Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Key Elements Of A File Format Strategy, Tyler Thorsted

Faculty Publications

Within the Digital Preservation Community there are many references to policies on file formats, acceptable file formats, preservation policies and strategies, risk matrices, and action plans. All have the intention of defining and describing file formats and guiding decisions on which formats to preserve how, and when. My team and I originally created a File Format Action Plan, which was later migrated from OneNote to Confluence and then included more strategic plans for hundreds of file formats. This paper explores which key elements should be included in an effective file format strategy and the different ways such data can be …

Personal Digital Archiving, Jeremy Myntti

Faculty Publications

Jeremy Myntti, Associate University Librarian for Metadata and IT at the Brigham Young University Library, presents on ways you can preserve your digital memories.

Watch the presentation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNo5W1jRzfs

University Archives And Etds: Exploring Best Practices, Cory L. Nimer, Rebecca A. Wiederhold

Faculty Publications

This poster reports on a preliminary study of current best practices for the management of theses and dissertations (TD) by university archivists in the United States. This will include procedural concerns, such as the maintenance of print copies, digital preservation, microfilming, and participation in external databases of TDs. It also begins to explore the relationships between university archives programs and institutional repositories in electronic TD submission/management, and the status of theses and dissertations as student records.

Keynote Address: Curating The History Of Covid-19, Jeremy Myntti

Faculty Publications

Many libraries and archives have a mission to document local or regional history and current events. Rapid response collecting during a crisis has become increasingly necessary in recent years in order to curate content during an event rather than after the event has concluded. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, libraries across the world recognized the importance of documenting contemporary history for the current and future study of the pandemic. Many projects were created to document different aspects of the pandemic, each with a slightly different focus based on types of content, populations, or regions. This talk will …

Cataloging Manuscripts And Archival Collections, Rebecca A. Wiederhold

Faculty Publications

Catalogers are increasingly responsible for creating metadata for a variety of unusual items. In the Beyond Books: Cataloging Special Format Items preconference at ULA 2019, participants learned how to catalog manuscripts/archival collections, artists’ books, zines, and posters. This webinar will reprise the Manuscripts and Archival Collections segment of that session, educating participants on when it’s appropriate to catalog special collections material archivally as a collection versus on an item level. Whether you have finding aids to use as a base for your catalog record or you are working directly with the materials, guidelines for using DACS and RDA for manuscript …

Beyond Books 2: Cataloging Archival Materials, Allie Mccormack, Rebecca A. Wiederhold, Nicole Lewis, Becky Skeen

Faculty Publications

View the video presentation in two parts at the following links:

Part 1 https://youtu.be/EQEhVpmfOBc

Part 2 https://youtu.be/XIAMdPYspFo

Archival materials can often be found in cultural heritage organizations that do not have trained special collections catalogers on staff. In this workshop, participants will learn how to catalog manuscripts, photographs, and audiovisual materials so they can be discovered in online catalogs and databases. Both item and collection-level cataloging will be discussed and participants will learn when and how to apply metadata standards like RDA and DACS. Time for hands-on practice will be included.

Cross-Functional Collaboration: The Placement Of Archival Processing In Arl Libraries, Cory L. Nimer, Rebecca A. Wiederhold

Faculty Publications

This paper reviews the results of two studies of the administrative structures that support archival processing functions in academic libraries, assessing benefits and drawbacks of current models. With this research, the authors sought to determine whether best practices exist for the placement of processing units within academic libraries and whether these structures correlate with other statistical measures. The first study examined staff directories and organizational charts on Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member library websites. A follow-up study gathered qualitative data from ARL libraries, examining library administrators' experience with their organizational structure. The research results were used to inform an …

Post-Custodial And Collaborative: A Primer For Memory Institutions Beginning Digital Archiving Projects, Lindsey Memory

Faculty Publications

This paper reviews the three major types of digital archiving projects: memory institutions’ digital archiving projects, community-based archiving, and personal digital archiving. An examination of some common challenges and opportunities present in most of these projects-- particularly any in the post-custodial model-- follows, with illustrative examples of various digital archiving projects. This paper may serve as a primer for memory institutional staff wishing to understand the landscape of digital archiving projects, both within and without the authoritative, disciplined approach most commonly taken by memory institutions.

Collaborating On Description And Digitization: The Perry Special Collections Land Indentures Project, Rebecca A. Wiederhold, Ryan K. Lee, Shanna Bessendorfer

Faculty Publications

A unique collection of English land indentures from the 16th to 20th centuries is at the center of a large undertaking at BYU’s Perry Special Collections. Born of a simple faculty digitization request, a much larger project with the potential to benefit other classes and researchers developed through the collaboration and coordination of multiple departments and individuals. This project required close collaboration between the faculty member who made the original digitization request, the Special Collections curator, our Collection Management team, the Conservation lab, our Manuscripts Cataloger, the digital lab, our Metadata Cataloging Specialist and multiple student workers. This presentation gives …

A Synthetic Document Image Dataset For Developing And Evaluating Historical Document Processing Methods, Daniel Walker, William Lund, Eric Ringger

Faculty Publications

Document images accompanied by OCR output text and ground truth transcriptions are useful for developing and evaluating document recognition and processing methods, especially for historical document images. Additionally, research into improving the performance of such methods often requires further annotation of training and test data (e.g., topical document labels). However, transcribing and labeling historical documents is expensive. As a result, existing real-world document image datasets with such accompanying resources are rare and often relatively small. We introduce synthetic document image datasets of varying levels of noise that have been created from standard (English) text corpora using an existing document degradation …