UC Irvine

Archival staff in the Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) at Princeton University Library lacked a fully-equipped digital processing workstation to capture, transfer, and secure born-digital and digitized archival content for long-term preservation and access. Staff recently conducted a survey that included information about the digital processing workstations of twenty institutions. The results of this survey informed a successful proposal to acquire a Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device (FRED) to serve as our digital processing workstation. The article will share details about the survey and considerations that went into our decision-making process, as well as introduce a collaborative tool to assist archivists in sharing specifications about their workstations across the field.