Recent Posts

I’m just back from Code4Lib, a conference of people who work with technology in libraries and archives, held this year in Raleigh, North Carolina. This is the third time I’ve been to Code4Lib, and as before, I found it a conference that is both stimulating and exhausting; that takes a lot, but gives a lot in return.

Since a number of people weren’t able to make today’s lunch presentation, I thought I’d post the slides so those who missed out could catch up. They are pretty bare-bones, so if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been looking into systems which will help us do a better job handling research requests that come in to us via email. You can see what our current workflow looks like in this chart.

In case you’re interested, I wrote a guest blog posting on the ACRL TechConnect blog about some of the more technical work I’ve been up to lately. Those of you who’ve completed the command line tutorial assigned to the D-Recs committee should see some familiar commands.

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Archive Center accepted the records of the Ford Foundation, and included among these papers were records pertaining to Unpublished Reports and Grants from the Foundation’s inception to the present.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with the materials, the Ford Foundation provided us with two spreadsheets filled with metadata describing both the Unpublished Reports and Grants files.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.