Erin O’Meara was fortunate enough to be awarded an International Council on Archives grant to travel to London and Glasgow to hold two workshops and attend other meetings in order to promote and get feedback about Curator’s Workbench, a locally produced and open source software to help prepare digital materials for submission into our institutional repository. Greg Jansen, the software developer for Curator’s Workbench, also attended.
The first workshop was at the British Library in London. Librarians, archivists and technologists from the British Library, London School of Economics, King’s College London, JISC, University of Hull, and the University College London attended. The following week, Erin and Greg went to the University of Glasgow to hold the same workshop in Scotland. Librarians and archivists attended from University of Glasgow libraries, University of Glasgow HATII, and Heriot-Watt University.
The goal of the workshops was to promote the ingest preparation software, gather feedback about the future uses and features of the tool, find potential partner institutions that want to help develop the software and to have a broader discussion about approaches to workflow for handling born-digital material.
Erin and Greg had great discussions with attendees and hope to share more information as it comes up. In the meantime, some of the feedback received is being used to add to the features list on the Curator’s Workbench github site.
For another discussion of the visit, Simon Wilson wrote a great post about his time at the workshop on the born digital archives blog.