Recent Posts

This month, we are pleased to announce that we have successfully transferred, validated, appraised, and accessioned digital records from the Ford Foundation using the Project Electron infrastructure. We plan to onboard more donor organizations over the next year. With Aurora and the associated Project Electron systems now receiving digital records, we’ve reached a major milestone for this project and for the Rockefeller Archive Center as we expand our capabilities as an archival repository and research center.

As Hannah indicated in her last blog post, we’ve been thinking a lot about the next phase of Project Electron which, broadly speaking, looks at how researchers (and other user communities) find and get access to all the great digital records we’ll be transferring from our donor organizations.

As with the rest of this project, we want to be conscious of existing tools and practices so we can build on what’s working well and try to improve what isn’t. This is a major reason we started by reviewing our personas and user stories. Hannah’s blog post does a great job of summarizing what we learned during that process, and I won’t repeat all of that here, other than to say that the challenges faced by our users in finding and accessing archival records need to be addressed holistically. In other words, considering access to digital records separately from access to physical records is akin to looking only at part of a large picture; on the other hand, considering user needs across formats is a useful way for us to focus on the qualities of the user experience we hope to provide for our researchers.

This year’s SAA schedule was really great and varied. Two of my favorite sessions were about community archive projects: a panel on SAADA Archivists’ Collective and a talk by Gabriel Solis from the Texas After Violence Project. But one session that really resonated with the work I’ve been doing the past year (and more) here was “Standards for Sustainability: Ensuring Sustainable Programs with It Takes a Village.”

I recently had the opportunity to attend my first DevOps4Lib Summit graciously hosted by the folks at Princeton University. The summit is a relatively small and informal two-day user meeting with an unconference feel that focuses more on the technical infrastructure and operations sides of library technologies. It originally formed as part of the Code4Lib community, and now has either one or two in-person summits per year. As a member of an institution that’s just starting to grow and standardize its DevOps practices, the meeting provided a valuable opportunity to meet face-to-face with other professionals working through the same infrastructure issues and learn from their experiences.

It is said that experience is the greatest teacher. I agree. New tasks and new researchers each day in an inspiring atmosphere made my RAC-CCNY internship experience a productive and memorable one. You can walk into the Rockefeller Archive Center with background information that seems black and white, but each interaction brings new elements that create a complete picture of the day to day workings of an archive with a welcoming environment.