Saa11: Session 410

Session 410: The Archivists’ Toolkit: Innovative Collaboration
This session included 8 lightening talk presentations of 5-8 minutes long.

Kate Bowers from Harvard University shared her experiences with a drop down plug-in for the “extent” field in Archivists’ Toolkit, which enabled her and the other 7 repositories at Harvard to shift their accession records into AT.

Mary Kenney focused on the idea that AT allows for intellectual control over collections, standardization of description, automation of processes and a public access point.

Al Matthews discussed the use of AT with XFT or extensible text framework which creates HTML from the XML that AT pushes out.

Rebecca Peterson shared how she worked with a cataloger to transform EAD finding aids created in AT to MARC records for her library’s Voyager catalog.

Christopher Geissler discussed his current NHPRC grant funded project to expose hidden collections through the use of AT and determine preservation measures for those surveyed collections.

Adrianna Del Collo presented on how she turned analog inventory lists into EAD lists through several transformations of a Word doc, an Excel spreadsheet, a text file turned into an XML file, and then an import of that file into AT.

Marisa Hudspeth shared the creation of ATReference that seeks to do several things. Already developed is automated patron registration. In the future she hopes to use this tool to track use of collections, reference questions, and to create personalized user accounts.

The last presentation came from Cassie Schmidt and Elizabeth Nielsen who discussed their collaboration through AT. Schmidt works in a special collections, and Nielson works for a university archive. Together they set out to create a common database and tags to describe their collections, despite working at different universities.

I found this session particularly helpful and hope to bring back to my institution the spirit of collaboration and the “anything is possible” mind-set these presentations inspired.