Recent Posts

I wrote an overview of the digital processing work the RAC is doing over at bloggERS!, the blog of SAA’s Electronic Records Section. Check it out!

Following up on Bonnie and Patrick’s posts about this year’s Code4Lib, I thought I’d write briefly about a few talks that really struck me this year.

Today I’m going to write about something that came up at Code4Lib, has been on my mind recently, and is near and dear to my heart: authority reconciliation.  You might remember this blog post from almost a year ago? If you don’t remember, or don’t have time to go back and read it, I’ll summarize the gist pretty quickly: reconciling large amounts of data against established authorities is complicated, time-consuming, and often frustrating, but we do the best that we can. I think my own experience in doing this type of work is why Christina Harlow’s talk “Get Your Recon“ resonated so strongly with me.

A big theme at this year’s Code4Lib conference was the importance of collaboration and building upon others’ work. Since collaboration and openness are some of the D-Team’s core values, this really resonated with me. A few different strategies were suggested to increase sharing and collaboration; these included openly sharing tools and documentation on the web, as well as designing code and tools so that they can easily be re-used by others.

A few weeks ago, in a series of conversations with some of the smart people in our Research and Education division, we came up with the idea of a reading group that would allow all RAC staff to engage with professional literature, share methodological expertise, and in general exercise our critical reading and thinking muscles. We’ve since had our first session – which focused on the concept of original order – and will be holding the next one on April 29^th. Overall, our readings will focus on methodology – rather than the history of a specific organization or more general field – in order to get us talking comprehensively about the what, how and why of our work.