Draft: Subject to Change
Case Study Notes
The purpose of this case study is to illustrate the heterogeneous nature of an ingest project. A non-trivial portion of ingest projects involve a single homogeneous set of records, such as paper course syllabi from the Office of Educational Affairs, School of Medicine. A majority of ingest projects involve a heterogeneous mix of records that usually have multiple clusters of records called series. The different series within a single ingest project covered by a single submission agreement have different attributes from each other that need to be documented in the submission agreement. This case study illustrates how a single ingest project can have multiple series that have different attributes.
Case Study
Producer
The Department of Widget Science, an academic department within the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University. It offers an undergraduate major and minor. It also has a small graduate program granting an MA and a PhD. It has 15 faculty and two administrators.
Records Transferred to the Digital Collections and Archives (DCA), Tufts University
The Department of Widget Science is transferring a mix of paper and electronic records to the DCA that is covered by a single regular submission agreement. This transfer is an ingest project.
Intellectually, the ingest project has five groups, referred to as series:
Departmental Meeting Minutes
Description Minutes that document the monthly meetings of the department faculty.
Date Fall 1990 to Spring 2008 with occasional gaps
Format Paper (Fall 1990 to Fall 2000); MS Word (Spring 2001 to Spring 2007); PDF (Fall 2007 to Spring 2008)
Copyright As administrative records the copyright is owned by Tufts University
Access Rights As typical administrative records that do not contain personal information, these records will be restricted for 20 years from the date of creation. Only staff and faculty members of the Department of Widget Science will be able to view records before the access restriction is lifted. Others can look at these restricted records with permission of the Department of Widget Science. When records become 20 years old, the DCA will consult with the Department of Widget Science before lifting the restrictions. The DCA assigns the following access category to these records: Category 3: General University Records, Closed 20 years from records creation. See Access Policy.
Record Type The DCA assigns the following records type to these records: See 910 Meeting Minutes and Agenda.
Retention Period Permanent
Departmental Course Booklets
Description Booklets the department used to print and now posts online that describes its course offerings each semester. These descriptions often provide more detail than the Arts & Sciences course bulletin.
Date Fall 1995 to Spring 2008
Format Paper (Fall 1995 to Spring 2007); PDF posted on department website (Fall 2007 to Spring 2008)
Copyright Owned by Tufts University
Access Rights As records were widely distributed at the time of their creation, these records have no access restrictions. Category 2: Universal Distribution, Open without restriction. See Access Policy.
Record Type See 520 Course Bulletins and Catalogs.
Retention Period Permanent
Course Syllabi
Description Syllabi of Department of Widget Science courses. The syllabi are usually five to ten page documents with a course description and outline, administrative information, reading list, and assignments. The syllabi, the paper ones at least, in this Ingest Project were collected by one of the department administrators. So the syllabi are coming from the Department, not individual faculty. Also, syllabi in the learning management systems are part of this ingest project at the request of a department administrator so the the DCA is considering that they also come from the department and not individual faculty.
Date Fall 1995 to Spring 2008
Format Paper (Fall 1995 to Spring 2003); Electronic course syllabi in Blackboard, a commercial learning management system (Fall 2003 to Spring 2008); two courses in TUSK, Tufts University Science Knowledgebase, a TUSK-developed learning management system for courses on the health science campus. (Fall 2007 to Spring 2008). These two course are cross registered with the School of Medicine.
Copyright Owned by Tufts University
Access Rights Category 2: Universal Distribution. See Access Policy.
Record Type See 540 Course Materials.
Retention Period Permanent
News Clippings
Description Three scrapbooks of news clippings from the Tufts student newspaper, and local, regional, and national publications about the department and its faculty members. A department administrator created and maintain these scrapbooks during the 1990s. The department has not created news clippings since 2000.
Date 1990-2000
Format Paper scrapbook.
Copyright Owned by the publisher or author of each individual article.
Access Rights Category 2: Universal Distribution. See Access Policy.
Record Type News Clippings. See 940 News Clippings.
Retention Period Permanent
Lecture Series Records
Description These are a mix of records that document the Larkin Monadnock Memorial Lecture Series, which brings five speakers to Tufts every year to give lectures on topics related to widget science. The records include administrative records securing speakers, publicity materials (announcements, flyers, posters, etc), and moving image recordings of speakers from 2004 to 2007.
Date 1998 to 2007.
Format Paper (administrative records); paper (publicity materials); Mini-DV tapes (recordings of speakers, 2005 to 2007).
Copyright All publicity and event planning documents: Owned by Tufts University. Recordings of speakers: Owned by individual speakers; two 2007 speakers signed licensing agreements with the Department of Widget Science that allows Tufts to distribute the recordings on the web.
Access Rights Administrative records: Category 3: General University Records, Closed 20 years from records creation. Publicity materials and recordings of speakers: Category 2: Universal Distribution, Open without restriction. See Access Policy.
Record Type See 935 Event Records.
Retention Period Permanent
Chair’s Subject Files
Description These are a single alpha run of paper subject files that belonged the former department chair, Norbert Flunderghast. The files include a mix of correspondence, memos, reports, and notes. Most of the subjects are individuals, committees, institutions, departments, and work activities.
Date 1994 to 2004.
Format Paper (all files).
Copyright Owned by Tufts University. Some reports in the subject files are authored by external institutions and individuals, the authors own the copyright of these records.
Access Rights These files include some sensitive letter discussing individual Tufts faculty and staff. Therefor the DCA applies Category 1: Personal Information, Closed 75 years from records creation or until the death of the record’s subject, whichever is longer. See Access Policy.
Record Type See 980 Subject and Project Files.
Retention Period Permanent