2023 Annual Meeting and Speaker Program

Business Meeting

• Welcome by section co-chairs (Brandon Pieczko and Tali Han)
• SAA Council Liaison report (Derek Mosley)
• Archival Elements blog committee update (Jennifer Langford and Nora Zaldivar)
• Resource Portal update (Tali Han and Nicole Topich)

Presentations and Discussion

• Julie Kelly (University of Minnesota), Reuse of Historical Data Found in Archives

Historic data in analog/print format is a valuable resource that is utilized by scientists in many fields. This type of data may be found in various locations on university campuses including offices, labs, storage facilities, and archives. This talk reviews work done to investigate whether biological data held in one institutional university archives could be identified, described, and thus made potentially useful for contemporary life scientists. Scientific data was located and approximately half of it was deemed to be of some value to current researchers and about 20% included enough information for the study to be repeated. Locating individual data sets in the collections at the University Archives proved challenging. This preliminary work points to possible ways to move forward to make raw data in university archives collections more discoverable and likely to be reused.

• Julia Pope (Henry Ford Health System), The Digital Afterlife of a Medical Journal: An Unexpected Impact

The Henry Ford Hospital Medical Journal ran from 1953-1992. Before 2019, it had never been digitized, and copies of its articles had to be requested through the health system's archivist. In order to make the material more accessible it was decided to digitize the entire run of the journal and make it available online through our institutional repository, bepress. We also found that we could display links to this content from within PubMed by using their LinkOut option. With these steps, a defunct journal that previously received one or two requests for articles per month now receives thousands of downloads per month. This presentation briefly outlines the process we undertook and how we've tried to measure its impact.        

• Penny Ahlstrand (Computer History Museum), Using AirTable to Prevent Gaps in Service

A mid-size science museum prepares to change from a 20-year-old content management system (CMS) to a new, custom-built CMS with a digital asset management system (DAMS), and uses AirTable to ease the pain of change.

• Gabrielle Barr and Haley Higingbotham (National Institutes of Health), Capturing the Data to Track Reference

In need of tracking our yearly reference requests but with no substantial resources to pursue this initiative, the Office of NIH History and Stetten Museum has embarked upon using Microsoft Forms as a tool to capture the information. This short presentation would discuss the process of creating and deploying our new system as well as some of its shortcomings.