This panel will discuss the substantial findings and documentation produced in the first year of the OSSArcFlow project, a collaborative effort of the Educopia Institute, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (UNC SILS), LYRASIS, and Artefactual, Inc. In this project, 12 archives and libraries of different sizes and sectors are investigating, synchronizing, and modeling a range of workflows to increase the capacity of libraries and archives to curate born digital content. These archival workflows incorporate three leading open source software (OSS) platforms (BitCurator, Archivematica, and ArchivesSpace) but the project is designed such that all of these workflows are institutionally driven rather than functioning as part of a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

From digital dossiers to aspirational workflows, our 12 partners have thoroughly documented both their current practices and their visions for the future. In this panel, we will discuss some of the trends and distinctions we see thus far in the workflows of our partner institutions, including 1) where current standards, models and “best practices” guides have fallen short in guiding their digital curation workflow development; 2) the impact of broader organizational conventions and policies upon local workflow instantiations; and 3) how junctures between software (BitCurator and Archivematica, or BitCurator and ArchivesSpace) are handled, and what specific pieces of metadata (like IDs) or artifacts are used to tie local systems together.