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2012 talks proposals

1,442 bytes added, 02:04, 21 November 2011
An Incremental Approach to Archival Description and Access
* Mark A. Matienzo, Yale University Library, mark@matienzo.org
''This An ongoing problem for many archives and special collections units is placeholder text; a lack of technological infrastructure and ongoing support. Funding for many archival programs arrives on a project-by-project basis, often in the form of grants. One of the largest concerns for archivist, therefore, is ensuring the sustainability of any solutions or processes that support core operations, such as archival description coming shortly'and access systems. The presenters will describe their experience developing an iterative and sustainable approach to archival description and access at the library of a small historical society. Starting with mostly OCRed legacy finding aids and no online access to collections, and ending with structured data about the entirety of their holdings available online over three years time, we will detail the evolution of the work from problem-solving through to the resulting phases of descriptive work and development of a basic online access portal created in WordPress. We will discuss making reasonable and sustainable choices in an environment with little monetary and technical support, and how the organization's staff were able to build a system and processes that could leverage messy legacy metadata initially and grow to use structured, standardized data as it was created. We will also discuss the specific technical solutions we developed (the WordPress instance and supporting plugins) and our experience with how bugs and barriers outside of our control changed our insights.
== Making the Easy Things Easy: A Generic ILS API ==
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