How is everyone managing? What is your organization working on?
- Working on new exhibits & scanning.
- Learning how to work with a new virtual environment -- providing scans of materials long-distance.
- Library is at half-capacity ; some tents are available to teach outside. This can be a challenge for professors who need more technology.
- Libraries have 103 virtual hours.
- Newburgh: created an imovie on the 1918 pandemic.
- Vassar: opened the library at half-capacity. A lot of tents around campus - very reminiscent of the 1918 photos. There is some recording equipment inside the tents, and they have laptops available.
- Finished designing and publishing an exhibit on suffrage. https://vclibrary.vassarspaces.net/votes-for-women/
- Hopefully starting to open up the library to in-person appointments.
- Everyone is doing the best they can!
Are students behaving?
Are you working at home or following a hybrid model?
- With virtual reference, there have been more questions. Some of these have been from individuals outside of the library community.
- With the online chat, they can make a ticket which can be followed up on. A half an hour to an hour can be spent on reference questions.
- Keep some things in FAQ and in files so they can be referenced regularly.
- There is usually an assumption that everything is digitized and able to be sent right away. However, there are a lot of things that haven’t been digitized yet. ‘
Academic libraries: are you serving the general public?
- Vassar: not open to the public at this time.
- Have different phases of re-opening; not sure when the college will move to having guests.
- Ordered a camera to stream for teaching: Logitech C90 Pro Webcam Model 960-000764
EmpireADC update:
- Have been working on creating a statewide finding aid project. It would aggregate finding aids from across the state.
- This can be challenging as there is no pre-existing software to provide the needed functionality.
- Have been working on a new front end for the service, which will launch this fall.
- Working on creating a form tool so libraries can create finding aids without having to know/encode EAD.
- It can also harvest EAD finding aids from institutions that can produce them.
- Form tool only requires 12 pieces of information and then you can attach pdf finding aids. The form tool is helpful because small institutions or non-specialists would be able to input information.
How do people publish their finding aids locally?
- Some EAD producing orgs, don't have indexing/display systems so they convert their EAD to HTML pages.
- ArcLite is an open-source technology designed to read EAD.
- Some publish PDFs on their websites.
- Working on getting EmpireADC to harvest directly from ArchivesSpace.
- Implementing ArchivesSpace is a challenge especially if you need to migrate existing EAD/finding aids into the system.
Next meeting: Tuesday November 17th at 2 pm