The intake desk
The desk is staffed Tuesday to Friday by two people. It works from a bench with a colour-managed monitor, a reference strip printed on the shop's own paper and a rack of drives. Nothing goes on the shelf until it has passed through five steps, and the desk writes each step onto the set's paper record as well as into the catalogue.
1. Log.
When a drive or a crate reaches the bench, we record its serial number, the job number the shop gave, the date it arrived and the number of files it holds. A crate with no job number is logged as unassigned and stays on the bench until the shop's own records match it.
2. Hash.
Every file is hashed with SHA-256 and compared line by line against the manifest that came with the set. A set with a missing or extra file is not turned away, but it cannot leave the bench until the difference is explained in the record.
3. Check.
We open one sheet from each plate and read the colour bar against the reference strip. For transparency sets we read the colour target from every hundredth frame. Fonts in page files are listed and checked for embedding. A file that does not open is kept, marked and never repaired without a note.
4. Write up.
The entry is drafted from the manifest: title, date range, file count, formats, size and any gaps. Descriptions are written by the person who checked the set, not copied from the shop's job sheet, because job sheets often describe what was planned rather than what was printed.
5. Shelve.
The set is given its reference number and written to the primary store. It goes onto the shelf only when its checksum manifest has been written beside it. The shelf location goes into the catalogue, and the drive is wiped and returned to the rack for reuse.
The desk closes around thirty sets in a normal week. Most weeks the limit is not the scanning or the reading but the time the checksums take on the larger sets, so the desk keeps a standing list of what is waiting for its second pass. Work on that list is taken in the order the sets were logged, and a set that fails a check goes back to the top of the list until someone has explained the failure in writing.