# A Donated Collection: What's Inside and What to Do With It

Libraries and archives occasionally receive donated collections — from private individuals, heirs, organizations that are closing down. The boxes and disks arrive, and going through them gets postponed for years: there's nobody to manually review each item and figure out what's valuable, what duplicates the existing holdings, and what isn't worth keeping.

Digercules goes through a donated collection and produces a structured description: what's inside, a uniqueness assessment for each item against the existing holdings, what needs immediate attention (fragile media, sole surviving copies), what doesn't need to be kept.

Exactly this task has already been solved in practice: a donated archive of bard songs — hundreds of concert recordings and 306,000+ accompanying text documents — has been sorted, transcribed, and cataloged (66,000+ hours of audio).

## The Same Process, From the Other Side

When a private individual decides what to do with an inherited archive (a home archive or collection passed down to them) and ends up handing it to a library or archive, that's the same process, from the heir's side. Covered separately, with a different, more personal tone: [Inherited Archive on digercules.net](https://digercules.net/inherited-archive/).

If the sorting was already done on the heir's side before the handoff, the institution receives, not raw boxes, but an already-structured description of the collection — a direction we're developing separately, so both sides of the handoff speak the same language.

## How it works

Processing runs either entirely on the client's own hardware, or — if that hardware isn't powerful enough — is delegated to a specific external machine over a closed peer-to-peer channel (not a public cloud): the compute is physically located in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, the client is always told explicitly which machine and which jurisdiction is doing the processing, and only text/structured results come back — never the source files.

If the collection includes photos or video with people who need identifying, a dedicated face-identification module handles it: the system only suggests a similarity match, the staff member doing the review always confirms, and a face nobody recognizes stays flagged rather than being passed off as identified. [How it works](https://digercules.org/face-identification/).

## Objections

**"Donated collections often have unclear rights status"** — Digercules describes the collection's content but doesn't resolve copyright questions; the result is a basis for making informed decisions about retention and rights, not blind ones.

**"We don't have the resources to even start sorting"** — that's exactly why the sorting is automatic: results in hours, not years of waiting for a volunteer or intern.

## First contact

A pilot on one donated collection awaiting review — a structured description with a value and duplicate assessment against the holdings. The decision on a pilot like this sits with the library/archive director or chief curator, not a line staff member.