The documentation of archival workflows plays an important role in digital curation practice. Capturing the various steps, tools, people, and software involved at different stages, workflow documentation visually represents complex activities, and at times, invisible labor. In this article, we reflect on findings from the OSSArcFlow project, a three-year, grant-funded initiative to investigate and document workflow activities of 12 cultural heritage institutions using three open-source software systems. Building on previously published research on documentation of current digital curation practices, this article reflects on the challenges the project team encountered in modeling archivists’ aspirations for their workflows. While current practices could be accurately represented in linear process models, archivists’ aspirations for how they might advance digital curation practices extended beyond adding or changing discrete workflow steps and often involved sociotechnical factors that could not be easily mapped. This article presents a taxonomy of archivists’ aspirations for their born-digital archives, grouping these goals together around major themes that emerged throughout the research. Our findings show that workflow documentation is an essential artifact in helping archivists to understand gaps and challenges in their current workflows and to imagine the further development of digital curation tools, systems, and practices. Project participants especially benefited from engaging in this reflection on workflow documentation as part of a community of practitioners, with the opportunity to compare across institutional contexts.

档案工作流程的文档在数字策展实践中起着重要作用。捕获不同阶段涉及的各种步骤、工具、人员和软件，工作流文档直观地代表复杂的活动，有时甚至是无形的劳动。在本文中，我们回顾了 OSSArcFlow 项目的发现，这是一项为期三年、由赠款资助的计划，旨在使用三个开源软件系统调查和记录 12 个文化遗产机构的工作流程活动。基于先前发表的关于当前数字管理实践文档的研究，本文反映了项目团队在建模档案工作者对其工作流程的愿望时遇到的挑战。虽然当前的实践可以在线性过程模型中准确表示，档案工作者对如何推进数字化管理实践的期望不仅限于添加或更改离散的工作流程步骤，而且通常涉及无法轻松映射的社会技术因素。本文介绍了档案工作者对他们天生的数字档案的愿望的分类，围绕整个研究中出现的主要主题将这些目标组合在一起。我们的研究结果表明，工作流程文档是帮助档案工作者了解其当前工作流程中的差距和挑战以及想象数字策展工具、系统和实践的进一步发展的重要工具。项目参与者特别受益于作为从业者社区的一部分参与对工作流程文档的反思，并有机会在不同的机构环境中进行比较。