Recent Posts

This post in our series on reimagining digitization processes is all about digital surrogate file naming and organization, which warrants its own post because a lot of other processes hinge on developing a digital surrogate file management approach that is standardized and actionable to allow both humans and machines to do things with those files.

The service design-based research and analysis Hannah described in an earlier post revealed two fundamental challenges to rethinking our digitization processes: nobody understood the entire process from end-to-end, and the process was not observable. It was clear that until we were able to address these fundamental problems, we would essentially throwing darts while blindfolded and dizzy. We’d have no idea where to intervene or whether changes we’d implemented had resulted in things getting better.

As a result, we chose to start in a very specific way, by making the units of work that are part of this process (digitization transactions) smaller, and de-siloing the entire process so that archivists could process a transaction from start to finish. While this might seem a somewhat arbitrary place to start, these changes are based in ideas developed in the Toyota Production System (TPS), a predecessor of Lean Manufacturing methodologies in wide use today.

In the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing a series of posts focused on the Rockefeller Archive Center’s archival records digitization services. In 2021-2022, our institution experienced a substantial increase in researcher digitization requests during reading room closures and diminished travel due to COVID-19, and we know we are not alone in experiencing shifting research patterns and request volume since the pandemic. So with the goal of sharing how we are reevaluating our digitization processes to better meet the demands of remote research support, this post will kick off the series with a look at how we used service design methodologies to holistically analyze our digitization workflows, systems, equipment, documentation, supporting policies, and the points of communication between them with the goal of identifying friction points and generating ideas for improvement based on that analysis.

Last month, we held our Archival Educators Roundtable (AER) Winter Workshop. These winter workshops grew out of the annual AER meetings that occur every summer since the start of the group in 2016.

I recently attended axe-con, the annual free online digital accessibility conference from Deque. With speakers and talks firmly rooted in the business domain from companies like Hilton, GitHub, Meta, Adobe, ADP, and multiple financial institutions, it was interesting to see the common themes this year. In this post, I’ll share my impressions and takeaways.