As the semester begins to wind down, so does my time as a Research Assistant at the London Life Corporate Archives. It has been an amazing opportunity to continue exploring the realm of digital archives practices.
For instance, this week I’ve been working on learning the new-ish Library of Congress Digital Preservation Software: Bagger. Bagger was developed in 2009 by the Library of Congress, Stanford University, and the California Digital Library as a specification to support the “reliable transfer” of digital content from one computer to another.
While the majority of my work experience in archives has been focused on digitizing physical archival materials, learning Bagger has allowed me to explore the collection and management practices for born-digital archival documents.
Much like how we as students are taught to back-up our files to avoid losing our work – the Library of Congress and other libraries and archives must be able to do the same without creating opportunities for loss or manipulation of files. Manual content transfers can fail for a variety of reasons including: human error, equipment failure, network corruption, inscrutable digital voodoo, etc. Additionally, transferring digital content successfully can be a challenge as there are no standards with which the content is created. Different organizations have different policies and different technologies that can make the transfers hard to arrange.
Bagger is a specification that supports the transfer of content in self-contained packages called “bags.” A digital bag is used to send content – much like an envelope would be used to send a letter through the post – from one computer to another. The bags can support any type of file format imaginable including: pictures, movies, audio, text, powerpoint, spreadsheets, and even other folders. Creating a bag is as simple as downloading the Bagger opensource software and reading through the user guide. After that, you just create a new folder on your hard drive or institutional server and Bob’s your uncle!
Okay so there’s a few more steps involved but it’s really not that complicated.
Downloading the software is probably the most difficult part of the whole process. There are several versions on the site and other links and ads that one could mistakably click on and download the wrong thing. Luckily, the guys at Bagger have created a User Guide that is fairly easy to follow and helps to navigate all the steps in the downloading process. The software downloads as a zip file so I was glad to have the guide to show me how and where to unzip the file and save it.
Within the zip file download there are several different files. Again, I was glad to have the User Guide to follow which file I should open to access the program. But as soon as I had that sorted out, it was mostly smooth sailing.
I decided I wanted to create a bag for the digital scans I’d been working on: three folders of 474 images total, plus two word documents. I created a folder on my C Drive called “Lovell_Scans_20181119_bag.” The User Guide recommended using underscores instead of spaces, including the date of creation, and the word “bag” at the end so it could be easily identified.
From there I used the “Create Bag” feature and followed the specifications outlined in the User Guide. There are several drop down menus that appear and the User Guide tells you what option to use without explaining why or what would happen if you were to choose a different setting – but I chose to trust the guide and created my bag without a problem.
I then had to add “payload” or content to my bag – which again was an easy process. Click the + button on the payload tab, locate the files I wanted on my hard drive, select them, follow the settings from the User Guide and wait for Bagger to create my bag.
476 files took around 5-7 minutes to load. After checking that my bag was populated with the 3 things the user guide specified it should have, I went back to Bagger and tried to validate the content.
The bag should contain:
A bag declaration
A list of content files
The contents itself inside a “data” folder
Bagger has a built-in inventory checker – the validation feature – which allows the user to be sure that every file in the “bag” transferred successfully and that no alterations/deletions were made. Selectin the “Validate Bag” feature in the Bagger application will verify that the content in the “data” folder matches the list of contents file. If three green checkmarks appear in the “Console” tab – completed, valid, profile complain – the inventory matches and the transfer was successful.
Bags can be sent between computers on a shared network or manually moved using portable storage devices. Essentially, the bags crated through Bagger are standardized file collection containers that sole the problem of their contents not being standardized. They “transcend differences in institutional data, data architecture, formats and practices” making it easy to automate the ingestion of data.
So after testing it out, Bagger is a really effective tool for digital preservation. It is decently user-friendly and has the ability to support a plethora of file formats. My favourite thing about this software is that it’s free, which means that small archives can also make use of its amazing features without financial burden. You can check out the introductory video on the Library of Congress website or download the software and User Guide to start exploring Bagger for yourself.