By Ariadne Rehbein
This is a cross post in coordination with the SAA Students and New Archives Professionals Roundtable.
The spirit of community at the 2016 Code4Lib Conference in Philadelphia (March 7-10) served as inspiration for a recent SAA Students and New Archives Professionals Roundtable #snaprt Twitter chat. The conference was an exciting opportunity for archivists and librarians to learn about digital tools and projects that are free to use and open for further development, discuss needs for different technology solutions, gain a deeper understanding of technology work, and engage with larger cultural and technical issues within libraries and archives. SNAP’s Senior Social Media Coordinator hosted the chat on March 15, focusing the discussion on collaboration between archivists and technologists.
Many of the chat questions were influenced by discussions in the Code4Archives preconference workshop breakout group, “Whose job is that? Sharing how your team breaks down archives ‘tech’ work.” On the last day of the conference, SNAP invited participants through different Code4Lib and Society of American Archivist channels, such as the conference hashtag (#c4l16), the Code4Lib listserv, various SAA listservs, and the SNAP Facebook and Twitter accounts. All were invited to share suggestions or discussion questions for the chat. Participants included archives students and professionals with varying years of experience and focuses, such as digital curation, special collections, university archives, and government archives. Our chat questions were:
- How do the expertise and knowledge of archivists and technologists who work together often overlap or differ? How much is important to understand of one another’s work? What are some ways to increase this knowledge?
- What are some examples of technologies that archives currently use? What is their goal/ what are they used to do?
- Who created and maintains these tools? Why might an archive choose one tool over another?
- What kinds of tools and tech skills have new archivists learned post-LIS? What is this learning process like?
- What are some examples of tasks or projects in an archival setting where the expertise of technologists is essential or extremely helpful? Please share any tips from these experiences.
- Do you know of any blogs/posts that are helpful for born digital preservation / AV preservation / digitized content workflow?
Several different themes emerged in the chat:
- The importance of an environment that supports relationships between those of different backgrounds and skills. Participants suggested developing a sharing a vocabulary to clearly convey information and providing casual opportunities to meet.
- The decision to implement a technology solution to serve a need may involve a variety of considerations, such as level of institutional priority, cost, availability of technology professionals to manage or build the system, security, and applicability to other needs.
- Participants suggested that students gain skills with a variety of different technologies, including relational databases, command line basics, Photoshop, Virtual Box, Bitcurator, and programming (through online tutorials.) The ability and willingness to learn on the job and teach others is important too! These are useful tools and may also help build a shared vocabulary.
- Participants had engaged in a number of collaborative tasks or projects, such as performing digital forensics, building DIY History at the University of Iowa, implementing systems such as Preservica, and determining digital preservation storage solutions.
- Some great resources are available for born-digital, digitized, and audiovisual preservation, including AV Preserve, the Digital Curation Google Group, the Bitcurator Consortium, The Signal blog, Chris Prom’s Practical E-Records, the Code4Lib listserv, Digital Preservation News, and National Digital Stewardship Residency blog posts.
Please visit Storify to read the full chat:
Many thanks to Wendy Hagenmaier of the ERS Steering Committee for inviting SNAP to share this post. #snaprt Twitter chats typically take place 3 times per month, on or around the 5th, 15th, and 25th at 8 PM ET. Participation is open to anyone interested in issues relevant to MLIS students and new archives professionals. To learn more about the chats, please visit our webpage.
Ariadne Rehbein strives to support students and new archives professionals as SNAP Roundtable’s Senior Social Media Coordinator. As Digital Asset Coordinator at the Arizona State University Libraries, she focuses on processing and stewardship of digital special collections and providing expertise on issues related to digital forensics, asset management workflows, and policies in accordance with community standards and best practices. She is a proud graduate of the Department of Information and Library Science at Indiana University Bloomington.
