Recent Posts

As you may have read in previous posts from Patrick and Bonnie, the D-Team went to METRO’s annual conference this past week. It was a great day (thanks to METRO staff for pulling off a fantastic event) with a lot of really informative sessions; the greater New York City library and archives community has a lot of smart people doing really creative work! Aside from the themes of systems and data interoperability that Bonnie and Patrick wrote about, I noted a common thread of attempts to integrate transparency across a number of presentations and institutions.

Last week I attended the annual meeting of the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). I felt inspired and excited by a lot of the talks I saw, but one project that stood out to me was the Culture in Transit project.

I attended METRO’s annual conference on 1/21. METRO is the Metropolitan New York Library Council, and as members, RAC staff is open to attend any of their events. There were a lot of fantastic panels and speakers at the panel this year, but I’d like to focus on an overarching theme that I picked up on this year: getting our systems to communicate nicely with each other can streamline our work processes and improve our work as archivists.

I spent the first week of November in Chapel Hill for this year’s iPRES conference. iPRES is an international conference covering the latest trends, innovations, policies, and practices in the realm of digital preservation.. The conference was full of smart, innovative, and knowledgeable people working to solve the problems posed by digital preservation. It’s not possible to cover everything that I learned here, but one of the themes that emerged for me was that of the importance of people in digital preservation. It can be tempting to think of this work as all about computers, but people and policies are integral to sustainable digital preservation.

Our very smart and articulate colleague Rachel Wimpee, who works in our Research and Education division, has published a post on MLA’s Connected Academics blog that talks about her work at the RAC, including the Zotero bibliography project the Digital Program helped to organize. She also touches on larger issues of cross-disciplinary work and the enduring value of humanities education, so her post is well-worth a read!