What’s a Digital Archivist?
Gregory Wiedeman
University Archivist
University at Albany, SUNY
@gregwiedeman
Some Background
M.E. Grenander Special Collections & Archives
- 4 permanent archivists, 1 on grant funding
- Department Head
- Supervisory Archivist (Manuscripts and Front Desk)
- Curator of Digital Collections
- University Archivist
- 3-4 Graduate students
- Undergraduate work study students
My Role as University Archivist
- Born-digital institutional records
- Lots of scripting
- Web Archives
- Support technical services
- ArchivesSpace migration
- New web front-end PUI
- Develop workflow tools
- Implement new systems
- Hydra-Fedora 4 implementation
- Experience with Python, XML and XML tools, Web Development, some JavaScript and Ruby
Library Systems
- Department Head
- Catalog developer and desktop support developer
- System Administrator and Database Developer
- One unfilled Web Developer position
We do development, they do support
- Ticket system
- XTF Public User Interface (PUI)
- I did all XSLT and CSS work
- Wrote scripts for static page generation
- Drupal
- Systems ported XTF styling to Drupal theme
- ArchivesSpace
- Systems exported data from old CMS
- I wrote migration scripts
- Hydra-Fedora
- Systems implements on servers
- We develop rails applications
Am I a developer?
- I end up writing code for large part of my job
- I developed our website, write small desktop apps, now writing Rails apps
- I don’t have to learn and write applications for outside processes
- If I wrote most of our tools I would be a bad archivist
- I’m not always in-line with professional best practices
I’m a really bad developer
Do you need developer skills to be a good archivist?
- Allows you to be active rather than passive use of existing tools
- Helps understand systems architectures
- Eases/Speeds migrations
- Small workflow tools can be really valuable
Technology is not the Core of our Mission
- Archivists collect
- Archivists appraise
- Archivists preserve
- Archivists describe
- Archivists make records accessible
Technology is an Amplifier
- Scripts collect over network transfers or disk images
- Command line tools or scripts enable appraisal at scale
- Digital repositories eases preservation planning
- Collections Management Systems support description
- Web applications make records more accessible
Not every archivist is a digital archivist
Every archives needs a digital archivist
What’s a Digital Archivist?
Gregory Wiedeman
University Archivist
University at Albany, SUNY
@gregwiedeman