I’ve been fortunate to attend a workshop and two conferences this month — see below for some quick recaps of the events.
Records Management in the Round: Re-purposing your Archival Expertise to Start a Program
- This was an New England Archivists workshop led by Sarah R. Demb, Senior Records Manager/Archivist, Harvard University Archives and, Sarah A. Polirer, CA, CRM, Manager Corporate Research, Cigna Corporation. The day long workshop provided a introduction to a variety of topics like: the role of records management, benefits of a RM program, identifying records, retention schedules, planning for RM program and records surveys, and more. I learned so much!
Mass History 2016 – Putting History on the Map Together
- This was a one day meeting at the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, MA. The meeting is organized by Mass Humanities. My colleague Greta and I participated in a session on “digital tools” by talking a bit about the value of Wikipedia edit-a-thons for archives/libraries. You can view our poster here.
Joint Conference on Digital Libraries
- This conference was a great opportunity to learn about the perspectives of researchers in using digital collections and evaluating/improving digital library systems. In particular, I enjoyed the web archive related presentations and the WADL (web archiving and digital libraries) workshop. There was also an interesting session on archiving “born-digital” (meaning web based) news. http://www.jcdl2016.org/program
- Some odds and ends from this workshop include:
- Mention of using Storify to summarize a web archive collection prompting a tweet to this slidedeck about the project.
- Unshorten utility for expanding shortened urls
- Stephen Bury talked about Frick’s new “digital lightbox” access system. I didn’t catch a link to the system or if it was open to the public — but here is some info on the tool.
- Vinay Goel from the Internet Archive showed off the new and soon to be released keyword search for the Wayback Machine. The feature will search website homepages.
- Laura Wrubel gave some updates on the development of Social Feed Manager. The project is developing functionality that will incorporating provenance information in the metadata output!
Archive Hour 