Unique Name

Wherever possible, the Archival Units (AUs) that you preserve in ADPNet SHOULD be organized into a single top-level directory with a Unique Name.

This will typically be the directory name for the AU on the Drop Server. If you are using the Drop Server then your top-level folder can have almost any name, but that name MUST be unique among all the AUs you will ever upload.

• Once you ingest an AU, you SHOULD NOT re-use that directory name unless you actually intend to replace the old materials the with new materials. You need a new name to ingest new AUs.
  • EXAMPLE: ADAH has a bunch of Q-Number Masters files to stage for ingest. Each of these is a package of 500 large TIFF files produced by our Digitization section. So we give the directory a name unique to those contents, and based on the range of internal identifier numbers ("Q Numbers") for those master files. For example: Digitization-Masters-Q-numbers-Master-Q0000150001_Q0000150500m contains the 500 Master files with identifiers Q0000150001-Q0000150500; next time we upload newly-created materials, we will upload them under a new directory with the next numbers in the sequence, to the directory Digitization-Masters-Q-numbers-Master-Q0000105501_Q0000106000m.

• Typically AUs SHOULD be organized in order to ensure Immutable Content, but if you end up in circumstances where you are required to add, remove, or correct content within an AU, you should upload the updated materials to a directory on the Drop Server with exactly the same directory name as you used for that AU when it was first ingested.
  • LOCKSS content harvesters treat content as an update to an existing AU if, and only if, the content is placed under exactly the same directory name as the AU when originally ingested.
  • A collection does not need to have been stored continuously on the staging server in order to update it.
  • In that case, make sure to upload all the content of the updated not just the new or modified content -- the AU will be entirely replaced by the corrected AU.

• When you unstage an AU from the staging server, we strongly recommend that you retain the uniquely-named directory on the server. You should remove the LOCKSS Manifest Page and empty the directory, replacing it with a small plain-text README file indicating that the directory was previously used to stage an AU for ingest.
  • This allows for easy tracking of the names you have used over time, which will make it much easier for you and for automated tools to guarantee Unique Names even after you have preserved dozens or hundreds of AUs.
  • This also provides a ready target directory if you should need to stage an update to the AU under exceptional circumstances.