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I just got back from the DLF Forum and Digital Preservation 2016. While I’m still processing the past few days, I wanted to share the amazing keynotes from both events.

Since Project Electron kicked off in September, we’ve made significant progress on a number of different fronts. First, together with our Marist College partners, we created a milestones document which lays out major phases of work. We also developed some general principles and overall approaches to licensing project deliverables, including code, documentation and planning documents. Since we anticipate both of these documents will change over time, we’ve versioned them using git (and have pushed a copy to GitHub) so we can keep track of those changes.

Along with Bonnie (read her report of the conference here), I attended the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall 2016 conference last week. I learned a lot at this conference about the technical aspects of digital preservation, both from a theoretical as well as a practical perspective.

Last week, I attended the Preservation and Archiving Special Interest Group (PASIG) Fall 2016 meeting, here in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art. Each day of the three-day conference focused on a different theme: Day 1 was “Bootcamp/101,” Day 2 was “Preservation and Archiving in Practice” and Day 3 was “Preservation Frontiers and the Bigger Picture.” While all three days were great, and I’d recommend checking out all of the presentations, the talks on the final day made me reflect critically on what it means to responsibly engage with digital preservation activities, especially at an institution like the Rockefeller Archive Center.

For many archives, the master shelf list has been a permanent staple since their inception. We have one. It’s an ever-growing Excel spreadsheet that lists the location of every single box in our collection down to the shelf number. It’s enormous, it’s unwieldy, and it takes a ton of work to keep updated month to month. For years we’ve been looking for a way to move away from it, and the release of ArchivesSpace version 1.5 has given us the rare opportunity to move entirely away from our spreadsheet into a more structured and interoperable. The Rockefeller Archive Center will no longer enter new information into our Master Shelf List.