Recent Posts

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.

As we wrap up the transfer phase of Project Electron, we’re turning to the next phase of the project which focuses on building, updating, and implementing systems, tools, and processes to facilitate access to digital records. We’ve started this work - which we’re calling the discovery and delivery phase - by revisiting and evaluating the user stories and personas produced during our user research in 2016 and 2017. Although this research was foundational to our understanding of the scope of Project Electron and shaped many of its deliverables, it was completed over two years ago. We needed to make sure our original user stories and personas still reflected our users and their needs.

In this post I’ll explain how we’ve revisited these original design artifacts to ensure that they continue to represent our thinking as an organization, and how this revision supports our project value of “plac[ing] users at the center of the design process.”

At the RAC, training and professional development have long been priorities and supported by substantial institutional resources. As technology has become an ever-critical part of our work at the RAC, the Digital Programs Team has been increasingly involved in training colleagues on using archival technology, usually as part of other projects, including running a cross-team reading group on digital preservation, ArchivesSpace training, and FTK training. However, despite all of these training efforts, the D-Team hasn’t had a unified strategy or articulated values for technology-related training. After reflecting on past training and thinking about what we wanted to do in the future, we realized we needed to approach this area more strategically and holistically in order to ensure that our colleagues have access to training opportunities that match their learning styles, and that training and education opportunities spearheaded by the D-Team align with our values as well as the RAC’s mission. A good first step towards that end seemed to be articulating principles for education and training.