Delegates

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

Courtney

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!

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

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

AIMS Symposium

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