Recent Posts

I’m just back from edUI, a conference of web professionals who work in educational institutions, held in Richmond, Virginia. As was the case last year, it was a gathering full of fascinating presentations given by excellent speakers. I was very honored (and more than a little intimidated) to present on some of the work we’ve done to improve DIMES. There was a lot of interest in what archivists do, and in bringing the worlds of user experience and archives in closer conversation, which I find very exciting.

You might remember that earlier this year I wrote a post about Metadata Cleanup and Ford Foundation Grants that gave a very basic overview of how I went about reconciling thousands of subject terms against the Library of Congress. This reconciliation was essential in helping us gain control over data that we did not create, but that we also identified as possibly extremely valuable to researchers. This post will give an in-depth and updated account of how I hobbled together a (mostly) automatic way to check large amounts of topical terms against the Library of Congress. It still requires some hands-on work and quality checking is a must, but it cut a hundreds of hours job down exponentially.

At the recent Society of American Archivists annual conference, I was fortunate enough to present as part of a panel discussing the application of digital forensics in an archival setting. I touched on the work I’ve been doing with the D-Recs committee and on developing the forensics workflows that I’ve discussed previously. My co-presenters, Cal Lee, Don Mennerich, and Christie Peterson, discussed different aspects related to digital forensics in archives, from learning forensics techniques to an overview of current research in the field. I highly recommend checking out the audio for the session, which is available on our shared drive.

One of the first sessions I attended at this year’s SAA annual meetings was “Getting Things Done with Born-Digital Collections,” and it stuck with me as a great entry-level review of how to deal with born digital materials in a variety of different institutional environments. It also introduced tools to help archivists jump into their work, while providing some advice for those looking implement or expand born-digital programs. Many of the following tools/concepts may seem familiar in the work that we do here at the RAC.

The panel included five panelists: Gloria Gonzalez, Jason Evans Groth, Ashley Howdeshell, Dan Noonan, and Lauren Sorensen. While all of the panelists covered slightly different experiences, there was one universal takeaway: preserving digital collections needs to be an institutional endeavor, and in many cases, that endeavor is a constant work-in-progress, from tools to processes.