Workflow:Community Owned Workflows

What is COW?

Community Owned Workflows (COW) provides a forum for sharing your workflows with others in the digital preservation community. We can learn a lot from each other by sharing our workflows, discussing what tools are used and why, understanding the context behind our workflows, and what challenges and issues they have addressed. So please explore this site, and consider sharing your own workflow!

Browse COW

View the workflows that have already been added to COW.

Contribute to COW

Please read the following guidelines before contributing to COW:

1. Share your workflow with the community
   1. Check out one or two existing workflows first
   2. Give your workflow a meaningful title to help others find it
   3. Keep your workflow descriptions clean and concise. Text only is fine, but you are welcome to add a diagram. We recommend Yed as used by Bitcurator, or Lucid Chart as used by OSSArcFlow. Also see this blog post from Bill LeFurgy on "Visualizing Digital Preservation Workflows". And check out examples as part of the complimentary OSSArcFlow Project and their Guide to Documenting Born-Digital Archival Workflows.
   4. If possible link your tool names to COPTR entries.
   5. Save an early draft then do a longer edit to avoid loss of your workflow due to login timeouts
2. Discuss or ask questions about the workflows of others using the respective "Discussion" pages.
3. Be friendly - please treat others with respect
4. Give us your feedback - let us know how you got on - email paul (at) dpconline (dot) org.

Create a new workflow

Create a new workflow by entering a title and clicking the button. Save frequently. Don't worry, once you've saved it you can go back and edit it further.

About COW

A recurring request from digital preservation practitioners has been for a community forum in which they can share and exchange experience on how they use tools in combination - in short - pool their knowledge about digital preservation workflows. This was discussed by one of the groups at the iPRES 2016 workshop: "OSS4Pres 2.0: Building Bridges and Filling Gaps". With some uncertainty over the best way to share our workflows, we decided to experiment with a lightweight wiki based approach. This would allow us to explore the process and what we wanted to get out of it, before considering the need for a more comprehensive solution. After initial discussion and development, a stall in progress, and a re-launch, COW is now ready to take submissions from the community.

COW is hosted on the COPTR Wiki, where more information can be found on this site and it's supporters.

Other workflow sites

Of course we aren't first to the party, and there are some domain specific collections of workflows that can be found here:

• OSSArcFlow Project
• Bitcurator
• Library Workflow Exchange
• open-workflows
• TNA Guidance on Workflows

COW logo, based on Cow icon by Artem Kovyazin from the Noun Project