Recent Posts

A few years have passed since we shared progress on our Culturally Competent Description (CCD) Action Campaign on this blog. In the last blog post fully devoted to CCD, we discussed adding cultural competency to the RAC processing manual and creating an internal Description Concern Form for staff to identify files or collections that need reparative description in addition to other types of issues (inaccurate information, empty folders, etc.). Now that we are five years into this work, the challenge has been maintaining momentum on long-term projects, starting new projects, ensuring that new staff members feel connected to CCD, and balancing CCD with other processing projects.

During my second year of architecture school, I was searching for summer internships when I came across an email announcing the Rockefeller Archive Center’s summer internship. At first, I ignored it, thinking I would not be accepted and that it had no connection to architecture. At the same time, my studio course that semester focused on documenting and researching, which encouraged me to explore archives. Through my project, I realized how closely archiving and architecture are intertwined, and I understood how wrong my initial impression was. I went back to my email, searched through my inbox, and finally found the announcement again. Even though I still had doubts, I applied, feeling excited about the possibility of visiting the site in Sleepy Hollow. While preparing my project for my final studio review, an activation structure that tells and documents the stories of 135th Street in Harlem, I received an email from RAC saying I was accepted.

I’m just back from the annual Society of American Archivists conference, held this year in sunny Anaheim, California, the home of Disneyland (the conference hotel was more or less adjacent to Disneyland and in fact offered rooms with a Disneyland view, which…I did not book). In many ways it felt like a markedly different conference than in the past, both because it was on the West Coast (so had a very different attendee base) but also because this year’s hot topic (as you might expect) was AI. While the AI conversation in archives feels far from settled, and there are clearly some widely divergent and strongly held beliefs about if and how the technology should be used in archives (or at all), I did notice a few themes emerging.

We’ve just completed a second round of development on the Fluxx Exporter, which sought to address bugs and usability issues we learned about from users. The new version of the application substantially improves ease of installation and configuration and enhances existing functionality in several key areas. Read on for a summary of what we did and what’s next.

We just deployed a major re-architecting of our digital ingest services which we believe will improve the energy efficiency, speed and maintainability of this pipeline. This project has been a while in the making, so I thought I’d take the time to reflect on where we’ve been, where we are now, and what comes next.