Recent Posts

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.

One of the sessions I really enjoyed at this year’s edUI conference (for a broad recap of the conference, see my earlier post) was Designing for Information Objects, presented by Duane Degler (Design for Context) and Neal Johnson (National Gallery of Art). Although the presentation took place on the afternoon of the last day of the conference, by which time my brain was already past its saturation point, it was immediately apparent to me that there were some pretty important ideas in the presentation that deserved some detailed attention. In part, I wanted to write this post as a way to revisit that session now that I’ve had some time to recover from the conference overload.

Last week I spoke at the NYART event, Preserving and Archiving Electronically Generated Materials, which was sponsored by the Leon Levy Foundation. My slides are attached below. Slides from other presenters will be made available on the event website, and you can find the event schedule [here.