This has been such an exciting semester! Alongside my amazing Information Science classes, I have had the opportunity to work on a grant during my Graduate Assistantship within the M.E. Grenander Special Collections and Archives. This experience has allowed me to explore my passions within digital processing and consider where digitization is going for archival practices, and how it differs from the traditional physical processing.
The “Arclight Integration Project”, undertaken together with the Empire State Library Network (ESLN), was funded by an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences grant. It is our mission to better the digitization process by developing ArcLight into a single platform, negating our digital repository and instead hosting our objects on network file shares according to a detailed specification. This project will allow us more control over indexing, as well as an interactive and searchable interface for our objects. Our work will enable archives to use their existing metadata (typically managed in a platform like ArchivesSpace) to provide access to digital materials.
Meghan Slaff (Class of 2025)
The Anna Radkowski-Lee Graduate Assistantship Endowment provides a graduate student studying Library and Information Science with tuition support and professional experience working in an academic library.
For the technically inclined, we are using International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) manifests which enable ArcLight and ArchivesSpace to work with any IIIF-compliant storage for digital objects. The finished product will be system agnostic—so anyone can use it. It will also allow archivists to describe digital collections the same way as physical collections, simplify technologies for under-resourced repositories, and give users the ability to locate online and offline collections in the same place.
This project will take two years to complete, and I have been able to work on it from the beginning, which is an honor that I cherish. I have helped to write and develop our specification sheet, as well as hosted our Remote Cohort Sessions with 20 wonderful and talented archivists. In February, we will host eight of them on campus for three days. I am attempting to help in any way that I can as it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I am so grateful for the chance to participate in it.
My experience with the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives has been unparalleled. I have learned so much while also receiving amazing advice and consideration from my mentors. Instead of being put off by these great challenges we are facing, I am inspired and impassioned to solve them. It has changed my way of thinking, my very perspective of the world. I have brought many of my experiences into the Information Sciences classroom as well as the English one and believe that all my peers should gain hands-on experience as soon as possible. We learn as much by doing as we do listening, and archival work is truly something that you need to be immersed in to really understand. I am forever grateful to all of the lovely people in the archives Greg Wiedeman, Jodi Boyle, Mark Wolfe, Melissa McMullen, and David Mitchell.