work in progress

DART (Digital Archivist's Resource Tool) is a tool for creating bags (based on the BagIt specification). If you are acquiring material that are confident that material being transferred is very straightforward (for example a transfer hard drive of photographs) and doesn’t need to be scanned for viruses, PII, or characterized before entering Archivematica, we can put it in a bag to ensure the transfer has checksums (to ensure nothing changes when moved) and some minimal metadata.

Installing DART and importing settings

If you are using one of the Windows based processing computers, you will have to install DART and import the settings.

If you are using DART within BitCurator or the Mac processing computer, you can skip ahead to the Creating and transferring the bag section.

Install

  1. To install DART, go to the DART docs page and download the .exe file under "Download" for Windows.
  2. Double-click the installer after download and follow the prompts on screen. Windows may give a warning, select more information, and then run anyway.
  3. There should now be a shortcut on your desktop, click it and DART should open.

Import settings

  1. Go to Settings > Import Settings
  2. Select the Import from URL option
  3. Enter this URL: https://github.com/jfcarrano/archives-docs/blob/master/dart_settings/MIT_ProccessingTeam_settings.json
  4. Click Import
  5. The settings import will show if it successful on screen. You should now be ready to start using DART.

Creating and transferring the bag

  1. If you haven't already, open DART
  2. Go to Jobs > New in the menu header 
  3. Drag and drop any folders or files you want to transfer onto the DART window. When ready click Next >>.
  4. Under BagIt Profile, select the profile most appropriate for the content you are transferring.
    1. MIT Institute Archives Collections (AC) for archival collections
    2. MIT Manuscript Collections (MC) for manuscript collections
  5. For Serialization, select ".tar"
  6. Package Name should be the accession number with an underscore in between, followed by “acc” for instance “2020_099acc”. Or if you are transferring the package as part of a group, we will omit the acc and replace it with _001, etc, for instance: "2020_099_001". The package name will be the name of the folder produced in the new location.
  7. Output path is the location where the files will be going to. Edit the location after entering all the other information (leaving the package name) or it will revert to the default location. This could be a local processing folder or the submission drive. Choose one of the following to send items to the Transfer folder that will be ready to go through Archivematica:
    1. On Windows: [drive letter for submission]:\Transfer (for example Z:\Transfer)
    2. On Macs: /Volumes/submission/transfer
    3. On BitCurator: /(fill in)

  8. Click Next >>
  9. On the Bag Metadata page, click the "Show All Tags" button at the top of the page. This will allow you to see fields that have default or partially filled-in values that you can adjust for your particular transfer.

  10. Enter or adjust any metadata related to the transfer following the help text (hover over the "?" symbol to see this for each field).

  11. Click Next >>
  12. The Upload Targets page should be blank, this is only used when sending content to a cloud service, Click Next >>

  13. On the next page, review the job, you can go back if you need to adjust something by clicking Back>>, if not, click the "Run Job" button

  14. The progress screen will show when the bag is created and validated. If successful, move on to the Adding submission documentation to the bag. If it fails, try the process again or contact the digital archivist.

Adding submission documentation to the bag

Once you have created the bag, if you have submission information (email from the donor, virus scan results, etc.), you can add it to the top level of the bag.

Note

 The gift agreement should be added into the relevant collection digital control folder in a subfolder by accession number. It should not be included with files transferred here.

  1. In order to add anything to the bag, you will have to "untar" it.
  2. Right click on the bag and go to 7-zip > Extract to (insert bag folder name).
  3. In the top level of the extracted bag, create a folder called "metadata".
  4. Within metadata folder create a folder called "submissionDocumentation".
  5. It has to be in this hierarchy with these exact folder names for Archivematica to be able to parse the bag once sent to submission. The top level of the bag will look something like the image below.

  6. Add any submission documentation to the "submissionDocumentation" folder.
  7. Proceed to the Next steps guidance at the start of this section.