Recent Posts Page 44

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.

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.