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A team effort: Overcoming digital appraisal anxiety through communication and collaboration
Journal of Digital Media Management,
8
(3),
229-241
(2020)
Abstract
The University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library (BHL) collects physical and born-digital archival records of the University of Michigan as well as of the State of Michigan, its organisations and its people. To streamline and better inform its processes in order to provide efficient and effective access to digital archival materials, the BHL’s curation team analysed its processes for the technical and intellectual appraisal of records. This article describes the challenges associated with the technical and intellectual appraisal of digital records, analyses the work of a cross-team group of BHL archivists, and makes recommendations for the expedient and informed appraisal of large sets of born-digital records.
Keywords: electronic records; archival appraisal; collaboration
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Alexa Hagen was a project archivist at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library at the time of writing this article. During her time at the Bentley, she contributed to the development of curation workflows for born-digital and audiovisual archival collections. She is now an archivist at Herman Miller. Alexa holds an MS in information from the University of Michigan School of Information.
Hyeeyoung Kim was a Project Archivist at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library at the time of writing this article. During his time at Bentley, he took on a two-year project executing the migration of content from over 4,500 removable media in Bentley’s legacy collections to a digital repository. He is now a Digital Archivist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. He holds an MS in Information Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science.
Olga Virakhovskaya is the lead archivist for collections management at the University of Michigan’s Bentley Historical Library. Before joining the Bentley, Olga worked as a project manager and acquisitions editor at Gale Cengage. She holds an MLIS from Southern Connecticut State University, an MA in Russian and East European studies from the University of Michigan, and a BA in sociology from Simmons College. Olga’s professional interests include archival processing, archival and library cataloguing, use of descriptive thesauri, professional ethics, and issues of privacy and confidentiality in archival practice.
