Introductions from the AIMS Symposium Google Group, brought here so it is all in one place.

Courtney Mumma

I feel like a bit of a keener for being first to post, but a quick browse of the list of attendees is very humbling and I just wanted to say how much I am looking forward to meeting everyone (or seeing those I've met before) in May. I'm on Twitter, @Snarkivist, though I'm still relatively new and shy about tweeting. My archives has a new blog that I will post to sometimes: www.vancouverarchives.ca  (AuthentiCity) and their own Twitter @VanArchives. 

For the last 2 years, I've been working with our digital archives team and a contractor (Artefactual Systems) towards building and implementing a bare metal install of Archivematica as part of a larger digital archives system that includes ICA-AtoM as its access module. By the end of this year, we hope to have ingested, stored, preserved and described around 25TB of digital materials from the 2010 Winter Games held here in Vancouver, in addition to nearly 200 boxes of analogue materials. I'm also personally very interested in digital forensics for pre-ingest processes.

Matthew Kirschenbaum

Hello everyone. I'm Matthew Kirschenbaum, Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Broadly, I work in the emerging field known as digital humanities. More specifically, I'm interested in the issues AIMS is engaging from the standpoint of future scholarship and access, particularly with regard to literary and creative born-digital work. To that end I've worked on these projects and reports: 

Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use (NEH): http://www.neh.gov/ODH/Default.aspx?tabid=111&id=37 

Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections (Mellon):  http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub149abst.html 

Preserving Virtual Worlds (NDIIPP, IMLS), final report here: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097 

I also co-teach, with Naomi Nelson, a course on Born-Digital Materials at the Rare Book School. 

Best, Matt 

Helen Broderick

Hello my name is Helen Broderick and I am a curator of Modern Literary Manuscripts at the British Library. As well as more traditional archivist duties at the library I am also a member of the Personal Digital Manuscripts Project along with Jeremy John who I think that many of you may know (for more information about the project please see - http://www.bl.uk/digital-lives/). 

My involvement with the project has included cataloguing and making accessible copies of born digital archival material that can be used by researchers. As part of this work I visited Emory University last June to find out more about born digital material in the Salman Rushdie archive. 

The library has also started to look at different forms of enhanced curation, which include immersive photography of workspaces. So far my knowledge and experience of working with born digital material mainly relates to processing and stems from my subject knowledge of the archival material but I am looking forward to finding out more about wider work being done in this field at the Symposium. 

Gabby Redwine

My name is Gabby Redwine, and I am an archivist and electronic records/metadata specialist at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. I am responsible for developing our program to preserve born-digital materials. I also process paper holdings and manage and review our EAD finding aids. Most recently, I collaborated with Matt Kirschenbaum (Maryland) and Richard Ovenden (Bodleian) on a Mellon-funded project that explored the overlap between computer forensics and the needs of archivists, curators, and others preserving born-digital cultural heritage materials (http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub149abst.html). More locally, I have been fine-tuning our capture and storage procedures and have begun large-scale imaging of the 3.5-inch disks in the Ransom Center's collection. I'm really looking forward to seeing everyone in May and learning more about your work. 

Sincerely, 
Gabby

Brad Westbrook

I am Brad Westbrook, and I am a metadata librarian / digital archivist in the UC San Diego Libraries. Currently, I oversee object definition and packaging for our Digital Asset Management System (https://libraries.ucsd.edu/digital/), serve as lead analyst for the ArchivesSpace planning project, and provide metadata support to UCSD's curation initiative (http://rci.ucsd.edu/) and Chronopolis (http://chronopolis.sdsc.edu/), a digital preservation framework.  In the recent past, I have been the project manager and lead analyst for the Archivists' Toolkit Project and the lead designer for the Union 
Catalog for Art Images, two Mellon-sponsored projects based at the UC San Diego Libraries.  Prior to that, back to 1993,  I served as the Manuscripts Librarian / University Archivist at UCSD.  Broadly, I am interested in tools and workflows for supporting digital library work, but especially those supporting asset description. 

I look forward to meeting you all. 

Brad Westbrook 
Metadata Librarian & Digital Archivist 
UC San Diego Libraries 

Tom Laudeman

I'm Tom Laudeman with the University of Virginia Library, and I'm the AIMS programmer. I have created Rubymatica, the SIP creation tool modeled closely on the SIP creation work done by the Archivematica  team (with many thanks to them). Rubymatica is written in Ruby on Rails. It is loosely integrated with a donor survey tool (adapted from a package I wrote a couple of years ago) and with the Tufts TAPER Submission Agreement Builder Tool. The entire suite is web-based, and will soon be available for public testing on a UVA-hosted server. Rubymatica is slated be the SIP creation/ingest module of the upcoming Hypatia arrangement and description tool. 

My software career started in the mid-1980s with scientific data, desktop publishing, and a stint at Kesmai Corp in online games. Since around 1995 I have been building web applications where scripts and databases interact with end users via the web browser. Prior to joining the Library, I worked with UVA scientists on cutting edge genomics databases, all with web-based interfaces. Besides being a computer techie, I'm also a content creator. Google "vw new beetle tail light replacement". There are more than 1200 captioned images on my various laudeman.com web sites. The images and text are managed in a content management system (CMS) I wrote specifically for that purpose. 

I look forward to welcoming everyone to Charlottesville! 

Tom Laudeman
twl8n@virginia.edu
AIMS Programmer

Matthew Stephens

My name is Matthew Stephens, and I'm the Sustaining Digital Scholarship programmer at the University of Virginia Library.  I've been involved preservation and migration of digital assets, primarily electronic texts, but also websites and digital image collections. I've done a lot of work in metadata conversion and manipulation, as well as digital object repository management.  I'm interested in most aspects of digital preservation and curation, but these days forensics and provenance are foremost on my mind. 

I'm looking forward to meeting everyone, and Gretchen, we're all very excited about your joining us at UVA! 

Matthew Stephens 
Sustaining Digital Scholarship Programmer 
Digital Curation Services 
521 Alderman Library 
University of Virginia 

Melissa Watterworth Batt

I am Melissa Watterworth Batt, Curator of Literary Collections and interim Head, Archives and Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut.  I am responsible for policy development and planning with regard to our ingest operation.  We are in the middle of adapting our ingest workflow to Archivematica and securing staff resources to sustain its development. Currently I am refining our SIP agreement, exploring the TAPER builder tool, and recently tested the CERP email parser.   

In my work and interactions with researchers, I see great utility and potential for institutional-collaboration with regard to EAC and literary collections.  I am interested in the application of digital forensics, particularly the development of open source tools and the feasibility of forensic workflows at medium-sized institutions.  I'd like to discuss the ethical issues with regard to forensics and personal archives, as policy development and the handling of illicit/sensitive materials, under the administration of a public university, has its challenges.   

Looking forward to meeting you, 

Melissa 

Head, Archives & Special Collections 
Curator of Literary, Natural History, and Rare Books Collections  
Thomas J. Dodd Research Center 
University of Connecticut Libraries 

http://doddcenter.uconn.edu/ 
http://doddcenter.wordpress.com/ 

Gretchen Gueguen

I'm Gretchen Gueguen and I've just accepted the position of Digital Archivist for the AIMS project/Special Collections at UVa. I currently work at East Carolina University where I head the Digital Collections department. We've been digitizing special collections and building a digital asset management system (http://digital.lib.ecu.edu/) that is fully integrated with our online finding aids (i.e. digital content dynamically delivered to finding aids) (http://digital.lib.ecu.edu/special/ead/). 

I've been at ECU since January 2008 and before that I was at the University of Maryland, first as a grad student at MITH, then in the library's Digital Collections and Research department, where we worked on a fedora repository for digital collections. 

I'm really excited about starting at UVa and meeting you all in a few weeks.

Dave Thompson

My name is Dave Thompson (dnt) and I'm the Digital Curator at the Wellcome Library in London. http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/  I'm looking forward to meeting everyone at AIMS in Charlottesville in May.  I've been at Wellcome since 2004 and was previously at the National Library of New Zealand. My main interest lies in working with born digital archival material. 

The Wellcome Library has been accepting born digital archival material for about three years now and we've amassed just under a TB of material. Some personal papers, some organisational material. I support our archivists in the technical aspects of digital archiving and help develop policy and procedures. 

I'm currently working on the Library's new digitisation project, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2010/News/WTX062533.htm This project represents a major change in the way we plan to make material available, it will encompass digitised as well as born digital material.  I'm presently working on the procurement of a workflow tracking system that will help us manage the production of content for this project. 

I've had the pleasure of visiting the University of Virginia before, dropping in at the e-Text Centre some years ago. 

Kind regards, dnt 

Dave Thompson, Digital Curator 
Digital Services 
Wellcome Library 
183 Euston Road 
London NW1 2BE, UK 

Susan Thomas

I'm Susan Thomas. I work for the Bodleian Libraries (University of Oxford) where I'm responsible for the service underpinning preservation, management and delivery of our born-digital archives (Bodleian Electronic Archives & Manuscripts). A major part of that work is currently being undertaken through the futureArch project, funded by the Mellon Foundation. I also teach 'Digital Archiving' on the University of Dundee's MA/MSc programme at the Centre for Archive & Information Studies. 

In terms of collections, we have digital archives from a number of individuals and organisations. Just over a TB now, and growing all the time... Some collections have a handful of files, while others include thousands. We're doing quite a bit of work at the moment to capture our legacy digital holdings, and we have new digital accessions coming in too. We've processed a handful of 'hybrid archives' and are working on our UI for presenting digital archives with finding aids to researchers. 
Looking forward to the coming discussions! 

Susan Thomas 
Digital Archivist/Project Manager 
Bodleian Library 
Web:  http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/beam and http://futurearchives.blogspot.com 

Aprille McKay

I'm Aprille McKay and I'm a digital archivist at the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library in the University Archives and Records Program (http://bentley.umich.edu/uarphome/index.php).  I'm currently working on a Mellon-funded project aimed at capturing scholarly correspondence of archival value that is transmitted by email .  Other efforts involve improving our workflows and tools for working with born-digital records, and helping to define needs for new policies and procedures. Another current project in our unit is the creation of a university-wide web archive in collaboration with CDL and its Web Archiving Service. 

The University of Michigan is in the midst of negotiating a contract with Google for email and collaboration tools for staff and students. We're challenged by the lack of tools and policy guidance to help us manage this transition. 

Another interest is in figuring out how to ascertain and manage access restrictions that are required by third-party privacy, copyright or institutional policy in born-digital records. 

I'm looking forward to meeting all of you and coming back to Charlottesville -- I'm an alum. 

Aprille Cooke McKay, MSI, JD 

Digital Archivist 
Bentley Historical Library 
University of Michigan 
1150 Beal Ave. 
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1333  
www.bentley.umich.edu

Seth Shaw

Hello! I'm Seth Shaw, Electronic Records Archivist, at the Duke University Archives (& Special Collections). If it comes through Duke's Special Collections and is born-digital, I am involved. What I am working on largely depends on the moment you talk to me: infrastructure & metadata (the constant battle), web-archivy (mostly via Archive-It), forensics, email, looking into emulation/virtualization, electronic poetry, organizational records, personal records, etc... I have been at Duke since 2007. Previously I earned my Masters of Information: Archives and Records Management from the University of Michigan, School of Information and my Bachelors of Science in Information Systems from Brigham Young University - Idaho in 2005. Additionally, I co-teach a two-day workshop for SAA: "Managing Electronic Records in Archives and Special Collections." 

I look forward to seeing you all in May. 

Seth Shaw 
Electronic Records Archivist 
Duke University Archives 

Dawn Schmitz

Hi all, my name is Dawn Schmitz and I am the archivist at the University of California, Irvine, where I am responsible for the management of technical services for archives and manuscripts. I have served as the archivist on one born-digital manuscripts processing project, working on a team with IT specialists and metadata librarians. As part of my current responsibilities, I am starting to work on establishing policies and procedures for the management of our born-digital manuscript materials, with an emphasis on accessioning, ingest, and storage. This week I will be attending the SAA workshop, Managing Electronic Records in Archives and Special Collections, where I hope to learn a bit more about digital curation and get a hands-on demo of Archivematica. I'm looking forward to the AIMS symposium and I know I will be learning much that I can apply to my work.

Ed Fay

Hello everyone, I'm Ed Fay - the Collections Digitisation Manager at the London School of Economics. I'm leading our programme of digital library development which is building on Fedora (and the Hydra framework) and aiming to have preservation storage and an ingest workflow for digital archives (Archivematica) in production by July this year. 

Our programme is titled "Digital Library Management and Infrastructure Development" which attempts to get across the idea that we are not only building a system we are also looking across all aspects of our digital collections - from strategy and policy through to staffing and of course technical development. Our primary focus at the moment is on ingest and preservation. 

Digital collections for us includes digital archives, digitised materials, our institutional repository and will at some inevitable point involve things like web archiving, forensic analysis of researcher's machines, research data management and so on. At the moment we are working with relatively structured collections - organisational archive deposits and digitised collections - but making preparations to deal with more complex scenarios. 

I work closely with our Archive department but am not myself an archivist - nor a librarian! I'm still working towards my formal information science qualification - I'm hoping to write a dissertation this year on the 'perception and demonstration of trust in digital libraries'. Much of my work is cross-library with archivists, librarians, learning technologists, IT specialists, etc.. I also manage our digitisation programme which is currently undertaking a number of projects and actively planning our next tranche of work and funding proposals. 

I look forward to participating in the symposium and meeting those of you I don't already know. 

All the best,

Ed Fay 
Collection Digitisation Manager 
Library, The London School of Economics and Political Science 
10 Portugal Street, London WC2A 2HD  
http://www.library.lse.ac.uk/  
http://www.twitter.com/digitalfay 

Peter Chan 

I am Peter Chan, Digital Archivist in the AIMS Project at Stanford University Libraries. For the past 14 months, I have been exploring and setting up equipments / software / workflow to work with born-digital materials at Stanford. (See workflow diagram at https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0By...) 

Highlights are follows:. 

1. Pre-Accessioning 
a. Explore the creation of high resolution site photos in donors/creators' offices. (see https://lib.stanford.edu/digital-forensics-stanford-university-librar...) 
b. With the help from all AIMS partners, created a donor survey based on the Paradigm records survey (published by the Bodleian Library, Oxford University). (See https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1-zhAUIAOyvBmGvmi-jHeQZOLbsO...) 

2. Accessioning 
a. Assembled a capture station for 5.25 floppy diskettes (IBM/MS DOS format) using components (CPU, RAM, motherboard, 5.25 inch. floppy drive, etc.) bought from NewEgg, eBay, etc. 
b. Use FTK Imager to perform logical / forensic capture. (Creating a YouTube video introducing the capture of born digital materials at Stanford.) 
c. Used external vendor to recover data from 4 "broken" hard drives. (See http://www.securedatarecovery.com/hard-drive-data-recovery.html) 
d. Setup a photo station to capture photographic images of computer media. The setup allows a computer to control a camera and to view the objects in the computer screen. This will streamline the photography of large volume of computer media and will allow the quality assurance of the photos to be performed immediately after the photos are being taken. 

3. Processing 
a. Explore the use of AccessData FTK to extract technical metadata and to assign descriptive metadata to collections. (See YouTube video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAhbR8dyp8) 
b. Explore the use of Adobe Bridge to add/supplement descriptive metadata to the IPTC data in image collections. 
c. Explore the use of Transit Solution to transform files with obsoltete formats to html. (See http://www.avantstar.com/metro/home/Products/TransitSolutions) 
d. Planning a hands-on FTK workshop for Stanford people in May. 

4. Delivery 
a. Explore the use a Fedora repository with files transferred from FTK to delivery collections. 
b. Explore the use of Virtual Machine software from Parallels to deliver design files created with InDesign together with the custom designed fonts in the reading room. 
c. Explore the use of AccessData FTK to deliver collections in the reading room. 

5. Preservation 
Will work with the SDR (Stanford Digital Repository) team to ingest files to preservation repository. (Submission agreement, SIP creation, etc.) 

6. Alternative Processing 
a. Explore the use of OpenCalais to perform entity extraction (See http://www.opencalais.com/about) 
b. Worked with Elijah Meeks, Digital Humanities Specialist at Stanford, to create network graph of Robert Creeley's emails using Gephi.  (see http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/02/palo-alto-ca/) 
c. Working with Sudheendra Hangal, PhD candidate from the Stanford Computer Science dept., to use MUSE (an email mining program for long-term email archives, from the Mobisocial laboratory at Stanford University) on Robert Creeley's emails. (See http://mobisocial.stanford.edu/muse/) 

I am also very interested in enhancing the authenticity of electronic files by using digital signatures. 

I am looking forward to learning from you all and to sharing my experience. 

Peter Chan 
Digital Archivist, AIMS Project 
Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries 
Stanford, CA  

Mark Matienzo

I'm Mark Matienzo, digital archivist at Manuscripts and Archives (MSSA) at Yale University. The majority of my time is spent working on the AIMS project, where I'm the lead digital archivist (a quasi-official project management role). I have also recently been appointed as the functional lead for the development of Hypatia, the Hydra head for AIMS. I've worked at Yale since January 2010, and before that I was a programmer for the New York Public Library's Digital Experience Group and was assistant archivist for systems  at the American Institute of Physics. I'm active in SAA, and I hold or have held positions on the EAD Roundtable, the Technical Subcommittee on EAD,  the Description Section, the Metadata and Digital Object Roundtable, and the Electronic Records Section.

My interests and efforts in the area of digital archives right now are mostly focused on developing workflows and tools for accessioning and processing electronic records. At Yale, we're hoping to develop a shared set of guidelines to be used by both MSSA and by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. We're hoping our work will scale to deal with large amounts of under-accessioned and under-described records in our units, particularly with records received on fugitive media. Whenever possible, we're trying to develop our workflows using open source software and open standards, so we've been looking at digital forensics formats like AFF and forensic software such as Sleuthkit and fiwalk. An early attempt to build an assessment prototype for imaged file systems was my tool Gumshoe <http://github.com/anarchivist/gumshoe>, which I demoed briefly during a presentation at this year's Code4lib conference. I'm also a bit of an archival description wonk, so I'm particularly interested in determining how descriptive standards such as DACS and EAD could be best adjusted and implemented to deal with born-digital records.

Mark A. Matienzo <mark.matienzo@yale.edu>
Digital Archivist, Manuscripts and Archives
Yale University Library

Catherine Hobbs

I am Catherine Hobbs, Literary Archivist (English-language) at the Library and Archives Canada.  My areas of research and publishing are personal archives (the archives of individuals/families rather than organizations) and literary archives.  I am also the founding Chair of the Special Interest Section on Personal Archives (SISPA) within the Association of Canadian Archivists.

My areas of interest concerning born-digital archives have to do with the way in which personal digital archives are currently being created and maintained in both more traditional desktop environments and in dispersed cloud computing, the web, and portable devices.  In order to break open some of these questions and get fresh perspective, I’ve hosted two dialogues in the SISPA group: one with Cathy Marshall of Microsoft and one with Susan Thomas of the Bodleian (about the PARADIGM project--looking forward to meeting you Susan!).  Last year, I led the Institute on Personal Archives through the ACA and we hosted Laura Carroll who spoke about Emory’s Salman Rushdie Digital Archives Project.

To me the salient questions have to do with how to capture the context of these records in a way which reflects the digital lives (or hybrid analog/digital lives) of their creators.  In what ways do we reconstrue original order within these fonds, for example?  Digital contexts have profound impacts for appraisal methodologies and for the types of questions we need to be asking archives creators when we first approach them. Of course this has further implications for interpreting arrangement and for archival description. In the published literature we are only beginning to scratch the surface of many of these issues.  There are other issues which are particular to literary archives and archives of creative artists more generally which play out here as well.

Looking forward to participating in the symposium with you….

Catherine

Simon Wilson

I’m Simon Wilson, digital archivist at Hull University Archives as part of the AIMS project. I have worked at Hull since November 2009 when my main task was to prepare the collections for a move into the new Hull History Centre - a new award winning building that provides a single point of access for the collections of the Hull City Archives, Hull Local Studies Library and the Hull University Archives. The building opened in January 2010 and has already welcomed over 52,000 visitors.

Although I have considerable experience of using ICT with cultural content including Project Manager for the Mersey Gateway digitisation project and as Collections Manager for Hull Museums Documentation Project participation in the AIMS project represents our first steps in born-digital archives. We are looking to install a quarantine PC and are creating the appropriate policy frameworks to move towards accepting born-digital material from any of our depositors. In addition to the AIMS work I am also currently working with colleagues across the UK to integrate the born-digital workflow with the CALM Collection Management System.

I am looking forward to discussing a wide range of issues with fellow delegates including those who have experience of providing access to born-digital material and those who have tackled email.

I am just putting the finishing touches to a wiki for the symposium event and I will send an email about this on Wednesday.
Simon Wilson
Digital Archivist (AIMS Project)
Hull History Centre

Alison Hinderliter

I'm Alison Hinderliter, Manuscripts and Archives Librarian at the Newberry Library, Chicago. I was very fortunate to have attended Matt Kirschenbaum and Naomi Nelson's Rare Book School class last summer on Born Digital Materials, and after that class I was able to go back to the Newberry and begin relevant conversations with materials donors, researchers, and staff. I am very interested in the full package of digital materials curation, from outreach and accessioning through appraisal, processing, description, and delivery. Most of this archival workflow is still in the theoretical stages at my institution, due to staff and budget restraints - my experience has been with the donor relations and appraisal part of the large puzzle thus far. I know that collaboration with other institutions will be key to the Newberry's flourishing on the digital curation front.  As an aside, having a music background, I am also very interested in preservation of born-digital music-related materials, including recorded sound and musical notation software preservation.

I am very honored to be a part of this important symposium and I hope to be able to contribute something useful in terms of best practices for donor relations / interviews, accessioning, and appraisal.  At the end of this month I am attending the Midwest Archives Conference in St. Paul, Minnesota, where there will be several sessions on different aspects of managing digital collections. I will be glad to share what I learn there with this group. Furthermore, I'm attending the DigCCurr symposium in Chapel Hill immediately following this symposium.... anyone else?
http://www.midwestarchives.org/assets/documents/2011_annual_program_low_res.pdf
http://www.ils.unc.edu/digccurr/institute.html

Erika Farr

Greetings, All.
My name is Erika Farr and I am the coordinator for digital archives at Emory University's Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library. Our acquisition of Salman Rushdie's personal papers included 4 personal computers and an external hard drive containing a file dump from the machine he was using at the time and it pretty much launched our born-digital archives program. In some ways, the Rushdie archive has been the proverbial tail wagging the dog and we are working toward establishing a sustainable program for acquiring, appraising, processing, preserving, and providing access to our born-digital and hybrid archival collections. We now have numerous "papers" with significant born-digital components (including complete computing environments) as well as four more sets of Rushdie data, so we are anxious to get a more efficient and effective set of processes and practices in place.

We have made some progress with infrastructure (fedora-based repository) and are now in the process of establishing a digital analysis lab. Because we have users interacting with one born-digital collection with some regularity, I am also trying to monitor user experience and user feedback. While the whole field of born-digital archives fascinates me, I am particularly interested in the user experience, how we provide access, and how shifts in archival media may (or may not) impact research methodologies.

As for my background, I am not an archivist and just barely a librarian, completing my MLIS in August 2010. I started working in libraries while getting my PhD in English lit at Emory and have worked with a range of digital library and digital scholarship projects. I was lucky enough to work with Matt and Gabby on the NEH ODH start up grant that Matt mentioned and have enjoyed getting to know some of the fascinating people working in digital archives through events such as
iPres and Digital Lives symposia.

I am looking forward to this gathering and learning from all of you.

Warm wishes,
Erika

Ben Goldman

Hello, everyone.

My name is Ben Goldman, and I am the digital archivist at the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center (AHC). Things develop very gradually here in Wyoming, whether you're referring to economic development, enlightened political thought, born-digital archives, or just my responsiveness to this Symposium's call for introductions.

The AHC has only recently begun to engage the issue of born-digital archives. We have been slowly developing a program that is greatly influenced by the work of many attending the AIMS Symposium, but is constrained by a lack of technical infrastructure and limited financial and human resources (1/5 of my time is 'officially' allotted for born-digital issues). I think these circumstances are pretty common for most academic manuscript repositories and so I've enjoyed the challenge of developing a program that tries to capture the field's nascent best practices in spirit, if not truly in practice, and sharing our lessons learned with other resource-challenged institutions.

Right now we are focused on working through our backlog of digital media in collections and transferring data from media to file server, while capturing descriptive metadata, checksums, file formats, etc. It's rudimentary at best. We're also using the experience of working through a large, complex, hybrid congressional collection (300 cu. + 350 Gb) to help formulate policies and procedures.

My interest in this topic has really grown out of my passion for archives. Like many of you, I am interested in exploring born-digital issues from the perspective of common archival administrative areas. I would classify much of my work so far as being focused on accessioning, though I am very interested in appraisal and processing issues. I am already experiencing some tension between our minimal processing philosophy (which pervades much of the profession) and the complexity of born-digital collections.

Looking forward to meeting you all.

Best,

Ben

Erin O'Meara

My name is Erin O’Meara and I’m the Electronic Records Archivist and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here at UNC, I’m developing workflows and procedures for the various collecting units in Wilson Special Collections regarding born-digital materials. I’m also the front-facing library staff member for services regarding the Carolina Digital Repository, a preservation-focused IR that uses Fedora and iRODS as its core technological infrastructure. I’m helping to develop the Curator’s Workbench, an open-source ingest workflow tool for digital content.

A bit of background: I got my Master of Archival Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2004. While I was in Vancouver I worked as a graduate assistant on the InterPARES 2 Project mostly with Richard Pearce-Moses and the Science Focus Group. My case study focused on the preservation of archaeological records within Geographic Information Systems. Before coming to UNC, I was the Electronic Records Archivist at the University of Oregon.

My main interests are in operationalizing a strong born-digital workflow in a working archives/special collections that has linkages to archival theory.

Michael Forstrom

My name is Michael Forstrom, and I'm an archivist at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale. At Beinecke I spend a good part of my time processing and cataloging modern literary manuscript material, but I'm also responsible for managing the work around born-digital material in collections. I'm part of the Yale AIMS team, along with Mark Matienzo and others, and in addition to AIMS-related work, over roughly the past 18 months my efforts have been focused on establishing a digital preservation workbench here at Yale, standardizing workflows with colleagues in Manuscripts & Archives, and developing Beinecke's curatorial services and documentation.     

Looking forward to next week,

Michael Forstrom

Catherine Stollar Peters

Hello, everyone. My name is Catherine Stollar Peters and I am a PhD student at the University at Albany in their Informatics Department. My current research interest is examining the data creation, maintenance, sharing, use, and preservation of large electronic data sets by museum scientists. I am trying to determine if the models archivists have created in terms of data curation really match up with what scientists really do.  Some recent findings that I would like to talk about at the symposium are social factors that play a role in data curation. 

Professional background: Before starting on my PhD, I worked for the New York State Archives in their Information Services Unit. In that position I did a lot of systems development work and participated in their efforts to create a state preservation system (through conducting technical appraisals and fine tuning requirements for a digital repository.) Prior to working at the State Archives, I was an electronic records archivist at the Harry Ransom Center.  I contributed to their early efforts in developing procedures and workflows for their digital preservation program.  

I am looking forward to see you all in Virginia!

Ricc Ferrante

Hi, I’m Ricc Ferrante, the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ Information Technology Archivist and director of Digital Services. Digital Services here includes our digital preservation and curation, digitization, electronic records management  and our web-based outreach activities. My primary focus since joining the Archives has been to tackle the preservation and curation of our more “thorny” formats and born digital objects, including email accounts, websites and social media. We have also been doing a lot in the area of digital video, DAT tapes and computer-aided design documents – some solutions but also a number of painfully discovered dead-ends.  Standards and best practices are near and dear to my heart, so I’m grateful to participate in the video and technical metadata part of the Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative effort and, previously, in the work to define the Audit and Certification of Trusted Digital Repositories standard (CCSDS 652.0 / ISO 16363) that is currently open for public comment. I also enjoy hosting internships as a way to invest in the future curation and preservation successes of archives a few generations down the road.

Bradley Daigle

Greetings, everyone. I am Bradley Daigle, Director of Digital Curation Services and Digital Strategist for Special Collections. I am also PI on The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's funded project: Born Digital Materials: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship (AIMS) along with Martha Sites. I have worked at UVa for over 10 year and in varying capacities. Currently, I am responsible for the life-cycle of the digital object here at UVa Library. That means from digitization to repository environment to collections strategy to digital preservation (stewardship). I directly oversee digitization and stewardship but am largely responsible for the functional requirements for said content in our managed environments. I also do a great deal of work with intellectual property and reuse of our digital assets. My area will be working very closely with Special Collections with respect to born digital materials.

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