Peabody Digital Access

This policy governs the provision of digital access to Peabody materials that were submitted to BMA as born-digital files. This includes items submitted on disc, hard drive, and flash drive leading up to (and including) the transition to fully digital submissions through OpenWater in 2015. The Peabody identifiers for these items often look like one of these:

• peabody_20163899ent_bag
  • This is a digital submission received through OpenWater, where all files from the entrant were combined into a single bag.
• peabody_2000087ent-supp
  • This is a supplemental (-supp) part of an entry that was submitted on a flash drive. Supplemental files often include photos, letters, promo materials, and other documents.
• peabody_2009007pst
  • This is an entry where the entire item was submitted on a flash drive. It contains the main entry, but may also contain related materials.

All of these objects have one thing in common: when they are digitally preserved, they are retained as entrynumber_bag. This makes it relatively straightforward to determine what Peabody content was born-digital, because it has always ended up as a bag. So, if it has _bag on the end, and it's Peabody, assume it's born-digital.

For a long period of time, there was not a specific policy to dictate how access was provided to these. If the item was a video file, like so much of our other holdings, it made sense to put it in CollectiveAccess. If files were not time-based, it was a bit more difficult to make a decision, and items were often served via Google Drive. To further complicate things, prior to the Peabody migration into CollectiveAccess, even the time-based media was served outside of CA, usually in Kaltura.

So, in order to establish one single, unified policy that eliminated as much guesswork as possible for technicians actually serving the files, we arrived at the following:

All born-digital Peabody materials will be served as media representations attached to the object record in CollectiveAccess, unless we receive a takedown request from an affected party. For entries which submitted materials that were not time-based, those additional materials (whether or not they were marked as a -supp/supplemental part), will also be attached to the object record as media representations. If any materials are a file format that cannot be attached as a representation, technicians may attempt to convert or migrate that file to an acceptable format, and then attach. Files will retain their original filenames as the "Representation identifier" in CollectiveAccess, so that information is also relayed to the user.