CMTRT Annual Meeting

CMTRT members:

Please join us on Wednesday August 19, 2015 from 3-4:30pm in Room 25A in the Cleveland Convention Center. We will be discussing the CMTRT Documentation Portal and we will also hear from 4 members who will present “simple solutions to common CMT challenges,” followed by Q&A. It’s going to be a great session, so we hope you can make it!

Meeting Agenda

3pm: Welcome and Announcements

3:15pm: CMTRT Documentation Portal: Purpose, Progress, and Next Steps

3:30pm: “Simple Solutions” Lightning Presentations and Q&A

Presenters:

Andra Darlington, Getty Research Institute

DAOs for Mass Digitization

At the Getty Research Institute (GRI) we have found that neither Archivists’ Toolkit nor ArchivesSpace adequately facilitates the creation of digital archival objects (DAOs) for mass digitization. I will present our workaround for programmatically adding DAOs to existing EAD finding aids.

Mark Custer, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

Excel and EAD

I will demonstrate how you can use Microsoft Excel to create EAD container lists. The reason that I have pursued yet another method of migrating data from Excel to EAD is because I wanted a solution that would allow:  1) any combination of complex hierarchies to be migrated; 2) formatting, like italics and bold, to be retained; and 3) the whole process to be reversible.  During the presentation, I will demonstrate how to convert an Excel file into EAD and back again.

Linda Sellars, Special Collections Research Center, NCSU Libraries

Steady: Spreadsheets to EAD

This talk will describe how NCSU Libraries developed and uses Steady, a Ruby on Rails application freely available on the web, to convert CSV to EAD that can be imported into ArchivesSpace. Steady eliminates the need to re-key container lists received from collection donors or lists created by staff working in areas without internet access before importing them.

Gregory Wiedeman, M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, University at Albany, SUNY

Managing Collections (for now) through Open XML

Hear why UAlbany is not moving to ArchiveSpace yet, and managing their collections with open XML tools. Methods for strict metadata creation, control, and automation will be discussed – including rule-based validation with Python and automating an on-demand digitization workflow.