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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

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