This morning I went to Tech Camp at RIT. Organized by the RRLC, this conference focused on new and emerging technologies that librarians and other information technology professions might find useful.

In the first session, Electronic Resources librarian, Adam Traub shared his experiences using Prezi, a presentation tool. Prezi is a cloud- based tool. Marketed as a more dynamic or non-traditional presentation tool, Prezi takes advantage of visual zooms, image imbedding and other features to challenge the tradition, linear PowerPoint presentation structure.

Prezi seems best for putting puzzle pieces or fitting related concepts together. The tool allows the user to zoom in and out to focus on different words, phrases, images, etc. Traub’s advice: create a Prezi for yourself before sharing in with others.

I presented Omeka: Bringing the 19th century on Online: the Post Family Papers Digitization Project. I shared with my audience the workflow I’ve created as project manager, along with my colleague Melissa Mead, for the Post Family digitization project. I focused on the benefits of using Omeka, while describing the limits of this content management system. Most important for information technology professionals, Omeka does a great job with displaying “pretty pictures.” I don’t believe it can be your one stop shopping place for all of your digital content.

Using Omeka, undergraduate students at the University of Rochester are transcribing 19th century manuscript letters from the Post Family Papers, scanning those letters to create a digital surrogate of the physical collection.

In the third session I attended, Wallace Center staff member, Mary Beth Koon shared the features of one of their technology infused classrooms or the TLT Studio. This space offers faculty and students 3 screens for projecting course content, tablet work stations, and collaborative spaces. Providing a physical space to explore new ways of teaching and learning offers faculty and students alike the chance to consider new ways of learning within the library.

The last session I went to featured apps for mobile devices. This session was somewhat self-indulgent, rather than strictly informational.

By participating in Tech Camp I had the opportunity to see what tools and ideas colleagues are implementing, which inspires me to stay current on trends in library science.

1. Learn at least one new technology.
While in graduate school I learned how to use XSLT, but I’d like to brush up on those skills to better understand how to transform an EAD finding aid. I’m in the process of creating a possible workflow to implement EAD in my department. We currently use Cold Fusion to store, manage and display our digital content. And while I’m working with our Digital Initiatives unit to transform these new EAD documents into Cold Fusion files that our system can render, I’d like to have a better handle on XSLT.

2. Teach someone at least one new technology/process.
To create EAD finding aids, we’ll be using Archivists Toolkit. I hope to train at least one staff member to use this tool not only to create finding aids, but also to change the the workflow for accessioning new items.

3. Work on my management skills and style.
I hope to increase my productivity by delegating certain tasks to my assistant and to my student workers. I also hope to express myself in such a way that fosters clear communication.

4. Make recommendations for the implementation of a digital repository for all digital content.
In March, we’ll be launching the first phase of a digitization project. One objective of this project is to determine what digital repository we should be using to share content with the public. I plan to assess our current system as well as similar systems and make a recommendation.

5. Increase department and library social media presence through Facebook and Twitter.
I’m collaborating with staff in other library departments to increase the library’s presence on Facebook and Twitter. I believe in being one voice among several when it comes to generating social media content. I hope that in 2012 the other contributors and I can develop a more formal plan for creating and pushing out content.

6. Evaluate and analyze social media contributions.
As we continue to generate content, I hope to share data generated by Facebook and Twitter to evaluate our social media success during our planning sessions that take place about every 3 months.

7. Find new opportunities to collaborate with colleagues, faculty and campus departments.
I find it rewarding to work with people outside of my department. I enjoy learning what faculty members are working on and how what I do may help them. I also think it’s important that the archives not become a silo within an institution.

8. Continue my own research.
As a trained historian, I’d like to continue my own research this year. I started a project using the Susan B. Anthony Papers housed at my repository and hope to begin writing an article this coming summer based on my research.

9. Submit an article on a current digitization project to American Archivist, or a similar trade publication.
As we complete the first phase of our digitization project, I’d like to share the workflow and results of our project with the archival community. In March, over 120 letters from the Post Family Papers will be made public. Undergraduates have transcribed each letter and in the next two months will be scanning each page. We’re uploading our content into Omeka. The Post Family Papers offers the public a glimpse into nineteenth century life and the opportunity to examine national social movements and trends through one family. I think it’s important to share different digitization projects and processes with the community so we all have an opportunity to learn as we explore this new aspect of our profession.

As 2012 continues, I will be updating you on my progress with these resolutions. So stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

1. Enacting or bringing about change in any organization is challenging. As a new professional or as someone new to a job we have a window in which we can propose and hopefully make change happen. As new staff members our voices may be heard and listened to, but that doesn’t mean we should rush to change everything. It’s tempting when you come into a new organization to believe you have the right answer for everything. Take the first 2 or 3 months to learn how your colleagues perform traditional archival practices: processing, reference, outreach, collection development, etc. During that time you can form any suggestions you have but wait to share them until you have a better understanding of the organizational culture. It can take the first few months to feel out who potential allies to your ideas might be, and who you’ll have to win over to make change.
2. Don’t forget the little guy or gal. It’s tempting now that we’ve landed this “grown-up” job to forget the kinds of tasks we were assigned as volunteers, student interns and workers. These staff members are invaluable. Having interns copy patron requests and re-house materials may be unavoidable but be sure and give them the option of bigger projects and the opportunity to share ideas of projects that interest them. Some will take us up on these offers and could be potential archivists in training and others will be happy to plug in their Ipods and make photocopies. It takes all types to keep our repositories running.
3. Get involved outside of your department. Many of us will find ourselves working in archives and special collections departments that are physically near other library departments or other libraries. It’s easy to remain in our comfort zones and only interact and exchange ideas with coworkers in the next cubicle over. By “sticking to our own kind” we miss the opportunity to learn about what’s going on in the wider organization. Maybe there’s a speaker series committee you can serve on in which you’ll work with administrators and other library staff or even faculty? Or perhaps there’s a library event put on for the community that could use another volunteer? These opportunities give you the chance not only to meet more people, but also to share what your department is up to.
4. Keep your archival mind sharp. Don’t abandon the American Archivist just because you’re no longer required to analyze case studies for your research methods class, or because your potential boss wrote it. Attend conferences if you can, write articles yourself, keep up on blogs (like this one) and stay connected to the profession even when your job security and comfort levels are at their highest.
5. Try saying “Yes” before saying “No.” As all those committees you’ve signed up to serve on, class sessions you’ve agreed to teach, conference programs you’ve agreed to chair, etc., etc., etc. begin to pile up it becomes much easier to say “No.” Resist the urge! We can’t do everything, but we can do many things to meet the needs of our researchers, communities and fellow professionals. By starting from “Yes” we’re more likely to expand our professional horizons and expose ourselves to new ways of doing things.

Go forth and triumph!!!

What are your thoughts on working with or being a new professional?

Both of these sessions gave me a sense of what up and coming open source systems offer archives and special collections.

The systems discussed were:
Collective Access- launched in 2004, and soon to be in its 4th edition with a mobile application coming out by the end of the year. This system isn’t object centered- authority items can be included and given equal weight as well. Matt Shoemaker from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania presented his use of Collective Access.

2. webDAM- a cloud based system.

3. VUDL& VUFind- both are home grown systems out of Villanova and offer a back-end and public access point for digital objects.

4. ArchivesSpace- by 2013 archivists will have the opportunity to take advantage of the back-end services offered by Archivists Toolkit and the public access face of Archon through ArchivesSpace. Mark Marienzo presented on the development of this open source tool.

These two sessions archivists real solutions for managing digital content- as well as systems and features to look forward to in the coming months and years.

As a former staff member at Mount Holyoke College’s Archives and Special Collections I was interested to see what progress they’ve made working through their electronic records grant issued by the NHPRC for the 2011 year. The grant is up this December and Leslie Fields the electronic records archivist hired to complete the project presented on her experiences moving toward a sound retention and preservation policy and workflow.

In her grant proposal, archives director, Jennifer King chose to focus the project on the following records groups:
Board of Trustee meeting minutes
Faculty meeting minutes
College’s course catalog- now only published on-line
Office of Communication’s News and Events stories.

As of now Fields has put the following workflow into place:

1. Transfer selected files electronically into a network drive and folder using a transfer form developed at Tufts for their faculty and staff.
2. Using Archnet (a server space for electronic records) which sends an email to archivists when files are added, represent the physical stacks. Each records group has its own file structure down to the folder, file and item level.
3. Virus scan and check sum is generated.
4. Then using Duke University’s Data Accessioner- a digital object and XML file are created.
5. Through collaboration with the Digital Assets and Preservation Services Department DAPS uses Dspace to provide public access to the digital objects.

Of course, Fields went into tremendous detail during her presentation and her slides will be made available on MARAC’s conference SlideShare account in the coming weeks.

I’ve gone to several sessions that addressed electronic records and born- digital records, but for the first time I felt more hopeful than discouraged.

As Fields stated at the beginning of her presentation, it’s better to do a little bit than nothing at all.

Enjoy the slide show!

Slide 1

• Good afternoon. My name is Lori Birrell and today I’ll be sharing with you my experiences implementing social media in two different organizations.

Slide 2

• First I’ll provide background on the 2 organizations in my case study.

• I’ll then explain what social media tools I implemented and the successes and failures involved in that implementation.

• Then I’ll share the results of implementing social media and discuss how successful I think this process was.

• Finally, I’ll share several recommendations for archival practitioners who are considering implementing social media at their institutions.

Slide 3

• I began working with the first organization- an international poetry society in the fall of 2010.

• Their current president approached me and asked me to consider new outreach methods for her organization.

• The organization was formed in 1988 and meets once a year as a society. At that meeting members give presentations on current projects or related interests to the poetry society.

• As of November 2010, the society boasted 313 members.

• However only 28 categorized themselves as students.

• This group- students- were the target of my social media efforts.

• The society’s president believed that by going to the forums where young people spend much of their time we could attract new, younger members.

• In our minds implementing social media tools would make it easier to find new members for the poetry society.

Slide 4

• Switching now to the small liberal arts college’s archives and special collections department.

• At this college their library is referred to as LITS which stands for: Library Information and Technologies Services. The archives and special collections is one department within LITS.

• I was interested in seeing whether by contributing content as a representative of the archives and special collections department, I could increase awareness and the dialog between the department and our users: students, faculty and alumnae.

Slide 5

• So what did I do?

• While volunteering for the poetry society- I started my social media implementation efforts by creating a Facebook page.

• The society already has a Facebook group- which they started in August of 2008 around the time of their annual meeting, but in the Fall of 2010 that group appeared to me to be pretty uninvolved. The administrators of the group would push out content- but little to no conversations or exchanges were taking place in that forum.

• I decided to create a Facebook page rather than add content to the group, because with Facebook groups- administrators must approve you to be a member before you can see the group’s content or contribute your own content.

• A group is designed to encourage communication between members and is therefore, more inwardly focused- rather than seeking out new participants.

• The purpose behind getting involved with Facebook was to attract new members. So I wanted to develop a Facebook page, which in my mind was a forum with that sense of community involvement built in.

Slide 6

• While working in the archives and special collections department I decided that rather than establish a Facebook page for the archives department, I would to add my voice and content to the established and well received Facebook page library staff had created.

• LITS staff began their Facebook page in 2009 as another outreach method. Prior to 2009, they had begun a blog to increase their outreach methods. Through the blog they posted about various reference services the library provides, events and news.

• The Facebook page serves as another outlet for that information and unlike the blog which doesn’t allow for comments, the Facebook page encourages participation.

• As a representative of the archives and special collections department I created a stock pile of posts that highlighted items and collections housed in the archives, as well as promoted events and exhibits related to the department.

• I began posting to the LITS Facebook page in December 2010. My first post publicized a long standing Christmas concert that is a tradition at the college.

• This event always draws a good crowd not only of students, but also members of the town’s community.

• I scanned the first concert program and uploaded that photo and a caption to the Facebook page.

• The posting read: Be sure to attend the 2010 Vesper’s concert this Sunday. But before you do, take a look at the first Vesper’s concert program! Photo from … College Digital Collections, part of the Archives & Special Collections.

• My posts always included the URL to the campus’s content management system, so the post viewer could see how the item I posted fit into a larger collection or the archives’ holdings in general.

Slide 7

• Returning to the poetry society, I created a Twitter account in October of 2010.

• Twitter is a wonderful tool useful for what I term as “quick hits”. In the example of the poetry society- these quick hits can be poetry quotations, biographical facts, today in history, event information, and book promotion.

• Twitter is set up based on followers and those users whom you follow. Unfortunately there is no tried and true formula for getting users to follow your feed.

• One way to increase your number of followers is to use hashtags. Users follow the hashtags of those topics their most interested in.

• When establishing followers for the poetry society, I used the hashtag #poetry, #literature and #westernma an abbreviation of Western Massachusetts because the poetry society has a partnership with a local museum and I wanted to take advantage of activity on the #westernma feed.

• I also took advantage of the @ symbol. When you create a twitter account, and want to mention another user in one of your tweets, you put the @ symbol before their user name.

• @ mentions are a way to direct your comment to an individual or organization within the Twitter social network.

• When that user looks through his or her @ mentions, they’ll see that you mentioned them in a tweet and most twitter users will re-tweet or send out your post to their followers.

Slide 8

• When implementing Twitter on behalf of the archives and special collections department, I again built on what the library staff had started beginning in January 2010.

• By using cotweet which allows multiple twitter users to access the same account and select the day and time they want a post to go out- I could devote maybe 30 minutes of my time one day to creating a stock pile of tweets for the month and then sit back- knowing my work was done.

Slide 9

• So how did things shake out in the end?

• My case study and foray into social media on behalf of these two organizations lasted from October 2010 to April 2011.

• On the screen you’re seeing a graph that shows the results of my efforts with Facebook.

• The blue bars represent the number of visitors to the Facebook page each week during the sampled period.

• Only in the last week, which was in February did visitors “like” my posts.

• Even with the increased traffic to the page during November and February I had difficulty initiating and sustaining a conversation among visitors.

• I had wanted to create an environment for conversation and the exchange of ideas and instead I found the Facebook page became a one-way street of information. I pushed out content but had little response coming back to me.

Slide 10

• In contrast, the LITS Facebook page receives on average 245 “likes” during any given week.

• Nearly 10 x’s as many users visit the LITS Facebook page as did the poetry society page.

Slide 11

• While Facebook sends you weekly statistics on the number of visitors to your page, number of comments and number of likes…

• Finding statistics for Twitter use is a bit more challenging.

• I used TweetStats to track the results of my Tweets.

• During the time I tweeted from November to March I averaged 1.7 tweets per day and 14 tweets per month.

• As I became more discouraged with the response from my followers and from the poetry society organization and officers- I began to tweet less.

• I tweeted the most in December because that’s when there are international events celebrating the poet and her birthday. I set up a google alert so whenever the poet is mentioned on a website I receive an email.

• I then decided whether to tweet the information I received via Google alert.

Slide 12

• My results with Twitter when I posted as a part of LITS was like my experience with their Facebook page more encouraging.

• On average LITS staff tweet 2.2 times per day Monday through Friday during the time I collected my data from Jan. 2010- March 2011

Slide 13

• In order to integrate social media tools successfully into an organization’s outreach efforts, you must have the buy in of key stake holders.

• These stake holders include:

• The people you have to run things by- your boss, your boss’s boss. The people who are involved in social media directly- you want to be all on the same page- not fighting on what platform to use. You also need content creators feeding you relevant materials or access to the places content is created so you can push it out through social media outlets.

• You must also work to establish and maintain clear lines of communication.

Slide 14

• While volunteering at the poetry society, I had the support of the society’s president, but not that of the Facebook group’s administrator.

• As I continued to volunteer I found out that the group’s administrator holds a lot of clout with the members of the organization- and without her support- I would not be successful.

• I also had difficulty creating my own content.

• While the society’s website gets updated with some regularity, the site’s administrators never emailed me when they updated the site.

• Ideally, you should be able to direct your traffic generated through social media back to a central information point- like an organization’s website.

• In this case, I had no place to direct traffic to through my Facebook posts and Tweets.

• While I struggled to implement Facebook and Twitter in the poetry society, I enjoyed a different response from colleagues at the college’s library and archives.

• I had the support of my boss, who despite her misgivings about Twitter, encouraged my posting to Facebook.

• The LITS staff and history with social media implementation offered me a supportive work environment.

• I had created the content I posted by scanning materials and writing captions and then uploading that content to Facebook and Twitter.

Slide 15

• Social media and on-line communication is not a replacement for community. It’s another outlet for communication.

• The use of social media doesn’t guarantee that people will care about what you care about- people have to want to engage independently of any communication tool.

• The members of your community must have a reason in common for participating in and contributing to your community.

• It doesn’t matter where you chose to build your community. The important part is that there is something around which a community can be built. Social media is an easier way of allowing a community to exchange ideas.

Slide 16

• The members of the poetry society meet in person for the annual meeting and then go on their way.

• While the organization and their interest in the poet may be part of their professional lives, that connections continues independent of the poetry society.

• The members don’t need the poetry society to feel connected to their common interest: the poet.

• Once the annual meeting has passed there is no expectation that any conversations begun at the meeting will continue throughout the year.

• In contrast, the college and the library reach out to its community members throughout the year through the alumnae magazine, fund raising efforts and news updates- all in print and on-line.

• The college serves as a central point to which the members of the community feel connected. The college as a place is their common link.

Slide 17

• The statistics rendered both by Facebook and by TweetStats lead me to conclude that the amount of content added to either a page or feed directly impacts the amount of traffic to that social media site.

• Increased traffic increases the chance that those reading your content will participate and engage with you and each other.

• When generating content, work to bring your users back to a central information point- like your website or blog. That way the content you post isn’t the end of the conversation. Users will visit your website and possibly find a collection they didn’t know you had- or didn’t know they could access.

Slide 18

• With the poetry society other than the buzz around the annual meeting and events celebrating the poet’s birthday. I found there simply wasn’t enough new content to generate conversation among members.

• I also found that by reporting on other people’s news which I found through google alerts, I was advocating on behalf of libraries and other organizations who put on events, rather than promoting the society and their activities.

• Unless you live in the area where such an event is taking place- your less likely to comment or appreciate that information.

• In contrast, the college and the library constantly have events going on.

• By tying in my posts from the archives to campus events, I found that alumnae really enjoyed these walks down memory lane.

• In March, I posted a picture of the first trolley car rides students rode from the college into town.

• One alumnae posted the comment on the library’s facebook wall: “firsts are not always easy. but 2 discover a digital archive @ my alma mater—- first of the Sisters. ride on sister.”

• This alum enjoyed the post, but also liked knowing about the digital archive where all of the content the archives digitizes lives.

• Perhaps in the future this alum will visit the archive during one of her reunions or possibly donate her papers to the repository.

Slide 19

• So social media: what is it good for???

• I have several recommendations for those of you thinking about implementing social media tools at your repository.

• I suggest that you approach social media tools a method for increasing the conversation between you and your users.

• This interaction makes your job easier and more fun.

• I don’t believe pushing content out through Twitter or Facebook should be a one-way street. Always work to create a dialog.

• As you plan your social media implementation and execute your plan you should keep in mind your initial goals and reasons for using these tools.

• With your goals in mind you can better measure your success.

• And finally, despite the seeming ubiquitous nature of social media tools- these new outreach methods should be integrated and not replace your existing suite of methods.

• We still need newspaper articles covering the opening of a new exhibit, posters announcing a lecture series and good old fashion word of mouth.

Slide 20

Thank you.

Amy MacDonald shared the results of assessing her social media program which just hit the two year mark, as a University Archivist at Duke. Across all Duke libraries there is a blog that all can contribute to, 5 different Facebook pages, 1 Twitter account, 5 Flickr accounts as well as a Duke Library YouTube channel.

Here are her suggestions:

#1 “Have Fun/ Take it Seriously”: consider social media as integral and not separate from your general PR strategy, and work to unite with other content creators to push out a cohesive message.

#2 “Bringing In/Sending Out”: push out content through social media may not result in bringing new or more users into your repository, but it increased the chance that these remote users can experience the treasures you have.

#3 “Community Finds Us/ We Find Community” : just pushing out content, doesn’t mean a community of users will materials.

#4 “Your Content/ Their Content”: as archivists we may have a different interpretation of our materials, than a user might. Both interpretation can be valid and valuable.

Greg Hansard from the Virginia Historical Society shared a fascinating project called “Unknown No Longer”. On this site, staff have scanned and uploaded records in their repository that allow users to trace their genealogy and research the history of slaves in Virginia. As the site’s name implies, it’s purpose is to provide names for the often faceless category of slave.

I would have liked to know how the site was put together, not just its functionality. Is this a grant funded project? What software does it use? How much staff time is needed to maintain the site and answer user questions on the community forum?

From this session I felt encouraged that archivists are approaching social media in different ways and are beginning to pay attention to assessing these activities in the same way we track exhibit viewers and reference queries.

However, as an audience member, I had difficulty envisioning how the departments functioned before the change. It seems that by cross- training subject librarians to be able to answer any question posed, would take up precious time. I would rather know who to refer a researcher to than possibly provide faulty information. I believe as archivists and information professionals, we best serve our users when we admit we don’t know the answer but can provide an informed referral to a colleague.

The second speaker, Patrick Connelly who works for NARA and described the massive changes the organization has experienced over the past year. Largely driven by new national archivist David Ferriero, NARA is working to make its operation more open and transparent to the public and remove layers of bureaucracy to create a hierarchy more receptive to staff comments.

Most interesting for me was Connelly’s discussion of how the organizational chart changed from being organized by geography and is now structured based on job junctions. I think NARA archivists no matter where they work best serve the profession and their users by working together, rather than being hemmed in and structured by the geographic location.

NARA’s change from geography to function mirrors the changes many libraries are implementing.

While I had hoped this session would provide concrete strategies and suggestions for implementing change, I left encouraged by NARA attention to becoming a more open organization- but also skeptical of whether the changes enacted by both the University of Maryland and NARA will stand up to staff and the public’s assessment.

The second speaker

Tim Pyatt’s “Not for the Uninitiated Documenting Secret Societies” conveyed how he has captured these organization’s records through Google searches, Facebook queries, web captures and yearbook images. It turns out these secret societies are not so secret after all!

Jackie Esposito’s: Facebook Me: Documents Student Organizations Using Social Media centered around her experience capturing the records of an annual dance marathon held at Penn State. By finding a student in the organization interested in becoming a student historian or archivist, Esposito trains these students in basic archival practice and follows up with the student before the end of the semester to be sure all relevant content has been recovered. Esposito uses a web caching software to harvest the data posted to the dance marathon’s Facebook page. Using the same appraisal practices as with analog records, Esposito picks and chooses the content that gets saved by selecting out of the 2,500 pictures that gets posted, 4-6 daily posts with 175 replies to each, and over 33,000 followers.

The final presenter, Janet Olson from Northwestern University presented her experiences titled: "140 Characters in Search of an Author or: All A-twitter in the Northwestern Archives." After the library administration striped the archives of its blogs during the summer of 2010, Olsen decided to reach her users through establishing a Twitter account. One of the blogs was a "on this day in NU history." The administration allowed Olsen to tweet using only this theme. She's not allowed to retweet or reply to a tweet. For the past year, Olsen has tweeted once per day and has amassed 489 followers, 90% are in the NU community.

While listening to Olsen I became intrigued by the fact that while 489 users follow the NU account, they only follow 295 users in return. Olsen's rationale for this decision is that she wants to reach users/students through their activities on campus, not as individuals.

I believe this practice will ultimately stunt the growth of this outreach method. As long as Olsen can't retweet, or reply to a tweet, she's missing the opportunity to engage her audience in a conversation. As of now these tweets are pushed out as one-way communication. By choosing not to follow individual students, Olsen may be missing the chance to connect with her primary user group.

As a twitter user, I tend to "unfollow" organizations or individual users who do not follow me back. I view twitter as a two way street of communication- both sides must be open to that exchange.

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.