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

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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! 

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I look forward to seeing you all in April. 
Seth Shaw 
Electronic Records Archivist 
Duke University Archives 

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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

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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

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