Digital Objects

Introduction

Digital objects locate digital backlog and processed material. These will typically be created by the Archivist for Digital Curation, who is responsible for creating digital object instances for both accession records and lower-most archival objects in resource records for born-digital mixed materials and born-digital audiovisual material.

In the event that processing archivists need to manually associate digital objects of material stored in Deep Blue (public link), the Bentley's Archive-It instance (public link), the Bentley Image Bank (public link), or the Bentley Digital Media Library (public link) with an archival object, the following instructions have been provided below.

General Workflow

Navigate to the "Instances" section and click on the "Add Digital Object" button at either the header or footer of the Notes section (public link).
Click on the downward pointing arrow next to the search bar and click "Create."
In the "Basic Information" sub-section, give the digital object a title—typically this title will be the same as the parent or associated archival object's title—and an identifier (e.g., a handle or URI that uniquely identifies the digital object). The identifier value will vary based on the origin of the digital material:
- For material in Deep Blue, use the Handle.Net version of the Item URL (e.g., http://hdl.handle.net/2027.42/110305) as opposed to the Deep Blue version (e.g., https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/110305).
- For web archives material stored in the Bentley's Archive-It instance, use the URL to the Captures page as demonstrated in this example (public link). Make sure to use the URL with the collection ID ("5486" in the example), not the organization ID ("org-934").
- For material in the Bentley Image Bank, archivists have two options. To reference a single image, use the "Copy Link" button (under the "Actions" section) to copy that image's permalink. To reference more than one image, coordinate with the Archivist for Digital Curation to to create a folder-level identifier of the appropriate material.
- For material in other sources, like the Bentley Digital Media Library, use the full URL of the material.
- For material in the offline Digital Archive, use the full path to the preservation package.
Next, click on the "Add File Version" button to add a File Version subsection. Complete the following fields in this section:
- File URI: Use the value you used for the "Identifier" field in the "Basic Information" section.
- Make sure the Publish? checkbox is checked off.
- XLink Actuate Attribute: Set to "onRequest".
- XLink Show Attribute: Set to "new".
Click on the "Add Note" button to create a new Note sub-record.
From the "Note Type" drop-down menu, select "General Note" and add text explaining the digital object. Some examples are listed below:
- download item
- access item
- view items
- view selected items
- download zip file
Finally, click the "Create and Link to Digital Object" button to finish making the digital object.

It is important to note the following:

When creating digital objects, make sure there are no whitespaces around the URL. Arclight is very picky about what it considers a URL and doesn't want spaces, returns, tabs, etc. near the link.

Modeling Archival Objects and Digital Objects

Depending on the relationship between archival objects and its digital objects, processing archivists can take one of several actions:

For an ArchivesSpace Archival Object with a Container Instance and a Digital Object that are NOT duplicates, create two children Archival Objects of the original Archival Object. The archival object with the Container Instance will represent the physical object, while the other one with the Digital Object will represent the digital material. See this example for what this would look like in ArchivesSpace (public link).
For an ArchivesSpace Archival Object with a Container Instance and a Digital Object that ARE duplicates, create an Archival Object that has both a Container Instance and a Digital Object. See this example for what this would look like in ArchivesSpace (public link).
For an ArchivesSpace Archival Object with two (or more) Digital Objects, create an Archival Object with two (or more) Digital Objects. The access version should be published and the preservation version should be unpublished. In these cases, use the digital object's general note to distinguish between access versions (e.g., "Access Part 1" and "Access Part 2").