By Richard Marciano
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When the bloggERS! series started at the beginning of 2015, some of the very first posts featured work on “computer generated archival description” and “big data and big challenges for archives,” so it seems appropriate to revisit this theme of automation and management of records at scale and provide an update on a recent symposium and several upcoming events.
Richard Marciano co-hosted a recent “Archival Records in the Age of Big Data” symposium. For more information about the recent Symposium, visit: http://dcicblog.umd.edu/cas/. The three-day program is listed online and has links to all the videos and slides. A list of participants can also be found at http://dcicblog.umd.edu/cas/attendees. The objectives of the Symposium were to:
- address the challenges of big data for digital curation,
- explore the conjunction of emerging digital methods and technologies,
- identify and evaluate current trends,
- determine possible research agendas, and
- establish a community of practice.
Richard Marciano and Bill Underwood will be further exploring these themes at SAA in Atlanta on Friday, August 5, 9:30am – 10:45am, session 311, for those ERS aficionados interested in contributing to this emerging conversation. See: https://archives2016.sched.org/event/7f9D/311-archival-records-in-the-age-of-big-data
On April 26-28, 2016 the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies (iSchool) convened a Symposium in collaboration with King’s College London. This invitation-only symposium, entitled Finding New Knowledge: Archival Records in the Age of Big Data, featured 52 participants from the UK, Canada, South Africa and the U.S. Among the participants were researchers, students, and representatives from federal agencies, cultural institutions, and consortia.
This group of experts gathered at Maryland’s iSchool to discuss and try to define computational archival science: an interdisciplinary field concerned with the application of computational methods and resources to large-scale records/archives processing, analysis, storage, long-term preservation, and access, with the aim of improving efficiency, productivity and precision in support of appraisal, arrangement and description, preservation and access decisions, and engaging and undertaking research with archival material.
This event, co-sponsored by Richard Marciano, Mark Hedges from King’s College London and Michael Kurtz from UMD’s iSchool, brought together thought leaders in this emerging CAS field: Maria Esteva from the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), Victoria Lemieux from the University of British Columbia School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (SLAIS), and Bill Underwood from Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). There is growing interest in large-scale management, automation, and analysis of archival content and the realization of enhanced possibilities for scholarship through the integration of ‘computational thinking’ and ‘archival thinking.
To capitalize on the April Symposium, a follow-up workshop entitled Computational Archival Science: Digital Records in the Age of Big Data, will take place in Washington D.C. the 2nd week of December 2016 at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Big Data. For information on the upcoming workshop, please visit: http://dcicblog.umd.edu/cas/ieee_big_data_2016_cas-workshop/. Paper contributions will be accepted until October 3, 2016.
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Richard is a professor at Maryland’s iSchool and director of the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC). His research interests include digital preservation, archives and records management, computational archival science, and big data. He holds degrees in Avionics and Electrical Engineering, a Master’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Iowa, and conducted a Postdoc in Computational Geography.
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