Beginning in 2012, the CCA began a curatorial project called Archaeology of the Digital, which examined how the introduction of digital technologies affected architecture and architectural practice from the late-1980s to present. As part of this project, the CCA acquired twenty-five fonds with a significant born-digital component, made up of an estimated five terabytes of born-digital archival material. An acquisition of this size required the CCA to reevaluate its born-digital preservation strategies so that it could provide meaningful long-term access to the born-digital architectural materials in its care.

Preservation was the starting point for ensuring access to these materials. Archivists processed the material and ingested it into Archivematica, a digital preservation system built by Artefactual. Archivematica enacts a number of preservation services, including identifying files and generating related metadata, and packaging this information into a METS file (an XML document encoded with key metadata) stored with the objects.

Despite the fact that Archivematica allowed the CCA to describe and preserve digital files in a granular way, we found that providing researchers meaningful access to the files and their descriptions remained difficult. Workflows for providing access to born-digital archival material were very time-consuming. Traditional finding aids were no longer able to adequately answer quantitative or cross-collection research questions that were common with these types of material.