Recent Posts

Beginning in 2011, the Rockefeller Archive Center accepted the records of the Ford Foundation, and included among these papers were records pertaining to Unpublished Reports and Grants from the Foundation’s inception to the present. Along with the materials, the Ford Foundation provided us with two spreadsheets filled with metadata describing both the Unpublished Reports and Grants files. The Grants file alone includes 54,644 rows and 34 columns of information ranging from subjects terms to restriction information. However, much of this data was “dirty”; many subject terms did not match LCSH vocabulary, dates did not match formatting for import into Archivist’s Toolkit, and many more issues. Despite these issues, the metadata opened new avenues of access and description to the materials, and wrangling and refining them for import into Archivist’s Toolkit and DIMES would help researchers from all over the world discover the exact item he or she is looking for. In November of 2013, members of the Digital Projects team met with representatives from Processing and Reference with the express goal of transforming this metadata into a machine-readable format so that the RAC may provide it in a searchable format online.

About a year ago, I started reviewing ways to secure our digital assets against potential catastrophic losses due to disaster (natural or otherwise), technical error, hardware failure, and system attacks. I wanted a solution that offered geographically-dispersed server space to minimize the risk of loss due to disaster, regular fixity checks to help uncover any potential hardware issues on those servers, and administration differentiation between those servers and our own systems to help alleviate technical error and system attack issues.

After a review of Distributed Digital Preservation Services (as of Spring, 2013), we selected MetaArchive. MetaArchive is a digital preservation network created and hosted by memory organizations like libraries and archives. It uses LOCKSS software, which was developed by Stanford University and is used by about 12 different preservation networks worldwide. In a LOCKSS based system, materials are ingested and stored on servers hosted by network members in disparate geographical locations. The fixity of the materials is checked at regular intervals. This system helps prevents data loss occurring during natural disasters or other emergencies, or due to malicious or negligent factors. No one administrator has access to all copies of the data or can tamper without detection. A step-by-step review of how it works can be found here. Current MetaArchive membership institutions span 13 states and 4 countries. These members include many universities, the Library of Congress, and a few smaller libraries.

On December 9, we attended an SAA workshop on “Privacy and Confidentiality Issues in Digital Archives,” taught by a dynamic Heather Briston of UCLA on the wintry campus of Mount Holyoke in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Invoking the familiar mantra that we rely on analog laws to govern digital materials, Briston provided a broad review of the legal basis for privacy and confidentiality considerations in archives (including privacy jurisprudence, defamation, HIPAA and FERPA laws). She balanced these discussions with considerations of archival values and ethics, which mandate that we provide the widest possible access to our collections while protecting the rights, and sometimes the interests, of persons and institutions represented within them. While opening records crosses a barrier of privacy by definition, archivists’ efforts to meliorate this act lead toward equilibrium in this intrinsic tension. From a third angle she explored the ways digital technology changes the possibility and condition—as well as our expectations—of privacy and access.

I’ve recently pushed out a pretty major change to the search results page in DIMES, inspired by direct feedback from users as well as analysis of web analytics and server logs, so I wanted to post a detailed account of both what I did as well as why I did it.

If, like me, you missed out on yesterday’s webinar from OCLC Research titled ”Achieving Thresholds for Discovery: Addressing Issues with EAD to Increase Discovery and Access,” you can now view a recording of the presentation. It’s worth your time to listen to Merrilee Proffitt (OCLC Research) talk about her recent article on EAD tag analysis in the Code4Lib Journal, and also to listen to Dan Santamaria (Princeton University) talk about the work of his institution’s Archival Description Working Group in improving their archival description as well as their discovery system for archival materials. A few months back, I wrote about a presentation that Dan and others from Princeton gave at SAA this past August, and found that this webinar nicely complemented that earlier presentation.