ARCHIVES 2015

Participants’ enthusiastic response to the past eight Research Forums confirms that the full spectrum of research activities—from “pure” research to applied research to innovative practice—is of interest and value to the archives community.  If you’re engaged in research…seeking to identify research-based solutions for your institution…willing to participate in the research cycle by serving as a beta site for research trials… or simply interested in what’s happening in research and innovation…then join us for the 9th Annual SAA Research Forum! 

Free to conference registrants; $50 / $25 (students) for those not registered for ARCHIVES 2015 (badge required for admission).

This session will address how the implementation of a customer relationship management, or “CRM,” tool has improved management of data about donor relations and opened up new possibilities for assessing the effectiveness of outreach to record creators. DePaul University Archives must rely on a pool of “perpetual donors” to provide fresh infusions of records to the institutional repository. Lessons learned from colleagues in sales and fundraising have informed the way the Archives has overcome challenges in reporting, cultivating new contacts, and “staying on the radar” of past donors who, as employees of a thriving institution, will certainly be asked to give again. Leveraging CRM software that provides contact profiles, overviews of in-person and email interactions over time, and flexible data gathering has contributed immensely to insights about the donor pool and managing its expansion.

About the Author:

Andrea Bainbridge has served as University Archivist in DePaul University’s Special Collections and Archives Department since 2010. She earned a Master of Library and Information Science degree from Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, and previously served as Senior Archivist at the American Medical Association. She is a proud member of the Chicago Area Archivists and Midwest Archives Conference. 

The research behind the basis of Drips Gallery explores the possibilities of using digital technologies in an archival setting. The hypothesis examined and investigated was: street art can be preserved and archived through archival websites and mobile applications. In order to explore this problem a community driven digital archive, Drips Gallery, was created. Drips Gallery is a new archive consisting of graffiti photograph collections and is available through a website and mobile app. The database, website, and mobile app was created, coded, and programmed specifically for the archival and community needs of Drips Gallery. Drips Gallery allows the community to drive the archive and changes the role of the archivist from record keeper to facilitator. By creating an archival mobile app and website, new and immediate ways of capturing and preserving culture as it is being created and consumed is now possible.

About the Authors:

Although a minimalist in most aspects of her life, Farah Jindani is interested in the collection, organization, and accessibility of all the interesting things in the world. Making sense of the future preservation of a born-digital culture is her primary goal. Currently, she provides ticketing access and database administration as Associate Box Office Manager at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in addition to being the co-founder and co-creator of Drips Gallery. She completed her Masters in Library and Information Science with a Certificate in Archives and Preservation Management from CUNY Queens College in December. Her hobbies include creative writing, stand-up comedy, and television. 

Alexandra Lederman is a digital humanitarian and believes in equal access to information. She is interested in capturing and preserving culture while it's being created and consumed. Graffiti, foodways and new technologies in the library and archive get her ticking! After 5 years in the hospitality industry, Alexandra finally listened to her true love for books and information. She is a MLIS graduate from Queens College and recently completed her Graduate Fellowship with theCiti Center for Culture x Queens Library. Alexandra currently works with EdLab, Teachers College, Columbia University as a Materials & Technical Services Librarian and with the AHL Foundation as a Digital Archivist. She is also the co-founder and co-creator of Drips Gallery. 

In April 2015, the Houston Astrodome celebrated its 50th anniversary. A revolutionary building when it opened in 1965, with its 642 foot clear span and fully air conditioned interior, it is now unused and unusable. Despite this fact, 25,000 people attended the anniversary party to share their memories of notable events during its history, including baseball, football, concerts, monster truck races, and its use as a shelter after Hurricane Katrina.

The Houston Public Library, in partnership with the Houston Metropolitan Research Center; the Harris County Archives; the Woodson Research Center Special Collections & Archives, Fondren Library, Rice University; Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries; and the Harris County Public Library, has developed a community resource documenting the history of the Astrodome as told in archival collections at http://astrodomememories.org. Creation of this resource required the partners to resolve numerous copyright concerns while negotiating political issues concerning the ultimate fate of the structure.

The second phase of the project, which began with the 50th anniversary event, invites the community to share digital copies of their own items and memories. This phase introduces new challenges, including whether to adopt a "post-custodial" model of archives and what that means in terms of privacy, intellectual property, and access to collections. Archiving personal stories shared on social media adds additional complications.

This presentation will address the role of archives in community memory projects and provide access to resources developed by project partners and consultants. Share your #AstrodomeMemories with us!

About the Authors:

Amanda Focke is the Asst. Head of Special Collections at Fondren Library, Rice University. She works with university archives, manuscript collections and rare books, with a focus on policies and workflows for digital content. She holds an MLS from the University of Maryland College Park, has been a Certified Archivist for 10 years, and has is a certified Digital Archives Specialist. She serves as a member of the Coalition to Advance Learning in Archives, Libraries and Museums and as co-chair of the Texas Archival Resources Online Steering Committee.

Vince Lee is the Archivist for the Shuart Women’s Archive and Houston and Texas History Collection at the University of Houston Libraries. In this role, he collaborates with the Friends of Women’s Studies, the Department of Women Gender and Sexuality Studies, and external stakeholders such as the Houston Area Rainbow Collective History (ARCH) and the Archivists of the Houston Area (AHA!). His research interests include Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies and the role women have played in forming Houston and Texas history. Vince received his BA in Political Science from University of Michigan and his MLIS from Wayne State University.

Danielle Cunniff Plumer is a digital collections consultant working with cultural heritage institutions developing online collections and preserving digital materials. She also teaches digital curation and access to digital collections for the University of North Texas, The University of Texas at Austin, and Texas State University. She earned an M.S. in Information Studies at The University of Texas at Austin in 2003. Prior to that, she earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Davis. 

Archival description tends by necessity toward the aggregate, but sometimes the opportunity arises to examine and reveal objects at a more granular level. This platform presentation will explain how an archivist and librarian at the University of Tennessee applied their interest in highlighting marginalia to UT Libraries’ Shaheen Antiquarian Bible Collection, a significant but understudied collection of 250 volumes, many from the 16th and 17th century. The books’ previous owner, Naseeb Shaheen, tracked Shakespeare’s many Biblical references back to different Early Modern English translations. While Shaheen studied the translation and glosses (or printed marginalia) “layers” of Biblical text, we looked at evidence of the books’ physical history via handwritten marginalia and ownership marks left by largely anonymous readers, in an effort to emphasize the importance of books as historical objects containing evidence of readers’ interactions with text and books as objects over centuries. After using iPads, Google Sheets, and a Tumblr blog to record and share instances of marginalia, the project is nearing the end of its first phase. We have discovered that marginalia – even from unknown authors – is a desirable, diverse, and significant subject of inquiry. It also makes a more human (and therefore more interesting) entry point into history for students. In our talk we will discuss our findings and next steps: using what we have learned in instruction, examining other collections, and investigating metadata standards to support widespread discovery of these small but significant marks.

About the Authors:

Kris Bronstad is the Modern Political Archivist at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, where, in addition to managing the collections of 20th century Tennesseepoliticians such as Howard Baker, Estes Kefauver and Bill Brock, she works with the library to find ways to best provide lasting access to digital material. Kris has a Masters in Information Science with a Specialization in Archives and Records Management from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA and MFA from University of Texas-Austin.

Chris Caldwell is Assistant Professor and liaison to the Departments of English, Theatre, and the Humanities Center at University of Tennessee Libraries in Knoxville. His research interests include book history, hidden collections, and forgotten libraries. Chris has an MS in Information Science from the University of Tennessee and an MFA from New College of California. 

Over the last two decades, libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) have made large portions of their anthropological holdings available in digitized formats. However, the development of tools and models for assessing the impact and usability of these digital assets has not kept pace. General models and tools created for the heritage sector in general are not necessarily appropriate for ethnographic collections, whose assessment demands special consideration. As a consequence, LAM institutions risk misunderstanding the significance of online access to ethnographic collections currently accessible and may be missing opportunities to strategically develop additional digital collections. Equally important, LAM institutions that fail to appreciate the distinctive nature of ethnographic collections, may mishandle culturally sensitive materials, and inadvertently foster cultural misunderstanding or the misuse of their collections. Current modes of assessing the impact of digitization in general are limited to metrics or analytics—numeric totals of downloads, clicks, hits, and “likes.” Lacking more qualitative data, institutions often rely on these proxy measures and anecdotal feedback to evaluate the impact of digitization projects. Reporting the findings of a yearlong interdisciplinary study titled “Valuing Our Scans: Assessing the Value and Impact of Digitized Ethnographic Archives,” my proposed presentation underscores the importance of storytelling in articulating the value and impact of digitized ethnographic collections. In particular, I will describe the different ways that stories and storytelling factor into understanding impacts of digitized cultural heritage objects. I will also discuss the implications of the study’s findings for cultural heritage practice and collections development.

About the Author: Ricardo L. Punzalan is an assistant professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, where he teaches courses on archives and digital curation. He holds a PhD in information from the University of Michigan School of Information. In addition to an MLIS from the University of the Philippines, he completed two certificates of graduate studies at Michigan, one in science, technology, and society (STS) and another in museum studies. Prior to his doctoral studies, he served in faculty of the University of the Philippines School of Library and Information Studies. His area of research includes understanding the relationship of archives and collective memory, the politics and dynamics of digitization decision-making in collaborative and inter-institutional settings, and the uses and users of digitized archival images. His current research examines “virtual reunification” as a strategy to provide integrated access to dispersed ethnographic archival images online. He is also developing ways to effectively document, evaluate, and articulate the impact and outcomes of digitized ethnographic archives. His articles have been published in the American Archivist, Library Quarterly, Archives and Manuscripts, Archivaria, and Archival Science. 

The development of recent standards in archival description, notably Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF), provides a new arena for archival description development. Linked data movements have occurred in parallel to the development of communication standards that could foster a reconceptualization of relationships between entities. This research focuses on the relationships between entities as reflected in existing archival description embedded in narrative text. Research questions explored include the nature of relationships included in archival description, the influence of domain on the relationship structures identified, and the challenges of relationship vocabularies. This research is based on source data from 167 American literary figures' archival collection descriptions as well as biographical resources. Social networks were constructed and a relationship vocabulary was organically developed from the narrative description. A data set of over 65,000 relationships was established with over 800 relationship terms derived. The patterns that emerge from a categorization of this vocabulary construction will be discussed. This research focuses not on the existence of real social networks among the original set of figures but on the inclusion and description of relationships in archival description. The results of this investigation hope to instigate a discussion about the types of relationships that make an essential contribution to archival context and the significance of relationships in archival description. This work should inform best practice recommendations for the application of description standards, centered on relationships as a core component. This research has been supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, RE-04-11-007 and the Emily Hollowell Research Fund at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College.

About the Author:

Katherine M. Wisser is an assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College in Boston, Massachusetts. She serves as co-director of the Dual Degree program in Archives and History and director of the post-Masters Archives Certificate program. She received a BA in History from Bates College, an MA in History from the University of New Hampshire, and an MSLS and PhD in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 2000, she has taught introductory and advanced courses on various topics in the organization of information and archival services. Wisser has also taught numerous workshops on various metadata standards. In 2006, she was appointed chair of the international EAC Working Group, responsible for Encoded Archival Context – Corporate bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). She currently serves as co-chair of the Technical Subcommittee for EAC-CPF and EAC-CPF Tag Library editor. 

This presentation categorizes metadata standards used in scientific data centers, and reports several mechanisms for the aggregate control of scientific data. Based on their targets of description, metadata standards in scientific data repositories can be divided into three categories: metadata standards that describe research subjects, such as specimens and samples, etc.; metadata standards that describe the instruments, platforms and facilities used to generate research data, and metadata standards that describe scientific datasets. Scientific data centers basically utilize similar aggregate control mechanisms as those in traditional archives management, including single-level description, multi-level description, separate and linked metadata records for components in an archival collection, as well as linking between different entities. There are differences in the details of the aggregate control methods between the two communities. However, these minor differences shrink or disappear when digital archiving is considered.

About the Author:

Jinfang Niu is an assistant professor at the School of Information, University of South Florida. She received her Ph.D. from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to that, she worked as a librarian at the Tsinghua University Library for three years. Her current research focuses on information organization, digital curation and archives management. 

56,451 people. Their college classmates, their social standing, and their social clubs. Their academic fields and degrees, their honors and awards, their employers, and—by implication—how all those connections mingled, interchanged, and influenced the world. All of this is data. In 1930, it was affixed to 1471 printed pages, safeguarded between two sturdy crimson covers, published, and distributed. This session will describe the EAC-CPF exploratory project at the Harvard University Archives which evaluated the potential of EAC-CPF to encode this data in a parsed and re-usable way. While the SNAC project used machines to mass produce EAC-CPF, and Connecting the Dots created hand-encoded, jewel-like records, our project explored a middle way. We sought to discover if a machine could interpret a book and to discover whether EAC-CPF could carry the metadata load.

About the Author:

Kate Bowers is the Collections Services Archivist for Metadata, Systems, and Standards in the Harvard University Archives. She has held a variety of positions in the Harvard University Archives for the past 21 years, all revolving around metadata. Her interest is in realizing the potential of metadata and technology to allow people to do what humans are good at--exploring, learning, thinking, teaching, and sharing their ideas. Before joining the Harvard University Archives, she worked at Tufts University, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division, and Harvard Law School. 

Descriptions of archival resources can often be a rich source of names for different kinds of entities: people, organizations, places, concepts, events, and works. In many cases, those names can only be represented in the description by a string of characters. At OCLC Research we’re enriching the descriptive metadata we aggregate in various ways. A focal point of this enrichment work involves relating strings to standard identifiers for the things they represent in the real-world. Those enrichments make it possible to re-organize the data to fulfill the promise of Linked Data, bringing like things together and showing their relationships. Archival metadata poses some special challenges, in that it can include many “uncontrolled” headings lacking standard identifiers. We will demonstrate experimental systems from OCLC Research that are helping us better understand the extent of these challenges and that suggest ways to resolve strings to things, with implications for how archival descriptive practices are carried out and for how aggregations of descriptions from various sources can make their enrichment processes and outputs available to archivists, catalogers, researchers, and system developers. Additionally, we will share experimental utilities that can be used to intuitively navigate a graph of data, allowing people to enter the graph through a recognized entity and then expand their search through exploration of related people, places, events, organizations and concepts. The current corpus of OCLC’s ArchiveGrid dataset will be used for the demonstration.

About the Authors:

Jeffrey K. Mixter is a recent graduate of Kent State University, having earned an M.L.I.S. (Masters of Library and Information Science) and an M.S. degree in Information Architectureand Knowledge Management. His master’s thesis demonstrated how to convert an existing flat data model into a detailed ontology that is interoperable with search engine aggregating services. As a Research Assistant at OCLC, Jeff worked with Dr. Ed O’Neill in developing the OCLC FAST controlled vocabulary. He is now working as a Software Engineer at OCLC with collaborators from Montana State University on the IMLS-funded project ‘Measuring Up: Assessing Accuracy of Reported Use and Impact of Digital Repositories.’ Kenning Arlitsch, Dean of Libraries at Montana State, is the principal investigator. Jeff’s role in the project is to serve as a data modeling expert, taking the lead in the development of an ontology for modeling items found in institutional repositories and digital collections in a form that can be discovered and indexed by Google and other major search engines. Jeff also currently teaches at Kent State University as an adjunct professor for the School of Library Information Science.

Bruce Washburn is a Consulting Software Engineer in OCLC Research. He provides software development support for OCLC Research initiatives and participates as a contributing team member on selected research projects. In addition, he provides software development support for selected OCLC Products and Services. Bruce reports to James Michalko, Vice President, OCLC Research, San Mateo. Prior to OCLC Washburn worked in a variety of roles for the Research Libraries Group (RLG), most recently as manager of its Information Architecture team. Before RLG, Washburn worked in the cataloging department of Stanford University Libraries. At OCLC Washburn has been a part of the product teams that developed and maintain CAMIO, ArchiveGrid, the WorldCat Search API, and OAIster. For OCLC Research, he is working on the Analyzing Archival Descriptive Practice and Museum Data Exchange projects. 

Archivists are beginning to consider social media platforms as venues where serious discourse and creation take place, and there is concern that this critical and ephemeral content will be lost to researchers unless institutions collect and preserve the content. But do archival researchers feel this way, and do they anticipate conducting research with social media data in the future? What do cultural heritage organizations need to be able to support this sort of collecting and research? With LSTA funding from the State Library of North Carolina, the NCSU Libraries has conducted two survey-based studies to support the building of a free, web-based documentary toolkit for social media archiving. The first study surveys archival researchers about the perceived value of social media data for archival research in the future. The second surveys North Carolina cultural heritage organizations about their social media collecting practices and what elements of a toolkit would most help them start or further their collecting practices. In the Research Forum, we will share our analysis of the surveys, as well as discuss other work completed on the project.

About the Author:

Brian Dietz is the Digital Program Librarian for Special Collections at NCSU Libraries. Responsible for all aspects of managing archival digital assets for the Libraries, his work includes planning for the implementation and sustainability of digitized and born digital resources. As co-PI on the LSTA-funded "New Voices and Fresh Perspectives" project, he designed new practices for identifying and harvesting social media data, oversaw the development of a free, web-based documentary toolkit, and contributed to two studies related to perceptions of social media held by archival researchers and cultural heritage professionals.

Records professionals operating under different legal and regulatory environments agree that evidence, security, and civil rights all depend on authentic records. But proving authenticity in the digital environment can be difficult, and requirements for authenticity may be unclear. Much research has been conducted on the preservation of authentic records and many recommendations and guidelines have been produced, but despite the wealth of past and current research findings, recommendations, and tools, authenticity is still discussed as an urgent problem to be solved. This presentation presents selected findings from the author’s doctoral research into how records professionals approach the issue of authenticity of digital records for which they are responsible. These findings are the basis for the author’s continuing research into the differences in the juridical frameworks supporting digital recordkeeping in common law and civil law jurisdictions. These differences are evident in the laws and standards that guide records professionals, as well as in the legal problems that arise in the authentication of records.

About the Author:

Corinne Rogers and an adjunct professor (diplomatics, digital records forensics) at the University of British Columbia and Project Coordinator of InterPARES Trust – an international multidisciplinary research project studying issues of trust in digital objects in online environments. She is also a researcher with the Law of Evidence in the Digital Environment Project (Faculty of Law, UBC).

This platform session will focus on the use of classroom response systems (“clickers”) as a means of guidance and assessment for archival instruction. Classroom response systems provide a unique technological resource for gaining instant feedback in instructional settings. By using clickers, the archivist was able to better evaluate students’ knowledge base and show how archival instruction increases their capacity to identify and evaluate information. Attendees to this session will leave with practical advice and suggestions for how to implement a classroom response system at their institution.

About the Author:

Christina Thompson Shutt is the College Archivist and a Public Services Librarian at Hendrix College (Conway, Ark.). Christina is an active member of SAA and currently serves on the Diversity Committee.

This paper explores the challenges and opportunities of developing an undergraduate archival studies curriculum at UCLA. This new curriculum draws on the expertise and community in the Department of Information Studies, which offers a graduate level specialization in Archival Studies. Building off of the work of Caswell et al*** in developing a social justice graduate curriculum in archival studies an aspect of our social justice commitment is expanding archival understandings at the undergraduate level. We argue that Archival Studies is a vital aspect of interrogating and understanding power. Without providing professional training or skills we focus on enhancing understandings of archives and archiving in disciplines, society, and personal life that inform students’ notions of identity, rights and social justice. Additionally, knowledge of archival functions and practice puts this understanding into motion, empowering students in research settings and providing them with skills in using primary sources. Archival studies concerns including accountability, transparency, access, community representation, cultural heritage, data literacy, human rights and social justice are paramount in a rapidly changing technological and political landscape. Developing a critical perspective on archives, records, and data in political, cultural, and technological contexts can serve as the foundation for archival literacy. An Archival Studies background provides students the tools to understand information through its structures and systems, establishing a material perspective that addresses everyday instantiations of power. Undergraduate offerings increase the Department’s reach and profile. They also enrich the archival community by opening opportunities to engage in new types of scholarship, pedagogical practice, and political possibility.

About the Authors:

Marika Cifor is a third-year doctoral student in Department of Information Studies at theUniversity of California, Los Angeles where she is also pursuing a Concentration Certificate in Gender Studies. She has worked as a processing archivist for the History Associates and in a range of archival positions for community, government and academic institutions. Marika has been an active member of SAA since 2009, and is outgoing co-chair of the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable and member of the Diversity Committee. Her research interests in critical archival studies include affect, community, human rights, and queer and feminist archives and archiving. She holds masters degrees in library and information science with a concentration in archives management and history from Simmons College. She is an editor of InterActions.

Stacy Wood is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has a Bachelor of Arts in World Literature and Gender Studies from Pitzer College and a Masters in Library and Information Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include archival history, government documents, military intelligence, infrastructure studies, critical bureaucracy studies and the role of archival documents in popular culture. She has worked with the Center for the Study of Women on an NEH funded project to process, digitize and publicize the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives. She is an editor of InterActions. 


***
Michelle Caswell, Giso Broman, Jennifer Kermer, Laura Martin and Nathan Sowry, “Implementing a Social Justice Framework in an Introduction to Archives Course: Lessons from Both Sides of the Classroom,” InterActions 8, no. 2. 

Campuses that focus on applied education and technological innovation prioritize and provide resources to those programs that best prepare students for successful careers. The archivist’s responsibility is to ensure longevity of the college archives through active engagement with career-driven rather than research-focused students and faculty. As the library building at SUNY Canton College of Technology transitioned to a Library Learning Commons space to better serve our students, the College Archives lost focus and attention. Archival files and materials were relocated multiple times and were eventually relegated to a cupboard closet under the bleachers of a former indoor pool. Over the past year and a half, the newly appointed College Archivist implemented a series of initiatives to transform the collection from a literal cupboard under the stairs to a sustainable institutional repository. Two highly successful initiatives that heightened awareness of the campus archives included: (1) focused digital outreach programs, such as storytelling tours with Augmented Reality, and (2) mass digitization and processing of targeted user-driven collections. This poster presentation provides details about the two successful initiatives and examines how an understanding of campus culture plus cross-campus collaboration, especially with the Office of Student Activities and the Office of Admissions, can sustain archival programs for campuses focusing on non-traditional and applied educational programs.

About the Author:

Rachel Santose is Instruction and Assessment Librarian and College Archivist at SUNY Canton College of Technology in Canton, New York. She received her M.A. in History and M.L.S. from Indiana University, Bloomington and her B.A. in History and Civil War Era Studies from Gettysburg College.

The focus of this poster presentation is the reconception/modification of the Reference Effort Assessment Data (READ) scale to record the reference request generated by Adelphi University Archives and Special Collection (UASC). Created by Dr. Bella Karr Gerlich, the READ scale is a six-point scale tool that was conceptualized to record qualitative statistics by placing an emphasis on recording effort, knowledge, skills and teaching used by staff during a library reference transaction. In 2014, Adelphi University Libraries decided to transition from Gimlet to Springshare's LibAnswers online reference platform. In addition to supplying the necessary data into the new system, it was proposed that all departmental units be required to record their reference inquiries using the integrated READ scale in the LibAnswers’ Reference Analytics module. To utilize the tool, the University Archives and Special Collections department found it necessary to modify the READ scale to correctly identify the various ranges of reference and research-related activities provided in the UASC. The poster presentation will visually display the process to integrate an archival READ scale that will effectively gather the appropriate data. It will also illustrate the comparative differences between an archival reference request and a library reference request.

About the Author:

David A. Ranzan is the University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Adelphi University, Garden City, NY. Previously, he was the University Archivist at Salisbury University, Maryland and a research associate for the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. He holds an M.L.I.S. from Rutgers and an M.A. in History from East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. David has edited or co-edited several documentary editions including Hero of Fort Schuyler: Selected Revolutionary War Correspondence of Brigadier General Peter Gansevoort, Jr. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014), Surviving Andersonville: One Prisoner’s Recollection of the Civil War’s Most Notorious Camp (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2013) and With Commodore Perry to Japan: The Journal of William Speiden, Jr. (1852-1855) (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2013).

After the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11 of 2011, people realized theimportance of memory, especially family memory and community memory. For instance,volunteers washed muddy family photographs in Tsunami–hit area, and some of them werereturned to their holders. Some towns reconstructed festivals to tie the people scattered becauseof evacuation. The records of the disaster themselves are also tried to keep in memory.Advancing technology makes these attempts possible. Many photographs that suffered damagesor moving images of Tsunami-attack are on the web. Now most Japanese people recognize theword “archive” as digital archive on the websites.

In Japan, the word “digital archive” was created in 1996 by a scholar of architecture as thedigitization of cultural resources for preservation. Its concept is the recording of tangible andintangible cultural assets as digital information, keeping the information in a database, andproviding information using networks for access and appreciation. This idea of digital archives islimited to just digitization. After the great earthquake in 2011, the idea of a “digital archive” waspopularized as images (including moving images) on websites such as JDArchive offered byHarvard University or HINAGIKU by the National Diet Library.

At the 2011 SAA Chicago Research Forum, I showed how archivists responded to the disaster.This presentation will introduce some “digital archives” that represent the situation after theGreat East Japan Earthquake. It will also discuss the issues on digitization, metadata, standards,copyrights, and digital preservation in Japan.

About the Author:

Yayoi Tsutsui is a certified archivist by Academy of Certified Archivists and a registeredarchivist of the Japan Society for Archival Science. She is a part-time lecturer of HitotsubashiUniversity and a part time staff of National Institute of Japanese Literature.

She is also apart-time student of Gakushuin University.She earned a Master of Arts in Archival Science degree from Gakushuin University, the firstgraduate school of Archival Science in Japan, in March 2010. She has served on staff at theUniversity Museum of the University of Tokyo and the Shibusawa Memorial Foundation. Shehas been involved in the construction of a number of exhibitions and databases.Yayoi Tsutsui received her Certificate of Museum Studies from Harvard University ExtensionSchool in 2001 and her Bachelor of Arts from International Christian University in 1980.She joined SAA in 2009 and continues to attend the annual conferences. She is a member of theArchival History Roundtable, the Museum Archives Section, and Preservation Section.

With a steady influx of newly described collections, it is rarely possible to devote sufficient time and resources to provide enhanced access to processed, yet under-described resources. In 2014, the University of Delaware Library hired two residents in an effort to plan and implement such a legacy metadata project. Simultaneously, the institution had begun to transition to a new description and access workflow involving ArchivesSpace and XTF.

The team created a survey tool to identify and quantify the repository’s holdings, assessing the level of description for every collection. Ultimately, each collection will have some form of record, discoverable through both the main online library catalog and a new installation of XTF. The team found that many of the 1000+ single-item collections had no traditional description, but were represented in either a legacy accessions database or paper accession files. By ingesting this information into ArchivesSpace, they could spawn basic Resource records. The large-scale systematic approach to the harvest and enhancement of accession and finding aid data helped the description coordinator troubleshoot and document the new procedures.

Through this process, the team continually asked “When is minimal description sufficient to provide maximum effectiveness, particularly for single-item collections?” They have largely found the answer to this question in leveraging cross-departmental collaboration, processing items at accessioning, and building procedural documentation that governs local use of subject and genre terms. The expected influx of newly created names from this project prompted further collaboration with the Metadata Services Department; important names not already in the LCNAF now prompt the creation of a worksheet.

The final stage for the single-item collections will be to digitize the items and provide access via either DSpace or ArtStor’s Shared Shelf Commons. The digital content will then be linked through the finding aid and catalog record, bringing the project full circle.

About the Authors:

Tiffany Saulter is an Affiliate Assistant Librarian and Pauline A. Young Resident in the Manuscripts and Archives Department at the University of Delaware Morris Library. She recently received her MLIS in August 2014 from Indiana University and also holds a Masters in Art History from the University of Miami. Her research interests include digital archiving and curation, popular culture, fan culture and fandoms. She currently serves as the co-moderator for ArLiSNAP, the young professionals’ interest group of the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) and is excited to be a new member of SAA.

George Apodaca is an Affiliate Assistant Librarian and Pauline A. Young Resident in the Manuscripts and Archives Department at the University of Delaware Morris Library. He earned his MLIS from the University of Arizona with a Graduate Certificate in Archival Studies in December 2013. He also formed part of a select cohort of the Knowledge River program, a fellowship motivated by culturally competent principles concerned with Latino/a and Native American issues of equitable access and representation. He currently serves as SAA’s Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives (LACCHA) Roundtable’s online communications liaison.

Jaime Margalotti is an Associate Librarian at the University of Delaware, where she has led the implementation of descriptive standards for the Manuscripts and Archives Department since 2006. She previously held the position of Library Fellow at the North Carolina State University Library. She received her MSLS at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2004 and her MA in History from North Carolina State University in 2002. She has presented and moderated several sessions at MARAC (the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference) and currently serves on the Membership Committee. For SAA, she has served on the Steering Committee of the Description Section and is a Key Contact for Delaware.

Successful digital curation begins at the point of creation. How can a small archive achieve this for permanent born-digital records produced by its own organization? The archivist doesn’t have time to assess, arrange, and describe masses of unidentified files. Creators don’t have time to assess and tag each piece.

The AIA Digital Repository program at the American Institute of Architects turns the traditional model upside down. Describe first—then just add records.

Development of the AIA Digital Repository began in 2015 and will finish in 2016. Current work focuses on three key areas:

• Meeting with each staff department to outline record series, content types, and their descriptive and administrative metadata—a blend of functional analysis, fonds, and records survey. This approach brings together the creator’s knowledge of the materials with the archivist’s understanding of context and arrangement.


• Developing an intellectual structure of contextual objects that describe creators or AIA programs, and have relationships with series, subseries, and records. Most metadata elements are pre-assigned at the appropriate level.


• Investigating ways to create a scalable and sustainable workflow to bulk ingest files into the pre-defined repository structure.

We hope that this “describe first” approach can become a model for other small archives to preserve their own organization’s born-digital records, or for collecting archives working with institutional donors.

About the Authors:

Nancy Hadley is Senior Manager, Archives & Records, for the American Institute of Architects. She has been a certified archivist since 1991, and was in the first group to receive the SAA’s new Digital Archives Specialist certificate. Prior to becoming archivist for the American Institute of Architects in 2003, she held positions at the College of William & Mary and at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center. She holds a B.A. in architecture (Princeton University), M.Arch. (Rice University), and M.L.I.S. (North Texas State University).

Valerie Collins is a 2015 National Digital Stewardship Resident at the American Institute of Architects. She holds a B.A. in English and German from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and a MLIS from Dalhousie University.

As part of Project Andvari, a digital humanities initiative to aggregate early medieval northern European artifacts, it was deemed necessary to develop a semantically structured iconographic thesaurus to properly describe the iconographic content of distributed artifactual collections from a variety of contributing institutions. Developed according to SKOS-methodologies through open-access platforms, the thesaurus will ultimately be integrated into the project platform and made available for distributed implementation and linkages to broadly adopted authorities. Despite a solid conceptual foundation, project members were concerned about the resource’s ability to properly describe resources based on domain-specific scholarly practices. With this in mind, the project team partnered with Micropasts – a crowdsourcing platform sponsored by the British Museum – in order to create a Pybossa-based crowdsourcing application through which researchers, graduate students, and the public could test the thesaurus by applying terms and concepts to digital objects collected from the British Museum and the Swedish National Heritage Board. In this poster, we will present the underlying concept behind the utilization of crowdsourcing approaches to perform initial testing of a controlled vocabulary resource, highlighting the benefits of bringing multiple subjective perspectives to quality assurance efforts. The poster will also discuss the development of the crowdsourcing application in collaboration with the Micropasts team. Finally, the poster will present initial findings of the crowdsourcing initiative, analyzing term usage and recommended concepts in order to determine both the usability of our thesaurus and the feasibility of our quality assurance approach. The poster will finally present actionable recommendations for future projects interested in implementing crowdsourcing approaches to authority record testing and enhancement.

About the Authors:

Dr. Youngok Choi is an associate professor at the Department of Library and Information Science, the Catholic University of America. Her areas of research and teaching include digital library development, metadata management, image information seeking behavior, image indexing, digital cultural heritage information management, and user studies. She is a principle investigator of the Institute of Museum and Library Service (IMLS) project, “Cultural Heritage Information Management (CHIM): Educating 21st Century Cultural Heritage Information Professionals during 2012-2015”. Recently, she organized a public forum of Cultural Heritage Information Management (CHIM) (http://lis.cua.edu/chimforum/).

Joseph Koivisto recently completed his MSLIS from the Catholic University of America where he focused on the intersection of cultural heritage information management and digital approaches to librarianship. His work focused on the development of thesauri for application to cultural heritage collections in digital platforms. His work for Project Andvari and Syriac Heritage—two projects hosted at CUA — have helped to further the involvement of librarian professionals in innovative digital humanities initiatives. Joseph currently works for the Library of Congress and the DC Public Libraries. A co-authored article to which he contributed on controlled vocabularies has been submitted for publication.

The preservation of the history and culture of African-American communities and the sharing of that knowledge with the general public and academic researchers are prevalent issues in Alabama. The “African Heritage in Alabama” project initiates the resolution of these issues first through surveying what awareness and accessibility exists regarding information about African-American history in the state. The project then strengthens awareness and accessibility through the development of a state catalog portal regarding African-American archival, artifact, and manuscript collections; a GIS program that changes information from several of these sources into spatial and attribute datasets that allow users to visualize the evolution of African-American history in the state; and the improvement of web presence and accessibility for African Americans in both urban and rural areas of the state to communicate and disseminate their stories to others.

Such efforts include surveying archives, museums, historical properties, and genealogical and other cultural organizations of varying size throughout the state to determine their emphasis on preserving African-American information resources as well as their level of involvement with local residents. The “African Heritage in Alabama” application is inspired by current platforms of spatial, textual, artifact, and oral data like Monticello’s Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery, and currently experiments with technologies like Google’s My Maps Pro and the Library of Congress NDIIPP’s ViewShare application.

About the Author:

Justin Rudder serves as the AlabamaMosaic Shared Server Coordinator at the Alabama Department of Archives and History. His duties include assisting repositories throughout Alabama in finding cost-efficient methods of digitizing their holdings and hosting them on a variety of different digital asset management platforms, and ultimately amplifying patron accessto these records through the statewide digital archive collaborative Alabama Mosaic, http://alabamamosaic.org/.

Justin received a Bachelor of Science degree in History from Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama, in Spring 2009, and a Master of Arts degree in History and Archival Studies from Auburn University in Fall 2015. Justin’s academic research focuses on comparing the goals, challenges, and achievements in processing and providing accessibility to physical and digital records in the archival and archaeological professions. He also studies how archaeological and archival records can be pulled together in a digital environment to assist in reconstructing the development of African-American communities in Alabama.

This poster will share and explore the challenges and opportunities presented to smaller institutions entering the realm of digitized archives. Small institutions face not just the challenge of the ever-restricted budget, time constraints, and understaffing. Their digitized objects must pass through the hands of multiple partners and service hubs before they arrive in major digital portals, like the DPLA. Within the digitized archives environment, an object is only as good as its metadata. The long relay chain of passage from the small institution to the DPLA requires a robust and intentionally crafted metadata schema in order for the objects to not be lost in the ocean that is DPLA.

In order to address these challenges the team of the CLIR Hidden Collections Cataloging project at Union College in Schenectady, NY, have developed many tools and resources. This poster will share our experience and resources including: our comprehensive study of fields for best discoverability for general public, K-12, and scholarly use; an archival digital object metadata reference guide for our chosen 25 fields written for use by both undergraduate assistants and professional staff; our combined digitization to metadata entry workflow which averages seven minutes per object from opening the folder to completing 25 descriptive fields; as well as our experience of leveraging the strengths of Union College’s undergraduate research fellowships to create extensive and detailed digital exhibits showcasing digitized collections.

About the Author:

Abi Simkovic serves as the Project Archivist and Project Manager for the CLIR Hidden Collections Cataloging “Grass Roots Activism and the American Wilderness: Pioneers in the Twentieth Century Adirondack Park Conservation Movement” project at Union College in Schenectady, NY. She received her MSIS in 2014 from the University at Albany, SUNY. Her duties within the grant include the processing and cataloging of 200 cubic feet of archival material; designing the digitization metadata schema and workflow; supervising graduate and undergraduate students; as well as engaging with non-traditional archival user groups to create learning materials.

The Internet Archive hosts many digitized assets from the University of Maryland Libraries, and its staff performs the large scale scanning. There are some archival materials, however, that due to their size, quantity, and/or fragility, student digitization assistants scan on site in the Hornbake Digitization Center in College Park, Maryland. In the spring of 2014, I helped to establish a workflow and documentation to track the materials as they progressed through description, digitization, and batch upload publication. The previously undocumented activities are now identified and assigned to the appropriate Libraries staff. This poster demonstrates how people in many departments—Special Collections and University Archives, Metadata Services Department, Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting, and Digital Programs and Initiatives—make this work happen as efficiently and effectively as possible.

About the Author:

Eric Cartier is the Digital Librarian in the Digital Conversion and Media Reformatting Department at the University of Maryland, College Park Libraries. Since October 2012, he has managed daily operations in the Hornbake Digitization Center, where digitization assistants create digital surrogates of paper-based and photographic materials, as well as sound recordings in many formats. Eric previously worked as an audio preservation technician at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, where he earned his Masters of Science in Information Studies from the University of Texas, and where he played drums in The Banned Books. He currently serves on the Steering Committee of the Society of American Archivists Recorded Sound Roundtable and plays keyboards in the band Bounce Pass.

Genealogists make up an important segment of many libraries’ and archives’ user population, but have largely been neglected in the professional literature until recently. This exploratory study investigates the connection between genealogical research and interest in history, seeking to find out more about how the public engages with history through genealogy. The goal was to better understand user interests and needs, informing the way information professionals serve their genealogist patrons and opening up avenues for further research. A survey was distributed online and in paper to three North Carolina genealogical societies, and the results compared to the answers given to the same survey by graduate students at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. The results indicate that genealogists tended to be more interested in history in general than the students, and revealed some common motivations for genealogical research between the two groups. Both groups enjoyed learning more about the context of their ancestors’ lives, exploring the continuity of family traits, and building a historical narrative in which they played a part – an important part of identity formation. The survey also revealed some differences; unlike the students, many genealogists also tended to enjoy the communities formed around their genealogical pursuits, the lifelong learning process, and the satisfaction of problem-solving. These findings can help information professionals to develop more effective resources for their genealogist patrons and provide them with better overall service. Further study of the motivations for genealogical research identified in the study and comparison among genealogists of varying levels of expertise are potential areas for future research.

About the Author:

Jamie Patrick-Burns earned her Master of Science in Library Science with a concentration in Archives and Records Management from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in2015, and her Master of Arts in Public History from North Carolina State University in 2014. She completed an internship in the University Archives at Duke University, accessioning, processing and describing records of enduring value to the Duke community and answering reference questions about the collections, as well as contributing to social media outreach and digitization projects. She also held a research internship for the Halifax County Convention and Visitors Bureau, conducting research to document Underground Railroad activities around Halifax, NC and helping develop historical interpretation and public programs. Jamie has published an original research paper on the interpretation of the tobacco industry in Durham NC in the NC State Graduate Journal of History and collaborated on multiple exhibits as a student at North Carolina State University. Her professional interests include public outreach and access, electronic records and technologies, and description. She received her BA in History and French from Wheaton College (IL).

Evaluating the related issues of document security and cybersecurity allows us to advance the archival profession’s impact on the lifecycle of digital content and its trustworthy overtime access. My poster will present the current developments in cybersecurity studies, in particular the organizational readiness work being done at MIT Sloan School of Management, and how archivists may leverage that work to extend the TDR model into the creation and post-custodial environments of records creators. As archivists, our responsibilities for maintaining the integrity, authenticity, and appropriate access to records in our care generally begin at the time of acquisition.

With digital records, what are our responsibilities in understanding the organizational security context present during the creation, use, and storage during their active period? Although this is often addressed in the field of records management and left to the records creators, I suggest that understanding the policies under which organizations and their employees create, use, and store records have a direct impact and relationship to an archives, esp. an organizational archives, ability to be a trusted digital repository when copies of digital material may still be used and shared outside of the archival enterprise.

By comparing the TRAC questions to the “House of Security” interview questions I will present ideas and solicit feedback and comment from Forum attendees as to how archivists might intersect with the Cybersecurity community to promote the related work we do as well.

About the Author:

Kari R. Smith joined the staff of the MIT IASC in December 2011 as Digital Archivist where she has established process and procedures for acquiring and managing born-digital content. Shemanages over 2TB of digital records for the Institute Archives and Special Collections department of the MIT Libraries. Prior to MIT, she worked at the University of Michigan, Department of the History of Art as Head of the Visual Resource Collections and at Cornell University Library as a digital project archivist. Since 2008 she has been an instructor for the Digital Preservation Management workshops. She is a member of the ArchivesSpace Technical Advisory Council, was elected to the Executive Council for the BitCurator Community, and is serving on the BitCurator Access Advisory Board. She serves as co-Chair for the SAA MDOR and is the Conference Chair for the 2016 IS&T Archiving conference. She is also a member of the program committee for the SAA Research Forum. She contributes to the digital archives and preservation community through her blog and participation in several community forums.

Nebium is a mobile survey app designed for archivists, collection curators, and preservation professionals. It facilitates the appraisal and assessment of archival collections, making it easy to record information in the field or in situ, and seamlessly link recorded data to an enterprise archives management system. The app allows users to easily note things like condition, research value, and restricted materials at the collection or container level. Designed to integrate with ArchivesSpace, Nebium is also a stand-alone tool that is able to export your survey data as CSV or PDF. Our poster session will include a prototype of the Nebium app, as well as documentation of the open-source Nebium data model.

About the Authors:

Lisa Darms is the Senior Archivist at New York University’s Fales Library & Special Collections. She teaches in NYU’s Graduate program in History, and is founder of the Fales Riot Grrrl Collection.

Brian Hoffman is an independent software developer and a contributor to the open source ArchivesSpace project. Nebium is an independent project not affiliated with an institution or organization.

In February 2013, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memorandum to the heads of 19 executive departments and agencies directing them to develop plans promoting open access (OA) to data and publications. As of June 2015, 17 of these agencies have released their OA plans to the public. The mandate for these plans includes establishing uniform elements and compatible approaches that would increase the opportunity for data integration across agencies. Given the agencies’ diversity of missions and foci, however, they do have some unique approaches to data. Understanding this new OA data landscape and where to access available resources will help organizations prepare for managing their data and publications. This poster presents preliminary findings of the IMLS funded project, Data Curation Needs, Gaps and Opportunities. This project has gathered and analyzed the government agency plans that have been released and explores the implications for cultural heritage projects, particularly those supported by IMLS. Project researchers are in the process of completing a gap analysis identifying how gaps might be filled and the implications for cultural heritage institutions.

About the Authors:

Suzie Allard is Associate Dean of Research at the University of Tennessee College of Communication & Information and professor in the School of Information Sciences. Her research focuses on how scientists and engineers use and communicate information. Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex are key partners for her work on science information and data curation. Allard is PI/Co-PI on grants funded by the National Science Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services and other agencies. She is a member of the DataONE Leadership Team and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations Board of Directors.

Alice Bishop is Senior Program Officer at the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). She directs the Postdoctoral Fellowship Program that provides recent PhD graduates the opportunity to work on projects forging and strengthening connections among library collections, educational technologies, and current research. She also oversees the IMLS-funded research examining the federally mandated plans for open access and their implications for the continuing education needs of libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions.

Cal Lee is an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His research focuses on the professionalization of digital curation and the diffusion of existing tools and methods including digital forensics and web archiving. He has served as Principal Investigator or Co-PI on projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Since 2012, Nancy Y. McGovern has been responsible for Digital Curation and Preservation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries, located in Cambridge Massachusetts in the USA. She directs the Digital Preservation Management (DPM) workshop series that has been offered almost fifty times since 2003. She developed the Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) curriculum for the U.S. Library of Congress. She has more than twenty-five years of experience with preserving digital content, including senior positions at ICPSR, a social science data archive at the University of Michigan; Cornell University Library; the Open Society Archives; and the Center for Electronic Records of the U.S. National Archives. In 2015, she was elected Vice President/President-elect of SAA. She completed her PhD on digital preservation at University College London in 2009.

This piece contributes to the literature on pluralizing the archival curriculum. It describes digital pedagogies used in archival courses to help students develop cultural competence. Cultural competence in library and information science is defined as the ability to function effectively in information environments serving populations from diverse linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic populations.1 We use relational reflexivity as a research method that engages with both educator and students’ perspectives on the value and use of such pedagogical strategies.

In one course, students created digital stories concerning diversity in the LIS professions ranging from topics on Latino cultural literacies to the role archives have in supporting Native American language preservation. In another course, students collaborated with faculty and curators to produce digital exhibits documenting local cultures and communities by using the scholarly publishing platform Scalar. This work has implications not only on the type of sociotechnical engagement educators foster to develop a pluralistic curriculum, but also on how such activities can help empower students

About the Authors:

Janet Ceja Alcalá is a faculty member at Simmons College in the School of Library and Information Science; she holds a doctorate degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Her scholarly fields of interest include the history and preservation of moving images, archival education and advocacy, and the role of archives in preserving intangible cultural heritage in Mexico and in Latino and Indigenous communities in the U.S.

Cordelia L. Hooee is a graduate student, Knowledge River Scholar, at the University of Arizona, School of Information; she is a graduate assistant at the University of Arizona’s American Indian Film Gallery. She holds a Bachelor of Liberal Studies degree from Arizona State University. She is a member of the Zuni Tribe and is from Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. A majority of Cordelia’s library career was spent working at the Pueblo of Zuni’s public library, and while she is a full-time student, she remains active in the New Mexico tribal library community and with the Zuni Public Library. Cultural materials and language preservation are her focus as she works towards a master’s degree in library science.

Jessica Kniest is a graduate student at the University of Arizona’s School of Information, where she is pursuing a master’s degree in Library and Information Science. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona. Her interests include writing, archiving and preserving documents, and organizing digital information. She currently works in the Graduate College Admissions office at the University of Arizona.

Hanni Nabahe is an ARL/SAA Mosaic Fellow and Knowledge River Scholar with the School of Information at the University of Arizona, pursuing an MLIS degree and graduate certificates in Archives and Digital Information Management. Originally from southern Mexico, she holds a BA in English from Brigham Young University. She is a library instructor at the Pima County Public Library, and has worked in Special Collections with both the University of Arizona and UC San Diego. Hanni is an active member of the American Indian Library Association, REFORMA, SAA, and SLA, and her professional interests include digital access and preservation of archival materials with a special focus on underrepresented/marginalized communities and indigenous language revitalization, as well as related intellectual property and copyright issues.

Monique Perez holds a BS in Education from the University of Arizona where she majored in Literacy, Learning and Leadership with a minor in History. She is a 2014 i3 (iSchool Inclusion Institute) Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, where she will be completing research along with her colleagues through the summer of 2015. Monique is currently obtaining her MLIS at the University of Arizona through Knowledge River – a program that focuses on educating information professionals who are committed to serving diverse populations, specifically Latino and Native American communities. In 2014, she was selected as an Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Initiative to Recruit a Diverse Workforce (IRDW) Scholar. She has a passion to assist underserved populations, such as the Latino community and increase early literacy skills and access to information and resources. She currently works with Make Way For Books, an early literacy resource center in Tucson, Arizona, as well as the Research and Learning Team at the University of Arizona Main Library.

This poster aims to report on the early stages of a research project to document and analyze how humanities and social sciences scholars perceive the quality of analog moving image works and their digitized surrogates. The study’s hypothesis is that user perceptions of image quality may impact researchers’ ability to incorporate moving images as research data in their work.

Potential user communities that will be studied in this research include psychologists, cinema studies scholars, and historians, all of which have been identified as communities that frequently use legacy moving image materials in their research for purposes of documenting and analyzing phenomena. Typical examples of moving image uses might include psychologists looking at babies’ facial expressions to determine reactions to various stimuli, cinema studies experts looking at uses of color in a particular director’s feature films, or historians examining details in news footage such as clothing, automobiles, shop and street signs, and various interactions and activities in which those depicted are engaged. While it is a given that poor image quality may negatively impact the ability of users to gather and analyze data about the phenomena they are studying, few studies have actually examined user definitions of image quality and how perceptions of image quality may affect research activities.

The poster will summarize the research design for the larger study and also report on plans for a pilot study on researchers’ perceptions of image quality while using moving image materials from the Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron.

About the Author:

Karen F. Gracy is an associate professor in Library and Information Science at Kent State University. She possesses an MLIS and PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and an MA in critical studies of Film and Television from UCLA. Recent publications have appeared in JASIST, Archival Science, American Archivist, Journal of Library Metadata, and Information and Culture. Dr. Gracy's scholarly interests are found within the domain of cultural heritage stewardship, which encompasses a broad range of activities such as preservation and conservation processes and practices, digital curation activities that consider the roles of heritage professionals and users in the lifecycle of objects and records, as well as knowledge representation activities such as definitions of knowledge domains, development of standards for description, and application of new technologies to improve access to cultural heritage objects. She teaches in the areas of preservation and archiving, with a focus on moving image archives and digital preservation issues.

In August 2014, I began processing 1700 linear feet of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) records at the Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. For this 18 month project I have had to balance the time constraints of my job with competing needs of the collections and of the Reuther, such as downsizing collections to save space, preservation concerns, and determining the proper amount of description to use. “More Product Less Process” seems to be the norm for processing strategies in many archives, and as I am using it on a fairly large scale, I am revisiting some of its strengths and weaknesses and the ways it can adapt to different collections. In this process, I am also attempting to see just how much can be accomplished with MPLP in a limited amount of time. My poster illustrates the challenges I’ve faced when carrying out this project, the various ways I have applied MPLP principals and methods, and the advantages and drawbacks of those approaches. It also shows ways I have adapted my approach that may stray from the “less process” side of the equation, but still keeps to the spirit of accomplishing more in less time. I hope my experience can benefit others when tackling large collection backlogs.

About the Author:

Stefanie Caloia is the American Federation of Teachers Project Archivist at the Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University. Previously, she worked for a private archives in Birmingham, MI, and for History Associates, Inc., which took her to Carlsbad Caverns National Park and Keweenaw National Historical Park. She received her MLIS and graduate certificate in archival administration from Wayne State University and a BA in photography from Grand Valley State University. She is also a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists, secretary of the Michigan Archival Association, and volunteers as a member of the Redford Township Historical Commission.

This poster will visualize and display three simple shell scripts that facilitate the acquisition of born-digital archival collections from donors’ computers and streamline the creation of descriptive data for EAD finding aids. Written by two archivists at Princeton University’s Mudd Manuscript Library with no educational background in computer science, these scripts aid the Library in conforming to the Producer-Archive Interface Methodology Abstract Standard (PAIMAS) and the Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS).

Mudd archivists created the first two shell scripts, which facilitate acquisition, using basic Bash and Batch commands that form part of the default shells in Unix (Mac) and DOS (Windows) computing environments, respectively. The usage of default commands is significant because archivists can execute these acquisitions on a donor’s computer irrespective of a particular operating system, eliminating the need for donors to install any additional software. Using the default Linux (Ubuntu) shell that is packaged with the open-source BitCurator environment, Mudd archivists composed the third shell script to streamline the creation of descriptive data. This script is important because it extracts metadata from the file system efficiently and allows archivists to quickly transform this data into an EAD component listing.

Taken as a whole, the scripts have simplified the Library’s acquisition and access procedures for born-digital archives, empowering them to gain greater intellectual control of materials and provide enhanced access to researchers through richer description.

About the Authors:

Rossy M. Mendez is a recent graduate and a Public Services Project Archivist at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library of Princeton University. Her responsibilities include providing reference services, assisting with reading room operations, and working on special projects including curating exhibitions and creating description for oral history collections. She is interested in outreach, archival literacy and the representation of marginalized communities in the archival record.

Jarrett M. Drake is the Digital Archivist at Princeton University where his responsibilities entail acquiring, accessioning, and describing University Archives collections in both digital and analog formats. He currently serves on the Start-Up Committee of the BitCurator Consortium and also co-chairs the bibliography subgroup of the Access to Electronic Records Working Group of SAA’s Reference, Outreach, and Access Section. Drake’s research interests include the intersection of digital archives, human rights, and social justice.

This project examines the perceptions of archivists regarding levels of job classification with particular focus on mid-career positions and determines if they are borne out with data. The investigators seek to address concerns within the archival profession that there exists a lack of job openings and positions available to mid-career archivists, with overrepresentation of entry-level and upper management positions. To quantify this perceived disparity of job offerings we will illustrate the number of professional archival positions at each career level available during a two-year time period (2013-2015). Each discrete job opening will be assigned to one of three categories: entry-level, mid-career, or upper management. We will contextualize these findings with data collected from a survey sent to SAA membership in 2015. The survey posited several key questions, including what career level respondents believed themselves to be in, whether they perceived a deficit of mid-career job opportunities, and if they saw a clear path from entry level to upper management/leadership positions. Through their findings, the investigators aim to shed light on the balance, or lack thereof, in the current career hierarchy and necessary areas for growth in the archival profession.

About the Authors:

E. Evan Echols is a Senior Assistant Librarian in the Manuscripts and Archives Department ofthe University of Delaware Library, where he has been since 2006. He is responsible formanaging manuscript collection audiovisual materials and creating policies for their housing,preservation, and description. Other responsibilities include processing and description,outreach and instruction, and providing regular public service and reference assistance. Echolsreceived a MasterÕs Degree in Library and Information Science from the School of InformationStudies at Syracuse University. He has been a member of SAA since 2007.

Tammi Kim is an Assistant Librarian in the Manuscripts and Archives Department of theUniversity of Delaware Library, where she has been since 2013. Prior to joining the University of Delaware, Kim worked at the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies atthe University Georgia. Kim received her MLIS with a concentration in archival studies from theDepartment of Information Studies at UCLA in 2011. She has been a member of SAA since 2009.

The LA as Subject Resident Archivist program presents an original, multi-faceted approach to archival training for early career archivists. This Institute of Museum and Library Services funded project is the only residency program of its kind on the west coast. The goal is to provide residents with the opportunity to gain professional experience in diverse institutional settings, engage with the LA as Subject community through workshops, and also receive professional guidance through mentorship.

LA as Subject was established nearly 20 years ago as a network of memory institutions, collectors, and enthusiasts dedicated to preserving the history of Los Angeles. The residency program was developed as a collaboration between The Autry National Center, the University of Southern California, and California State University Northridge, each of whom serves as the home institution for one resident. The residents transfer between four three-month rotations, where they will complete projects specifically chosen to address the core set of archival competencies codified by SAA, and to provide opportunities to experience the diverse cultures and practices of a variety of institutions. Furthermore, each resident is required to hold workshops for LA as Subject members and present a capstone project at the annual Archives Bazaar in October.

In this poster, inaugural residents Rachel Mandell, Kelsey Knox, and Beth McDonald reflect on their experiences thus far in this innovative program, discuss their expectations for the remainder of the year, and outline their hopes for how participating in the residency program will benefit their future archival careers.

About the Authors:

Kelsey Knox is the LA as Subject Resident Archivist at California State University, Northridge. She has previously held internships at the Getty Research Institute, Yosemite National Park Archive, and the Peace Corps Records Office in Washington, DC. During this LA as Subject residency, Kelsey is looking forward to diversifying her experiences and learning more about archives in the Los Angeles area.

Kelsey received her B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz and her MLIS at UCLA with an emphasis in Archival Studies.

Rachel Mandell graduated from UCLA in 2012 with a master’s degree in Library and Information Science, where she focused on the research data management and digital archiving. Her thesis project traced the development of the UCLA Data Registry—an online tool designed to promote data sharing among scholars. After graduating, Rachel pursued a personal goal to live abroad and also gained international experience as a visiting scholar in the Media Library at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe, Germany. She was then awarded a 2013-2014 Fulbright grant in Vienna, Austria where she concentrated on audiovisual archiving by working in the Austrian Academy of Sciences’ Phonogrammarchiv—the oldest sound archive in the world—as well as the Austrian Film Museum, where she digitized and archived amateur films. Rachel is currently the LA as Subject Resident Archivist with the Autry National Center. By the program's end, she will have processed paper-based, photographic, and film collections from the region's diverse populations at The Autry National Center, CSU Dominguez Hills, the Los Angeles Police Museum, and the Los Angeles Public Library.

Beth McDonald is the L.A. as Subject Resident Archivist with the University of Southern California. She recently finished her rotation at the Center for Oral and Public History at California State University Fullerton and is currently working with the Pasadena Museum of History. Beth graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with an MLIS specializing in Archival Studies in 2014. She has done research on creating a Twitter archive for UCLA, and done studies to analyze user experience and digital preservation best practices for the South Asian American Digital Archive.

Beth is also the Museum Manager and Archivist for the Campo de Cahuenga, a small historical site in Studio City, California, and has held internships at UCLA, Pepperdine University, and Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park. She previously received her BFA in Theatre from Auburn University and is always looking for ways to blend her love for performing arts and archives. Before her move to the archival field, Beth worked for many years in the entertainment advertising world.

As an institutional repository, DePaul University Archives faces a constant influx of small transfers of records in addition to larger, periodic donations. This constant “trickle” of records ranging from routine mailings and ephemera to vital records had created an environment where some materials were meticulously “over-accessioned” and processed while others languished in backlog. This poster will address the very simple steps implemented to reduce (and prevent) accessioning and processing backlog for physical and digital records, while improving use of staff time and knowledge about how staff time is begin used. A combination of three accessioning “streams” that immediately queues records as they come in the door, coupled with a “Last-In-First-Out” processing plan, has standardized when and how records are managed.

About the Author:

Andrea Bainbridge has served as University Archivist in DePaul University’s Special Collections and Archives Department since 2010. She earned a Master of Library and Information Science degree from Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois, and previously served as Senior Archivist at the American Medical Association. She is a proud member of the Chicago Area Archivists and Midwest Archives Conference.

Anthony Cocciolo will present a study that examines strategies to appraise significant email as a cultural heritage resource, using an art museum located in the Northeast Untied States as a study site. The central research question is, by what method can email be appraised such that only significant email is retained? To study this, email messages from three mailboxes (an executive and two curators) are manually appraised for retention using a rubric. Following this manual appraisal, strategies for expediting this appraisal process, using what is learned from the manual appraisal process, are explored. A major finding of this study is that sent mail is almost always significant, although preserving only sent mail, or preserving sent mail in combination with inbox items that have been acted upon (replied to or forwarded), are not sufficient to capture significant correspondence. Rather, a social network approach holds the most promise to accelerate the process of email appraisal. This means that appraisal should be conducted by gaining an understanding of the mailbox owner’s social network, and appraising messages in groups by the sender/receiver. Some senders/receivers can be retained in entirety because of the nature of the relationship between the sender/receiver and the mailbox owner (e.g., professional relationship where correspondence is always related to mission of museum), where other senders/receivers require more fine-grained appraisal (e.g., relationships that span personal and professional life).

About the Author:

Anthony Cocciolo is an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science, where his research and teaching are in the archives area. Prior to Pratt, he was the Head of Technology for the Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College, Columbia University. He completed his doctorate from the Communication, Media andLearning Technologies Design program at Teachers College Columbia University, and BS in Computer Science from the University of California, Riverside. You can find out more about him at his website: http://www.thinkingprojects.org. 

In an environment in which the cognitive processing of visual information is ever-more important and visualization of data, concepts, and worlds is on the rise, there is great interest in visual interfaces with library collections. Archives are particularly challenging from this perspective because each one is unique; without visual interfaces equivalent in intuitiveness, efficiency, effectiveness, and user pleasures to those used with other types of databases, archival information will be even more obscure, difficult to access, and underused in the future than they have been in the past. This experimental research project explored how individuals search when they are using a visual information retrieval system in an archival setting. Six individuals from different academic backgrounds were studied as they search using a prototype of a visually oriented interface to a subset of archival collections from the American Geographical Society Library at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries, which was developed by the PI for the purposes of this test project. Participants carried out a number of interactive tasks, and were interviewed to more deeply understand insights into the visual retrieval process. The findings suggest that the visual display of the archival images enabled participants to discover information more quickly, and was more enjoyable to use. The discoveries from this small pilot study will be expanded to a larger scope to learn more about the performance of the visual system and user engagement.

About the Author:

Jennifer Stevenson is a PhD Candidate at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Jennifer has a MLIS with a concentration in Archives and a Certificate of Advanced Study in Digital Libraries from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee. She is also an Archivist at the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Her research interests include archivists’ use of social media, interface design, and the social impacts of information and communication technology amongst different user groups. Professionally, she has been working in the world of digital archives. Over the past several years she has worked at several institutions as a digital archivist consultant 

The Web has come to represent a new space and manner in which to conduct many of our life spheres. Government, corporate, institutional and personal records are created and presented: linked, dynamic, ephemeral, semi-permanent, censored/commercialized/rated via secret search algorithms, public or increasingly locked to members. Indicatively, the Web itself has not yet become a focus of digital history and this might be related to a lack of ‘adequate’ web archives.

Rather implicitly, historians have developed routine procedures to carry out analog research projects AND, in response, cultural institutions have either created or preserved adequate types of primary and secondary resources. Briefly reviewing both, we then follow a hypothetical historian of the future who wants to search currently existing web archives using her beloved procedures and looking for like resources. Of course, her web history also requires new types of questions and thus resources regarding for example functionality (browsers and algorithms), record types (personal narratives and popular entertainment), or privacy issues (e.g. targeted advertisement).

Our historian samples members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium and the Wayback Machine as representing today’s best available tools, standards and practices of web archiving. Alas, she fails: what she encounters demonstrates how web archives are currently not preserving an adequate cross-section of the Web in its interconnected aspects of collection policy/appraisal and access tools for historical research.

An analogy to a European medieval town might help here. Little will be left of its infrastructure, of changes in all its aspects, functionality, and its close links to the outside via trade, migration, pilgrim and tourism routes, wars, diseases, and crises. Archivists and historians know this: only minute aspects and little of its medieval functionality will be preserved. Perhaps they will also know the same to hold true for the early web.

About the Author:

Susanne Belovari, Archivist for Faculty Papers and Assistant Professor, University Archives, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, previously worked at Digital Collections and Archives, Tufts University and as Holocaust restitution historian and archivist for the Jewish Community of Vienna, Austria.

Susanne has served on the board of the International Council on Archives – Section of University and Research Institution Archives and is editor in chief of the section’s Who’s Who in Archives Globally as well as its newsletter. She has presented at regional, national, and international conferences on international archival issues, digital archives issues, the history of archives, food and culinary history before and under National Socialism, and processing ‘archives under siege’ among other topics and has published numerous articles. Her academic background is in international development, Latin American Studies, the history of colonialism and science and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana, and a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 

Providing security to records and promoting individual rights, often thought of as the domain of government archives, can present complex problems for archivists in non-government archives. Because of the wide range of records and personal collections they contain, university and other research institution archives often face particular challenges navigating conflicting needs of access to records and protection of personal privacy. Such diverse collections can include varying degrees of sensitive or private information in administrative records, personal papers, oral histories, literary works, legal and health records, and research data. These records and personal papers come with unique sets of considerations before access to researchers can be granted. These archivists must think of personal identifying information, the protection of research subjects, third party privacy, and compliance with legal mandates.

This presentation will address the variety of restrictions possible in such hybrid archives and practical solutions of how to balance the archival ethics of protecting privacy and providing access. Multiple strategies will be explored relating to creating and negotiating formal policies for access. It will also consider limits on the effectiveness of even the best articulated access policies when facing legal or political pressures. This research contributes to ongoing discussions and provide useful solutions on the protection of third parties and donors, fulfilling legal mandates for access and restriction, and fulfilling the ethics set by the archival profession as well as what advisory or advocacy role the profession might adopt to ensure that best professional practice can withstand political pressure.

About the Authors: 

Cara Bertram is a Visiting Archival Operations and Reference Specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she provides reference services for the University Archivesand manages the American Library Association Archives. She received her BA and MA in History at Western Washington University, along with a certificate in Archives and Records Management.

Jameatris Y. Rimkus is currently the Archivist for Reference & User Engagement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she provides Archival Instruction and Reference Services for the University Archives. She received her M.S. in Library and Information Science from the Graduate School of Library & Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006. 

The American Archivist (AA) is approaching 80 years of existence and is itself a portrait of the archives profession. Since Volume 1, Number 1 from January, 1938, the journal has provided quarterly – and since 1998 – semi-annual coverage of research, best practices, bibliography, and news of interest to the archival and library communities. It is not overly introspective to examine this publication’s history as a reflection of the profession – indeed, it is a primary source of evidence in its own right. The proposed short presentation will summarize a research project that will examine author characteristics and subject coverage in research articles of The American Archivist through Volume 77 (2014). While this presentation will present merely a snapshot of the period, the intent for the overall project to collect data for all quarterly issues (volumes 1-60) and semi-annual issues (volumes 61-77), including number of authors, author gender, author affiliation, author location, and subject. It is anticipated that this research will shed light on two major aspects of archives in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. First, professional and cultural changes may be reflected by changes in topics or perspectives. In the first decades, the journal focused more on issues related to the administration of archives and in specialized repositories than in later years. In more recent decades the publication has included a higher percentage of articles about archival education, intellectual property issues, digital technologies, and the social roles of archives. Secondly, changes in authorship patterns are expected to mirror cultural and professional changes in archival practice and research.

About the Author:

Thomas D. Walker has been a librarian and educator for more than twenty years. He has worked in public, academic, and special libraries. He has worked with two small archives in Illinois, but most of his energies have been focused on library and information science education. His M.A. in Library and Information Science is from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois. He currently teaches in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, specializing in the organization of information. He has edited issues of Library Trends, and published articles in Library Trends, The Library Quarterly, JASIST, Knowledge Organization, among others, and has also written many encyclopedia articles, book reviews, and other short publications and maintains a wiki, Celsus, about library architecture.

Many works of contemporary art resist documentation, operating through performance and ephemera. The standard strategy for creating a record of these works is to snap a few photographs, which generates important documentation, but radically flattens and obscures many vital dimensions of the artwork, including the affective responses of the audience, temporal and spatial components, and the artist's own intentions. In collaboration with two artists in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, I have experimented with a program to more fully document performance and ephemeral art. This strategy employs an ethnographic method, wherein I observe how individuals participate in the event, using interviews to elicit a narrative of the viewers' affective, temporal, and spatial experiences. In the first phase, I conduct an interview with the artist, in which the artist discusses the creative processes behind the artwork, and all of the components required for exhibition. In the second phase, I embed myself at the art exhibition, and conduct interviews with exhibition attendees, recording these conversations to create a multi-perspective archive of the event. This body of recorded dialog provides a more complete resource for art historians and other individuals seeking a record of the artwork. In my presentation, I will discuss two attempts to implement this program, discussing what worked and what could be improved. I will especially focus on the methodology of this experiment, which draws upon practices of both contemporary art conservation and archival preservation. As museums and archives increasingly care for complex digital, ephemeral, and otherwise vulnerable objects, dialog and exchange between these professional fields can be productive of innovative practices addressing difficult problems. I hope this experiment can suggest possible such exchange and collaboration.

About the Author:

Colin Post is currently a graduate student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he is working on a dual degree masters program in Art History and Library Science. Colin is also a fellow in the IMLS funded Learning from Artists' Archives project, which investigates practical and innovative strategies for studio artists to build and sustain personal archives. Before moving to North Carolina,

Colin received his MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana and his BA in Religious Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.

Archivists have used the MARC format for description since the 1980s, but deep analysis of the corpus of records has never been done. As of February 2014, OCLC’s WorldCat database included 3,000,000 archival records. This research establishes a detailed profile of data element occurrences, providing a view of 30+ years of practice. The data challenge some common assumptions.

MARC provides no straightforward way to extract all records for “archival materials.” We therefore scoped a filter to extract the archival subset. A simplified description of the filter: it pulls in records for “unpublished” materials in any format (e.g., text, visual, moving image, sound recording) held by a single institution. It excludes records for published materials, theses and dissertations, and bibliographies. The filter itself suggests a rich discussion question: What are the characteristics of “archival material” in the context of the MARC format?

I analyzed the dataset from numerous perspectives in order to address questions such as these: In what significant ways do descriptions differ from one type of material to another? To what extent does use of the archival control byte successfully encompass the universe of archival descriptions? Is it true that archivists usually describe materials at the collection level? How often is DACS used as the content standard?

Some high-level findings:

• About 50% of records are coded as “mixed materials,” while 25% each are textual manuscripts or visual materials.


• 28% are coded as being under “archival control.”


• 58% describe collections, 42% describe single items.


• 85% include one or more indexed creator names 


• 75% include one or more indexed subject terms.


• The fields used vary significantly from one type of material to the next.

I also explored implications for effective discovery, including those relative to the findings of the Bron et al. study of the 120,000 EAD instances in the ArchiveGrid database.

About the Author:

Jackie Dooley is a Program Officer in OCLC Research, where she undertakes projects to address current challenges faced by archives and special collections libraries in research libraries. Past projects have included detailed surveys of special collections and archives in the US/Canada and the UK/Ireland, the data from which have helped OCLC define its work agenda for the past five years.

In previous positions Dooley worked with archival, visual, and rare book collections at the University of California at Irvine, the Getty Research Institute, the University of California at San Diego, and the Library of Congress.

Dooley has lengthy experience working with descriptive standards, including as a member of the original EAD development team. She’s held a variety of positions within SAA, including serving as President (2012-2013).

Dooley’s latest publication is The Archival Advantage: Integrating Archival Expertise into Management of Born-Digital Library Materials (OCLC Research, 2015), which describes ten areas of archival knowledge that are essential for managing digital materials such as research data that often are managed by library units outside the archives.

The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) believes that everyone should be able to access - and, whenever possible, reuse - cultural heritage materials made available online. Currently, there is no international approach to rights statements that works for every institution, leading to a confusing proliferation of information. Europeana and DPLA, along with a community of internationally recognized experts in intellectual property, technology, and metadata known as the International Rights Statement Working Group (IRSWG), have been working together to improve these possibilities through the development of minimum, baseline standards in expressing intellectual property status for organisations that contribute to metadata aggregators. The rights statements under development are intended to be understood by both machines and humans, making the concepts around copyright clear and understandable to all. By doing that, we can educate and encourage people to use cultural heritage material to the fullest extent possible while still respecting its legal copyright status.

This presentation will focus on the analysis of the rights statements for in metadata aggregated by DPLA as a large-scale cultural heritage aggregator. Our research has uncovered that there is considerable diversity within those rights statements represented in DPLA's data set, which will need to be reconciled to adopt a framework such as that under development by IRSWG. The presentation will also briefly describe the IRSWG’s development controlled vocabulary modeled using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), and potential ways which existing “legacy” rights statements can be reconciled with this vocabulary. This research, and the work of the IRSWG, has been generously funded through the Knight News Challenge, a program of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

About the Author:

Mark A. Matienzo is the Director of Technology for the Digital Public Library of America, and focuses on promoting and establishing digital library interoperability at an international scale. Prior to joining DPLA, Mark worked as an archivist and technologist specializing in born-digital materials and metadata management, at institutions including the Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, and the American Institute of Physics. Mark’s current projects include serving as the project director for Hydra In A Box (a software development project in collaboration with Stanford University and DuraSpace, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services). Mark’s previous projects include serving as the technical architect for the ArchivesSpace planning grant and implementation grants, and as lead digital archivist for AIMS (Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship), a collaborative project between University of Virginia, University of Hull, Yale University, and Stanford University. Mark received a MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information and a BA in Philosophy from the College of Wooster, and was awarded the Emerging Leader Award of the Society of American Archivists in 2012.

As institutions strive to make more of their archival collections accessible through digitization, methods that yield high quality color jp2 images and searchable text, at low cost, open up a lot of possibilities. In the fall of 2014, the Harvard Law School Library Digital Lab team, partnering with Historical & Special Collections staff, successfully adapted the Library’s in-house use of an ibml ImageTrac 3 high speed scanner, primarily used for the mass digitization of published materials, to digitize material from the library’s Nuremberg Trials Collection. Dealing with 360 boxes of largely unprocessed primary source material from nine of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, the team overcame the many issues this heterogeneous collection presented to meet the challenge of processing and digitizing over 414,000 document pages in 18 weeks.

Keys to the success of our approach were building an agile project team that worked in close proximity and employing available technology to track and organize the material throughout the workflow. The team was able to produce thousands of color jp2 images per day, with virtually no rework required, and a fully processed collection of the analog material. This platform presentation will emphasize lessons learned from this experiment in the mass digitization of archival material, highlighting the resulting workflows, techniques, and tools used throughout the project that could readily be applied in successfully digitizing other archival collections.

About the Author:

Lindsay Dumas is the Digital Projects Archivist in the Library Innovation Lab (LIL) at Harvard Law School Library, where she coordinates digitization projects large and small. She holds aMA in Archives and Public History from New York University and a BA in History from Providence College.

Rather than using one tool for all their digital preservation needs, institutions tend to deploy 2 or more systems in their workflows. Often, transitioning between systems is difficult and requires internal configuration or special development, and upgrading customizations can be complicated. Further, no two institutions use systems identically or to fulfill the same functions at the same point in their workflows. So, how do systems designers build tools that allow for a smoother kind of interoperability? The Archivematica team has long believed that integration with many other open source tools is necessary to be sustainable. This platform presentation will discuss the Archivematica integration work with Islandora/Fedora, DSpace, DuraCloud, Hydra OpenStack, LOCKSS, AtoM, ArchivesSpace, and others, and how those workflows continue to expand as we add points of intersection based on diverse institutional workflows.

About the Author:

Courtney C. Mumma is an archivist and a librarian responsible for national and international community development for Artefactual Systems' open source digital preservation, Archivematica, and digital asset management, AtoM. She collaborates with her team on system requirements and product design as well as provides training and community dialogue. Courtney has delivered dozens of presentations on the practical application of digital preservation strategies in academic, library, archives and museum contexts, demonstrations and workshops.