Born-Digital and Electronic Records – Page 3

Saving UNC’s Slice of the Web

If you have ever stumbled across a webpage with this banner across the top of it, you’ve encountered the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine was developed by the Internet Archive in 1996 to start archiving the web, and since then it has collected around 240 billion web pages.

In 2006 the Internet Archive launched Archive-It, which is a hosted service that allows institutions to create their own web archives.

In January of 2013, the UNC Libraries began archiving websites in five different collections. These collections support existing collecting areas in the Libraries and include

Digital Artists’ File curated by the Sloane Art Library,
North Carolina Collection Web Archives,
Rare Book Collection Web Archives,
Southern Historical Collection Web Archives, and
University Archives Web Archives.

You can browse all of our collections through Archive-It, and individual websites have been cataloged for access through the UNC Libraries’ catalog.

Additionally, websites that are part of existing archival collections are described in that collection’s finding aid. For example, you can see description of and get access to an archived version of the North Carolina Literary Festival’s 2009 website from the finding aid for the records of the North Carolina Literary Festival.

Here’s a snippet from that web site, showing the banner that Archive-It uses to let the viewer know that they’re looking at an archived web page.

Cleaning House

Recently UNC Libraries launched a new, redesigned website. As any archivist should, we took this opportunity to look at some of the older, somewhat outdated content of the previous website and flag materials for archiving.

Amongst other items, we decided to save a bunch of photographs, some of which were taken by a library employee during the renovation of the Robert B. House Undergraduate Library (the UL).

Here you can see the evolution of a favorite UL study spot, the new books reading room.

Feb14-02DSCN0013 — …construction continues…

...The grand re-opening... — …the grand re-opening…

6newbooksreadingroom — …after the renovations!

Special thanks to Kim Vassiliadis, head of User Experience, who alerted us to these cool photographs before they were deleted from our web servers.

Construction photos taken by Fred Stipe, head of the Library’s Digital Production Center during the UL renovations (1999-2001).

Meg Tuomala Appointed Electronic Records Archivist

University Archives and Records Management Services is pleased to announce that Meg Tuomala has re-joined our staff, this time as the Electronic Records Archivist. Her first day was December 3, 2012.

In this position, Meg will be responsible for ensuring the proper management and preservation of electronic archival records created by UNC-Chapel Hill and the UNC General Administration as well as lead efforts to assist other special collections units in Wilson Library in managing and preserving born-digital materials. Her contact information is mtuomala@email.unc.edu; 919-962-6402.

Meg received an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature and Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 and a Masters in Library Science from UNC’s School of Library and Information Science in August 2010 with a specialization in Archives and Records Management. She is no stranger to Wilson Library or UARMS having worked as a graduate assistant in Special Collections Technical Services processing university archives collections and serving as the Records Services Archivist from September 2010-July 2011. Most recently, she served as the the Digital Archivist at the Special Collections at Washington University in St. Louis.

Welcome back Meg!

Visit to UK for work on born-digital archives

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.