I am looking for a straightforward accession tool. Can people please advise?

DataAccessioner is a simple, straightforward accession tool that is also open source. The tool migrates content between different media and generates checksums and creates an XML metadata file. The simple interface makes it easy to use. To learn more and to download, visit: http://dataaccessioner.org/index.htm

There is also a user guide and a step-by-step tutorial available on the Digital POWRR website: http://digitalpowrr.niu.edu/survived-powrr-wkshp/

In case you would rather have a nicer report instead of the XML file that is generated, you can use the DataAccessioner:Metadata Transformer Tool. That is also available on the POWRR website.

You might want to also check out version 2.5.0 of the Library of Congress' Bagger. It has been improved and has metadata ready to help with your accession (such as media type, media number, records series, title, etc.). What is important is that it uses the BagIt standard, which could be a plus, depending on what tools you wuld use to manage the accessionned bags.

For more detail, see the recent Library of Congress blog on the topic http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2016/04/baggers-enhancements-for-digital-accessions/?loclr=eadpb

In the spirit of full disclosure, I co-authored th blog above, and you are free to also check out Exactly.

In summary, Bagger and Exactly adhere to the BagIt standard. Data Accessioner (as POWRR mentionned earlier) uses many preservation metadata tools imbedded to capture the digital objects' properties. Check them all out and make your choice.

Hope this helps,

Tibaut

I would recommend Data Accessioner. It provides a nice GUI for the FITS toolset, creates and validates chechsums while moving content from external media, and provides a PREMIS XML file output (with flexible output available through subbing in different XSLT files) - http://www.dataaccessioner.org/