Library and Information Science Commons^™

Building Bridges In The Clouds: Connecting Researchers And Hidden Works, Andrew Elder, Joanne M. Riley, Daniel Ortiz-Zapata, Ann Blum, Reyes Coll-Tellechea

Joseph P. Healey Library Publications

The work of two researchers, Mercedes Agullo and Rita Arditti, is the raw material for the development of two projects using cloud-based turn-key solutions. The resulting digital libraries bring together primary and secondary sources to a global audience of scholars and researchers that previously could not access these valuable yet hidden scholarly works.

Mercedes Agulló y Cobo is a Spanish historian who, over the course of her career, has produced important scholarly reference works in the historiography of the book, painting, sculpture, and theater. The Library at UMass Boston was approached by a faculty member in Latin American & Iberian …

Mass. Memories Road Show: Your Place In Massachusetts History, Andrew Elder, Carolyn M. Goldstein, Joanne Riley, University Archives & Special Collections, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Office of Community Partnerships Posters

The Mass. Memories Road Show is an event-based public history project that digitizes family photographs and stories shared by the people of Massachusetts. We work with local communities to organize free public events where everyone is invited to bring photographs to be scanned and included in the archives at UMass Boston.

To date, the Mass. Memories Road Show has digitized more than 5,000 photographs and stories from across the state, creating an educational resource of primary sources for future generations. Over time, we plan to visit each of the 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts.

Crowdsourcing Transcriptions Of Archival Materials, Aaron G. Noll

Graduate History Conference, UMass Boston

Crowdsourcing is a method that has been effectively used to pool the knowledge and skills of large numbers of online volunteers for the creation of information resources utilized by historians, genealogists, and scientists. In recent years, archivists have begun to crowdsource the transcription of their handwritten records. Transcription of such records has traditionally been completed by professional transcribers who are skilled in reading multiple handwriting styles, knowledgeable about the creators and historical context of the records, and can interpret varying record formats and genres. However, increasingly limited resources of time and money have made traditional transcription more difficult to accomplish. …

Born Digital: Event-Driven Archives, Vincent Capone

Graduate History Conference, UMass Boston

The growth of the internet has brought numerous tools and opportunities for archivists to both enhance their collections and reach out to potential patrons. Archives across the globe have begun immense digitization efforts to bring collections into the digital age and make them accessible to a broader audience. But what challenges face new archives whose collections are born-digital? How do these archives prove that they are indeed an archival facility and not simply a memory institution? These questions have risen around numerous digital archives born in the past decade to document and commemorate social events and tragic disasters, including the …

Ambiguity And The Digital Archivist, Caryn Radick

Provenance, Journal of the Society of Georgia Archivists

This article presents an exploratory study of the use and interpretation of the position title “digital archivist,” and considers issues in how this term is used and understood, particularly in regard to working with born-digital materials. It looks at discussions of terminology and mentions of the digital archivist title in professional literature and provides a brief content analysis of digital archivist position advertisements from between 1995 and 2012 that focuses on responsibilities of working with born-digital versus digitization. The lack of clarity and consensus regarding what a digital archivist is or does reflects uncertainty within the archival profession even as …