Today ended with the RAO section meeting. In the Marketplace of Ideas, I heard about a class scheduling system developed at Harvard, from Emilie Hardman. This is an open source platform that you can access through GitHub. Through this system faculty can schedule classes in the archive, which removes the back and forth nature of scheduling sessions and finding rooms and staff to work with. Hardman commented that they have not experienced a drop off in faculty due to this less proactive outreach method. This system also enables them to coordinate instruction efforts across the libraries and archives at Harvard.
I then heard about how Andrea Bainbridge at DePaul is using Relenta.com to keep track of her interactions with potential donors in her capacity as University Archivist. The system enables her to fulfill the university’s records management mandate, and also helps her to cultivate relationships across campus.
I wondered about the feasibility of sharing the data she’s gathered from reaching out to students (soon to be alumni) with the university’s advancement office. We give data to our library’s advancement liasion and then she enters into the university-wide system so all interactions are tracked in a central system. This enables us, whether in special collections, archives, etc to be aware of the relationships we’re developing.