Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Decolonizing Descriptions In Library Archives, Michael J. Daronco

School of Information Sciences Student Scholarship

Descriptions in a library archive are the anchoring guide to all information that’s available to those who are researching a subject of their choosing. For hundreds of years, estates, historical documents, artifacts, moving images, and sound material have been donated to libraries and universities for the use of higher education, but without a tool to help one navigate the endless amount of information, knowledge will become doormat if there’s no organizational means of looking it up. With the use of Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS), this system can help provide direction towards what you’re looking for to the point …

Protecting The Integrity Of Archives, Sean Daigle

School of Information Sciences Student Scholarship

This article examines the problem of fraudulent and stolen materials being introduced into archives. If these issues become common enough, people will not trust archives or history itself. Archivists can fight these problems by learning how to spot potential sellers of stolen or fraudulent items. They can also catalog unique aspects of their collections and share them on the internet, dedicate more resources to security, and hire experts when items’ authenticity is called into question. The most helpful step they can take, however, is being so diligent about establishing provenance that provenance becomes a security measure in itself. Ultimately, resources …

Issues Of Description And Access For The Graystone And Other Collections At The Detroit Sound Conservancy, Daniel Joseph E. Kelly

School of Information Sciences Student Scholarship

In this mixed case study research paper, I examine how Community Archives deal with issues of access and difficulties of description, especially with hard-to-describe materials. I first discuss the general role of a community archive. I then discuss some of the issues faced by community archives through the lens of three collections at the Detroit Sound Conservancy (DSC) that are complicated when it comes to matters of description. The case study part of this project is based on my own experience working on collections at the DSC and from interviews with Michelle McKinney, the Archivist at the DSC. The first …

Growing Up Fast: Using Vagrant To Prototype New Infrastructure, Joshua Neds-Fox, Cole Hudson, Graham S. Hukill

Library Scholarly Publications

The library established a task force with the university archive to preserve and provide access to the archive’s digital objects. The archive said: ‘here’s 60 terabytes.’ We (the librarians) thought: ‘our 2 terabyte, single server infrastructure won’t work.’ So, we sketched out one that met the archive’s requirements and aligned with trusted digital repository best practices. Given limited resources to build out this infrastructure, we turned to virtual machines.

Our presentation will outline how prototyping with Vagrant and virtual machines allowed us to put a theoretical infrastructure through the wringer, improving the design and leading to a confident deployment.

Archival Processing Science, Stefanie A. Caloia

Reuther Library Scholarly Publications

Archival collections come in all sizes, formats, and subjects, and it is impossible for any archival education program to cover all situations that professional archivists encounter. Proper planning is essential to processing and paramount when a collection comprises hundreds of linear feet, yet it is often difficult to develop and implement processing plans when drawing on your experience alone. This presentation details a method of conducting a pre-archival processing survey that can be useful through all processing stages, as well as some additional tips on handling archival materials.