Presentation at the New England Archivists conference held in Portsmouth, NH on March 21, 2014 regarding the role of project archivists in innovation initiatives
Effective information sharing - workshop session CILIP Cymru Wales Annual Con...Stephen Gregory
Considers how Welsh Government Library & Archive Services works to capture and make accessible for the longer term, information published by the Welsh Government.
Promotes the Welsh Government Publications Catalogue including full text access to contemporary documents and an increasing range of historical documents from the Welsh Government and predecessor bodies - Welsh Assembly Government and Welsh Office. Further considers how the role of the Publications Catalogue is branching out to include content published as Freedom of Information Request answers, and Ministerial Decision Reports.
Welcome and introduction to the ARIADNE projectariadnenetwork
Introduction to Ariadne and to the Ariadne training workshop given by Julian Richards of ADS
Ariadne Workshop held prior to EAA 2013.
Pilsen, Czech Republic
4 September 2013
An overview of the online archaeological data services that will be available through ARIADNE. These include several services provided by ADS, University of York, FASTI Online and ARACHNE.
Working with News Data across different media: A workshoplabsbl
The aim of the News Data workshop is to bring together researchers, developers and content owners to look at different kinds of British Library news data and how they may be used. There will be a number of short presentations from projects either using BL news data or with which we are collaborating on news data-related work.
The key aims are to illustrate the extent of our news collections, to demonstrate ways in which their data can be re-used for research, and to encourage cross-media analysis of news datasets (i.e. print, TV, radio, web). The event will be followed by a news hackathon which will be run on Monday 16th of November, 2015 at the British Library.
Effective information sharing - workshop session CILIP Cymru Wales Annual Con...Stephen Gregory
Considers how Welsh Government Library & Archive Services works to capture and make accessible for the longer term, information published by the Welsh Government.
Promotes the Welsh Government Publications Catalogue including full text access to contemporary documents and an increasing range of historical documents from the Welsh Government and predecessor bodies - Welsh Assembly Government and Welsh Office. Further considers how the role of the Publications Catalogue is branching out to include content published as Freedom of Information Request answers, and Ministerial Decision Reports.
Welcome and introduction to the ARIADNE projectariadnenetwork
Introduction to Ariadne and to the Ariadne training workshop given by Julian Richards of ADS
Ariadne Workshop held prior to EAA 2013.
Pilsen, Czech Republic
4 September 2013
An overview of the online archaeological data services that will be available through ARIADNE. These include several services provided by ADS, University of York, FASTI Online and ARACHNE.
Working with News Data across different media: A workshoplabsbl
The aim of the News Data workshop is to bring together researchers, developers and content owners to look at different kinds of British Library news data and how they may be used. There will be a number of short presentations from projects either using BL news data or with which we are collaborating on news data-related work.
The key aims are to illustrate the extent of our news collections, to demonstrate ways in which their data can be re-used for research, and to encourage cross-media analysis of news datasets (i.e. print, TV, radio, web). The event will be followed by a news hackathon which will be run on Monday 16th of November, 2015 at the British Library.
Research Data Australia - the national research data catalogueRichard Ferrers
Understanding the national research data catalogue.
A presentation to the RMIT University - Research Data Management - Information Session for Researchers and HDRs, 21 Nov 2017.
Geosemantic Tools for Archaeological ResearchPaul Cripps
Presentation given at the annual Postgraduate Researchers Presentation Day held at the University of South Wales Postgraduate Research Centre, Trefforest Campus.
Linked Geospatial Data for Archaeological Research Paul Cripps
Investigating Archaeological Research Questions using a Linked Data framework
A presentation given to the Avebury & Stonehenge Archaeological & Historical Research Group, May 2015.
21st Century Geospatial #HistEnv Data ManagementPaul Cripps
A keynote presentation given at the Towards a Collaborative Strategy for sector information management (TACOS) seminar held at the University of York, May 2014
Introductory slides from the BCS Data Management Specialist Group debate on the role of the Chief Data Officer. Experts were Caroline Carruthers (CDO, Network Rail) and Alex Coley (Epimorphics, and was formerly Deputy Director of Data Transformation at Defra).
Video available at https://youtu.be/l57XE_1xNYI
From the CNI Fall 2014 conference in Washington:
http://www.cni.org/topics/digital-libraries/developments-in-digital-repositories/
The National Library of Wales has developed a large number of digital resources (including newspapers, archives, manuscripts and photographs) that are freely available as a national digital public library for Wales. Development of this material has involved research and innovation in all aspects of the digital life cycle, and development of an underlying digital infrastructure, to support the creation of open and sustainable digital collections that can be used, and re-used, by the widest range of stakeholders. Central to this has been the development of digital content in collaboration with national and international partners. This presentation will discuss this national context for Cynefin, a recent project developed in collaboration with the Archives and Records Council Wales (ARCW) and funded by the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund. The project will digitize over a thousand tithe maps covering 95% of Wales between the period 1838 and 1947. The project has explored new approaches to crowd sourcing to geo locate the tithe maps and transcribe related apportionments, and also to develop links between content in the collections, linking location, ownership, land use and value. The project has also had to find innovative ways to digitize large tithe maps, including the use of an automated tripod head originally developed to capture panoramic landscapes and the construction of a specifically designed wall to ensure a consistent horizontal distance from the camera. The digital images have been ingested into a Fedora repository and shared using the IIIF standard. The crowd-sourcing element will be released to the public at the beginning of November 2014 and the initial results of the uptake and engagement of volunteers will be discussed in the presentation. The digital preservation of the tithe maps, apportionments and the crowd-sourced data will present future challenges, and approaches to these issues will also be discussed. This project is a potential model for other institutions to leverage the resources of the crowd to produce a useful and enduring digital humanities resource.
http://chicagocollectionsconsortium.org/
http://cynefinblog.archiveswales.org.uk/?p=195
http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk/en/home
http://cymru1914.org/en
Dr. Dimitris Gavrilis, Digital Curation Unit - IMIS, Athena R.C.
CARARE Workshop: Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana
Leiden, Netherlands
13 -14th June 2017
Terry MacKenzie, South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture
Justin Parkes, Culture NL
Chantal Knowles, National Museums Scotland
Presentation from the Museums Galleries Scotland 'Fortune Favours the Brave' conference, September 2013.
Bridging the Divide: Collaborative Staff DevelopmentLorie Millward
This session presented a case study of a staff development initiative that proved effective for bridging the divide that often exists between museum departments. Programming staff contributed to ongoing research and learned about the skills and concepts they were responsible for teaching as they worked alongside collections staff. Collections and research staff in turn learned public communication skills and participated in the development of educational programs and curricula. This session further discussed how this initiative evolved, the challenges faced, and the unanticipated outcomes of this collaboration.
Presentation delivered by Josie Caplehorne (Kent University partnership project with Rochester Cathedral) at "Cataloguing and Organisation of Special Collections: by Library Association of Ireland: Rare Books + Cataloguing & Metadata Groups" - Fri 23 March 2018
Research Data Australia - the national research data catalogueRichard Ferrers
Understanding the national research data catalogue.
A presentation to the RMIT University - Research Data Management - Information Session for Researchers and HDRs, 21 Nov 2017.
Geosemantic Tools for Archaeological ResearchPaul Cripps
Presentation given at the annual Postgraduate Researchers Presentation Day held at the University of South Wales Postgraduate Research Centre, Trefforest Campus.
Linked Geospatial Data for Archaeological Research Paul Cripps
Investigating Archaeological Research Questions using a Linked Data framework
A presentation given to the Avebury & Stonehenge Archaeological & Historical Research Group, May 2015.
21st Century Geospatial #HistEnv Data ManagementPaul Cripps
A keynote presentation given at the Towards a Collaborative Strategy for sector information management (TACOS) seminar held at the University of York, May 2014
Introductory slides from the BCS Data Management Specialist Group debate on the role of the Chief Data Officer. Experts were Caroline Carruthers (CDO, Network Rail) and Alex Coley (Epimorphics, and was formerly Deputy Director of Data Transformation at Defra).
Video available at https://youtu.be/l57XE_1xNYI
From the CNI Fall 2014 conference in Washington:
http://www.cni.org/topics/digital-libraries/developments-in-digital-repositories/
The National Library of Wales has developed a large number of digital resources (including newspapers, archives, manuscripts and photographs) that are freely available as a national digital public library for Wales. Development of this material has involved research and innovation in all aspects of the digital life cycle, and development of an underlying digital infrastructure, to support the creation of open and sustainable digital collections that can be used, and re-used, by the widest range of stakeholders. Central to this has been the development of digital content in collaboration with national and international partners. This presentation will discuss this national context for Cynefin, a recent project developed in collaboration with the Archives and Records Council Wales (ARCW) and funded by the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund. The project will digitize over a thousand tithe maps covering 95% of Wales between the period 1838 and 1947. The project has explored new approaches to crowd sourcing to geo locate the tithe maps and transcribe related apportionments, and also to develop links between content in the collections, linking location, ownership, land use and value. The project has also had to find innovative ways to digitize large tithe maps, including the use of an automated tripod head originally developed to capture panoramic landscapes and the construction of a specifically designed wall to ensure a consistent horizontal distance from the camera. The digital images have been ingested into a Fedora repository and shared using the IIIF standard. The crowd-sourcing element will be released to the public at the beginning of November 2014 and the initial results of the uptake and engagement of volunteers will be discussed in the presentation. The digital preservation of the tithe maps, apportionments and the crowd-sourced data will present future challenges, and approaches to these issues will also be discussed. This project is a potential model for other institutions to leverage the resources of the crowd to produce a useful and enduring digital humanities resource.
http://chicagocollectionsconsortium.org/
http://cynefinblog.archiveswales.org.uk/?p=195
http://welshnewspapers.llgc.org.uk/en/home
http://cymru1914.org/en
Dr. Dimitris Gavrilis, Digital Curation Unit - IMIS, Athena R.C.
CARARE Workshop: Archaeology and Architecture in Europeana
Leiden, Netherlands
13 -14th June 2017
Terry MacKenzie, South Lanarkshire Leisure and Culture
Justin Parkes, Culture NL
Chantal Knowles, National Museums Scotland
Presentation from the Museums Galleries Scotland 'Fortune Favours the Brave' conference, September 2013.
Bridging the Divide: Collaborative Staff DevelopmentLorie Millward
This session presented a case study of a staff development initiative that proved effective for bridging the divide that often exists between museum departments. Programming staff contributed to ongoing research and learned about the skills and concepts they were responsible for teaching as they worked alongside collections staff. Collections and research staff in turn learned public communication skills and participated in the development of educational programs and curricula. This session further discussed how this initiative evolved, the challenges faced, and the unanticipated outcomes of this collaboration.
Presentation delivered by Josie Caplehorne (Kent University partnership project with Rochester Cathedral) at "Cataloguing and Organisation of Special Collections: by Library Association of Ireland: Rare Books + Cataloguing & Metadata Groups" - Fri 23 March 2018
Emerging researchers slideshow jv r -7-fontseResearchatUCT
eResearch is 21st century discovery through the application of advanced computing and information technology. UCT eResearch seeks to accelerate and enhance research at UCT and help lead the eResearch movement in Africa
Enacting a Learning Mission - June 2009Jill Patrick
Enacting a Learning Mission at the Ontario College of Art & Design. Presentation to OCAD Board of Governors. Jill Patrick, Director of Library Services, June 1, 2009. Impetus, Consultants, Collaborators, Process, Report, Preliminary Space Program, Innovation in Art & Design Education, Needs Assessment, Library Vision, Library Mission, Libraries & Learning Symposium, Learning Zone, Next Steps.
Collaborative Web Archiving with Ivy Plus / Borrow Direct Anna Perricci
Presentation for Web Archiving Collaboration: New Tools and Models (#cuwarc), which was a conference held at Columbia University Libraries on June 4th, 2015. There are corrections on the slide covering the citation analysis we are doing, which is still currently in progress. Video of this and all presentations on June 4 is expected to be available later in 2015.
British Library Labs Presentation Given to British Library Stafflabsbl
Presentation given to British Library Staff as part of C21st Curatorship staff talks by Mahendra Mahey (British Library Labs Manager) and Stella Wisdom (Digital Curator)
NORFest 2023 Lightning Talks Session Three dri_ireland
Lightning Talk Session 3: Enabling FAIR Research Data and Other Outputs
The Irish ORCID Consortium
presented by Catherine Ferris, IReL;
Exploring Large-Scale Open Data: The Curatr Platform
presented by Derek Greene, University College Dublin;
A Workflow for Research Data Management (RDM): Aligning the Management of Research Data
presented by Gail Birkbeck, University College Dublin;
Making Cultural Heritage Data FAIR: Developing Recommendations for the WorldFAIR Project at the Digital Repository of Ireland
presented by Joan Murphy, Digital Repository of Ireland.
The Team Member and Guest Experience - Lead and Take Care of your restaurant team. They are the people closest to and delivering Hospitality to your paying Guests!
Make the call, and we can assist you.
408-784-7371
Foodservice Consulting + Design
The case study discusses the potential of drone delivery and the challenges that need to be addressed before it becomes widespread.
Key takeaways:
Drone delivery is in its early stages: Amazon's trial in the UK demonstrates the potential for faster deliveries, but it's still limited by regulations and technology.
Regulations are a major hurdle: Safety concerns around drone collisions with airplanes and people have led to restrictions on flight height and location.
Other challenges exist: Who will use drone delivery the most? Is it cost-effective compared to traditional delivery trucks?
Discussion questions:
Managerial challenges: Integrating drones requires planning for new infrastructure, training staff, and navigating regulations. There are also marketing and recruitment considerations specific to this technology.
External forces vary by country: Regulations, consumer acceptance, and infrastructure all differ between countries.
Demographics matter: Younger generations might be more receptive to drone delivery, while older populations might have concerns.
Stakeholders for Amazon: Customers, regulators, aviation authorities, and competitors are all stakeholders. Regulators likely hold the greatest influence as they determine the feasibility of drone delivery.
Integrity in leadership builds trust by ensuring consistency between words an...Ram V Chary
Integrity in leadership builds trust by ensuring consistency between words and actions, making leaders reliable and credible. It also ensures ethical decision-making, which fosters a positive organizational culture and promotes long-term success. #RamVChary
Comparing Stability and Sustainability in Agile SystemsRob Healy
Copy of the presentation given at XP2024 based on a research paper.
In this paper we explain wat overwork is and the physical and mental health risks associated with it.
We then explore how overwork relates to system stability and inventory.
Finally there is a call to action for Team Leads / Scrum Masters / Managers to measure and monitor excess work for individual teams.
Specific ServPoints should be tailored for restaurants in all food service segments. Your ServPoints should be the centerpiece of brand delivery training (guest service) and align with your brand position and marketing initiatives, especially in high-labor-cost conditions.
408-784-7371
Foodservice Consulting + Design
Public Speaking Tips to Help You Be A Strong Leader.pdfPinta Partners
In the realm of effective leadership, a multitude of skills come into play, but one stands out as both crucial and challenging: public speaking.
Public speaking transcends mere eloquence; it serves as the medium through which leaders articulate their vision, inspire action, and foster engagement. For leaders, refining public speaking skills is essential, elevating their ability to influence, persuade, and lead with resolute conviction. Here are some key tips to consider: https://joellandau.com/the-public-speaking-tips-to-help-you-be-a-stronger-leader/
Enriching engagement with ethical review processesstrikingabalance
New ethics review processes at the University of Bath. Presented at the 8th World Conference on Research Integrity by Filipa Vance, Head of Research Governance and Compliance at the University of Bath. June 2024, Athens
Org Design is a core skill to be mastered by management for any successful org change.
Org Topologies™ in its essence is a two-dimensional space with 16 distinctive boxes - atomic organizational archetypes. That space helps you to plot your current operating model by positioning individuals, departments, and teams on the map. This will give a profound understanding of the performance of your value-creating organizational ecosystem.
Senior Project and Engineering Leader Jim Smith.pdfJim Smith
I am a Project and Engineering Leader with extensive experience as a Business Operations Leader, Technical Project Manager, Engineering Manager and Operations Experience for Domestic and International companies such as Electrolux, Carrier, and Deutz. I have developed new products using Stage Gate development/MS Project/JIRA, for the pro-duction of Medical Equipment, Large Commercial Refrigeration Systems, Appliances, HVAC, and Diesel engines.
My experience includes:
Managed customized engineered refrigeration system projects with high voltage power panels from quote to ship, coordinating actions between electrical engineering, mechanical design and application engineering, purchasing, production, test, quality assurance and field installation. Managed projects $25k to $1M per project; 4-8 per month. (Hussmann refrigeration)
Successfully developed the $15-20M yearly corporate capital strategy for manufacturing, with the Executive Team and key stakeholders. Created project scope and specifications, business case, ROI, managed project plans with key personnel for nine consumer product manufacturing and distribution sites; to support the company’s strategic sales plan.
Over 15 years of experience managing and developing cost improvement projects with key Stakeholders, site Manufacturing Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Maintenance, and facility support personnel to optimize pro-duction operations, safety, EHS, and new product development. (BioLab, Deutz, Caire)
Experience working as a Technical Manager developing new products with chemical engineers and packaging engineers to enhance and reduce the cost of retail products. I have led the activities of multiple engineering groups with diverse backgrounds.
Great experience managing the product development of products which utilize complex electrical controls, high voltage power panels, product testing, and commissioning.
Created project scope, business case, ROI for multiple capital projects to support electrotechnical assembly and CPG goods. Identified project cost, risk, success criteria, and performed equipment qualifications. (Carrier, Electrolux, Biolab, Price, Hussmann)
Created detailed projects plans using MS Project, Gant charts in excel, and updated new product development in Jira for stakeholders and project team members including critical path.
Great knowledge of ISO9001, NFPA, OSHA regulations.
User level knowledge of MRP/SAP, MS Project, Powerpoint, Visio, Mastercontrol, JIRA, Power BI and Tableau.
I appreciate your consideration, and look forward to discussing this role with you, and how I can lead your company’s growth and profitability. I can be contacted via LinkedIn via phone or E Mail.
Jim Smith
678-993-7195
jimsmith30024@gmail.com
First disclaimer: All ideas and opinions are my own and do not reflect those of my employer the MITRE corporation. Second disclaimer: I will be talking about myself. When preparing I thought “How can I give a this presentation without just getting up here and talking myself?” But I’m not sure I can talk about the skills I had to learn on the job without talking about the jobs themselves. So it feels terribly self-indulgent but hopefully it gives the students and new professionals in the audience some sense of a what kind of career path is out there. And hopefully those in the audience that know me well can forgive me for prattering on about myself – again.
I have held not one, not two, but three project archivist positions. I’m going to talk briefly about those to provide some context. Because as archivists we love context. I’m also going to talk about some of the skills I had the opportunity to learn on the job. And my point here is not that you learn things on the job – because of course you learn on the job, that’s why they call it experience. I’m also not really talking about the new skills that are required of archivists in the digital age and what should or shouldn’t be taught in graduate school. Rather, My overall thesis is that there are times when people are hired on for specific projects and those projects are often at the cross roads of new directions and innovation
As I said on that last slide, Upon graduating from Library School I had three consecutive project archivists jobs that involved three very different things. They were all term jobs, with time limits, and most were grant funded positions. I think this was positive for me because I was able to get a variety of experiences and learn about many different types of archives. It gave me a well rounded sense of practices in some very different places.
But the more we are different the more we are the same. What I learned is that there can be different types of collections, but most archives have the same problems. They have a back log,
There are usually some vestiges of some unorthodox ways of organizing something done by some, very well meaning individual, in the past, which has become, unsustainable and abandoned and this plagues the archivists as they strive for perfection
And lastly, they have limited staff (at least for the things they want to do). And this goes for everyone whether you are a lone arranger or have a permanent staff of 40. There are so many things that we are already doing just to keep up. And this is why they hire project staff. It gives them extra hope of getting ahead and maybe even a chance to innovate.
But why do we hire project people and is it sustainable? I propose that there are two main reasons project archivist are hired. They are hired to innovate or address a specific problem. Or they are hired to catalog a large collection or a high profile collection that is deemed more special then the other special collections. In what I’m calling “very special”. Whether it is innovation or a very special collection it takes extra time to do it right
I’m going to start with the most recent project job and move backwards in time. And I’m going to start by talking about one reason project archivists are hired and that it is to work with large collections or very high profile collections. At Harvard’s Houghton library, I was able to provide item level access to a collection of autograph letters in the Theatre collection. In addition, I helped manage the cataloging of a large accession of over 700 linear feet. Through hiring a project archivist they are now able to provide access to cool things like this Kathrine Hepburn letter.
And this letter from the Bunker brothers – the original siamese twins. They are items that needed the extra man power and time to be described. What’s interesting about these collection centric project jobs is that they are innovative in their own way. Because there is a person dedicated to the task of a specific collection they can often go into more detail and this can lead to new or expanded procedures to the typical collection work. In addition, collection project jobs can also be innovative, especially in outreach. There is suddenly time to do things like write a blog, do presentations, or make a website to draw people to the collection. Of course this can lead to a new set of expectations to those working with the archives and suddenly everyone wants their own website or readers start to wonder why only this collection has such wonderful description.
The next project job I’m going to discuss, was an innovation project. The Tufts Digital Collections and Archives undertook a three-year National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) electronic records Program Expansion Project grant to support the Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records or better known asthe(TAPER) project. During the project the DCA designed, developed, and implemented machine-readable submission agreements and creator records. The DCA has fully implemented the machine-readable submission agreements to document accessions and is producing creator records encoded in EAC-CPF as part of its normal descriptive practices.I would like to think that is in part to my efforts as the project archivist that these tools have been fully implemented. And There is a forthcoming article in the Journal of Archival Organization about the EAC-CPF part of the project. I’m going to focus on the tool.
The idea was to create some pieces of the puzzle to make the accessioning of electronic records more scalable. The submission agreement builder tool was to help with one small aspect of this Open Archival Information system which you may have seen before.
Specifically the tool dealtwith just this small area here. Where the submission information package meets the producer. Basically instead of just going back and forth in email with the producer we sought to formalize the transfer arrangements and in the process solicit an agreement from the person producing the records.
To make this tool I met with developers. What we primarily discussed were the use cases and requirements. What I learned was that the tool will only be as good as the requirements we gave them. (comic) We went back and forth about every aspect of the tool. They even gave me command line access to code on the backend so I could change some the field names, etc. There are so many questions when you are creating a tool or even a website. What should we call the fields? What should we expect the producer to fill out. How do we track the records producers? What kind of information do we need about the producers? How can we make this easy for them? What color should the navigation bar be? How can we make this sustainable?
This last question about sustainability I want to talk about. Because it involves imbedding what you are doing on a project basis into the normal workflow and procedures. This requires serious buy in from everyone. And this goes for innovative projects and very special collection projects. In both instances, sustainability doesn’t really become an issue until the project archivist leaves. Once the staffing returns to its pre-project levels you are left with procedures, practices or a product and the trick is trying to integrate that once innovative project into the every day workflow. More often then not, it is abandoned. The special exhibit website dies with the next java upgrade or the procedures implemented during a project are just too time consuming to be continued on a routine basis. It becomes another one of those well meaning, past things, that have become, unsustainable and abandoned and plagues the archivists as they strive for perfection.So the key is to get buy in while the project is still around.
Well how do you get answers and buy in? That gets to the second important lesson when managing a project. And that is that you need to be a helpful but persistent pest. And I mean that in the most positive way. Use whatever word you want: Determined, dogged, opportunistic, nagging, tenacious. As I discussed in a project there are a ton a of questions to be answered. And as the project person you are the one responsible for making the project happened and, paradoxically, you are not the one to answer questions. It takes meetings, phone calls, conversations and dogged persistence so you can get the right information to the developers. And you need to document the decisions and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to document why something was done the way it was done. Another universal observation I’ve made about archives is that there tends NOT to be many hard and fast deadlines. However, projects unlike many problems in a archive are for a limited time and stuff has to get done.
So I’ve been hired to do both work on a large collection and innovate. The last project I’m going to talk about was one I worked on when I was first out of grad school. I managed a project called A New Nation Votes. The project was to create a database of election returns or vote tallies from the signing of the American constitution to the presidential election of 1824. But really the project centers around one man and his life’s work. In what historian Jill Lepore called, “the most heroic tale in americanhistorical research” Philip Lampi transcribed the election returns from archives and state libraries all over the country. Here is an example of one of his transcriptions. See since the states are responsible for their own elections they did not systematically keep the data about the vote totals. In some state, I’m looking at you Florida and Ohio, they still don’t keep the returns systematically
When Phil was in high school as an orphan at a boys home he became very interested in politics and started looking up historic state returns in the world almanac but they only went back to 1824 because that is when the book was first published. He knew elections went back further and that is when he started looking up old newspapers from before 1824 on microfilm at the public library in Fitchburg, Mass. And when he finished looking at all they had he kept going. Travelling the country trying to fill in the gaps and copying every return he could find – on his own dime, sleeping in his car and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. He never went to college but his research was recognized by the top historians in the early republic. Phil ended up at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass because they have the largest collection of early american newspapers in the country and those are the goldmine of election data. And AAS partnered with Tufts University to create a database of his collated returns at the urging of historians. Here’s Phil giving a talk at Oxford university
And Here’s Phil getting his honorary doctorate at Tufts in 2012.
So this job had a lot going on. It was funded and continues to be funded by the NEH. There was the building of the database and like I said the project lead needs to get the requirements right and get answers from everyone and this was a little harder in this project because I needed answers from the folks in Worcester at AAS, the folks at Tufts and the historians that were so interested in using the data. Here was the database we came up with and we worked with programmers and designers to come up with
The election information was to be encoded in XML. Election data is very hierarchical making XML the perfect thing. In addition the emphasis on capturing the content only and not the design aspects made XML a sustainable and attractive solution. The XML schema was developed at Tufts just for election data. I was heavily involved in editing the schema as it was developed. I managed and trained the folks doing data entry in XML and there was no graphic user interface. They encoded, validated and checked the file into subversion. Subversion is a way of tracking versions of code. I managed the versions on the command line, resolving any conflicts and double checking the XML. What I discovered is that training on XML is easy but teaching American civics is much harder. And I think that goes with most technical things, they come and go. I didn’t learn how to use subversion on the command line in library school, I didn’t learn how to change the field names in the java script either. What I did learn in library school was the basics of information organization, the importance of pursuing the right answer and the eye for sustainability.
There are certain things that make librarians and archivists so ideal for innovation in information discovery and for project management. Specifically, we know how to organize things so they can be found. This is not trivial. Also skills such as project management are highly valued in a corporate setting. And this is something that archivists are doing all the time. We are constantly working on projects to make things better and more accessible but we don’t often call it project management. I don’t know if you know that there is whole employment field for just project management complete with a special certificate called a PMP – or the pimp. And people with those skills get paid! And are actively sought by recruiters. I think in many ways that our skills are undervalued and I’m not sure if this is a problem of out reach or because it was historically a pink collar profession. Maybe I’m biased but I think that there ought to be massive hiring of archivists everywhere. The scope of what every archive does is massive and if project archivists are hired every moment of the project you should be asking is this sustainable and how can we demonstrate that we need the additional staff to make it sustainable.
Speaking of hiring, I did a little micro look at archives jobs that were posted on through archives gig in the past month and this is what I found. Most of the jobs are permanent. 41 jobs, 10 are term. 10 are for internships some of which focus on cataloging a very special collection. 8 were project jobs to work on one very special collection. You could combine those two as 18 jobs that deal with very special collections. 8 were digital. 2 were project jobs that had to do with innovative projects and 6 had to do with records management. What I find interesting is the trend at hiring permanent digital archivists. I think when I got out of library school many of these innovative digital initiatives were part of projects but this is just anecdotal. But then, at what point, do we all become digital archivists. Archiving digital started as an innovative task assigned to a project and it is more main stream now but it is still given special status in our job descriptions. I think archives would rather hire permanently if they could but the reality is that it’s not always possible. So I would urge anyone looking to hire a project archivist to take a deep look at why they are doing it, what innovations can be sustained in their archival program and how can they advocate for more staff to keep it going. And for anyone working as a project archivist, congratulations and may all your efforts be sustained.