Greg Wiedeman

No More Finding Aids

A New Frontend for Special Collections & Archives at UAlbany

Gregory Wiedeman
University Archivist
University at Albany, SUNY
@gregwiedeman

#Archives are Esoteric

-"intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest."

Note: secret handshakes and cryptic signposts

This is a direct and fundamental conflict with Web Usability

Note: Where the key to usability is making things obvious to all

Esotericism directly undermines archives’ primary mission

Note: Archives public access systems are not obvious to all users, we need to make archives readily apparent to all

Finding Aids are the Problem

The Finding Aid is Jargon

Not a popular convention
Broad to the point of meaninglessness

The Finding Aid is a pre-Digital Information System

A system for displaying archival description as a document
“Modernized” for the web
- XML and XSLT

Users don’t want help finding things

They want help getting things

Discovery without delivery, wtf?
"Online Finding Aids"
"Collection Guides"
"Guide to the University Senate Records"

Replace Finding Aids with Web Discovery and Delivery Systems

The best way to provide archival description on the web is not a document
Web design best practices
Separation of concerns
Based on user-testing

but… we’re already doing this!

Practice is changing, not professional identity and literature

Note: That’s true, new tools are moving us there. This is important for defining professional skills, grad programs, etc.

but… we can’t put it all online!

No, but we can deliver content both digitally and physically
Make our limitations readily apparent
Move to On-Demand Digitization

Note: Lets treat our users like adults, they will understand, also helps transparency, this just means we need our design to span digital and physical

library.albany.edu/archiveDev

Note: This is our new front-end access system for special collections and archives. Now I have to confess we haven’t quite reached these goals, we haven’t yet killed the finding aid at UAlbany, but I’m going ot show how we made strides towards that goal