RAO Hot Topics Blog Series: Exploring Solutions to Providing Access to Born Digital Materials

By: Mary Manning, University of Houston, SAA RAO Section Past Chair


While great attention has been placed on best practices (although somewhat nascent) established for accessioning, processing, and preserving electronic materials, it seems that comparatively very little attention is given to how we provide access to these materials. Solutions for access to born digital materials lag behind. Yet these resources are preserved and processed precisely so they can be used by researchers, just like their analog counterparts.

What are our colleagues doing to provide access to born digital materials? What are the largest barriers to providing access? Are best practices for born-digital access taking shape yet? If so, what are these best practices? Is there a roadmap that archivists can follow to guide them to their desired destination of providing access to these valuable resources?

There are two groups that I know of who are working hard to answer these questions. The first is a research study while the second is an RAO working group.

A research study being conducted by the research team of Rachel Appel (Bryn Mawr College), Alison Clemens (Yale University), Wendy Hagenmaier ( Georgia Institute of Technology), and Jessica Meyerson (University of Texas at Austin) comprise the first group. These archivists note that archivists “lack empirical data that might empower those working with born-digital materials to map the landscape of born-digital access efforts and to work together to design future access solutions.” They hope to begin to help fill that gap by documenting existing trends, challenges, and forward strides in providing access to born-digital materials—in terms of both policy and practice.

Through a mixed-methods study (a survey conducted in fall 2014 and semi-structured interviews conducted in spring 2015), they aim to gather data and uncover insights about what types of institutions and professionals are working to provide access—and where, when, and how. They hope to highlight not just what those institutions and professionals have accomplished already or what they're tackling right now. Their study also “endeavors to capture the landscape they envision for access in the future.”

Anonymized data from the study will be made available to the profession, along with analysis of current trends and possibilities for further research. During a session at the 2015 SAA Annual Meeting, the research team will share a brief analysis of the findings and facilitate a hands-on hackfest to begin designing achievable best practice models for access. SESSION 110, Born-digital Access Hackfest: Collaborative Solution-Building for Current Challenges, is scheduled for 8/20/2015, 11:00:00 AM to 12:00:00 PM, and the research team hopes to see you there. I know I will be there.

The second group working to answer the questions is the Access to Electronic Records Working Group, which is co-chaired by Rachael Dreyer and Amy Schindler. Greg Kocken is the leader of the initial research subgroup, Alexis Adkins and Jarrett Drake are the leaders of the bibliography subgroup, and Stacey Lavender is the leader of the survey subgroup. The RAO Steering Committee approved the formation of the working group in June 2014, with the charge to investigate and share current best practices for providing access to electronic records.

The initial research subgroup went to work immediately as the work of the other bibliography and survey groups depends heavily on the initial research group’s findings. Members investigated current best practices, current strategies/technologies, and challenges. The subgroup’s work included surveying the professional literature from 2002 to 2014 from the U.S., Great Britain, and Australia to identify current technologies in use to provide access to electronic records.

The bibliography subgroup is working on an annotated bibliography and has been considering where and how to present the bibliography online, access points, the audience, scope, and other questions. The subgroup has already found that with the limited resources addressing access specifically, their work will dig into related works and broader topics to compile the parts related to access.

Additional information about the Access to Electronic Records Working Group’s efforts is available at http://www2.archivists.org/groups/reference-access-and-outreach-section/access-to-electronic-records-working-group.

As the research study group noted, to date, we, as a profession “lack empirical data to empower those working with born-digital materials to map the landscape of born-digital access efforts and to work together to design future access solutions.” However, this research study group and the RAO working group are making great strides mapping out that landscape, by gathering, analyzing, and making available information to the rest of us looking for solutions for providing access to born digital materials.

Do-It-Yourself Book Scanning

One of the biggest expenses that archival repositories and libraries have to deal with is the expense of digitization. Options include renting a Scribe from the Internet Archive or partnering with Google to digitize books in your library. For archival repositories, high-quality planetary scanners cost just as much. All of these options have their problems and so a community has arisen to try and develop do-it-yourself replacements for these scanners.

The primary community for this is the aptly named DIY Book Scanner community. Their goal is to create book scanners out of parts that can either be scavenged or easily purchased. The County of Brant Public Library in Ontario, Canada, has created a book scanner out of a dSLR camera and three-panel presentation boards (like the ones used by science fair projects). They are currently using the scanner to digitize, among other things, large ledgers. The quality that they get out of their scans, which you can see through the previous link, is impressive. On the DIY Book Scanner site, there are a plethora of designs, ranging from the cheap and easy to build all the way up to impressive and professional looking scanners.

Other members of the community are trying to build portable scanners to take into archival repositories and use them to quickly take pictures of materials that they need for their research. This is more problematic, for a variety of preservation and copyright reasons. But what do you think of users trying to democraticize the digitization process? Are there any circumstances under which you would allow visitors to set up a portable digitization stand at your repository? And would you consider building your own DIY Book Scanner for use at your own repository?

Guest Blogger: Questions Not Answers

Guest blogger Susan McElrath answered the call (well, an email message) and agreed to share her thoughts on the discussion of RAO's mission in advance of the section's annual meeting. Susan is the Team Leader, Special Collections and University Archivist at American University and a past-chair of RAO.

The Reference, Access, and Outreach Section encourages you to attend the upcoming section meeting at the 2010 annual meeting. We will be breaking into discussion groups to discuss our mission. How do we define reference, access, and outreach? How do they interconnect? What do we want to do?

I have been asked to share some initial thoughts to get the dialog started. As I am not a member of RAO’s Steering Committee, my comments and questions should not be taken as the “official” opinion of our leadership. In thinking through what to write, I realized that questions not answers would be most beneficial. Some of these questions might be worth discussing during the section meeting.

Of the three, reference seems the most straight forward. But is the concept of reference changing? What is the role of the reading room and archivist? Is it possible for Archives to do reference via chat? Is there a role for text messaging? What web 2.0 tools should we be adopting? How many of you are already blogging, tweeting, and creating wikis? There have been numerous sessions at SAA on this topic. Are there recommendations/standards that RAO can share with its members? Should we be evaluating these tools – are they worth the time spent?

In Jan Blodgett’s February 19 posting to the RAO blog, she asked the question “A is for???” Are we talking about physical and/or intellectual access? Is our emphasis on addressing barriers to access (legal, ethical, descriptive)? Are we more interested in access policies – how we make collections available? How does this overlap with the work of the Description section? What about digitization? Are we more interested in the search interface, the selection criteria, the determination of what metadata to share, or all of the above?

Outreach potentially covers a broad territory including exhibits, education, and public relations. SAA is now an active partner on this front with the Archives Week PR kit, its elevator speech contest, and its support of NHD. Should we be doing more? Do we need to redefine RAO’s role in light of this positive change? SAA’s focus is on external audiences but what about internal audiences? Does this form of outreach require a different approach? Is this something we want to explore? Do we consider advocacy a part of outreach? Would we want to work with the Issues & Advocacy Roundtable?

In recent memory, RAO has emphasized outreach with projects relating to Archives Week and National History Day. Do we want to continue this trend? Are there new issues that we should address?

Would it be worthwhile to look at SAA’s publications and workshops to see what additional topics might be of interest? Several years ago RAO proposed a workshop on exhibits which was accepted and continues to be extremely popular.

My apologies for the somewhat disjointed posting. I hope that this provides some food for thought. I look forward to talking through these issues with many of you in DC in August.

Life As We Know It

Last winter the RAO Steering Committee discussed goals and planning for the section beginning at a draft document. While the conversation included goals that seem to show up in the planning documents for so many organizations - improving and varying communication, increasing member involvement, etc. - one issue that was a sticking point for many of us was the question of the section's mission. We came to a consensus that there is a need to define and relate RAO's three component interests to each other as well as other sections.

At the same time, Steering Committee members had received positive responses from members that the break-out small group discussions during the 2009 annual meeting were worthwhile and an attractive alternative to the usual conference session of presenters talking at the audience and planned a similar opportunity for the 2010 annual meeting. The Steering Committee agreed that at this year's annual meeting a part of the afternoon's agenda will be small group discussions about the R, A, and O. Keynote remarks from Jessica Lacher-Feldman from the W.S. Hoole Special Collections Library at The University of Alabama will precede the discussion and we look forward to what she has to say about what reference, access, and outreach mean to archives today to begin our in-person conversation. Update 7/8/10: Unfortunately, Jessica Lacher-Feldman will not be able to give a keynote talk at the RAO annual meeting.

We hope these discussions will give members the opportunity to interact with folks they wouldn't otherwise as well as get us thinking and talking about how the R, A, and O do or should function together within the section's mission and priorities. Frankly, I think a case could be made that the RAO Section might be better as - or simply acknowledge the fact that it has become - the OR Section.

Does an RAO still make sense? Did the archivists who organized the Reference, Access and Photo-Duplication Policies Committee (which makes me think RAO members with a sense of the section's roots may be passionate about RLG's "Capture & Release": Digital Cameras in the Reading Room report) have it right? Can a single section really lay claim to these distinct, yet related functions? Why is it that SAA has an RAO? Is it time to consider the OR (Outreach & Reference) Section? (If a DA (Description & Access) Section came to SAA, would another group step up and form a MA section or roundtable?)

Leading up to the annual meeting on Friday, August 13th at 1pm we hope to share a few posts with thoughts from other archivists on the R, A, and O. These may take the form of what reference, access, and outreach mean to archivists today, the relationships and intersections of the three, the section's mission, and probably more. RAO's webmaster Jan Blodgett shared some of her thoughts back in February and whether you will be in DC in August or not, I encourage you to share your thoughts there or elsewhere on this blog in the weeks ahead.