The Horrors of Good Intentions: Told through the story of a dark repository.

"The library manages a dark repository, named Dark Blue because I have no imagination, for material needing preservation but not public access such as preservation copies of digitized moving image and in-process born-digital material. You can read more about the implementation of this repository in this 2018 post. It is fair to say that Dark Blue had some growing pains over these past few years that include incorrect packaging of material and broken deposit and withdrawal workflows. While these sound like technical problems, the thesis of this post is that our troubles with Dark Blue are not based on bad systems or policies, but the limitation of people and time, and choosing to do the “nice” thing over the realistic thing...."