Sunday, April 3, 2011

Archiving Archivists' Archives

If you can think of a way I could slip another variant of the term "archives" in that title, let me know.

Ticket for Dr. Gracy's famous finger-lickin' potluck, 1994
If any graduate student organization should have total control over its recorded history, it would be the Society of American Archivists student chapter, right? Especially the student chapter for the number one archives program in the U.S.?

Well, as many professional archivists will attest, on-the-job archival expertise don't always translate to diligent care of one's personal records. Scattered among the Briscoe Center for American History's unprocessed collections, the disheveled storage room on the fifth floor of the iSchool, and former board members' hard drives, the SAA-UT records are in need of some love.

Rachel and Wendy save the day! For our final project, Rachel and I are creating a digital repository for the SAA-UT archives. Over eighteen years of archival activities, SAA-UT has accumulated boxes and drawers full of paper and photos--both hard copy and born-digital--so this is going to be an overwhelming task. Fortunately, once we've established a work flow, I will be able to pick up where we leave off in my role as SAA-UT Archivist. Here's how we envisioned the entire project in the beginning:

Digitization for Preservation: Digitization of hard-copy SAA-UT Materials from Dr. Gracy and other chapter sources:
-digitize materials in various formats from Dr. Gracy's SAA-UT records, which he donated to the Briscoe several years ago, and which they haven't yet processed: these materials occupy a large records box and include typewritten documents, graphics (posters for Archives Week, etc.), photos, possibly artifacts (such as designed t-shirts)
-digitization of any other relevant materials from past chapter members (materials in our storage cabinets and files that have been handed down from various boards through the years)
-OCR-ing where appropriate
-creation of necessary metadata

Digital Preservation: Work with born-digital records:

-create preservation-quality versions of born-digital records (meeting minutes, important emails, budget documents, digital photos/audio/video, SAA-UT Facebook page and Twitter feed, SAA-UT website), OCR-ing where appropriate
-creation of necessary metadata

Creation of Digital Repository on DSpace:

-store digitized and preserved born-digital materials on the iSchool's DSpace system
-work with SAA-UT Webmaster to establish records schedule to ensure that all new records are added to both the website and DSpace while active, and then retired to DSpace when no longer active (accessible through "archive" link on website)

Creation of Finding Aid for SAA-UT Digital Records:

-write a finding aid for the materials in our digital repository, which can be expanded as the chapter moves forward
-encode the finding aid using EAD
-make the finding aid searchable

For the purposes of this project, Rachel and I have decided to narrow our focus to digitizing records from SAA-UT's first three years (1993-1996) in the following categories:
  • Records of Chapter's official formation and recognition by national SAA organization
  • Original Chapter Constitution
  • Meeting Minutes
  • Events
  • Correspondence
  • Archives Week
  • Budgets

We also hope to digitize at least a few photos, and audio or video (and possibly some version of our website/social media presence in order to experiment with a variety of file types.

We will be scanning and OCR-ing the paper documents, creating files in the following formats:
  • TIFF (archival master)
  • JPG
  • PDF
  • TXT

Because the Briscoe Center will serve as the official repository of the SAA-UT archives, we will describe each digitized record using a custom metadata schema, which we've constructed from the Briscoe's Dublin Core-based digital metadata guidelines.

Once we've digitized the materials and described them with metadata, we will work with Professor Galloway to ingest the materials into an SAA-UT digital repository on DSpace, where they will be preserved for the foreseeable future and available for download or access by future SAA-UT members. This digital repository will also serve as a home for our born-digital records. We probably won't have time to complete any sort of finding aid/guide to the SAA-UT digital collections, but I will tackle this in the summer and later this year.

If we can accomplish our goal of establishing a work flow for ingesting materials into the SAA-UT DSpace repository, we will have provided the activation energy for the continuing digital stewardship of SAA-UT's archives.

Check out Rachel's reflections on our master plan here: http://digitisaster.blogspot.com/2011/04/saa-ut-1993-2011.html

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