Digital Archives for City Department of Health Marketing Comms Division

THE PROBLEM

The Director of the Health Media and Marketing division of a City’s Department needed to set up a Digital Archives. He was retiring after 20 years and wanted to facilitate knowledge transfer and share insights. Also, he wanted to create a digital repository. He was confident it would be good for his successors, staff and would increase awareness.

Over the years, he had surreptitiously saved and stored examples of past campaigns in a storage closet.
In addition, he also knew of others who were preserving digital campaigns on a shared network drive.  As retirement neared, he needed to set up a Digital Archives or a system to share information digitally.

THE SOLUTION

So a team of archivists came up with a plan that would create an inventory of print resources and would begin to build the foundation of a Digital Archives.  As a result, these steps would ultimately lead to  inventories of digital, media, and analog materials, and would create descriptive metadata including, in some cases, shooting representative reference photos for media assets.

Ultimately, the inventory and the reference photos would be ingested and related in a central repository.

Then a team of archivists created content inventory, purchased archival supplies, rehoused the materials, and began to focus on increasing awareness and intellectual control.

THE RESULTS

The inventory spreadsheet served as a finding aid. This helped build awareness of print materials and historical resources.  In phase 2, the team focused on creating controlled vocabularies and improving intellectual control. They also

• updated inventory with user-friendly terms (e.g. campaign taglines, formats, languages, dates, location)
• labeled shelves and storage areas and rehoused items in archival-quality enclosures
• enhanced metadata, mapped it, and ingested the spreadsheet into a CMS
• uploaded and attached reference photos and worked on improving User Experience

As a result, the Department has built an archival collection containing nearly 1,000 images from past campaigns and history. Print materials had been digitized and ingested, and the metadata and thumbnails allow a new generation to benefit from and appreciate the past. And, for the first time in years, staff has access to more than 30 years of its health materials and marketing campaigns.