Recent Posts Page 14

Working at the RAC has opened my eyes to how I view and understand archives and philanthropy and has furthered my need to work in the industry. I have learned so much about the RAC and its different departments from the collections management, processing, and reference team, and from the “RAC 101” videos that give a more in-depth understanding of the archival process. The projects I worked on were similar to the projects I hoped I would be working on. I would even go as far as to say I know these projects were made for me. During my internship at the Rockefeller Archive Center, I worked on a couple of different projects.

The Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) has become increasingly aware of and concerned by the environmental impacts of climate change. We recently commissioned a carbon footprint study to better understand our emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). For the RAC, GHGs are tied to our energy usage. Developed in consultation with Climate Change & Environmental Services – a local firm that specializes in environmental inventories – this report creates a benchmark of our current energy usage and GHG emissions as well as a foundation for future action which can reduce our environmentally harmful emissions.

This summer I had the opportunity to intern at the Rockefeller Archive Center. Going into this internship, I had no experience in archives or archival work, but that drew me to this organization. Not only that but, when I found out that I would have the chance to come on-site, my first reaction was “finally.” After two years of remote work and school, one could only imagine my excitement.

We are excited to announce some new functionality in our archival discovery site, DIMES, that uses Wikidata identifiers to pull in biographic information and links to external authority records about people, organizations, and families that exist in our collections. In this post, we’ll share what this looks like in DIMES and how we are enhancing our agent data in ArchivesSpace to enable these changes.

Six years ago, DACSspace, a tool that checks an ArchivesSpace repository for DACS compliance, was created by Hillel Arnold and Amy Berish. Since then, the Processing Team has been using DACSspace on a semi-annual basis to ensure that our finding aids maintain a 100% compliance rate to DACS single-level required elements.

More recently, the Digital Strategies Team and the Processing Team collaborated on a new version of DACSspace that includes improved functionality and implements coding best practices we’ve learned throughout other coding projects. This project also marks the first time a coding project was led by someone outside of the Digital Strategies Team, read more about this shift in Hillel’s post, From Silo to Hub.