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Date: November 14, 2010
Name of Section/Roundtable: Archivists' ToolkitTM Roundtable
Officers:
Genie Guerard, Chair. UCLA
Daniel Harwig, Steering Committee Member. Stanford University
Marisa Hudspeth, Steering Committee Member. The Rockefeller Archive Center
Cory Nimer, Steering Committee Member. Brigham Young University
Annie Ross, Web Liaison. University of California, San Diego
Katherine Stefko, Steering Committee Member. Bates College
Report from annual meeting:
At the 2009 inaugural AT Roundtable meeting, it was announced that the Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon development teams had just been invited by Mellon to submit a proposal for integrating the two tools. A planning grant was subsequently awarded (February 2010). Prior to the SAA 2010 roundtable meetings, Cory Nimer, ATRT Steering Committee, interviewed planning grant team members Brad Westbrook, Chris Prom, Scott Schwartz and Annie Ross. The interview was meant to give the AT and Archon communities a sense of the status of AT and Archon, and the future of the integrated product under consideration.
Given the plans to evolve and integrate the Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon, a draft proposal to revise the AT Roundtable name, and mission and goals statements, was posted to the AT Roundtable website in advance of the meeting, and was the discussed. The steering committee has drafted the revised statement and name, and will submit to the ATRT Discussion List during the week of November 15, 2010, for feedback, with the intention of submitting the revision proposal to the SAA Council by January 1, 2011.
Project updates, announcements and presentations at the roundtable meeting included:
- Cory Nimer, Brigham Young University. Plug-in update: enhanced extent and date types in AT
- Marisa Hudspeth, Rockefeller Archive Center and Sibyl Schaefer, University of Vermont. Reference module
- Adrian Turner, CDL. Consortia support for AT and Archon.
- Nancy Enneking, Getty Research Institute Archives. Outputting statistical reports from AT.
Completed projects/activities
Profiles of two institutions, one implementing AT and the other implementing Archon, were posted to the ATRT website. Profiles were developed by steering committee members Marisa Hudspeth and Kat Stefko:
2009 and 2010 AT Roundtable presentations are posted to the ATRT website:
Two members of the Archon user community volunteered, and are working with the ATRT steering committee on the mission revision and planning for the 2011 roundtable meeting. They are: Caitlin Nelson, Digital Initiatives Librarian at the Florida Center for Library Automation in Gainesville, Florida; and Bridget Lerette, Archivist at the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta, Georgia.
Following on an issue that arose in an open discussion at the AT Roundtable meeting, members of the ATRT Steering Committee met with Brian Doyle to explore the idea of bringing together the listservs/forums of the Archivists’ Toolkit, Archon, ArchivesSpace, and AT Roundtable, through the AT Roundtable website. The possibilities, pros and cons were discussed by members of the roundtable on the ATRT discussion list, who arrived at the following in October 2010: While there is broad support across the community for a united location, we feel that this is not a feasible or the most useful solution at this time. The Steering Committe discussed at length, apart from our current capabilities, the need for a forum to offer its users the ability to easily search/find topical commentaries and help. We also discussed the preference of some to be notified by email when a topic of particular interest comes up among the forum participants, as opposed to the discussion list format we are most familiar with.
Ongoing projects/activities
AT Roundtable members who are interested in contributing profiles of their repository’s use of the tools are invited to contact Kat Stefko, who will conduct the interviews and continue to post them to the roundtable website. Two new profiles are in process: The California Digital Library, and Hadassah Archives.
New projects/activities
As above, draft revisions to the roundtable name, and mission and goals, to be submitted week of November 15, 2010, to the ATRT Discussion list, for submission to the SAA Council by January 1, 2011.
Online elections for steering committee members to be held in 2011.
Diversity initiatives
Questions/concerns for Council attention
A proposed revision to roundtable name, and mission and goals statement, to align with the evolution and integration of the Archivists’ Toolkit with Archon will be submitted to SAA Council by January 2011.
