Archiving overview
Recommendation: If possible, communicate with the archive you will use before you start the project. What you are told can affect access protocol choices, the way you prepare and deposit metadata with your data, and so on.
SayMore can help get you ready to archive a session or archive the project. You choose access protocol for the project and select access for each session.
To aid with consistent and proper archiving, SayMore:
helps you name files in a way that identifies their relationship to a session
organizes files into an easy-to-understand folder structure
uses a simple xml format to record metadata for people, sessions, and the files you collected to document them.
SayMore:
collects all of the files in a session, all the files for the people you have associated with a session (their metadata, informed consent files, and so on), and project metadata.
creates a package that contains these files and metadata
pre-populates as much of the metadata as it can
opens RAMP, or saves the files in an IMDI package which you can open in Arbil or another appropriate program.
Note
Reasons that you might want to archive sessions, instead of the whole project, include (not exhaustive):
Individual sessions are typically 500Meg to 5 Gigs. That is already a significant amount of data.
Early archiving is encouraged; do not wait until the entire project is completed, which could be years after it is started.
When people do a search for the material, we want them to be able to look for "Examples of preaching" or "Discussions" or "Children" and so on, which relate to individual sessions. We do not want to force them get the whole project.