Lightning talks

Each delegate must present a 5 minute lightning talk at the start of Day 1 as an ice-breaker to the Symposium.

This should be on an aspect or element of digital archives. Your lightening talk may relate to a topic proposal but this isn't compulsory.

UPDATE: order of the talks determined by random order generator - see the lightning talk timetable page.  We have also created a page for you to add comments to colleagues talks, identify connections, propose solutions etc etc

What's a Lightning Talk?

If you are looking for more information, please consult the following.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Talk 
• http://perl.plover.com/lt/lightning-talks.html

Lightning talks - topics

Erin O'Meara, University of North Carolina

I'll run through a brief demo of the Curator's Workbench, an open source ingest preparation tool we developed here at UNC. It stages material to a server (for us, on an iRODS staging grid), material can then be arranged and described. Text files containing metadata can be bulk crosswalked to digital objects via MODS editor. The GUI is geared towards non-technical users while a complex METS file is being built behind the scenes.

Tom Laudeman, University of Virginia (AIMS software developer)
I'll dash through the process of turning an ingest of files into a SIP via the Rubymatica web site. Being based on Archivematica, Rubymatica unpacks any archive files in the ingest, detox'es file names, checks for viruses, checksums all files, runs FITS for file identification, pulls in an empty DC file (for later use), creates a METS file with the directory structure and FITS XML, and then extracts DROID PRONOM PUIDs. Done. Log files and technical meta data are created and saved as part of the SIP directory tree on the server. Separate steps are available to loosely integrate a Tufts TAPER submission agreement, a donor survey, or to create a Bagit bag.

Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland) 
"Librarians as the Enemies of Bits": Using a title tendentiously drawn from Randolph G. Adam's famous 1937 attack on librarians as the enemies of books I will offer a couple of quick, cautionary examples of how and why the "materiality" of born-digital materials matters, and what sorts of things scholars of the future might be looking for in born-digital collections.

Courtney C. Mumma (City of Vancouver)
"Taming the Games: Information Must Submit": I'll offer a practical overview of what we're currently working on in Vancouver. Our biggest challenge this spring and summer will be turning the assorted Olympic records into SIPs ready for ingest. I'll address the variety of media and formats as well as our plans for taming them.

Mark Matienzo (Yale)
"Gumshoe: A Prototype Accessioning Assessment Tool": I'll run through a quick demonstration of Gumshoe, which is a web application written in Ruby and that uses Solr. Gumshoe indexes file- and filesystem-level metadata from a forensic disk image. I'll be describing it in the context of the accessioning workflow we're trying to flesh out at Yale.

Seth Shaw (Duke)
*Tentative. (I reserve the right to think of something better; comments & suggestions welcome.)* "IT Audit Fun": I will briefly talk about our Library's IT audit including the auditors initial reactions (hint: they weren't expecting Special Collections born-digital electronic records), their report, and our next steps.

Dave Thompson (Wellcome Library)
'Welcome to the dark side' - I'd like to spend my five mins explaining how we got to where we are at the Wellcome Library, the principles on which we work and how we build on existing professional knowledge to leverage the core principles of archival work in a digital context.  We've also worked hard to tie our digital work closely to the buisness drivers of our wider organisation and I'll talk a little about that.. 

Gretchen Gueguen (UVA)
"Presenting the whole fruit basket" -- I'll talk about the issues surrounding presentation of digital resources in the special collections/archives environment (aggregate description) vs. the library environment (item-level description). As an example, I'll look at the work we've been doing at East Carolina University, where we have experimented with providing digital resources both in a digital library and EAD environment, and mixing item-level objects (apples) and folder-level objects (oranges) in the same fruit basket. It's a delightful and fruity mess! :)

Simon Wilson (Hull)
"The Good, the bad and the Ugly: negotiating the deposit of born-digital archives" - I won't be re-enacting scenes from the movie but I will be looking at some of our experiences to date in dealing with depositors regarding born-digital archives and what we have learnt in the process.

Peter Chan (Stanford) 
I would like to share 10 things I have been exploring in the past 16 months for the AIMS project: donor survey; high resolution site photos; 5.25 inch floppy capture station; computer media photo station; forensic / logical capture; forensic software for arrangement & description; email mining on Koch's emails; network graph on Creeley's emails; virtual machine for InDesign files; issues on authenticity. (Slide)

Gabriela Redwine (Texas, Ransom Center) 
I'd like to use my recent struggles with a group of 5.25-inch Apple ][ Plus disks to frame a larger (and very brief) discussion about process and failure. What aspects of methodology and procedure do our skirmishes with different types of media call into question?

Alison Hinderliter (The Newberry Library) 
“Can’t we just print it out?” and other FAQs. With hesitation and resistance (aka fear and loathing) coming from my potential donors as well as my library colleagues, I’ll share some good answers and analogies for justifying the curation of digital materials in the first place.  This will be my lengthened “elevator talk,” with some visual accompaniments that I normally can’t bring into the elevator with me. 

Michael Forstrom (Beinecke) 
I'll walk through one or two recently drafted documents, depending on time, relating to Beinecke's curatorial or collection development efforts: a "digital collection development statement" and/or what I've identified as the digital capture options we must discuss with donors as part of the transfer process.    

Erika Farr (Emory) 
"Liminal shock and other early researcher reactions." I will briefly discuss researcher use of Salman Rushdie's digital archive and describe how researcher feedback is shaping our future plans for access and researcher tools. 

Catherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada) 
“Dispersed Persons":  I’ll briefly discuss how digital archives of individuals raise issues around provenance, original order and interpreting arrangement in an age of proliferation, multiple platforms/devices, and benign neglect.

Ed Fay (London School of Economics) 
I'll talk about some of the challenages we've faced in getting our digital library off the ground - from organisational to technical issues - and what solutions we've come up with (and borrowed!) to get us to where we are now. Some of these may be peculiar to us (or just peculiar!) but hopefully there will be some common themes.

Brad Westbrook (UC San Diego Libraries) 
"UCSD DAMS Assembly Process."  I'll provide a quick overview of the process for assembling information packages for the UC San Diego Digital Asset Management System.  We accept diverse sort of files and metadata, normalize the metadata to certain formats, and store as RDF, wch serves as the basis for our public interface but also for various exports, inc. METS.  My focus will be primarily on the workflow. 

Helen Broderick (British Library) 
From the extraordinary to the ordinary: I will talk a little about the process of cataloguing our born digital archives and how we are planning to incorporate such work into "normal" staff work processes, i.e. moving from seeing born digital material as being something extraordinary that is only the responsibility of specialists to it becoming part of everyone's normal workflow.

Susan Thomas (Bodleian Library) 
I'll provide some examples of hybrid archives that are in various stages of processing at the moment. Hopefully this will help to illustrate the range and quantity of materials that we're dealing with, and the amount of collecting and processing activity in the Library. This does mean that we're encountering some challenges as we attempt to move our work from R&D status to business as usual, so I may say a few words on that too. Minutes permitting, I'll also show you a little of our researcher interface for hybrid archives (in development).

Dawn Schmitz (University of California, Irvine) 
I will discuss what I have been able to learn about researcher use of the (online) digital part of a hybrid born-digital/analog collection. Using primarily Google Analytics data, I will discuss what seems to draw users to the site and a little bit about their behavior once there. I will touch on the possible significance of this data with respect to description/metadata and public outreach.

Catherine Stollar Peters (University at Albany) 
I would like to discuss social aspects of preservation that I have been thinking about recently in regards to my research on how research scientists work with large electronic data sets. I would like to consider the role of social networks in scientists' choices for archiving institutions and how social networks and trust place a role in use of electronic records. 

Melissa Watterworth Batt (University at Connecticut) 
I will provide a summary of our experience with recent acquisitions, comments and concerns that we heard from creators, and the changes to policy and practice that resulted from these interactions.  If there is time, I will review questions that have come up from my institution's administrators about access controls, custodial responsibility, and the presence of sensitive information. 

Matthew Stephens (University of Virginia)
I will briefly discuss the design process for creating digital preservation data objects, keeping technical matters to a minimum. I hope to convey the iterative nature of this process, as well as share some of my experiences balancing the (often competing) goals of curators, preservation experts and technology architects.

Ricc Ferrante (Smithsonian Institution Archives)
I will split my focus between the pitfalls and successes of working with a DAMS shared between several museums, galleries, and research centers and leveraging social media and the web to expand and amplify researcher constituencies.

Aprille McKay (University of Michigan)
I will summarize our project to capture and preserve scholarly communications transmitted via email among university officers, deans, directors and VIP scholars.  I will focus on the rapid pace of change in our environment, and the collateral benefits that accrue through persisting in the face of uncertainty.