Day of Digital Archives

My Day of Digital Archives is not going at all as planned. I meant to be working on web archiving and training my students in processing the e-records of our last University President. Instead, I'm sitting at home typing one-handed and nursing a broken elbow (on my dominant arm, of course) sustained in a cycling crash yesterday on my way to work. So this post will be pretty short, and if anything catches your interest feel free to email me at khomo [at] uoregon [dot] edu for more information.

First, a little background about me: I'm the Electronic Records Archivist at the University of Oregon. I'm responsible for the ingest and preservation of e-records in Special Collections and University Archives. My current most pressing projects:

• Processing raw video files of oral histories documenting the Latino experience in Oregon. I had a plan, and then Final Cut X threw a wrench in the works: the raw video footage created in Final Cut 7 can't be read with Final Cut X. This is a textbook example of why proprietary digital formats are not a preservation solution.
• The aforementioned presidential e-records. Organic file trees are a nightmare, and trying to sort out the records designated as non-permanent by state law only adds to the confusion.
• Creating an inventory of all our audio-visual material in order to prioritize both for digitization and for traditional preservation/conservation.
• Doing some pre-emptive work with a couple of faculty members who are teaching oral history classes this academic year and who want their students to deposit the audio files in the archives. I'm happy to take the content, but if I work with the professors ahead of time and get myself scheduled to do some basic instruction in the class I'm far more likely to get usable files at the end of it.
• Archiving University web content, both from the official UO pages and from other sources (social media, news outlets, etc.)
• Working with our data management team to create ingest and cataloguing workflows for acquired digital data.

I think that's it. Now excuse me while I take some pain medication.

The To-Do List of a Digital Archivist

It's immensely gratifying to see today coming together. I hope that everyone who is reading is enjoying the blog and learning a lot. While this project wasn't an incredible amount of overhead to put together ("Hi, my name is Gretchen. Could you write a blog on October 6th? Thanks!" ...okay maybe a bit more swearing at Blogger was involved...), I haven't been able to do a lot of thinking about what I would write today. But since the point is to capture a "slice of life" in the world of digital archives, I thought the best illustration for me would be to post my (annotated) To-Do List. So, in all it's glory, here it is:

• start to draft blog for D0DA
  (woo-hoo! it doesn't say "finish blog" so I can check this one off!)
• check on saturday shift
  (As a member of the Special Collections staff I am still required to work on the reference desk each week and one Saturday each month. Although I don't consider myself "a people person" and working on the desk slightly stresses me out, I'm generally happy to do this. It helps me to understand how people use our collection, which in turn helps me design better interfaces and tools. It also helps me to learn about what's in the collection. However, I just started here in May and some things that are specific to our department are still a mystery to me. This task is related to my shift this coming Saturdy. The schedule says that my shift this Saturday is only from 1-5, but I know the building is open all day. I need to figure out what's going on...before Saturday.)
• correct Warner EAD
  (this item and the next one are all related to the AIMS grant project. I started here at UVa in May to replace the former Digital Archivist on the project, which is exploring the management of hybrid collections — those containing both digital and analog materials. One of the collections that was to be processed for the grant was the Papers of Senator John Warner. The collection included 35 CDs of scanned correspondence. There ended up being far too many issues surrounding copyright and to be able to do much with this collection at this point other than to image the discs and put the content into our long-term storage space. This fulfills part of our mandate to steward these materials because they will be "preserved" in this way, but we still need to process them to some level (i.e. track what's actually ON the disks...maybe) and make them accessible.
  [As an aside, the idea for the D0DA project came out of an unconference held by the AIMS team. You can read all about it on our AIMS blog if you are interested.])