Spec before Tech: Delivering digital objects using archival principles with DadoCM

Ask your archivist colleague(s) how your digital repository makes them feel. Digital repositories and DAMS are really designed for library-style metadata and single, atomic objects, rather than archival principles which emphasize describing in bulk and representing relationships across records, creators, and functions. This creates major headaches for archivists. Archives users encounter multiple discovery environments with very different user experiences—one for archival description, another for digital objects—often with overlapping materials discoverable in both. Archivists also face duplicative work when digitizing already-processed collections and struggle to deliver complex born-digital materials at scale. To address this, the IMLS-funded ArcLight Integration Project has developed DadoCM, a conceptual model for digital objects in archival description that helps give our wonky archives data some common structure. We see DadoCM as foundational infrastructure that lowers implementation complexity and costs while promoting maintainability and interoperability across multiple different possible implementations. This talk will show how we’re working to make these design patterns accessible to small and under-resourced archival repositories and also demonstrate a local implementation of DadoCM using ArcLight and IIIF. It is possible to use a range of existing software and implementation paths to design digital repositories to work with, rather than sideline, archival principles.