Recent Posts

I am happy to introduce myself as the newest member of the RAC’s D-Team! I’ve joined the RAC thanks to the generous support of the Ford Foundation to work on Project Electron, and to help facilitate the transfer of digital records from our donor organizations. My work will have a specific emphasis on usability and user-centered design, a core value of Project Electron. 

This month we’re excited to announce the release of the first version of a specification for transferring digital records to the RAC over a network connection. In line with our project value of supporting archival practices and standards, we’ve built many parts of this specification on existing standards and frameworks such as BagIt, BagIt Profiles, Activity Streams, and OAIS. We believe this approach will make the products we come up with more easily reproducible at other institutions, which is another one of our project values.

In May, Marissa Vassari and I presented a poster at the 2017 Annual Meeting of The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) in Chicago. Check back soon for a posting about our poster experience.

In this post, I wanted to discuss why I flew out to the AIC annual conference early in order to attend a workshop on digital file structure entitled “Examining the Composition and Structure of Digital Collection Objects: Strategies and Guidance for Ongoing Management and Preservation.” Although this workshop may have stood out as an oddity against a schedule full of photograph conservation, collections care, and environmental monitoring lectures, this workshop helped inform how I am thinking about my larger role in preservation at the RAC.

Back in January, archivists from the Princeton University Manuscripts Division visited the Rockefeller Archive Center to discuss digital processing with members of the RAC Processing Team. To continue this conversation, a few staff members from the RAC went on a field trip to Princeton on June 8th. The group consisted of staff from various departments including members of the Processing, Collections Management, and Digital Teams.

Several years ago RAC faced a dilemma familiar to many in our profession – a daunting processing backlog that was growing exponentially and depriving scholar’s and staff of access to many of the records held in our collections. Our collections are great resources of knowledge, but only if those resources are available to our users!

To find a solution, we actively sought processing practices that reflect our values as an operating foundation, specifically the values of collaborating and sharing knowledge, disseminating information, promoting discovery in all its forms, and facilitating open and equitable access to all our archival holdings. Over the last year and a half, we shifted our strategy to processing by accession and implemented a standards-based approach which has been a resounding success thus far and has resulted in the processing and opening for research of over 4,500 cubic feet of records. This discussion will be the first in a series of posts about our processes and collaborations. I hope our experiences may be valuable and helpful to others.