Educational Session VI
Saturday, May 18th, 10:30-11:45
Archivists Reaching Beyond the Archives
Canyon A/B
The SSA State Partnerships and Outreach Committee (SPOC) is a newly permanent committee dedicated to enhancing opportunities for SSA members to engage with professionals in other disciplines in order to collaborate on archival projects and advocate for informed archival practices. This session will serve as a workshop in which the SPOC will invite SSA members to a conversation about different ways we can become involved with professional organizations related to archives such as those of historians, librarians, museum professionals, and others. The SPOC session leaders will share ideas and experiences with attendees, then work in small groups to brainstorm new ideas. As the session concludes, we will come together as a whole to share what we have discussed, providing a concrete take-away for attendees: a framework for how to create partnerships and fruitful outreach in their own communities.
Data Remediation at Scale: How to Clean Up Your Metadata Quickly and Effectively Using Excel
Madera
Metadata remediation is inevitable – at some point or another all institutions need to clean-up legacy metadata of their digital collections so it conforms to new standards and to updated metadata application profile, or simply to prepare it for migration. Optimized metadata is vital for improved search experience and easy discovery of digital objects. This short session will demonstrate how Excel can be a very handy tool for manipulating and cleaning up exported non-MARC metadata from ContentDM. The presenter will manipulate a metadata spreadsheet from a real digital collection demonstrating the following:
– Data remediation using some advanced Excel functions that allow cleaning up at scale (Data Filter, TRIM, CONCATENATE, TEXTJOIN, insert module with VBA code, Duplicate Values (look up and remove), INDEX and MATCH, Find and Replace, break text/numeric string MID, LEFT, RIGHT, insert line break CHAR(10), remove end punctuation [;], clean messed up copy-pasted dates, etc.)
– Mapping old fields to new fields
Attendees will learn the fundamentals of data remediation and some helpful Excel functions. They will add some practical skills in their toolbox and will leave the session with confidence that they can immediately apply their new skills in real-life projects. The metadata file, the slides and the handout will be uploaded at http://bit.ly/CIMAdataSession and distributed among attendees. They are welcome to bring laptops to get their feet wet and play with the data, testing out some of the demoed Excel functions. Alternatively, attendees are welcome to simply watch how stress-free metadata clean up can be.
Anywhere but the Dumpster
Pima
How can we use our training as archivists to assist individuals, families, or institutions faced with dealing with large amounts of material of varying significance, so they don’t get overwhelmed and decide to dispose of everything? How do we practice the art of triage — separating what needs to be preserved, what might be preserved, and what should be discarded? When and how do we gracefully say no to all or part of a donation? And how do we help the holder(s) of material divide it and get it into the right hands — possibly several different hands?