MSUL through the University Archives and Historical Collections is the caretaker of MSU's rich history including its born and digitized content. Currently, very little of this digital content is available to students, faculty, staff and the public. This project was proposed as one method of preserving and providing access to these resources. The project is executed with the MSUL's Digital Preservation Working Group as an opportunity to experiment with this tool for use among MSUL units. It also provides an opportunity to collaborate outside MSUL and MSU through our membership in this consortium for hosting Preservica. Ideas and documents are shared using the BaseCamp tool.

Timeline

• Original start was summer 2019 but was put aside due to other priorities after some initial successful testing with basic functionality and training courses.
• Resumed late summer 2020 after merging of the UAHC and SPC collection management tool, ArchivesSpace. Basic functionality rechecked.
• Integration with ArchivesSpace was setup and verified in fall 2020.
• Ingesting of content from previous Archivematica system begun fall 2020. Continue into 2021.
• Other test cases from evaluation plan execution began late 2020. Continue into 2021.
• Preservica user procedures drafting Nov 2020 - Jan 2021.
• Evaluation report draft started December 2020.
• Ingesting content for user experience evaluation Dec 2020 - Jan 2021.
• Public Interface support from MSUL Web Services, Jan - Feb 2021.
• Selected User Experience Evaluation Jan - Mar 2021.
• Complete Evaluation Report Spring 2021. Make recommendations.

Web crawls of 2020 local election websites and Facebook. These websites are very transitory and usually disappear shortly after an election. No one was collecting this information. Metadata was added to the collection and website URLs (seeds). This is a follow-on to a 2019 micro-grant. This effort helped add specialized content for future students and researchers in political science, history and other social sciences. Content also included candidate website from under represented communities in the Greater Lansing area - these are not regularly collected in the historical record.