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This week I attended the annual edUi conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. As I’ve written before - this was my third year in a row attending - I’ve found the conference and community to be a place of challenge and inspiration, and I always leave with at least one major “aha” moment.

One of my biggest takeaways from this year’s SAA was how many awesome digital curation and digital preservation tools are in development. The tools that most stuck with me were related to the appraisal and accessioning of born digital materials. This is something we’ve been thinking about a *lot* at the RAC, and it’s encouraging that so many smart folks are working on these issues, and developing amazing tools that we’ll be able to use. I saw way more tools than I can talk about here, but here are a couple of highlights that I hope to explore more:

I’m very pleased to announce that the Rockefeller Archive Center’s substantial (and rapidly growing) bibliography of publications based on work completed using our collections is now available in Zotero. This is the culmination of several months of hard work on the part of many individuals here, working together to create functional requirements, evaluate potential solutions and select the best option, and then migrate our existing bibliography into Zotero.

Somewhat surprisingly, one of my favorite panels of Archives 2015 had very little to do with the actual work that I do day to day. Session 702, Controversial Crawling: Documenting University Scandal in Real Time, dealt with the practical issues of trying to capture internal and public discussions of university controversies on the web.

I often feel like archives shy away from documenting and seeking out controversial source materials, in many ways because of institutional pressure from invested parties that do not want those controversies kept in perpetuity. However, this panel offered a refreshing take on scandal, by explaining exactly how to three different web archivists selected and collected materials pertaining to institutional scandals, sometimes even against the wishes of those higher up in the organization.

I’ve just returned from the Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting, held this year in Cleveland. As usual, it was a rewarding experience, full of opportunities to connect and catch up with colleagues from all over the country, as well as to learn from the speakers in a variety of sessions.