Category: NDSA

We are delighted to announce the recipients of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) annual Innovation Awards!

Individual Awards: George Edward McCain
Organization Award: Texas Digital Library
Project Award: UC Guidelines for Born-Digital Archival Description
Educator Awards: Heather Moulaison Sandy
Future Steward Award: Raven Bishop

These awards highlight and commend creative individuals, projects, organizations, educators, and future stewards demonstrating originality and excellence in their contributions to the field of digital preservation.

The awardees will be recognized publicly during NDSA’s Digital Preservation 2018 during the Opening Plenary on Wednesday, October 17. Please join us in congratulating them for their hard work! Each of the winners will be interviewed later this year, so stay tuned to learn more about their work on our blog.

Individual Award

Organization Award

Project Award

The UC Guidelines for Born-Digital Archival Description are a significant step in breaking down one of the biggest obstacles to making born-digital content accessible: its description. With standards for describing born-digital content, archivists and other professionals can more clearly communicate the quality, quantity, and usability of digital material to users. The UC Guidelines were the result of intensive research by a large group of practitioners and content experts who analyzed existing descriptive standards, emerging best practices for born digital materials, and archivists’ practical considerations. The resulting UC Guidelines are a comprehensive resource presented in simple terms, expanding accessibility beyond advanced professionals to include a wide range of practitioners. This project embodies a creative and inclusive approach to problem solving: tackling a hyper-local problem while contributing to larger discussions about widely shared challenges. The mapping to DACS, MARC, and EAD allows other institutions to easily incorporate the UC standards into their own. The guidelines are also useful for institutions new to born-digital descriptive practices and for graduate students learning how to write and compose finding aids.

The most up-to-date version of the UC Guidelines for Born-Digital Archival Description can be found in GitHub.

In addition, the UC Guidelines for Born-Digital Archival Description have been preserved and made permanently accessible in eScholarship, a service of the California Digital Library that provides scholarly publishing and repository services for the University of California community. The permalink to this paper series can be found on eScholarship.

Educator Awards

Nominations are now being accepted for the 2018 Innovation Awards for the National Digital Stewardship Alliance (NDSA)!   The NDSA established the Innovation Awards in 2012 to recognize and encourage innovation in the field of digital stewardship.

These awards focus on recognizing excellence in the following areas:

• Individuals making a significant, innovative contribution to the digital preservation community.
• Projects whose goals or outcomes represent an inventive, meaningful addition to the understanding or processes required for successful, sustainable digital preservation stewardship.
• Organizations taking an innovative approach to providing support and guidance to the digital preservation community.
• Future stewards, especially students, taking a creative approach to advancing knowledge of digital preservation issues and practices.
• Educators, including trainers or curricular endeavors, promoting innovative approaches and access to digital preservation through partnerships, professional development opportunities, and curriculum.

As a diverse membership group with a shared commitment to digital preservation, the NDSA understands the importance of innovation and risk-taking in developing and supporting a broad range of successful digital preservation activities.  Acknowledging that innovative digital stewardship can take many forms, eligibility for these awards has been left purposely broad. Nominations are open to anyone or anything that falls into the above categories and any entity can be nominated for one of the four awards. Nominees should be US-based people and projects or collaborative international projects that contain a US-based partner. This is your chance to help us highlight and reward novel, risk-taking, and inventive approaches to the challenges of digital preservation.

You can submit a nomination via this quick, easy online submission form: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/VK63BN5.

Nominations will be accepted until August 31, 2018.  The prizes will be presented to the winners at the Digital Preservation 2018 meeting taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada, on October 17-18, 2018. Winners will be asked to deliver a very brief talk about their activities as part of the awards ceremony.

Help us recognize and reward innovation in digital stewardship and submit a nomination!

We encourage all NDSA members to submit nominations.  We will be hitting electronic mailing lists, but also please promote the awards throughout your community.

For more information on the details on awards from previous years, please see here: http://ndsa.org/awards/

Helen Tibbo has been honored with the 41st Distinguished Alumni Award from the Information and Library Science program at the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering (SICE).

Tibbo, a 1983 graduate of the then-IU School of Library and Information Science, is currently the Director of the Professional Science Master’s Degree in Digital Curation and an Alumni Distinguished Professor for the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Tibbo was nominated by Devan Donaldson, an assistant professor of information science at SICE.

“I think Helen’s accomplishments really speak for themselves,” Donaldson said. “Over the past 30 years, Helen has pioneered research in archival science and digital curation. Her accomplishments are truly worthy of honor and recognition. My hope is that I can carry on the legacy she began at IU by training students who are as quick-witted, thorough, and able to contribute to the development of the ILS field as her.”

Tibbo earned her undergraduate degree in English from Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts in 1977, and she worked as a junior high school English teacher until 1982 when she enrolled at IU. She earned her M.L.S. in 1983 and served as a graduate assistant at both SLIS and the University of Maryland, where she earned her Ph.D. in Library and Information Science in 1989.

Tibbo became an assistant professor in SILS at North Carolina in 1989 and rose through the school, becoming an associate dean in the late 1990s and a full professor in 2003. She was a pioneer in the study of online research, and Tibbo has worked to define problems and solutions of the challenges of preserving digital assets.

“Over almost 30 years at UNC, Helen has shaped an internationally recognized program in digital curation,” said Gary Marchionini, the dean and Cary C. Boshamer Professor of SILS. “She has influenced scholars and students around the world to think about the issues of digital curation and preservation of digital assets in enterprises ranging from small community archives to national repositories and archives. Helen is recognized as a scholar and teacher, and reflects brightly on IU as one of the school’s most distinguished alumni.”

Tibbo has served as the president of the Society of American Archivists, the largest professional society in the field, and is an SAA Fellow, which is awarded for lifetime achievement. She has led numerous workshops and conferences, and she created courses and credentials that have furthered the study of digital curation. Tibbo also was named a Digital Pioneer by the Library of Congress in 2001.

“Professor Tibbo has long been a pioneer in archival research and education,” said Elizabeth Yakel, the professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Michigan. “She has demonstrated exceptional skills in conducting rigorous research. She was an early innovator in successfully rethinking and redesigning curricula to focus on digital curation at both the master’s and the continuing education levels. Her service to the profession in many positions has been impactful.”

Tibbo’s efforts have made her a globally renowned researcher, and her work at UNC raised the profile of the school’s reputation in the world of digital preservation.

“Helen’s contributions have had a lasting effect on the profession, on her students, on her host institution, and on all those who, like me, have had the pleasure of working with her,” said Kevin Ashley, the director of the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. “I have every expectation that there is yet more to come, but her achievements so far are already worthy of recognition.”

Tibbo will be honored at the SICE alumni reception and award ceremony at the American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference in New Orleans June 24.

NDSA Member Profiles is a new collaborative series from the Interest Groups of the NDSA. The series is inspired by past NDSA traditions such as Insights Interviews, and aims to build on and expand these types of interviews with featured NDSA members to allow for better shared communication and collaboration around the work of digital stewardship and preservation. Topics range from member questions and insights for the NDSA community to sharing failures, discoveries, and anything else in between. If you or your institution is interested in being featured, please contact Lauren Work (lw2cd@virginia.edu) or Sibyl Schaefer (sschaefer@ucsd.edu). 

Sally Vermaaten is the Manager of Archive Solutions at the Gates Archive, where she leads a team that designs, implements, and maintains the technology and business solutions that support the work of the organization. Gates Archive has been an NDSA member since 2016. Sally joined the Archive in March 2017 and has become involved with the NDSA’s Infrastructure Interest Group.

Describe your position, and how you spend most of your working time

As the Manager of Archive Solutions, I lead a team responsible for the organization’s systems, infrastructure, asset management, digitization, reformatting of audiovisual materials, as well as strategic program management. My primary focus is on making sure that my fantastic team – which includes library and archive professionals, technologists, and a program manager – have the tools and support they need to do their jobs.

Another portion of my role is planning and executing programs of work to implement new technology, improve process workflows, and ensure we are maintaining core infrastructure including storage and archival systems.

Fostering a positive organizational culture – one where collaboration and professional respect are the norm and the team feels empowered to identify and make improvements – is also a part of my role. Work at the Archive is fast-paced, which makes a culture of trust and open communication especially important.

Do you have a ongoing or finished digital stewardship project that you are particularly proud of that you would like to share?

One recent project I am proud of is an email analysis pilot project currently underway. I am working with Archivists Kate Stratton and Martin Gengenbach, Systems Engineer Julio Lopez, and Application Developer Erik Hauck to test tools and develop workflows for analyzing and appraising email. We are particularly interested in methods for screening personally identifiable information (PII) and sensitive content that can scale to large email collections. Tools we are testing include Forensics Toolkit, ePADD, Microsoft Advanced eDiscovery, and AccessData’s Summation.

The project has required experimentation but the team has also made good use of the growing body of professional literature about email in archives – including webinars from the SAA Electronic Records Roundtable, resources from the University of Illinois System’s Processing Capstone Email Using Predictive Coding project and the Task Force on Technical Approaches to Email Archives Consultation Report Draft. Email is a key component of modern archival collections so it is great to see the profession sharing information and exploring how archivists might be able to use email ‘power tools’ that are actively being developed for system administrators, information security, and legal teams.

What are your current challenges working in digital preservation?

As part of ongoing management of our infrastructure’s health, we are revisiting the architecture of our ‘digital stacks’ storage. We have just kicked off a project to refresh storage projections and requirements and to evaluate potential storage providers. Setting up more robust storage policies and monitoring mechanisms is also an important part of the work to ensure collection materials are in the right types of storage and to ensure we are adhering to sound data management practices, e.g. deleting working copies and adhering to consistent packaging practices.

What have you found most beneficial from the NDSA community, and where do you think the NDSA has room to improve?

I have only recently become active in NDSA. I attended Digital Preservation for the first time in Pittsburgh this fall and was impressed by the outputs of NDSA’s groups – one highlight for me was a walkthrough of the results of the Storage, Fixity, and Staffing surveys. As those who conducted the surveys know, cross-institutional and longitudinal data on the state of digital preservation is valuable in many ways including benchmarking one’s own organization practices and gaining a more concrete understanding of the current needs of the field.

Being able to connect with colleagues about the nitty-gritty of digital preservation work is an obvious but key benefit of NDSA. As I learned from my involvement with a smaller professional group in New Zealand, the Digital Preservation Practical Implementers’ Guild, institutions charged with long-term preservation face comparable challenges but often in different sequences based on needs of their users and collections. This means there are opportunities to learn from institutions who have already developed models to handle similar use cases. The forum also proved to be a great place to discuss computing trends – such as the decline of the file –  that directly impact current and future digital preservation practice.

What recent digital stewardship discovery have you made that you would love to share with the NDSA community?

I am excited about the rapidly evolving area of image analysis and automated keyword extraction services such as Microsoft Computer Vision, Amazon Rekognition, Google Cloud Vision API, Clarifai, and Imagga. My colleagues Ryan Edge (Digital Production & Metadata Lead), Jonathan Steinberg (Asset Management Specialist), and Erik Hauck (Application Developer) have done some testing of these tools. They are finding their output is far from perfect (I love the hilariously incorrect examples of automatically generated captions in this blog post) but can be accurate enough to hold significant promise as a complement to human analysis and description, in particular for basic, bulk extraction of metadata for large sets of digital images that would otherwise be ‘hidden’ due to lack of metadata.

Do you have an example of a digital preservation or stewardship failure you would like to share? 

In my role at Statistics New Zealand, I managed a project to implement a new centralized system for metadata about the organization’s statistical data, which ranged from census data to unemployment, GDP, and CPI data. Implementation of the system delivered many benefits including improved long-term stewardship as it facilitated capture of detailed metadata essential to data re-use and it facilitated more efficient transfer of data to the internal Data Archive. The repository, public facing website, and metadata authoring client saw strong adoption. Once the system was in place, we strove to set up integrations with existing statistical systems. The idea was that users of those statistical systems could stay within existing interfaces and, via the addition of controlled fields that pushed and pulled information from the metadata system via an API, seamlessly capture metadata as they were working. We made some progress towards these goals – in particular, harvesting information from those systems – but, due to competing priorities, we did not realize full integration. Our integration plans were ambitious and we were reliant on the schedules of very busy teams, but I wish I had been even more dogged in advocating for these integrations to be built. This experience taught me the importance of seizing windows of opportunity and running hard and fast when you have the attention of potential collaborators.

What topics or issues do you wish the digital preservation community offered more expert guidance or robust documentation for?

I would like to see more guidance and work on many of the digital preservation related topics Chela Scott Weber identified in her recent OCLC Position Paper, Research and Learning Agenda for Archives, Special, and Distinctive Collections in Research Libraries.  A few topics that particularly resonated with me are the need for: 1) more appraisal tools and frameworks to help curators appraise digital collections both before and after transfer to the archive 2) models and practical guidance on the roles librarians, archivists, and technologists can fill in open source software (OSS) projects and better ways to understand the ‘total cost of ownership’ for OSS and 3) standardized metrics and data collection strategies to help archives assess their programs and drive decision-making.

What does the next year of digital stewardship hold for you and your institution? What are you working on next?

There are a number of projects on the docket for the Archive this coming year. One highlight is the work mentioned above to revisit our digital collections storage architecture. Another major focus will be an internal access layer that allows archivists and internal users to browse and search our digital and physical collections and securely access or request access to digital objects. Meg Tuomala, Archivist, and I are currently leading a review of several technology options and we will then move into the implementation phase.

We are pleased to announce and welcome two new members to the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Coordinating Committee, Karen Cariani and Sibyl Schaefer!

Karen Cariani is Senior Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives (MLA) and WGBH Project Director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB).

Sibyl Schaefer is the Chronopolis Program Manager and Digital Preservation Analyst for Research Data Curation at the University of California, San Diego. She currently serves as the co-chair of the NDSA Infrastructure Interest Group and is an active member on the Fixity Working Group and National Agenda Working Group.

Members of the NDSA Coordinating Committee serve staggered three year terms. We thank our outgoing Coordinating Committee member, Jim Corridan, for his service and many contributions. We are also grateful to the very talented, qualified individuals who participated in this election.

To sustain a vibrant, robust community of practice, we rely on and deeply value the contributions of all members, including those who took part in voting. 

Best wishes to all as we welcome Karen and Sibyl to their new roles in coming year!

This winter, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance turns its attention to leadership renewal. We gratefully thank our outgoing Coordinating Committee member, Jim Corridan, for his service and many contributions. And we are pleased to welcome a new co-chair for our Infrastructure Working Group, Nathan Tallman — you can learn more about NDSA leadership on the NDSA page.

Members of the NDSA Coordinating Committee serve staggered three year terms.

Following a public call for nominations, we are presenting to members a slate of nine candidates running for the Coordinating Committee. Between now and December 20th, NDSA members will have the opportunity to affirm and endorse two candidates by vote. (One vote per member organization, with information sent via email to institutional contacts.)

Here are bios and statements from the candidates, presented in alphabetical order:

Karen Cariani

Karen Cariani is Senior Director of the WGBH Media Library and Archives (MLA) and WGBH Project Director for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB). The MLA provides licensing services and access to the WGBH collection in addition to circulation, accessioning, and preservation activities. The AAPB, a collaboration with the Library of Congress, aims to preserve and make accessible significant and historical content created by public media. Karen has been project director for numerous on-line digital projects providing preservation and access to media archive, in addition to the development of a digital media preservation system utilizing the Hydra/Samvera community open source technology in partnership with Indiana University. She is active in the archive community and professional organizations and passionate about the use of archives and library digital collections for learning and education.

Candidate Statement: The NDSA is a unique community dedicated to digital preservation.  This community has created amazing resources to help manage and educate people about digital preservation. The annual NDSA Digital Preservation convening provides an opportunity for people to share work related to digital preservation, and the NDSA working groups provide a platform to tackle digital preservation challenges as a community. We have common needs and concerns as stewards of digital collections. Working together we can solve some of the challenges. Raising public awareness of these challenges is critical to gaining support.  I would be honored to serve on the NDSA coordinating council to help set strategy and direction for the community.

Corey Davis

One of the themes that repeatedly emerged for me at the recent NDSA meetings in Pittsburgh was the need for the preservation community to work more closely with international partners, not only to mitigate against the significant risks associated with increasing political and environmental uncertainties in the U.S. and beyond, but also to build the networks and relationships that are prerequisite for doing such important work. It’s imperative that the NDSA and its members continue to strengthen their international partnerships. I bring substantive connections to the preservation community in Canada, where there are significant collaborative opportunities, and I also provide a uniquely Canadian perspective in a time when such diversity of outlook is becoming ever-more necessary.

I’m currently the Digital Preservation Coordinator for the Council of Prairie and Pacific University Libraries (COPPUL), which represents 22 university libraries in Western Canada. I’m also a founding member of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’ Digital Preservation Working Group and the Portage Preservation Expert Group (PEG). Portage is a national RDM initiative, and PEG provides Portage with advice on RDM infrastructure developments supporting the long-term stewardship of research data in Canada. I’m also Coordinator of the Canadian Web Archiving Coalition (CWAC), which has over 30 members from across the GLAM sector in Canada, and I’m a member of the Canadian Research Knowledge Network’s Trusted Digital Repository Task Group. CRKN represents over 75 Canadian research libraries and undertakes large scale content acquisition and licensing. The TDRTG is developing a framework for establishing a national TDR to ensure long-term access to CRKN-licensed resources in Canada.

Kate Dohe

Kate Dohe has been the Digital Programs and Initiatives Manager at the University of Maryland Libraries since 2016. In that capacity, she leads day to day operations to ensure that workflows and systems are in place to support and facilitate the creation, acquisition, discovery, and preservation of digital assets in support of the mission of the Libraries. Her department manages all digital repositories, digital preservation activities, research data services, and electronic publishing for the Libraries.  Prior to joining UMD, she was the Digital Services Librarian at Georgetown University, and the digital librarian for an academic textbook publisher in California. Over the course of her career, she has created and managed digital repositories on multiple platforms with an eye to scalable, transparent, and sustainable operations in support of the research mission of the institution. One of her signature initiatives is her outreach efforts with campus student publishers, to advocate for open publishing models, digital preservation, business process management, and developing a self-supporting peer community. She earned her MLISc. from the University of Hawai’i, and also holds a BSEd. in Speech and Theater from Missouri State University. Her research interests are in digital library pedagogy, sustainable digital preservation, library publishing initiatives, student publishing, and communication frameworks for collaborative initiatives within academic libraries.

Candidate Statement: I would honored to serve on the NDSA coordinating committee and advance the national conversation about sustainable digital stewardship. I am committed to equipping digital preservation practitioners with the tools, resources, and support framework to advocate for sustainable digital preservation as a core operation of cultural heritage institutions. Whether those tools are communication toolkits and frameworks for advocacy, or decision-making tools that support cost-benefit analysis and fiscal modeling, I firmly believe that collaboration across a diverse practitioner community is essential to addressing the critical mission of preserving our cultural assets and scholarly products.

Jay Haque

I am at the New York Public Library and work in Information Technology as Director of DevOps and Enterprise Computing. I have led our digital repository storage system design and subsequent purchases over the past 15 years. I’m also leading our RFI/P process for our next generation solution. It would be great to be a member of this committee to not only provide my insights but also help other organizations navigate the vast crowded storage marketplace.

Martha Alvarado Parker

Originally from Monterrey, Mexico, I graduated with the MLIS degree May 2011, University of North Carolina at Greensboro where I also received the prestigious UNCG’s Academic and Cultural Enrichment (ACE) Scholarship, a Laura Bush 21st Century Librarian Program funded by a grant from the Institute of Institute of Museum and Library Services and the UNCG-LIS department.

Six years into my librarianship career, I am now heading the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville’s Digital Services Unit.  However, getting to this point has not been easy.  I worked with the UAF as the Librarian-In-Residence, LIR, from 2012-2015.  I have held the digital librarian position for the past two and a half years.  As the digital services librarian, I contribute regularly to metadata creation, digitization, and preservation of our digital collections.

After the MLIS, I have earned the two certifications currently offered by the Society of American Archivists: the SAA’s Digital Archives Specialist (DAS), April, 2016, and SAA’s Arrangement and Description Certificate (A&D), October 2017. I am currently the co-chair for the CUACRL Digital Initiatives Committee and the Chair for the SAA’s Metadata and Digital Objects Section (MDOS).

I am definitely committed to preserving and providing access to our national digital heritage. Collaborating at the NDSA’s Coordinating Committee will afford me the privilege to interact with talented professionals and to learn the latest preservation trends. I thank you in advance for reviewing my credentials.

Nicole Scalessa

Nicole H. Scalessa is IT Manager and Digital Humanities Coordinator at The Library Company of Philadelphia where she has been employed since July 1997. She represents LCP on multiple committees for the NDSA, is a Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries board member, and is a Digital Public Library of America community representative. In addition she is a member of DVAG, MARAC, the Philadelphia Digital Managers Working Group, PhillyDH Meetup, the Philadelphia Digital Archivists Group, and the Philly Regional Islandora User Group.

In her role as IT Manager she maintains organization effectiveness, efficiency, and security of all information technologies including, but not limited to, the local area network, backup and storage infrastructure onsite and in the cloud, digital asset repository, online resources, office technologies, and event audio/visual hardware. She is responsible for designing and implementing strategic plans for technology and institutional policy. Nicole is a Department Head and supervises the Digital Collections Manager.

As the Digital Humanities (DH) Coordinator, Nicole is responsible for the planning, implementation, and maintenance of Digital Humanities projects in consultation with fellows, curators, the Digital Collections Manager, Digital Outreach Librarian(s), and Director as well as the hiring and supervision of DH interns. Additionally, Nicole fulfills marketing design needs in both print and digital formats for the institution while providing reports tracking online resource usage and campaign success.

Nicole has a BA in History, certification in Graphic Design for Print and the Web, and will earn her MBA in IT Management in June 2018.

Sibyl Schaefer

Sibyl Schaefer is the Chronopolis Program Manager and Digital Preservation Analyst for Research Data Curation at the University of California, San Diego. She currently serves as the co-chair of the NDSA Infrastructure Interest Group and is an active member on the Fixity Working Group and National Agenda Working Group. In addition to working with national digital preservation efforts like the Digital Preservation Network and the NDSA, she helps define long-term digital preservation solutions for the UCSD campus. She previously served as the Head of Digital Programs for the Rockefeller Archive Center and as the Metadata Librarian for the University of Vermont’s Center for Digital Initiatives. She has been recognized an Emerging Leader by the American Library Association and has participated in the Archival Leadership Institute. Schaefer holds an MLIS with a specialization in Archival Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Matt Veatch

Matt Veatch is the State Archivist at the Kansas Historical Society (KSHS) in Topeka, KS, a position he has held since 2006. Collecting, preserving, and providing public access to permanently valuable Kansas government records has been his focus at the KSHS for over 25 years. Since the mid-1990’s, Veatch has been engaged in digitization, electronic records management, and digital preservation initiatives. He helped establish an electronic records management program for Kansas state government that includes active KSHS participation in IT project planning. Veatch led the Kansas Memory project, which created a scalable online delivery platform for digital collections and established digitization as a part of routine operations. He also directed a multi-year effort to plan, fund, develop, and implement the Kansas Enterprise Electronic Preservation (KEEP) system, a trusted digital repository for Kansas government records. Currently, Veatch is overseeing KEEP’s transition to Preservica Cloud Edition. Veatch served as a member of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) Board of Directors (2012-15); CoSA President (2013-14); co-chair of CoSA’s State Electronic Records Initiative (SERI) Steering Committee (2012-15); CoSA representative to the Coalition to Advance Learning in Archives, Libraries, and Museums (2015-17); and facilitator for three, week-long, SERI-sponsored Electronic Records Institutes (2013-14) conducted for state archives staff as part of an IMLS grant project. Veatch believes the NDSA provides essential digital curation guidance, thought leadership, and collaboration opportunities that cross disciplinary boundaries. He would bring a unique and valuable government archives perspective to the NDSA Coordinating Committee.

James Watson

I graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County with a Bachelor’s degree in History and have been employed at the Maryland State Archives since 2005 as an Appraisal and Outreach Archivist. My duties range from assisting agencies at all levels of government in Maryland in developing records retention schedules, transferring records to the Archives, managing digitization projects, developing agency policies and procedures in terms of record ingest and description, along with other varying tasks. Some of my larger scale projects that I have worked on since I began at the Maryland Archives includes, co-developing an automated electronic records processing program for our state assessment records, creating a user guide for our state-wide plats website, developing an aerial photography metadata standard for records transfers and overseeing the conservation and scanning of over 100 oversized maps that documented the early mining history of Maryland. I have recently joined the Tools and Resources subcommittee for SERI, where I hope to use my experience to add value to the work being done to assist intuitions in providing better access to their collections.

I am eager to help the committee in expanding the membership and working within in the community. Over the years I’ve had opportunities to work with various members in the archiving community and have found it to be very rewarding. I would love to further expand those connections and help others who are new to the community to meet and work with their colleagues as well.