Yes, another round up of things you might want to know about:
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has recently come out with a publication that I’m putting on my Christmas list: Processing Decisions for Manuscripts & Archives. I recommend you take a look at the table of contents and executive summary here.
Speaking of ARL, they have also posted the proceedings (a combination of documents and audio files) from their fall conference, “An Age of Discovery : Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age.” I heard this was great, and it features speakers such as Mark Greene, Ian Wilson, Anne Kenney, Bill Landis, and Clifford Lynch.
If you’re an archivist or manuscript curator at an American college or university, please take this survey: http://tinyurl.com/ArchivistSurvey. The creators explain: “Anecdotal evidence suggests that archivists and manuscript curators are juggling an increasing variety of roles and responsibilities. The survey is designed to identify how archival collections at American college and university are administered and to quantify the roles of contemporary archivists in these settings. In so doing, we also hope to discover the benefits and challenges related to these various responsibilities.” The survey closes on 11/24/2009.
It’s survey season, I guess: If you’ve ever served on a search committee or have played a role in the hiring process of archivists, please complete this survey. Results will be used to inform a new workshop for job seekers. It’s open until the end of December.
If you’re an SAA member, you are encouraged to log in and vote in the American Archives Month 2009 Make An Impact! Contest. You also get the chance to see some of the lovely posters your colleagues produced for Archives Month, and you can learn about two special “campaigns” as well. Voting closes on November 30.
SAA is also doing a survey–trying to collect visitor statistics, so if you haven’t already, please complete their “Visitors2Archives” survey. Although I’m not sure it’s stated on that first screen, they’re looking for statistics specifically about visitation in the month of October (Archives Month), so answer the survey accordingly. The closing date for this is also November 30.
Dan Cohen, of George Mason’s Center for History and New Media, has just launched Digital Humanities Now:
a real-time, crowdsourced publication. It takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention.
The “publication” “is fully automated. It is created by ingesting the Twitter feeds of hundreds of scholars followed by @dhnow (a list of scholars taken from this digital humanities Twitter list), processing these feeds through Twittertim.es to generate a more narrow feed of common interest and debate, and reformatting that feed on this site, in part to allow for further (non-Twitter) discussions.” It’s an interesting model to keep an eye on.
In a comment on a post about the Amsterdam City Archives’ “scan on demand” program, a reader wrote: “The National Archives of Australia has been doing since 2001 (if they are still doing it). Here is an article from 2004: http://alia.org.au/publishing/aarl/35.1/full.text/ling.mclean.html.” If anyone can supply more information on this, that would be great!
David Ferriero has been sworn in as Archivist of the United States, and will be on the job very soon–he might already be by now. Maybe someone will tell him to keep on eye on this blog? Nah, he probably has flunkies for that, right?
Tiny little correction: You have “ACRL” in your first bullet, which is a division of ALA; ARL–the publishers of the item you’re discussing–is an entirely different organization. (ARL has institutions as members and a defined membership; ACRL has primarily librarians as members and no limit or qualifications other than paying dues.)
Oops! Thanks, Walt. I had ACRL on my mind because of something else. It’s fixed now.
Just one of the NARA flunkies that watches your blog.
Please, Howard, you’re more than a flunky. Maybe a poobah? Thanks for checking in on me!
Kate, on the Australian scan-on-demand digitization initiative, RLG DigiNews ran an article on it in 2002. See “Why the Archives Introduced Digitisation on Demand” by Ted Ling at http://www.worldcat.org/arcviewer/1/OCC/2007/08/08/0000070519/viewer/file2881.html. I am sure there have been more reports since (including the 2004 article).
Both surveys seem to me very interesting. In my opinion it will provide useful information both the archivist as for library science. It will let obtain very interesting conclusions about the archivist work at the present, and it will let to question the current model archive. I think that it will let us know how go on archives. I think worthwhile to do it.
I hope that it gets enough survey people to obtain useful and reliable results. I’m aware of the situation and the date, I can’t take a part in this survey because I’m not Association of Research Libraries member, but the other survey (visitor2archives) I would have like to take a part in order to contribute towards it, but it finished.
Ultimately, then, I hope the published obtains results as soon as possible.
Both surveys, they seems to me, can be so much interesting and we can obtain very important and outstanding conclusions as a result of the importance the archival collections at American college and university. I think that is important nowadays do research about the current roles of contemporary archivist, particularly, who works in humanistic and old archives. On account of adapting new technologies.
So, in spite of this argument, my own view of this is that surveys and researches could be in places which there are so much humanistic and old archives, for instance anywhere from Europe, because the most important old documents and archives of the world are there. Otherwise, it couldn’t be suitable and reliable results.