Kathleen O’Neill is a 2020 Staff Innovator with LC Labs and a Senior Archives Specialist in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. She’s shared about Born Digital Access Now!, her Staff Innovator project, in previous posts.
In this post, she discusses her analysis of the various file formats in the Manuscript Division’s born-digital holdings.
As a 2020 Staff Innovator working on the Born Digital Access Now! project, I conducted an analysis of the file formats contained in the Manuscript Division (MSS) holdings. Analyzing and documenting file formats is a necessary first step to mapping the 85 processed collections containing born-digital material to the most suitable access pathway. Additionally, this analysis will inform the development of a pilot digital access workstation with the appropriate specifications and tools.
Some of the questions I sought to answer as part of this analysis included: What file formats are in the Manuscript Division’s collections? How many? What do the file formats tell us about the content in our born-digital collections?