Tool Assessment and Selection: The DANNNG Tool Selection Factors in Action

While digital archives practitioners often chose between a prescriptive set of software tools for their workflows a decade ago, today’s digital archives tool landscape is radically altered. As our community has grown in number and experience, the number and diversity of tools we evaluate for our work has grown as well. Practitioners now select from a wide range of tools that have myriad, often overlapping functionality. However, the abundance of choice has led to challenges of assessment and selection, in some cases breeding a mentality that if others in the community have vetted and selected a tool, it should work for me and my organization as well.

We propose a 45-minute demo of how to use DANNNG’s newest resource, the Tool Selection Factors, which can help overcome this mentality by providing guidance for practitioners to assess and select software tools that fulfill their specific use cases. First, a small group of Tool Selection Factors authors will provide an overview of the resource. Then, they will run a live demo on how to use the Factors, including presenting sample individualized use cases, extracting assessment and selection criteria from those cases, and using the criteria, the Factors, and tool registries to find, assess, and select tools. At the end of the demo, we expect that attendees will be able to use the Tool Selection Factors as a resource to aid in review and selection of tools for their specific organizational context.

SLIDES

Links

• DANNNG! (Digital Archival traNsfer, iNgest, and packagiNg Group): https://dannng.github.io/
• Using the DANNNG! Tool Selection Factors – Activity worksheet