Article

Exactly: A New Tool for Digital File Acquisitions

By: Bertram Lyons
January 13, 2016

AVPreserve and the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries are excited to announce the release of a new tool for born-digital acquisition and delivery.

Building on work originally begun by the Gates Archive, AVPreserve and the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries developed Exactly to meet the growing need for archives to acquire born digital content directly from donors and to begin the activities of establishing provenance and fixity early in the process of acquisition.* Read more about how the Nunn Center is using Exactly here.

Exactly is a simple and easy to use application for remotely and safely transferring any born-digital material from a sender to a recipient. Exactly 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 recipient to create customized metadata templates for the sender to fill out before submission. Exactly can send email notifications with transfer data and manifests when files have been delivered to the archive.

Read more about Exactly’s features in the Users Guide and the Exactly Quickstart tutorial at our Exactly webpage. Downloads for the Exactly application are also available there (Windows executable, Mac OS Build, or Java Package).

* Thanks, also, to StoryCorps and MIT staff for participating in beta testing and requirements documentation efforts.
Exactly-50-small