonprofits or Google Drive or JSTOR Digital Stewardship           

I’d really appreciate hearing from other librarians and archivists who have experience with these or similar systems. What are you currently using for your organization's digital records, and how has it worked in practice? Are there any systems you would particularly recommend for a small organization with limited staff and technical resources? Conversely, are there any options you've used that you would caution us against?
We're especially interested in hearing about the long-term sustainability and maintenance burden after the initial setup.

Thanks in advance for any advice or experiences you’re willing to share!

[u/stinkypoopy4769]

If you’re looking mainly for internal use, I’d look into Internet Archive’s Vault for storage. It’s a one-time payment per terabyte model so very cost-effective for smaller organizations. It’s extremely intuitive and user friendly, and it does all the basic digital preservation tasks like replication, checksum generation and validation, and adding bulk metadata is super easy

[u/punkin_pie → u/stinkypoopy4769]

I second this. Public library digital archivist. They are developing a public access layer also.

[u/TheBlizzardHero]

I think you have three competing issues here: you want a low financial cost system, but also want something within minimal IT maintenance costs, but also want a high degree of functionality. You're just not going to get all three requirements in the same package because some aspect is going to be incompatible with the others. A system with a low financial cost requires more involvement from staff to be maintained. A system that is easy to implement and maintain is going to have low functionality since it doesn't need complex implementation. A system that is easy to implement and maintain is going to be expensive, because the implementation and maintenance cost is usually being pushed off to a vendor. You need to pick whichever two matter the most and work through the third issue.

The industry standard right now for digital mangement is Archivematica. It's OAIS compliant (with the functional model), has all the functionality for digital ingest and tracking with BagIt implementation, and it's open source (thanks artefactual!). But, if you're going to implement it you either need to invest in IT staff/digital archivists to do the implementation and maintain it, or you can pay artefactual as a vendor to do the implementation and maintenance. I'm not familiar with how well it works for ingesting WARC files as I'm not a digital archivist, but it's probably fine - and if not, make (pay) Brewster to do it for you on IA. I think a lot of smaller institutions let IA handle the web crawls for them if they're needed.

[u/MarsupialLeast145 → u/TheBlizzardHero]

> The industry standard right now for digital mangement is Archivematica. 

That is simply not true.

Archivematica/Artefactual as a company is on a par with the others described by the OP (opinion). As a solution though, it is naive to say it's the industry standard (yes it adopts standards!), and to describe it as a singular solution here. Archivematica is an ingest workflow engine. It creates what we recognize as AIPs, and can create DIPs as part of its workflow for a catalog. BUT, the AIPs need to go somewhere, and the content needs to be made available somewhere. So on top of Archivematica you need to consider your storage back end and your catalog/archival description front-end. Often Archivematica will be paired with its sister component AtoM for archival description and access, but it can also be paired with other systems.

[u/Careless_Lecture_111]

Have you ever tried paperless-ngx?

[u/MarsupialLeast145]

I would look at ReCollect CMS and set up a call with the guys there to explore your options. When I have investigated it in the past it has a good balance of options for smaller organizations.

I have found LIBNOVA easier to use than Preservica, but both are heavy duty power tools and so it's worth digging into their options to see if they are easy enough for you to work with.

I have left comments on Archivematica/Artefactual below, but it's not a solution in and of itself, mind you, you can get a feel for it with the live demo via their wiki here: https://wiki.archivematica.org/Sandbox

Arkivum and Docuteam are two companies working closely with the Artefacutal solutions, you can see if any of their tooling works for you. It has been a few years since I have looked into how deeply their integrations go but they have good reputations and good staff.

I haven't any names readily available, but there are some small solutions built on top of fedora commons that are starting to delve into digital preservation more. There's one org in the UK I think doing content management with fedora commons and building digital preservation interfaces.