Recent Posts

I recently attended the M-Enabling Summit in Arlington, Virginia, an annual conference organized by the global nonprofit G3ict and supported by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP). The Summit aims to advance digital accessibility and inclusive technology. Over 2 days and more than 50 sessions, people who build, regulate, use, advocate for, and form strategy related to accessible technology gathered from across domains including government, education, corporate, and nonprofit contexts.

A common theme this year was the importance of establishing and sustaining accessibility work as a program, not just a project. A project ends when the fixes are done, but a program is integrated, continuous, and resourced. In this post, I’ll dig into this idea as explored at the Summit, and from my perspective as User Experience and Accessibility Analyst on the Digital Strategies team here at the Rockefeller Archive Center.

A little over nine years ago, I wrote that we were implementing a temporary solution to deliver digitized content to onsite researchers, which we named the Virtual Vault. That “temporary” solution has proven to be fairly long-lasting, remaining in place until this week, when we replaced it with a completely rearchitected version. This update has gotten me thinking about strategies for managing change over different timescales.

A few weeks ago, we published “A Path to Permanence: Navigating Archival Export from Salesforce for Grantmaking Organizations,” which defines archival export from grants management systems, evaluates current mechanisms for this kind of export from Salesforce, and outlines several paths for organizations looking to implement archival export of grant records in that system. In line with this blog’s focus on rationale and methodology, I wanted to describe a little about why that report came to be, and dive into how we created it.

This spring, I attended several conferences with digital preservation as either the focus or a major theme. The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) held their second annual Americas Member Forum in New York City in April, providing a hybrid networking opportunity and platform for members to discuss their current projects and challenges. In early May, I was invited to attend a collaborative convening at the Getty Conservation Institute (GCI) called Designing Digital Preservation Strategies Across Contexts. This was my first time attending this type of event, with three days of discussion among participants from around the world on digital preservation practice, education, and opportunities to support and grow the community of practice. The Best Practices Exchange (BPE) conference took place in Indianapolis and featured talks on cloud environments for digital preservation and strategies to find support as a new practitioner in the field. One of my all-time favorite conferences, the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries (TCDL), demonstrated how peer support and iterative approaches can make our work a bit more fun. While these events occurred over several weeks and in different parts of the country, I found some similar themes being discussed across events.

Last week, I attended the Archivists in the Loop symposium in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The highly interactive gathering, which was sponsored by the Bentley Historical Library and the University of Michigan School of Information, brought together practitioners, technologists, and scholars to develop a deeper understanding of how generative AI will impact the work of archival reference services. I found the two days we spent together to be incredibly generative, in ways that I haven’t experienced in conversations around AI and archives.