Participatory Archival Research and Development: The Born-Digital Access Initiative

In an effort to advance the professional discourse around establishing best practices for access to born-digital archival collections, we designed a multi-phase, mixed-methods initiative, begun in 2014, that aimed to identify gaps and challenges in existing access methods and identify plans for how cultural heritage organizations hoped to improve access practices in the future. Over the course of our collaboration, our goals quickly evolved beyond the scope of collecting and publishing a static data set. We were inspired by models of research in practice, participatory action research, and research and development to translate our results into action by using the data to kickstart collaborative progress towards the future of archival practice. Through this paper, we synthesized our personal experiences of conducting the study, our exploration of existing models, and our aims and hopes for the future of research in our field into a framework for research in practice called Participatory Archival Research and Development (PAR&D)

Institutional Readiness for Data Stewardship: Findings and Recommendations from the Research Data Assessment

This report was written by members of the Georgia Tech Library's Research Data Project Team. The report is based, in part, on survey data collected by this group. The survey data are located in SMARTech and can be found at http://hdl.handle.net/1853/48198.The potentials and possibilities afforded by managing, preserving, and sharing digital research data have been lauded by funding agencies, universities, and researchers alike. As federal funding agencies require data management plans and data sharing, questions around how to ensure that research data are managed and shared have come to the fore. Academic institutions and libraries are particularly interested in these issues, recognizing the need to support researchers in their work with research data. Accordingly, the Georgia Tech Library began investigating the research data practices and needs at Georgia Tech by conducting a campus-wide research data assessment. The assessment, which included a survey, interviews, analysis of data management plans submitted with NSF grants, and data archiving case studies, revealed a number of noteworthy trends, which are detailed more in the full findings of the report. The major findings of the assessment were: 1. Data management plans are still a frustrating burden for most researchers. 2. Georgia Tech researchers lack the guidelines, resources, standards, and policies to properly care for their research data. 3. A disconnect exists between the expectations of Principal Investigators and Graduate Assistants. 4. Researchers recognize the importance of documentation and metadata, but few capture this information adequately. 5. Sharing data with collaborators outside Georgia Tech is challenging. 6. Researchers are willing to share their data, but the conditions under which they are willing to do so vary widely. 7. Researchers rarely plan for the the final disposition of their research data. 8. Very few researchers deposit data into repositories. Based on these findings, we make the following six recommendations: 1. Enhance institutional ability to support data archiving 2. Establish a campus Research Data Stewardship Group 3. Develop a formal data stewardship marketing plan 4. Create a repository of Georgia Tech data management plans 5. Provide data management training, especially for graduate students 6. Create and update the necessary and appropriate institutional policies The challenges of caring for research data are many and constantly evolving, and Georgia Tech will need to adapt to the needs of their community. These recommendations are but a starting point for developing the institutional capacity to steward research data, but they provide important insight into the framework needed to properly care for institutional digital data

Building a Collaborative Curation Framework: Working Towards Sustainable Digital Stewardship

This presentation was given at the virtual 2021 Digital Library Federation Forum on November 2, 2021.This presentation will discuss lessons learned from an academic research library’s endeavor to reconsider curation work holistically – across siloed content types, processes, systems, and departments. Georgia Tech team members will explore insights from our efforts working with Artefactual Systems to reimagine and sustain digital stewardship work across existing organizational silos

Supporting Software Preservataion Services in Research and Memory Organizations

Reconnaître la préservation des logiciels comme un problème commun et complexe que chaque organisation ne peut résoudre seul, le Software Preservation Network (SPN) a été lancé en 2016 pour sensibiliser, renforcer les capacités et favoriser les actions collectives qui mobilisent un large éventail d’intervenants qui ont un intérêt dans ce travail

Disrupting Mainstream History

Interview portion of Lost in the Stacks episode 350, broadcast July 14, 2017. Features interview and discussion of the 2017 Allied Media Conference. Episode guests are: Itza Carbajal, Information Studies student at UT-Austin; Sine Hwang Jensen, Asian American Studies and Comparative Ethnic Studies Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library; Irina Rogova, Race and Racism Project Archivist at the University of Richmond; and Jessea Young, Digital Collections Librarian at Loyola Marymount University

Salute your Jorts!

Interview portion of Lost in the Stacks episode 353, broadcast Aug 4, 2017. Features interviews with Maria Sotnikova and Carter Sutherland, organizers of the 2017 JortsFest music festival

More Publishing, More Problems

Interview portion of Lost in the Stacks episode 352, broadcast July 28, 2017. Features interview with Dr. Mike Filler, associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and head of the Filler Lab at Georgia Tech, speaking about issues in scientific publishing and reproducibility

Retrogaming in the GT Archives

Students in six sections of English 1102 used the GT Archives retroTECH hardware and software in the Spring 2015 semester to complete an assignment as part of their course, Narrative in Videogames, taught by Dr. Josh Hussey and Dr. J. Stephen Addcox. This report highlights the involvement of the Archives and Library staff and the results of a survey distributed to all students who used the retroTECH equipment

97% Eclipse of the Heart

Interview portion of Lost in the Stacks episode 354, broadcast Aug 18, 2017. Features interviews with: James Sowell, director of the Georgia Tech Observatory; Lisa Yaszek, Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication; and Morris Cohen, Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. All guests share their views and perspectives on what the great American eclipse of 2017 is, what we can learn from it, and what it means to our culture

Paper seismograms shake up research data workflows at Georgia Tech

Presented at the 2014 Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum, October 27-29 2014, Atlanta, GA.Although most research data collections submitted for inclusion in Georgia Tech’s institutional repository SMARTech are born digital and comprised of only a few digital files, some researchers still have valuable, non-digital collections. Case in point is a retired seismologist who offered the Library ownership over of a collection of original paper seismograms containing over 30 years of unique readings on seismic events that had occurred in the Southeast region. Given the unique and longitudinal nature of the collection, the Library, with support from the University Archives, agreed to digitized, preserve, and make accessible the complete collection through the Institution’s DSpace repository. The project was a strategic opportunity to provide access to a valuable collection of data files, and to collaboratively review and assess existing practices and workflows for dealing with digital collections. Areas of interest include: the need for review and subsequent adjustment to the existing repository deposit agreement to allow for the transfer of ownership and eventual destruction of the paper records; the expansion of digitization services to include patron submitted materials ; digitization of oddly shaped and often poorly documented paper records; struggles with the hierarchical collections and communities in DSpace when archiving a complex and highly interrelated collection; finding the balance between customized, discipline-specific metadata and the standard fields used for all repository items; and the creation of collection level metadata, using the Encoded Archival Description standard, to comprehensively document the breadth of the collection and allow future users more direct access to individual items contained within the entire collection. Our poster will discuss the specifics our process and reflect on lessons learned, highlighting areas for future consideration and collaboration