Archival Innovator Award: The APT Research Team

The APT (Augmented Processing Table) Research Team is the first recipient of the Archival Innovator Award. Established in 2012, the Archival Innovator Award recognizes archivists, repositories, or organizations that show creativity in approaching professional challenges or the ability to think outside the professional norm or that have an extraordinary impact on a community through archives programs or outreach.  

The APT project is an ongoing and collaborative effort at The University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information led by researchers in archives (Dr. Ciaran B. Trace) and human-computer interaction (Dr. Luis Francisco-Revilla). The main objective of APT is to enhance and accelerate archival curation, and in the process, enhance online access to reliable, accurate, and trustworthy collections of information. The APT research team is focusing on devising a working solution to clear the backlog of hidden collections residing in archival repositories and set up infrastructure for managing ongoing accessions of born-digital, digitized, and paper-based materials. The team’s work has included the development of two prototype large-scale surface computing devices for processing and making accessible collections of digitized material.

The Award Committee noted that the team’s work is “groundbreaking, overcoming professional and philosophical boundaries, embracing innovative ideas and emerging technology, and rethinking current standards and commonly-used models for arrangement and description in modern archives.”