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This page provides documentation about sending digital material to Distinctive Collections (DDC) from the creators or donors of the material. For more information, see the donate digital material page on Distinctive Collection's webpage. As mentioned on that webpage, these steps are only to be undertaken once you have been approved by Distinctive Collections staff.

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The Archives Transfer Tool currently exists as a Dropbox shared folder. Once you have been in contact with Distinctive Collections (DDC) and have created a submission agreement, you will be added to a shared folder to transfer files for yourself, DLC, etc.

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1. Access the /ArchivesTransfer/ folder in Dropbox using the this URL above. 
2. Double-click the subfolder into which you want to upload your filewhich DDC has created for your transfer.
3. You will see two files already there:
   1. default_metadata.json: a file set up by DDC that you don't need to change. It has some general metadata for any file that might be uploaded to this folder. Leave this file in place.
   2. sample_csv.csv: a file that can be used as a template for providing additional metadata, as described in the section below.

4. You can either drag and drop the file(s)  from your computer into the browser window or click the Click the “Upload or drop” button in the upper left corner and then choose File from the list of options. This will open a

   navigation window

   file browser to go find the file to upload from

    your

   your computer. If using the file browser, select the file (or files) and click the OK button.

   Warning
   Important: Do not create or upload any subfolders inside of this folder! You can only upload files to the root of this folder.

5. Proceed to the next section to provide some basic metadata about the content you are transferring.

Providing additional metadata

To provide additional metadata for each of the files that you have uploaded, you need to do a little work with a CSV file. The sample_csv.csv file is the template for the additional metadata. You should create one CSV file for each collection of files that you are uploading. So, if you are only uploading one file, you should create a CSV file with one data row. If you are uploading a collection of 10 files, you should create one CSV with 10 data rows. The sample CSV contains the following columns:

• filename is the exact name of the file in the submission agreement folderDropbox folder, for instance: MyRecords.docx

• beginning_year is the beginning date of the files you are transferring (a four-digit year)

• ending_year is the latest date of the files you are transferring (a four-digit year)

• description is the full text description of the file you are transferring (with no commas in the description)

To provide this metadata,

1. Download the sample_csv.csv file to your workstation

2. Rename it with an appropriate name for the set of files it is describing

3. Using an editor (Excel, Notepad++, BBEdit, etc…) add one row for each file

4. Fill out the information for the columns listed above: filename, beginning_year, ending_year, description

5. Save the updated CSV as a .csv formatted file

6. Upload the updated CSV to the Dropbox folder (so that it lives alongside the files that you uploaded)

Notify the Distinctive Collections

When you are finished with your upload (of one file or of a collection of files) and the upload of the metadata CSV file, send an email to DDC to let them know that content is ready and give them the name of the CSV file that contains the list of files and associated metadata!

DART

Connect to the network drive

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