Article

Exactly: A New Tool for Born-Digital Acquisitions!

By: Bertram Lyons
October 27, 2015

In honor of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage, AVPreserve and the the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries are excited to announce the upcoming release of a new tool for born-digital acquisition and delivery.

Building on work originally begun by the Gates Archive, the Nunn Center and AVPreserve have created Exactly, a simple and easy to use application for remotely and safely transferring any born-digital material to the archive. Exactly is a user-friendly application that utilizes the BagIt File Packaging Format (an Internet Engineering Task-Force standard, developed by the Library of Congress and the California Digital Library, with current support from George Washington University and the University of Maryland), supports FTP transfer, as well as standard network transfers, and integrates into desktop-based file sharing workflows such as Dropbox or Google Drive. Additionally, Exactly allows the archive to create customized metadata templates for the donor to fill out before submission. With structured metadata coming into the archive with the digital object, the accessioning process will be a quick importing activity. Exactly can send email notifications when files have been delivered to the archive. Exactly is addressing one of the Nunn Center’s greatest workflow challenges, but also one of the greatest challenges facing any archive working with born-digital material. Stay tuned for more about the release of Exactly.

Read more about Exactly’s history from Doug Boyd of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries here: http://digitalomnium.com/exactly-a-new-tool-to-safely-transfer-born-digital-materials-to-the-archive/.