Recent Posts

As our work on the transfer application portion of Project Electron nears its completion, I’ve started to think more seriously about modeling our data that we are bringing into our systems. We’ve actually been prepping for this stage of the project for months, going all the way back to the Data Model Bibliography I put together in February 2017. Now that the D-Team was in the thick of data modeling, we thought it was time to bring the rest of the Archive Center on board as well. I’m just a single archivist, and even though I’ve done a lot of reading about data models, I’m no expert on the entirety of our collection or its materials. We knew that we’d need more eyes on our initial data model draft once we made it to make sure we weren’t forgetting an important component of our collections.

It has been a busy month for Project Electron as we near the end of the first phase of development, which focused on building an application to enable the secure transfer and validation of digital records and their metadata according to the Rockefeller Archive Center BagIt specification. In addition to the transfer application development, much of our work this month has been about planning for the next phase of the project. In this post I will share a few activities and strategies we undertook to prepare for development and to keep users at the center of the design process.

I recently attended the edUI conference in Charlottesville, VA. It’s a conference for web professionals working in educational institutions, and the speakers come from a variety of professional contexts including design, development, management, content strategy, and UX. For me, this conference was a chance to hear from and connect with folks outside of the archives field who are doing related work. It pushed me to think about familiar problems from a fresh perspective, build conceptual connections, strategize to improve communication across disciplines, and learn some practical approaches and skills that are not often emphasized in archives-specific conferences.

By Amy Berish, Kanisha Greaves, and Emeline Swanson

One of the professional development opportunities at the RAC this summer was the chance to participate in NEDCC’s online Preservation 101 course. The objective of the course was to create an executive summary for a collection in our own institution. While many people took the class individually, Amy, Kanisha, and Emeline joined forces to create a robust final project and collaborate across departments: Processing, Reference, and Collections Management, respectively.

It is hard to predict when inspiration is going to hit. While a great idea can strike quickly, realizing it is a longer process; one that often requires seeking the help and guidance of others. Luckily, at the RAC, I have coworkers who are ready to listen to new ideas and willing to help me figure out how to turn inspiration into reality. Today, I am very excited to share with you a recent example of such a collaboration and the RAC’s newest application: MatchBox.