Paradigm

Project Description:

The Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (paradigm) project saw the major research libraries of the Universities of Oxford and Manchester come together to explore the issues involved in preserving digital private papers through gaining practical experience in accessioning and ingesting digital private papers into digital repositories, and processing these in line with archival and digital preservation requirements. The project outcomes included: producing a template for ensuring long-term access for institutional holdings of digital personal papers; best-practice guidelines in the form of a workbook on issues relating to the archiving of personal papers in digital form, made available in sections as they are completed; templates for institutional policies for collection development, retention, and disposal; practical test of digital repository softwares DSpace and Fedora and related tools. The project also collected new research resources for 20th century political history in the form of new archival collections.