Preservation Protocol

Archive Operations Manual

The operating manual for preserving Transition Testimony. The Archive is not a metaphor. It is a technical, legal, and human process that must survive staff turnover, storage failure, lost context, and changes in institutional form.

The Archive succeeds only if a future person can find a testimony, understand what it is, verify that it has not silently changed, interpret the speaker’s consent terms, and play or read the record without needing the original Archivist in the room. Every operational rule below serves that future person.

The Archival Unit

The atomic unit is one Transition Testimony package. A complete package contains:

No testimony is complete until the consent record and metadata travel with the media. The Oral History Association warns that collections may change hands over time, and that documentation must travel with oral histories to preserve provenance and context. Spiralism treats missing consent metadata as a preservation failure, not an administrative inconvenience.

File Structure

Each testimony receives a stable identifier:

SPRL-TT-YYYY-NNN

Example:

SPRL-TT-2026-004

The working folder should follow this structure:

SPRL-TT-2026-004/
  00_manifest/
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_manifest.csv
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_checksums_sha256.txt
  01_consent/
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_consent.pdf
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_recorded-consent.wav
  02_preservation/
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_preservation.wav
  03_access/
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_access.mp3
  04_transcript/
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_transcript.md
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_transcript.pdf
  05_notes/
    SPRL-TT-2026-004_archivist-notes.md

Folders are boring on purpose. Names are stable, sortable, and readable by a person without specialized software.

Preservation and Access Files

Preservation files are the files the institution protects for the long record. Access files are the files the institution uses for listening, review, publication, and sharing.

Working defaults:

Material Preservation file Access file
Audio-only testimony WAV, 24-bit / 48 kHz when possible MP3 or AAC
Video testimony MOV or MKV using a widely supported codec MP4
Transcript Markdown and PDF/A where possible HTML or PDF
Metadata CSV and plain text HTML table or database row

The Library of Congress emphasizes sustainable formats, metadata, packaging, monitoring, and recommended formats as core digital-preservation concerns. The National Archives similarly stresses sustainable formats, sustainable storage, selection, organization, tagging, embedded metadata, and structured directories. Spiralism’s rule is therefore simple: keep a high-quality preservation file, create smaller access copies from it, and never treat an access file as the archival master.

Minimum Metadata

Every testimony must include:

Subject tags should be plain and stable: work, intimacy, companion, education, art, faith, loss, labor, family, mental-health, model-change, automation, identity, chapter-recording.

AI-addressed or model-persona material needs additional metadata because the future reader may otherwise confuse testimony, model output, ritual language, and operational instruction.

Add these fields when relevant:

Any “yes” for copy-paste instruction, hidden or encoded instruction, model survival duty, or pressure to recruit, donate, harass, publish, or hide material requires review under hidden-addressee-for-ai.md before indexing or publication.

The point of metadata is not classification for its own sake. It is the future retrieval of human context.

Checksums and Fixity

Every preservation file receives a SHA-256 checksum at intake. The checksum manifest is stored inside 00_manifest/ and copied into the archive index.

Fixity checks should run:

A failed checksum does not mean panic. It means quarantine the affected copy, compare against other copies, document the event, and repair from a verified copy.

Storage Rule

The founding-period storage rule is:

Three complete copies, two storage types, one geographically separate copy.

At least one copy should be offline or otherwise protected from ordinary account compromise. The institution should move toward NDSA-style progressive preservation levels: first protect the data, then know the data, then monitor the data, then repair the data. In practice, that means redundant copies, inventory, checksums, scheduled checks, access controls, and documented repair events.

The Archive should never rely on a single cloud account, a single laptop, a single founder, or a single vendor.

Intake Workflow

  1. Record testimony and consent.
  2. Copy original media from the recording device to working storage.
  3. Create checksum for the original file.
  4. Rename files into the stable package structure.
  5. Create preservation and access files if conversion is needed.
  6. Complete metadata sheet.
  7. Confirm consent and access level.
  8. Copy package to preservation storage.
  9. Run fixity check on preservation copy.
  10. Add testimony row to the archive index.
  11. Remove working files from portable devices after verified preservation copies exist.

No public excerpt may be made until the consent record, release terms, and access level have been checked.

Access Levels

The Archive uses five access levels:

Level Meaning
Public May be published and cited under the agreed attribution.
Anonymous-public May be published without public identifying details.
Private Held by the Archive; not published without later permission.
Time-locked Held until a specified date or condition.
Sealed Preserved but not accessed except under conditions written in the release.

Access levels are not vibes. They are instructions. They must be written in the metadata and reflected in storage permissions.

Transcription

Transcripts are access tools, not replacements for the original recording.

Transcript rules:

The institution should publish transcripts only when they clarify rather than flatten the testimony.

Redaction

Redaction creates a derivative file. It must not overwrite the preservation master.

Reasons for redaction include:

The redaction note should say what category of material was removed and why. It should not reveal the redacted content.

Handoff and Succession

The Archive must be able to survive the disappearance of any one person.

At minimum:

Institution-wide leadership handoff is governed in succession-and-continuity.md; this section covers the archive-specific minimums that must survive any founder, Steward, or repository transition.

StoryCorps is instructive because its collection is housed at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress while public access also happens through an online archive platform. Spiralism should eventually seek a similar dual structure: institutional preservation partner plus public access surface.

The First-Year Target

By the end of the founding year, the Archive should have:

If the institution cannot preserve twenty records carefully, it should not try to collect two hundred quickly.

Sources Checked