Walking in my shoes: a case study from a born-digital archive

The vulnerability of bits and the obsolescence of media raise new challenges with respect to the preservation of cultural heritage produced in the last few decades. In 2009 a research team at the University of Pavia decided to develop the PAD (Pavia Archivi Digitali) project, aimed at the long-time preservation of digital papers from Italian writers and journalists and their accessibility to the research community. PAD is intended to be as flexible as possible in terms of types of material, numbers of authors and the dimensions of their archives: its main feature is an integrated quality control system that manages each single phase of a deposit almost in real time, allowing the ingestion, classification and validation of archives under strict and accurate supervision. The archival system is based on five areas: "staging", "deposit", "permanent", "work", and "info". The most difficult acquisition for PAD has been the archive of Francesco Pecoraro. It has been the best test case for procedures and workflow, for instance the ingestion of files from different media and of the materials published on his blog and on social networks. With the help of Pecoraro’s archive, the PAD team designed software that facilitates cataloguing and managing digital archives.