Recent Posts

A welcome change from the bustling 125th street I am accustomed to, the tranquility and nature surrounding the Rockefeller Archive Center struck me the first day I arrived. From my first day here to my last, I was able to witness a cold and beautiful Brontë-esque winter transform into a bright and vibrant spring. The similarities in the transition of the seasons and my maturing and learning process while an intern at the RAC is not lost on me. I entered with little to no knowledge of the processes and facilities of archives, and left with a fully formed introduction to all aspects of the important work of archiving and with a hunger to work even closer to the field.

In the past month, Hillel and I have published a series of four blog posts discussing the Rockefeller Archive Center’s rationales and approaches to recent research, analysis, and interventions to update our digitization processes. These interventions have resulted in some major improvements to how we create, manage, and make available digital surrogates of our archival records. In my Reimagining Digitization Using Service Design post, I shared how increased researcher requests for digitized content during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted a comprehensive research project to better understand redesign our processes, resulting in actions to increase the observability and transparency of our onsite digitization workflow by making units of work smaller, change our on-demand digitization file structure and naming conventions to facilitate machine actions that will improve long-term preservation and access, and introduce automation and scalable cloud-based architecture to receive, preserve, and make available archival records that were outsourced to vendors for digitization.

In this fifth and final post of the series, I’d like to take a step back from technical details to contextualize these process changes in terms of bringing our digitization program in line with our organizational values. Taking the time to research and understand the problems we need to solve, atomizing units of work, increasing automation, and improving sustainability are all strategic actions that support our values of embracing change, collaborative learning, accountability, centering people in our use of technology, and pursuing excellence in stewardship.

I went to Code4Lib again this year, and the experience reaffirmed how much I love this conference and community. As one might expect, practical applications of AI in the library and archives spaces got a lot of attention and time this year, but while these talks were fascinating, useful, and important, they didn’t resonate with me quite as much as some of the more human-oriented talks. There are so many smart people out there thinking about how to make life easier for people by using technology, which I find incredibly useful and uplifting. For me, Code4Lib has become less about unique expertise, and more about impact on a larger community, as Hillel alludes to in his recent conference report.

In the weeks following the Code4Lib Conference (held this year in Ann Arbor, Michigan) I have been reflecting on some themes from the conference which have relevance for our work here at the RAC. I’ve also been thinking about what it means to be part of a professional community over the long haul, and how my own relationship with Code4lib has evolved over the years.

We’ve described in earlier posts changes we made to onsite digitization processes – including implementing ideas from the Toyota Production system and establishing file naming conventions – as a result of the service design research that Hannah conducted. However, it was also clear from the research that another major pain point in our digitization processes was handling the products of outsourced digitization processes.

Typically, when we send out a group of materials to be digitized by a vendor, we’d get the digitized files back from the vendor at the end of the project on an external hard drive. We’d load these files onto our local storage, do some manual renaming and restructuring of files, and then push them through a semi-automated pipeline which assigns structured rights statements, submits files for ingest, and finally makes access versions available online via DIMES. Not only does this process require a lot of manual intervention, it’s also incredibly tedious and error prone, puts a lot of strain on our local storage, and ultimately means there’s a long delay between the time when materials are digitized and when they are made available online.

Fortunately, we had an idea about how to improve this process, through the introduction of additional automation and scalable architecture.