Presentations & Interviews

2023

Archiving Your Work

Panel discussion on archiving analog and digital videographic media for Public, Government, and Educational (PEG) Access TV stations and other community media centers.

[recording]

Bootstrapping Digital Special Collections @ Middlebury College

A case study on "low-cost, high-impact" digital collections infrastructure. Presented to the Digital POWRR Peer Assessment Program's 2023 cohort.

[recording]

2022

Crowdsourced transcription, Internet Archive, and IIIF

Middlebury has used FtP to crowdsource transcription for a wide range of letters and manuscripts from the 19th and 20th centuries, held in our collections on Internet Archive. Using IIIF and some simple scripts, we have been able to enrich our item records with full-text transcriptions from FtP en masse, at very little cost in terms of money, time, or labor; this has been a boon for researchers and instructors using our collection, many of whom have since become contributors and transcribers themselves.

[recording]

An Interview with Patrick Wallace of Middlebury College

[link]

2020

We’re not “kludgy” we’re “scrappy”: Active archiving at a small liberal arts college.

[recording]

2019

Email Archiving for the Rest of Us: Developing and Implementing a Low-Resource Strategy for Institutional Email Preservation

With the shift toward email as the dominant form of written correspondence, archivists are increasingly responsible for gathering and protecting these documents. Email preservation not only inherits all the core technical challenges associated with born-digital preservation, such as ensuring the accessibility and survivability of the data themselves, but also presents a host of additional challenges unique to email. Presenters will examine some of the challenges they encountered while developing, advocating, and implementing an institutional email archiving and preservation effort at Middlebury College. Discussion will include non- and semi-technical problems, practical workflows, and technological solutions that--with a bit of luck and care--help staff minimize the negative impact of technological disruptions of the integrity and continuity of the college’s institutional memory.

Co-archiving: Collaborative Archiving of Diverse Student Groups

Co-archiving, a non-hegemonic process of gathering records for a group based on collaboration between the group and archivists, requires outreach and active consent, as well as processes to deal with regular turnover--a given for college student groups. Presenting co-archiving initiatives at two small liberal arts colleges--one involving digital records of student groups, the other concerning artifacts of traditionally underrepresented aspects of student life and campus culture--this session will examine some of the practical, ethical, and technological challenges of archival student life and compel us all to turn a critical eye on our institutional memories and the role we, as archives professionals, play in crafting it. 

2017

Alternatives to obsolescence - reimagining the role(s) of yesterday's media, formats, and platforms.

Notable examples of "obsolete" technologies' continuing use and remarkable survivability, and how they challenge our professional training, research data, and assumptions regarding library users and user experiences.

[slides]

Library & laboratory: institutionalizing a dynamic digital projects infrastructure across workgroups.

As part of a broad, ongoing effort to coordinate digital scholarship efforts across multiple campuses and disparate administrative units, Middlebury College has launched MiddLab - a “library DevOps” team charged with institutionalizing the iterative development and rapid integration of new digital scholarship tools and services.

Unauthorized Voices in the Archive: Documenting Student Life in Middlebury College’s Community Web Archive

[link]

2016

It takes a village: Collaboratively building a cross-disciplinary digital repository

Middlebury College is engaged in a collaborative effort between librarians, ITS, and faculty to define, plan, and implement a digital preservation and access system that answers the varied needs across multiple disciplines. We discussed the challenges, strategies, and insights encountered throughout this process.

[slides]

Without a Ten-Foot-Pole: Archiving Campus Controversies and Student Criticism on the Web and Social Media

Discussion of attempts to archive critical student conversations about sensitive topics, including treatments of race, class, gender, and sexuality on campus, carried out over social media, blogs, mobile apps, and other digital platforms — even when those conversations show the institution in a less than ideal light.

[slides]

How to Be a "Mad Archivist": Digital Project Labs, FOSS Tools, Radical Collections, and the Value of Creative R&D.

Discussing the creative side of digital archivists' craft, with special attention to how digital librarians and archivists can leverage institutional strengths, professional collaboration, FOSS technology, open data, and bantam attitudes in order to make innovative contributions to the broader community - and why liberal arts colleges should support those efforts.

[slides]

Free for All: Opening Collections and Supporting Multi-Institutional Efforts with Internet Archive

A collaborative session on integrating Internet Archive (IA) into digital archive workflows and technical infrastructures. Key topics included how IA fits alongside other digital archive and repository platforms, using scripts & software to support batch processing and API interactions, and leveraging IA to help support coordinated digital preservation projects with smaller memory institutions.

[slides]

Collaborating Across Units and Institutions to Support Digital Scholarship

Unlike much traditional scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, digital scholarship and digital humanities projects often require support teams with a wide range of expertise from across the institution. Libraries play key roles at many stages of a digital project’s lifecycle, from consultation, to training, to project management. Although some features of successful models for collaboration will be unique to the institution, many strategies will be widely applicable in the liberal arts context. In this discussion, we briefly described three recent examples of successful collaborations at Middlebury College: the first was a pilot program for hosting and supporting Omeka and Neatline instances from conception to preservation; the second was a four-day Liberal Arts Data Bootcamp that introduced faculty and academic staff to data management basics and demonstrated ways that data is, or might be, applied in the liberal arts context (e.g. data visualization, mapping, and text mining); the third was the in-process development of a digital repository, hosting faculty/student/staff scholarship, including articles, datasets, and materials from Special Collections and Archives.

[presentation notes]