** Event moved to Friday, February 7th **
Join us for a dialog with the ArcLight Integration Project Cohort on designing access systems for digital archives!
Where: Standish Room, 3rd floor of Science Library, University at Albany, SUNY
When: Friday, February 7, 2025 4 to 5pm (Because of the snow storm, Date Move!)
Cost: Free (visitor parking is $5 for the day)
Register here: Google Form
The ArcLight Integration Project is designing and developing specifications for archives access systems. Currently archivists struggle to use the archival description they create in finding aids to provide access to digitized and born-digital materials without creating additional digital object metadata and removing items from their archival context – also making it challenging for users to navigate.
UAlbany’s M.E. Grenander Special Collections & Archives is hosting a cohort of experienced practitioners to collaborate in developing new specifications that will enable archival description and digital objects to be managed and discoverable in the same place. While ArcLight is the primary example for this work, we hope to create a tool-agnostic design that can be implemented in other systems. This work is also specifically focused on smaller institutions without substantial technology support.
Join us to hear about the work we’re doing and give us feedback for your local perspective! Over the hour, we will have a mix of presentations and small group discussions. We welcome students and practitioners of all levels of experience.
Project Goals
- Allow users to discover online and offline collections in the same place
- Enable archivists to describe digital collections just like they do physical collections
- Allow digital collections metadata to have varying levels of detail for each object
- Empower archivists to use their appraisal skills to allocate metadata resources in proportion to the value of materials
- Enable archivists to use existing description for digital materials when appropriate
- Simplify archives technology for smaller or under-resourced libraries
- Experiment with inheritance when indexing multilevel archival description
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services award LG-256722-OLS-24.
