As development of the Project Electron transfer application has continued over the past month, one important aspect of the work has been the creation of user interfaces based on the wireframes we have designed during the design planning process. In this month’s update, I will discuss how both wireframes and the resulting user interfaces (UIs) of the application are important communication tools both internally for the development team, and externally with user groups including Rockefeller Archive Center staff and donors.

Audiovisual Accessioning

A current trend in the archival field is “Accessioning as Processing,” based upon Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner’s article, “More Product, Less Process.” Dubbed “MPLP” for short, this topic remains prickly in the a/v world - and I am going to steer far away from discussing whether this trend has consequences for audiovisual collections (!).

A few weeks ago, I attended the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology in Philadelphia. Along with my colleague Eira Tansey, I presented a paper titled “For Good Measure: The Role of Regulatory Records in Environmental Maintenance,” which made the case that environmental regulation relies on the work of recordkeeping. Eira was fresh off of delivering the opening keynote at NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2017: Preservation is Political, a talk which covered many of the same themes.

Audiovisual Processing

I feel fortunate that the RAC has always gathered and/or maintained some form of documentation for their roughly 13,000 films, video, and audio elements. However, as with any archival institution, this information has been collected by several different individuals, who have sometimes employed different approaches over the course of many “eras” of RAC’s history. Applying consistency to audiovisual description became one of the first goals undertaken.

John Dewey once stated: “We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.”

So, as I have just finished my first year as the Audiovisual Archivist at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), I thought now might be a good time to reflect upon what has been accomplished in these last twelve months.