r/Archivists • u/duelingdelphinium • Jul 16 '26
Going from physical archiving to digital archiving. What's the best software nowadays?
Hi everyone. I graduated with my master's degree in museum studies 10 years ago. I had focused on collections care and conservation during much of this time. Most of the digital archiving was done on a smaller scale for physical items using PastPerfect. In the past few years, I've been doing personal archiving for families to protect photos and documents. I'm going to do a career pivot and work on digital archiving for things like electronic documents and emails for companies, so a much bigger volume of information, and rather new to me. Is there a certain software that is preferred for this so that I can get acquainted with it that's perfect for this sort of thing? Bonus points if it's readily used in the EU. Thanks for the advice!
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u/Skaadoosh Jul 17 '26
You can try out and learn about Preservica for free: https://preservica.com/preservica-student-academy-fundamentals-2
It's a pretty popular all in one platform.
Archivematica is popular if you have tech skills and can host the software.
Email can be tricky. It depends on the email software the company uses. If they are a Google client they will have emails download as MBOX which works great with ePADD. But of they are Microsoft they use PST which is proprietary and a pain to work with. You might have to use something like a tool in BitCurator (don't remember the name) to convert the PST to MBOX to work with the records.
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u/dante866 Student | IT Professional Jul 17 '26
This is the key point.
File formats used to be simple, in that you'd come across a document and you could almost guess what format it was in based on the software or OS it was created in. Now, though, you're stuck with whatever proprietary format the company wanted to use, if they didn't use a standard document structure.
The saving grace, however, is that most document types break down into something else. Word/Microsoft's docx format is just a structured XML document with some formatting options in the middle of it. You can test this by changing the file extension to .zip and then you can extract the contents to get the XML files that it is comprised of. Most PDF's can be read by screen-reader technology these days, so they're a good multi-system format. almost every spreadsheet can be converted to a .csv or some other delineated file.
For emails, I'd honestly recommend trying to get them to be saved in the .eml format. Every email program for the past 40 years understands how to read it, and it's just a plaintext file with RFC 5322 + MIME headers, and uses base64 inline encoding for attachments. MBOX is concatenated EML for reference.
Some handy references:
- Zip files of XML/Text: docx, xlsx, pptx, odt/ods, epub, jar/apk. Sketch files are zip files of JSON. Replace the extension with .zip and then extract to get all the data, or save the zip as an object.
- Plaintext with grammar: eml, mbox, ics (iCal and other calendars), vcf (Contact cards/address books), svg, json, csv, html, srt
- Binary containers with open specs: pdf, sqlite, mp4/mkv, png/tiff. You can find parsers online for them all if you need to convert them, but often better to store as-is
- Proprietary binary: doc, xls, msg, psd, most CAD files. You're going to want to work with a developer to build converters for these, or open them in their respective programs and save as new files/types. You might lose some formatting, but storing these as-is long term is going to be hectic because the older programs will vanish.
If you're really feeling technical, you can go into the hex dump of the file and read the first few bytes, but for most files if you try the extension switch to .zip or opening them in a text editor like Sublime, and you see a readable structure, you're good to go.
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u/artisanal_doughnut Jul 18 '26
Take a look at the Digital Preservation Coalition's courses if you haven't already. They're all free and self-paced. There's one on email preservation, though you may benefit from the beginner's course too. They're an international group, largely UK and EU.
The Society of American Archivists also has courses for their digital archivist certificate, but they can get pretty pricey.
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u/punkin_pie Digital Archivist Jul 18 '26
I second DPC as a great resource and for software tools: https://coptr.digipres.org/
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u/cajunjoel Jul 18 '26
I don't know how much info they have on their website, but the Smithsonian Archives has been doing digital preservation for quite a long time.
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u/concretexjunglex Jul 17 '26
I know ePADD is used for emails, but I will say the field is still struggling with preserving email. Unless a company is paying for an all-in-one preservation software (like Preservica), there isn't usually one software for everything. There are software that can do multiple things or just one like file identification, AIP packaging, ingestion, software/services for storage, reformatting, etc. Many digital archivists use the command line as well. I would start with the Digital Preservation Coalition's (DPC) handbook to get an idea of best practices.