Recent Posts Page 19

I began my work as a Fellow with the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) in late May of this year, for a 10-week termed position. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the hands-on work that I would have undertaken had to be altered to best accommodate an offsite remote Fellowship. Thus, my work turned towards research. One of my projects involved investigating potential tools and systems for preserving the RAC’s digitized audiovisual files in Archivematica, the RAC’s current digital preservation system. Along with this research I would also be including recommendations for future preservation practices and/or decisions.

I began my work as a Fellow with the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC) in late May of this year, for a 10-week termed position. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the hands-on work that I would have undertaken had to be altered to best accommodate an offsite remote Fellowship. Thus, my work turned towards research. One of these projects involved various avenues of research and investigation into culturally competent description (CCD) and how it can be utilized to better reflect the content and represent the recorded cultures in the RAC’s audiovisual (AV) collections.

As Hannah wrote back in February, the new DIMES we’ve just released is more than one system; it could more accurately be described as a system of systems. One of those pieces is the Request Broker, which facilitates requests for records, either onsite in our reading rooms, via digitization processes, or by downloading or emailing citations. This post describes that system in more detail, including the motivation behind it, the process by which it was developed, and our future plans.

I’ve just finished reading Managing the Flow of Technology, a book which synthesizes the results of several studies done in the 60’s and 70’s by Thomas J. Allen which analyzed the production of new technologies in the aerospace industry. Although the book reproduces some of the problematic aspects of the corporate culture it describes (overwhelming whiteness and maleness, and an obsession with quantitative analysis), and some of Allen’s suggestions seem dated (open office layouts), many of his insights into how technical knowledge moves within and between organizations seem useful, so I thought I’d try and summarize the main points of the book, and draw some connections to the work of the D-Team.

In spring 2020 as the RAC offices closed due to COVID-19, we convened a group of 5 staff members representing each of the Rockefeller Archive Center’s program areas to learn and explore how we measure our work and impact in the context of website analytics data. This Web Analytics Owners Group was formed as part of a project to standardize and better leverage the organization’s use of analytics data from our various web properties. It has been an incredibly successful case of cross-program collaboration, building expertise, and strengthening the RAC community in what has been a pretty bleak and isolating year for the world. One year out, this post reflects on how this group came together and what has made it successful.