DUSLA

Archivists Being Awesome - July Meeting Round-Up

Earlier this week I attended the Archivists Being Awesome presentations at the Academy of Natural Sciences. First of all, what a beautiful library. So many portraits and books and seems like a great place to do some research. There were four presenters, the Maureens: Maureen Skorupa, Maureen Cech, Maureen Callahan and Samip Mallick. All four had great presentations and discussed what they do at their institutions.

Samip discussed his online archives called the South Asian American Digital Archives - nickname SAADA. This archives is digital only. They do not have a repository and it is completely open access. This archives has more than 600 items processed, the team will go to wherever the material is to process it and then it normally remains there until SAADA can find a permanent home for the materials when the owner is ready to part with it. This archives is unique in many different ways, the archives is:

• post-custodial
• digital only - whether the material is born digital or not
• focuses on access
• processes to the item-level
• keen on engaging community members to contribute to South Asian culture

If you want to learn more, you can visit at www.saadigitalarchives.org

 Maureen Skorupa is in the middle of moving her archives from Pennsylvania to North Carolina and gave a great presentation on all the work that goes into moving such specialized items! She went step by step through her process and said that while she is constantly learning from the experience, it is a good one though she is sad to part with her collections.  The advice she reiterated was to plan ahead and to make sure the timeline established stays on schedule. Maureen received a lot of help from the SAA Listserv and also through publications.

Maureen Cech discussed the literary manuscripts she works with at the University of Delaware. She gave an overview of some of the awesome collections they have at the University, and also emphasized that literary manuscript archives do not only have the manuscripts but it may contain the final works, any edits made by various editors or authors, the business side of book publishing, for example - how well the books do on the shelves and how many copies are sold.

Maureen Callahan discussed using Google applications for data manipulation. She works at Princeton University as the processing archivist. Maureen's presentation really shed light on the value of data manipulation tools which as as simple to use as GoogleDocs! She has a 7 step processing sequence and she really emphasizes the data collection and manipulation. Maureen will use GoogleDocs to do series spreadsheets and to work with her student workers to delegate tasks and check on what they are doing since multiple users can be on the same document at a time. She also discussed how Google uses script galleries to pull similar words together for you. One last tool she uses is Google Refine which is great for analyzing legacy data. It is a FREE program where a flat file format is needed (excel spreadsheet) and this tool will cluster similar subjects together to help the archivist name or rename subjects - which is especially helpful if someone needs to change 10 similar subject headings to one that the LOC has recently assigned!

You can read about these presenters at archivistsbeingawesome.wordpress.com!