Please see the Schedule page for session times | bpe2019-simple-schedule-final (PDF) & bpe2019-complete-schedule-final (PDF)
Plenary Speakers
Sharon M. Leon
Collections, Data, and Interpretation: Exploring the Life Cycle of Digital Objects [SLIDES]
While the traditional origin story for digital humanities work dwells on literary studies and computational text analysis, the grounded look at digital humanities work reveals origin stories that are much more varied. Nonetheless, all of that work begins with the creation and mobilization of digital objects and their accompanying data. Reflecting on more than a dozen years as both a scholar engaged in work that forefronts digital methods and as director of the Omeka family of web publishing platforms, Leon will trace some of the historical and contemporary ways that digital artifacts traverse a life cycle that moves from thematic digital collections to public engagement to digital scholarship and back. Along the way, the talk will consider the essential points of intersection and collaboration between libraries, archives, museums, scholars, and the public that make this work possible.
Leon is an associate professor of History at Michigan State University, where she specializes in digital methods with a focus on public history. Currently, she is at work on a digital project about the cohort of people enslaved and sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits. Simultaneously, she is building a major methodological project on doing digital public history. Prior to joining the History Department at MSU, Dr. Leon spent more than thirteen years at George Mason University’s History Department at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media as director of Public Projects, where she oversaw dozens of award-winning collaborations with library, museum, and archive partners from around the country. She continues to serve as the director of the Omeka family of web publishing platforms.
Katherine Skinner
Managing Maintenance—Juxtaposing Technology and Community
Ask not what technology can do for communities; ask what communities can do for technology.
In library, archives, and museum environments, we regularly explore what technology can do to support our communities. We implement new tools and systems that promise to simplify our workflows, expedite access to our collections, and efficiently connect us with new patrons, authors, and users. And then…we find that each “great new thing” isn’t as great as we expected, or that it doesn’t play well with the other tools we use, or that it is outmoded a year or two later. And we carry an ever-amplifying sense of panic over the masses of digital objects and assets that we are accruing that require constant vigilance to maintain. In this talk, Skinner will ask us to flip our perspective to think about what communities can do for technology. Drawing deeply on her experiences building and working with networks of cultural and scientific institutions, Skinner will highlight the way that community-driven and community-led work can build crucial communities of practice that ground and recalibrate an individual institution’s relationship to technology. By aligning our interests and investments, these collaborative environments can help to stabilize our work and the environments we deploy to create, collect, disseminate, and maintain digital collections field-wide.
Skinner is the executive director of the Educopia Institute, a not-for-profit organization that empowers collaborative communities to create, share, and preserve knowledge. Over the last 12 years, she has helped to found and cultivate a range of communities including MetaArchive Cooperative (digital preservation), Library Publishing Coalition (scholarly communications), BitCurator Consortium (born-digital archiving), and Software Preservation Network (software maintenance. Skinner received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Emory University. She has co-edited three books and has authored numerous reports and articles, including Community Cultivation – A Field Guide (2019). She regularly directs research and consulting projects on sustainability, community development, digital preservation, and scholarly communications.
Sessions
Please see the Schedule page for times and locations.
Accessible Library Websites: When the Department of Education Steps in to Make the Choice for You. Lauren Douglass, East Lansing Public Library; Sonya Schryer Norris, Library of Michigan.
The Library of Michigan, an agency of the Department of Education, and the East Lansing Public Library, were both served with U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights complaints about their inaccessible websites. In 2014, LM entered into a consent decree to correct their site and did so. Since then, it has become clear that knowledge about accessibility must be an organization-wide performance expectation. In 2018, ELPL began its own process of negotiating with the OCR, who first reduced their expectation and then, after a lawsuit, returned to a more aggressive stance. ELPL is learning to comply with the OCR’s new standards. Keywords: Accessibility;
Adoption and Use of IIIF for Digital Resource Sharing in CONTENTdm. Shane Huddleston and Jeff Mixter, OCLC.
OCLC’s digital content management system, CONTENTdm, has recently been updated and enhanced to support the IIIF digital image description and access standards. This work has helped to connect CONTENTdm’s 14 million digital resources with the over 1 billion other resources that use the IIIF standard. While not a silver bullet, IIIF does provides a standard and interoperable basis for describing images and their structural metadata and sharing them across the Web. In this talk, we will briefly introduce IIIF, explain the reasoning behind CONTENTdm’s adoption of IIIF, and present use cases that are implemented with CONTENTdm and IIIF. Keywords: CONTENTdm; Content Management Software; Digital Collections; IIIF
Assurance Not So Assured: New Technology Puts Data Corruption on Steroids. Jim Havron, Cultural Heritage Cyber Preservation.
Assurance of data integrity becoming increasingly difficult at a phenomenal rate. “AI” and other technologies, are rapidly deployed increasing the speed and scope of technology found in the world around us. As such technology increases, a likewise increasingly inadequate number of cybersecurity professionals has forced the techniques used to validate data integrity left behind. Cyber-criminals alter checksum hashes, encrypt and alter our files with ransomware, or take vast amounts of data gathered from the “Internet of Things”, “smart technology”, and social media, and add machine learning (AI) to produce nearly undetectable corruption of files, putting record authentication in jeopardy. “AI” often allows criminal-hackers to deploy our own system security to protect themselves, and alter even video records with a process known as “deepfake” to make counterfeit videos practically undetectable from the original. This presentation seeks to identify trends, with discussion focusing on potential issues and responses to them from our combined viewpoints.
Collaborating Towards New Directions in Digital Preservation. Rachel Muse and Zachery Whitaker, Vermont State Archives and Records Administration.
The Vermont State Archives and Records Administration founded its digital repository in 2016. The late-2018 addition of a digital processing workstation represented a major value-add for our organization–it also necessitated a major overhaul of digital preservation workflows and documentation. The imperative to distribute digital processing work among VSARA staff, many of whom are not digital archivists, required a synergistic approach to bridge existing paper-based workflows with new digital workflows. As such, staff from both digital and traditional archives units were instrumental in the development process. We will discuss our approach, implementation, and hurdles faced.
Collaboration Strategies for Preservation and Access. Allen Ramsey, Connecticut State Library; Barbara Teague, Council of State Archivists.
The Council of State Archivists (CoSA) through their State Electronic Records Initiative (SERI) was awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant. Called Implementing ACCESS: Guiding the Creation, Preservation, and Use of Electronic Records, it will allow CoSA to gather, develop, and share best practices and guidance materials to improve the creation, management, preservation, and use of permanent state government digital records and information. The session will provide an overview of collaborations built so far and introduce products of those collaborations, as well as prompt attendees to discuss successes and challenges faced while collaborating with creators and users of data to improve preservation and use of digital records.
Collaboration Through Analysis: A Journey in Digital Content Management Workflow Analysis. Krista Sorenson, State Library of North Carolina.
The Government Heritage Library is halfway through an initiative to evaluate digital content workflows and tools. The analysis includes interviews with catalogers, agency liaisons, and digital staff to help identify breakdowns in processes and improve digital projects. This presentation provides a project overview, lessons learned, and tactics used during analysis. Analyzing workflows is a vital component to ensuring long-term and reliable preservation, access, and support to our collections and for our users. By taking the time to step back and analyze our workflows, who’s involved, and what’s used, we better position ourselves for future projects, collaborations, and problem-solving.
Command the Digital Flood. Juan Romero & Paul Severn, LIBNOVA.
As we progress down the digital preservation path, we realize that archives have to accession more and more content year after year, and that lately the trend has shifted towards more born digital material. We would like to share with all the attendees how listening to and working alongside government, national, state and university libraries and archives has given us the insight to develop the way we should start to recreate the paradigm of content ingestion as a seamless flow, maximizing accession within constrained resources, while guaranteeing absolute data integrity from moment one.
Community Webs: Creating Web Archives with the Internet Archive. Chatham Ewing, Cleveland Public Library; Aaron O’Donovan and Angela O’Neal, Columbus Metropolitan Library.
Join representatives from the Cleveland Public Library and Columbus Metropolitan Library to learn about the Internet Archives’ Community Webs program, a two-year, IMLS-funded grant program to provide education, applied training, cohort support, and web archiving services for public librarians to develop expertise in web archiving. Participants will provide background on the program, discuss their project plans and explain next steps.
Computational Tools and Strategies in Enhancing Access to Cultural Big Data Collections. Ryan Cox, Maryland State Archives; Richard Marciano, University of Maryland.
This session demonstrates in two-real world case studies how computational strategies are critical to managing and accessing archival Big Data collections. The case studies represent on-going collaborations between the University of Maryland’s Digital Curation Innovation Center, the Maryland State Archives, and Densho.org. Based on the concepts of computational archival science, both case studies use visualization and analytical tools to display linked data to create transparency in cultural Big Data. Case studies involve automating the detection of personally identifiable information (PII) in Japanese-American World War II Incarceration Camps; and in penetrating the complex pre-Civil War slave system in Maryland.
Creating Treasure Maps. Mona Meyer and Jennifer Greene, University of Southern Indiana.
Our libraries contain treasures that remain hidden to our users. USI’s library has been enriching the metadata for its digital collections to provide as much access as possible. Community input has proved vital, as well as serving as a public relations tool. Information gathered from this metadata work has been used to generate weekly blogs. Blog postings may be on any topic so long as they highlight materials within our digital collections. Frequent social media posts, public presentations, as well as activities like Arch Madness (think March Madness) raise the awareness of the collections, promote librarian/user interaction, and encourage use of our treasures.
Curating the Profession: Opportunities, Challenges and Strategies in Digital Curation Professional Education. Cal Lee, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Bonnie Weddle, New York State Archives.
Caring for digital materials requires continual learning. No matter how educated and experienced we become, changes in technology, policies and user needs–and our own curiosity–propel us to explore new approaches and develop new skills. University courses, workshops, webinars, and other resources developed by educational institutions and professional associations play an essential role, but there are many opportunities for improvement. Let’s talk about what’s working, what’s missing, and what needs improvement. Digital curation novices, seasoned practitioners, education providers, and supervisors of employees who work with digital materials are all encouraged to take part in this discussion.
Deciding How to Decide: Facilitating Agreement on Teams. Robin Dean, Michigan State University.
Many of us work on a variety of teams, from elected committees to ad-hoc working groups. However, these groups of colleagues don’t always start with a shared understanding of what they are empowered to do as a group and how to make decisions. This presentation will discuss different kinds of teams that are common in digital library and archival work, and how to know what decisions your team can make. We will also provide concrete exercises and examples for building consensus or reaching a decision even when everyone doesn’t agree.
Digital Archives in the Discovery Layer: Collaboration between Archivists and Technical Services Librarians. Christina Beis, Kayla Harris, Stephanie Shreffler, University of Dayton.
Effective collaboration between archives and technical services increases the discoverability of special collection materials. Archivists at a medium-sized institution had been using Archive-It to collect websites for a few years, but the information was isolated in a separate platform and wasn’t effectively marketed to users. Working together, the team of archivists and technical services librarians incorporated the website collections into the discovery layer. Metadata was added at the seed level and indexed on a single, user-friendly platform. Attendees will learn about implementing digital archive collections and explore how they can increase their visibility through marketing. Keywords: Archive-It, EBSCO, Web archiving
Digital Creation and Curation Best Practices, Guidelines and Standards: NISO? Jody DeRidder, Information Creation and Curation Topic Committee Chair, NISO.
What areas of digital creation and curation are ripe for the establishment of guidelines, best practices, or even standards? Are you ready to help develop them and share them nationally? The National Information Standards Organization offers support and oversight for working groups to develop guidelines, best practices and standards that the community needs. NISO also provides visibility and online access to these, along with the ability to revise and upgrade over time as needed. The Information Creation and Curation Topic Committee is looking for opportunities to support the community in managing digital content effectively, from guidelines for content creation through preservation and long-term access. Let’s talk!
Digital Government Records Preservation: Backlog Research Highlights.
Lori Ashley, Preservica; Barbara Teague, Council of State Archivists.
In spring 2019 the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) in cooperation with its ACCESS partner NASCIO will conduct survey research on current capabilities and gaps related to interagency transfers of permanent electronic government records and publications to state archives and libraries. This session will describe the key survey focus areas and preliminary research findings. The backlog research initiative is designed to identify and prioritize risks associated with the handling and storage of permanent electronic records by agencies and their IT support units. Based on the findings, CoSA and its partners will work towards implementing more coordinated, integrated approaches and technology solutions for digital records transfer and preservation.
Digitizing Modern Archival Collections, Or How We Addressed Copyright in the Murky Waters of Clippings, Student Strike Papers and More
S29. WEDS 9:00 AM-10:00 AM. Room 1A.
Virginia Dressler & Cindy Kristof, Kent State University []bpe2019-s29-slides-dessler-kristof
In order to aid digitization of the Kent State University May 4th Collection in preparation for the 50th anniversary, University Libraries received a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) grant which funded digitization of a selection of the large archival collection. Librarians developed new workflows to address copyright and privacy issues in assorted archival materials to be digitized. The session will highlight this work, and also provide information on the approach to complex copyright issues present in many archival collections, including fair use analysis and permission-seeking. Lastly, effective cross-training of staff and student assistants will be reviewed.
Documenting Digital Forensic Ingest Workflows. Mike Shallcross, Indiana University.
In recent years, the digital preservation and archives communities have increasingly integrated forensics tools in workflows for the acquisition and ingest of content. While such tools help ensure the authenticity and integrity of content, the documentation of our workflows—what actions we’ve taken and when—are significant factors in capturing the digital provenance of archival materials. In this short presentation, I will discuss my work refining and extending Python scripts from the digital preservation community to create PREMIS metadata for actions such as disk image creation, forensic feature analysis, and file format identification.
Documenting Digital Preservation: Policies, Practices, and Workflows. Carly Dearborn, Purdue University; Sam Meister, Educopia Institute; Nathan Tallman, Pennsylvania State University.
We preserve our collections, but like the cobbler’s children without shoes, our own documentation of preservation policies, practices, and workflows could be improved. Session facilitators will highlight innovative approaches from around the digital preservation field (e.g. OSSArcFlow, Rockefeller Archives Center) for creating sustainable documentation that helps pivot projects to programs and foster shared understanding among teams. Participants will break into small groups organized around common digital preservation pain points and share their own policies, practices, and workflows and their approaches to their documentation. Participants will find commonality through discussion, leverage community knowledge to solve local problems, and opportunities to collaborate on shared problems.
Evolving and Adapting: The MetaArchive SuperNode Pilot Project.
Kyna Herzinger, University of Louisville; Sam Meister, Educopia Institute.
The MetaArchive SuperNode Pilot Project (SPP), which kicked off in June 2018, is assessing the feasibility of simplifying digital preservation—especially for small organizations. This project is focused on determining the requirements for a technical infrastructure that simplifies ingest, testing multiple transfer tools and options for utilizing cloud-based services to “stage” content for ingest to storage nodes hosted at member institutions, and measuring costs associated with different versions of a SuperNode network. SPP holds fast to the MetaArchive community’s founding principles while adapting to the changing landscape and responding to the digital preservation needs of organizations with limited resources.
Evolving Narratives: Digital Storytelling Collaborations in the Classroom. Ashley Butler and Jenna Nolt, Kenyon College.
At Kenyon College, the Center for Innovative Pedagogy (CIP) and the Library are working together to develop workflows and toolkits to support digital storytelling in the classroom. In this session, we will discuss projects, collaborations, opportunities, and challenges we’ve encountered during our first two years of this initiative, as well as plans for the future. Participants will be provided with a worksheet [bpe2019-s19b-worksheet-butler-nolt], and will brainstorm about the potential for digital storytelling at their institutions. Examples of some of our successful projects: https://digital.kenyon.edu/cel/ and https://tinyurl.com/y96r2ezl.
Improving the Ratio of Information to Data in your Collection. Peter Anderton, Preservica.
Effective use of the information in your archive requires quick & effective discovery and easy access to the data preserved within. The Information structures that we inherited from the physical world are not suited for the new sources of information and manual processes are not scalable to handle the increasing volumes of digital data. In a collaborative approach by over a hundred user organizations Preservica has embraced challenge. This presentation shares the lessons learnt from the collective intelligence of our users.
Indiana Digital Preservation (InDiPres): A Collaborative Model for Long-Term Preservation. Cinda May, Indiana State University; Matt Schultz, Grand Valley State University.
Widespread digitization requires collaborative approaches to mitigate the formidable challenges faced by memory institutions to ensure persistent sustainability of digital assets endangered by insufficient technical infrastructure, staffing and/or monetary resources. Indiana Digital Preservation serves as a statewide model for the long-term preservation of digital content. InDiPres collaboratively manages and sustains a low-cost, secure and geographically distributed archive of locally sponsored digital resources. This presentation details the evolution of InDiPres and focuses on the organization’s first major test of its viability, as well as its contributions to a new grant-funded effort to promote statewide distributed digital preservation networks more nationally.
Institutional Repository Workflow, Project Management, and Outreach in a Remote/Online Library Environment. Daina Dickman, Providence St. Joseph Health.
In 2018 Providence St. Joseph Health launched an institutional repository, primarily staffed by a librarian located in Oregon and a library assistant located in Montana with occasional help from other Library Services staff. Workflow and communication standards had to be created that would allow library staff in multiple locations and time zones to seamlessly launch, populate, and manage the institutional repository. Outreach, instruction, and promotion tactics had to also be created to reach researchers and clinical staff across six states and 100+ locations.
Is the Screensaver a Significant Property? Defining a Metadata Model and Cataloging Workflow for Software and Computing Environments. Seth Anderson, Yale University.
Preservation of software is essential to the long-term accessibility of our growing digital collections. To support preservation and use, an effective means of describing software and computer environments is needed. Projects such as GAMECIP, CodeMeta, and Wikidata for Digital Preservation, as well as the work of the SPN Metadata Standards and Practice Working Group, have examined and proposed metadata properties for description of software. This session will provide an overview of this work and the Scaling Emulation and Software Preservation Infrastructure (EaaSI) project’s recent efforts to define a model and procedures for cataloging software and computing environments.
Leadership via Shared Ownership: An Approach to Co-Managing a Digital Scholarship Center. Stephanie Becker, Mark Clemente, Amanda Koziura, Case Western Reserve University.
Members of Kelvin Smith Library’s Digital Learning & Scholarship team at CWRU will discuss how they transitioned from a status quo model of hierarchical and siloed management to an egalitarian model of shared responsibility through radical collaboration. Previously, each team member was responsible for specific programs and tasks that were largely isolated from one another. This division of labor was often unfair and an ineffective way to carry out our team’s mission and advance its core values. The results of our efforts led to shared ownership of student management responsibilities, of growing a fellowship program, and of expanding instruction across campus, among other programs and duties.
Levels of Preservation: A Progress Report. Bradley Daigle, University of Virginia Library; Carol Kussmann, University of Minnesota Libraries.
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance took on a project in late 2018 to address growing interest in reviewing and updating the NDSA Levels of Preservation document. The “original” Levels of Preservation is a tiered set of recommendations for how organizations could enhance their digital preservation activities and is most easily identified in grid format. Over the years, there have been suggestions from the community on how to add to or improve the Levels many of which the Levels of Preservation Working Group hope to address. This session will provide an update on the work of the six subgroups and provide an opportunity for feedback on the work prior to a final product release. Project website.
Leveraging Correspondence Management systems for Digital Object Metadata. Brian Thomas, Texas State Library and Archives Commission. Correspondence tracking systems are an increasingly common way for public officials to manage large amounts of incoming and outgoing communications. When he left office in 2015, Texas Governor Ricky Perry’s office provided the Texas State Library and Archives Commission with a copy of their homegrown correspondence tracking system and database. This session will overview how the information within that database was extracted into metadata that is paired with correspondence preserved in a digital repository, and follow-up with discussion of how the methods might be extensible to other correspondence systems.
Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and Access to State Government Information. Jim Kammerer, Montana State Library.
The Montana State Library (MSL) in 2009 selected PURLS as our persistent identifier (PID) system to provide researchers a stable address for citing our publications and to give us needed flexibility to redirect users to a new, yet-to-be-created local digital repository. Today, years later, MSL is evaluating our PURL decision based on the rate of adoption, maturation, and support of PURLS among the various other PID systems. This session aims to bring together BPE attendees interested in sharing ideas/experiences with persistent identifiers. Are you using them? Why or why not? Which ones? Do you really need them?
Playing Nicely: Managing Electronic Records at Colleges and Universities.
Victor Fleischer, The University of Akron.
Managing electronic records at colleges and universities can be particularly challenging. Frequent challenges experienced by the presenter include lack of communications between IT, campus offices, and archives/records management; lack of awareness of archival and records management policies; digitization of records without archival value or those that have passed their legal retention periods; and lack of management, control, and storage of digital records on campus. The presenter will present these issues and lead a discussion as to what others are doing to “play nicely” and collaborate with various offices on campus to implement best practices for electronic records at their institutions.
A Practical Approach to Arrangement and Description With Preservica CE. Hannah Wang, Wisconsin Historical Society.
In 2018, State Archives staff at the Wisconsin Historical Society found themselves with less than a year to get a Preservica instance up and running. This session will cover that process and the steps you need to take if you are approaching a similar project. It will present a practical, implementation-based approach to getting started with Preservica CE, focusing on establishing an information hierarchy, customizing metadata schemas, and restricting access. Although the session will cover some workflows and technology specific to Preservica, the topics and approaches will also apply to other content management systems.
Prioritizing People: Accessibility and Digital Collections. Heather Alexander & Hanning Chen, OCLC; Nathan Tallman, Pennsylvania State University.
Libraries spend significant resources digitizing collections, but are the platforms and repositories that provide access to these resources accessible to everyone? We make great effort to ensure physical access to our collections, we need to put the same intention into providing access to our digital collections. This session will highlight intentional steps to choose and build accessible digital infrastructure at Penn State. CONTENTdm at OCLC will share challenges when designing accessible interfaces. Participants will be broken into groups and assigned temporary disabilities and asked to interact with digital collections. First-hand experience using adaptive technologies can be an eye-opening user experience.
Problems from the Past Informing Better Practices for the Future. Frances Chang Andreu, Rochester Institute of Technology.
In 2017, RIT Libraries performed an audit of their institutional repository, a legacy digital collection, to evaluate for copyright and updated internal policy compliance. This process uncovered a number of problems involving inconsistent applications of metadata, collection development, and copyright. In this session I will discuss how analyzing these practical issues helped develop a better-defined policy and informed the best practices we are currently utilizing for a new digital collection. This includes better documentation of processes and decisions, creation of a detailed metadata application guide, standardizing rights statements, and establishing a file management workflow.
Progress Report from the Digital Preservation Assessment Training Program. Sean Ferguson, Northeast Document Conservation Center.
Building a digital preservation program involves assessing current activities and training appropriate staff. This session reports on the NEH-funded Digital Assessment Training program, a collaborative project that approaches digital preservation assessment and training through case-study assessments, shadowing opportunities, and workshops. The speaker will engage the audience by describing the challenges in developing a framework for performing a digital preservation assessment. The session will share consultant impressions and client feedback, and will introduce the Digital Preservation Assessment Handbook, a free resource resulting from this grant project. The speaker will allocate generous time for audience participation and discussion.
Quality OCR: A Tango of Available Resources. Mira Basara and Michelle Paolillo, Cornell University.
Cornell was an early pioneer in digitization as a strategy for preserving the appearance and content of physical books. While we were an early leader in standards of digital capture, we have been less consistent in practice around the quality of the text flow. We plan to present our early practices for OCR, why we found them wanting, what we have improved through the intervening years, and the state of our current practice. Finally, we will speculate on future adjustments, and will facilitate a group discussion on community practices for OCR, available software tools, and the balance of effort required to produce quality text flow in a world of limited resources. Bring your smartphone or laptop to participate fully!
Quilting Together Data Maps: The Many Pictures of Your Organization’s Information. Pari Swift, The Ohio State University.
There are many reasons that an organization should map its data: e-discovery, privacy regulations, security, systems applications, and retention and disposition. Chances are, for each of these maps, different “quilters” within the organization are taking the lead. There’s one common thread, though, the records manager. This session will describe the varying purposes for each type of data map, the groups that should be involved in the process, and the pertinent data fields to be collected. Through facilitated discussion we’ll look for ways to merge the maps for a comprehensive overview of an organization’s information.
Review, Access, and Triage of Mail (RATOM). Cal Lee, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Jamie Patrick-Burns, State Archives of North Carolina.
The Review, Access, and Triage of Mail (RATOM) grant builds on the successes of TOMES and BitCurator, projects which advance the curation of electronic records. BitCurator and its subsequent projects have created an environment for LAMS to acquire and characterize/triage data from digital media, while TOMES built an open source software set to assist with the preservation and processing of archival email accounts in state government. RATOM will further develop use of machine learning and NLP to facilitate iterative processing and access, allowing archivists to interact with output data to answer questions, select, appraise, and process collections over time. Audience discussion of their email curation experiences and software development suggestions will be encouraged.
The Rise and Fall of Favor-Based Digitization: Workflows Taste Better on a Cake. Pat Lawton, Mikala Narlock, Patrick Rader, University of Notre Dame.
The process of moving digitized and born-digital materials from selection to recovery, discovery, and preservation, was ambiguous at Notre Dame, as a “favor system” had become the norm. To address the issue, the Digital Collections Workflow (DCW) team, comprised of individuals from units across the library, developed workflows based on representative and adaptable use cases. This collaborative process, fueled by shared experience, resulted in a low-tech “case manager” approach that ensures personalized attention and continuous communication. ND case managers will describe the process of establishing collaborative workflows, including triumphs, lessons learned, and strategies for adopting and sustaining the process.
“Scare Them, but Not Too Much:” Fostering an Institutional Awareness for Copyright and Rights Management. Elizabeth Blackwood, Hillwood Estate, Museum & Gardens.
Custodians of digital collections are often responsible for communicating and enforcing copyright and rights-related best practices at their institutions, frequently with users and colleagues who lack training or understanding of these concepts. This presentation covers the techniques that one museum library used to foster best practices at the institutional level, including through strategic planning, establishing metadata governance, and fostering inclusive practices.
Updating the Vision for Your Digital Repository: Revisiting the Collections Management Policy and Addressing Legacy Collections. Stephanie Becker, Case Western Reserve University.
Considering that our digital repositories have been around for at least a handful of years (if not longer), it’s only natural that the original vision your institution set for its repository is in need of updating. This session will focus on how (re)writing a digital collections management policy can help to define a future forward direction for your institution’s repository. Using my own institution’s IR, I will discuss the evolution of our repository and how I dealt with the challenges presented by legacy collections in trying to move forward. Open discussion will give participants a chance to ask questions and share stories on how they’ve dealt with moving the framework of their repositories into the future. Keywords: Digital Collections; IR; Institutional Repositories; Policy
Using FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Headings) in CONTENTdm.
Terry Butterworth and Eric Childress, OCLC.
FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Headings) is a faceted terminology system based chiefly on the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), and available from OCLC. CONTENTdm is a widely-used content management system from OCLC that allows institutions to integrate controlled vocabularies into their metadata authoring workflow. Because FAST is easy to use and easily learned, it has proven to be an excellent solution for the OCLC Library and Archives for digitization projects. We will describe FAST and outline the approach the OCLC Library has taken to integrating and leveraging FAST in CONTENTdm. Keywords: Cataloging; Collection Management Systems; CONTENTdm; Digital Collections; Metadata;
We are MPLP-ing in a Digital World: Confronting the Realities of More Product, Less Process in Digital Archives. Rachel Gattermeyer, American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming.
At what point do you reach “good enough”? What does “good enough” even mean? How do you quantify “less process”? These are the questions many archivists confront when ingesting and processing digital records. More Product, Less Process is a framework meant to help archivists quickly move newly donated materials into the hands of researchers, but MPLP frequently leads to confusion and headache. I would like to share my experiences on the journey, lessons learned, and current practices of balancing high standards with the realities of digital preservation at the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center.
A Web(Site) for Sore Eyes: Creating a Platform to Store, Share, and Maintain Documentation. Darren Young and Katie Martin, Rockefeller Archive Center.
In the session, we will discuss how the Rockefeller Archive Center created a solution for disorganized and decentralized institutional documentation and in doing so, reexamined how to effectively write and structure documentation for the web. A team of three newly-hired archivists developed a website to share our openly-licensed documentation with the wider archival community and better track revisions to content. Developing the site enabled us to build new collaborative and digital skills which we shared with our colleagues through various workshops. We will explain how we learned technical skills, managed the workload, and empowered other archivists to utilize new technology.
WITHDRAWN
Building Duke: The Architectural History of Duke Campus from 1924 to the Present. John Taormina, Duke University.
Building Duke is a three-year initiative comprising data collection and organization, primary from Duke University archives (first year); data analysis and interpretation (second year); data output (third year). The project will combine historical research with digital technologies. The project team includes undergraduate and graduate students, staff, and faculty. The initiative will culminate in a relational database of textual and visual archival material on the architectural history of Duke’s campus; an interactive digital 3D model of campus developments since the 1920s; a series of multimedia thematic narratives on the history of the campus; and a series of augmented reality tours.
Digital Commons at Rhode Island School of Design: Art and Design Content for a Global Audience. Mark Pompelia, Rhode Island School of Design.
Rhode Island School of Design launched its Digital Commons institutional repository in 2015 following a period of research and investigation. The three-and-a-half years since then have resulted in nearly seventeen thousand items from stakeholder offices and departments. Digital Commons @ RISD has been presented to faculty and trustees, and stands to contribute to faculty promotion and tenure dossiers while promoting school content to a global audience. This presentation will detail the processes of building communities, soliciting content, workflows, and challenges while forcing a much-needed conversation for content access and preservation leading to the creation of the school’s first-ever digital archivist.
“Open Office” Meetings: For Birds of a Feather (BOF), Office Hours, Pop-Ups, User Groups, etc.
Open Office slots occur during every concurrent session time slot in room 1B. Attendees can request to reserve a time for their group by contacting carleton@ohio.edu
Office 1: Open.
Office 2: NDSA Office Hours. Bradley Daigle, Carol Kussmann, Dan Noonan, Nathan Tallman, facilitators.
The National Digital Stewardship Alliance is hosting open office hours for the community who may be interested in what the NDSA is up to, or if there are specific questions that we can help address.
Office 3: Open.
Office 4: Open.
Lunch Break Groups: CoSA Updates.
Grab your boxed lunch and join Council of State Archivists staff and state archives members for an update on CoSA projects and activities, and to discuss recent work in your state archives.
Office 5: IIIF Opportunities & Extensions. Shane Huddleston, Jeff Mixter, Taylor Surface, OCLC.
Share ideas about what International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) applications are needed to extend your repository capabilities, support digital preservation and improve discovery and access.
Office 6: MetaArchive Office Hours. Sam Meister.
Come learn more about the MetaArchive Cooperative‘s community-based approach to digital preservation! Meet and chat with MetaArchive staff and current members to hear more about our preservation storage service and community of support for practitioners.
Office 7: Birds of a Feather: Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing for Digital Curation. Cal Lee & Jamie Patrick-Burns, facilitators.
Do you have ideas about how machine learning (ML) or natural language processing (NLP) could help your institution to better manage and provide access to digital collections? Have you experimented with any of the existing tools? Do you have suggestions for new software functionality that could support your work? Want to learn from your colleagues about what might be possible? Come join us for a highly interactive meeting to discuss opportunities and challenges in ML and NLP for digital curation.
Office 8: Open.
Office 9: Open.
Office 10: Open.
Best Practices Exchange 