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
  • no local development
• 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