Emmanuela Carbé

PAD (Pavia Archivi Digitali) is a project developed at the University of Pavia aiming at long-term preservation of born-digital papers by Italian writers and journalists. The structure is part of the University library system and it complements the Centre for Research in the Manuscript Tradition of Modern and Contemporary Authors (Centro Manoscritti, Pavia University). The origin of PAD dates back to 2009, when a first collection of more than 16,000 files was entrusted to PAD with the intent of setting up a digital archive for the preservation of the otherwise undisclosed textual material provided by Italian authors, thus building a wealth of memories that, whilst providing sources for investigating Italian literature and culture of our time, could be extensively accessible to the scholarly community. Over the years, more archives have been bestowed to PAD, so that more than 67,600 files are currently preserved. Since the beginning, great effort has been devoted to the implementation of new technology and processes aiming at achieving better performance and allowing the acquisition of further materials. In fact, evolution in technology, use of different types and versions of software, ever changing storage techniques, from floppy disks to cloud services, tend to introduce severe challenges in securing collective and personal memories of the last decades. In fact, the project is inherently complex as it requires endless updates for its management. It implies the integration of fields that are considerably different from each other: literature, archival techniques, information technology, and legal and administrative considerations.
The quality issue through an efficient management of the workflow is critical to the success of the entire project. Procedure supervision in PAD is supported by a locally developed Quality Control Software, dubbed QUANDO (Quality control for Archiving and Networking Digital Objects), based on the FileMaker platform, initially implemented as a stand-alone application and subsequently ported to a multi-user environment accessible via the Intranet. The software is mainly developed for personal computers and iPad tablets, but it can be accessed through almost any device. The software is able to manage all the aspects of the process, integrating information entered manually with data that has been gathered automatically using a PAD-developed application suite performing a variety of actions on every single archive: checksumming, antivirus scanning, metadata extraction, synchronization, etc.
Besides data treatment, QUANDO supports the many actions implied:  acquisition of the files from the author’s storage devices; convalidation and authentication; preservation management; coordination of staff (academic board, DAMS administrator, repository management, cataloguers, legal consultants); ongoing testing and improvement of the entire workflow.
Keywords: Quality management system, Quality control software, Born-digital archiving, Digital curation, Evaluation, Qualitative methods

The vulnerability of bits and the obsolescence of media raise new challenges with respect to the preservation of cultural heritage produced in the last few decades. In 2009 a research team at the University of Pavia decided to develop the PAD (Pavia Archivi Digitali) project, aimed at the long-time preservation of digital papers from Italian writers and journalists and their accessibility to the research community. PAD is intended to be as flexible as possible in terms of types of material, numbers of authors and the dimensions of their archives: its main feature is an integrated quality control system that manages each single phase of a deposit almost in real time, allowing the ingestion, classification and validation of archives under strict and accurate supervision. The archival system is based on five areas: "staging", "deposit", "permanent", "work", and "info". The most difficult acquisition for PAD has been the archive of Francesco Pecoraro. It has been the best test case for procedures and workflow, for instance the ingestion of files from different media and of the materials published on his blog and on social networks. With the help of Pecoraro's archive, the PAD team designed software that facilitates cataloguing and managing digital archives.

PAD – Pavia Archivi Digitali was created in 2009, alongside the Centre for Research in the Manuscript Tradition of Modern and Contemporary Authors, with the aim of acquiring, preserving and giving access to born- digital papers of contemporary writers and journalists. The archives which were bestowed to PAD so far show a variety of features involving a considerable effort in defining and fine-tuning both the ingest procedures and the management of the preserved papers life-cycle. One of the crucial issues is the preliminary analysis of the logical and technical structure of these archives. For this purpose the writer is interviewed and more information is collected through a specific questionnaire. By combining the two one gains a valuable insight into his or her working methods and files arrangement logic. The literature on the subject is still quite scarce, since researchers have been more keen to focus either on traditional archives or on digital archives though characterized by a greater stability. To share reflections emerged in response to the various acquisitions is therefore the aim of this paper.

L’archiviazione e la conservazione a lungo termine di documenti digitali presenta problematiche molto differenti da quelle che siamo stati abituati ad affrontare nel trattamento di archivi tradizionali di natura prevalentemente cartacea. La novità del tema e la necessità di individuare gli strumenti e le modalità di archiviazione rendono opportuno un confronto con specialisti che abbiano già preso parte allo sviluppo di progetti analoghi.

PAD (Pavia Archivi Digitali) is an archival project of the University of Pavia directed by a board of academic members coming from various fields, which is coordinated by Professor Paul Gabriele Weston. It aims at collecting and preserving born-digital materials provided by Italian authors thus building a wealth of memories that, whilst providing sources for investigating Italian literature and culture of our time, could be extensively accessible to the research community. Evolution in technology, use of different types and versions of software, ever changing storage techniques, from floppy disks to cloud services, tend to introduce severe challenges in securing collective and personal memories of the last decades. At present PAD is preserving materials by five Italian authors totalling more than 67.600 files. These files are copied from the author's storage devices onto a cryptography capable external hard disk, and acquired by PAD using procedures that focus on guaranteeing authenticity and security. For every archive two copies are kept in Pavia and another one more than ninety kilometres away from PAD main site, thus following the principles of Distributed Digital Preservation. The aim of the paper is to outline the state of the project, especially the development of models for file acquisition and usage, privacy and intellectual property protection plans, Quality Control procedures based on an internally developed Quality Management System software, the preservation strategies that have been adopted, and the issues arising in classification and content visualization.