October 2, 2017
Chip Calhoun, Digital Archivist
September has ended, and so has my month of running our social media. Because so much of my work is on our databases and our online resources, I took us on a tour of some of those. Before our next INTO THE STACKS tour guide takes over, let's review the things we looked at this month.
We started with one of our most recent projects, the Physics History Network. We've been discussing this a lot (we're very proud of it!), but this month we looked at the XML standard behind it and how we get that encoded.
The sample here is our biography of James Van Allen, born #OTD in 1914! https://t.co/rJYnpKZXzv 3/3 #PHNFact #archives pic.twitter.com/qFkPRyvkle
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 7, 2017
This month all of the archivists here worked on adding new records to our International Catalog of Sources, so I showed how we create those catalog records.
This week I'm doing my share of the archives cataloging to keep this resource up to date. -Chip pic.twitter.com/1ISQrM3ZAH
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 13, 2017
I also showed how we encode the finding aids which describe our collections.
A finding aid explains the content of archives collections. This is how we publish them online. -Chip #archives https://t.co/VWKYoFSMLx pic.twitter.com/20bVfv1jW9
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 15, 2017
Next I showed off our growing online collection of online manuscript biographies. We have many more in our collections, and I'm working on getting the permissions squared away so we can put them online; in the meantime, all of them are listed in our catalog.
Getting back to scanning manuscript biographies. We've got a growing collection of these online. -Chip https://t.co/28rFHRqEQd pic.twitter.com/7F0Es83crU
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 20, 2017
On a #throwbackthursday we dug up our old site from the late '90s.
We've been on the web for 20 years! This is one of our earliest pages from 1997. -Chip #tbt #throwbackthursday #histphys pic.twitter.com/wIhuQpTBbG
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 21, 2017
We also found our old Awards & Webrings page, which is how we got around the web in the days before modern search. -Chip #tbt pic.twitter.com/fp4FLOuZLm
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 21, 2017
I talked a little about backup tapes, which we've only dipped our toe into dealing with. We try to bring in digital collections on less awkward formats, but that's not always an option.
We can't read these, but the contents are restricted for 50 years for privacy reasons. The tapes are stable enough to wait. 2/2
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 28, 2017
And I talked a little about email, another relatively new area for us.
PDF conversions can be more usable; but none of the software accounts for every weird email formatting choice made over the years. 2/2
— Niels Bohr Library (@AIPhistory) September 29, 2017
Thank you for coming with me on this month's tour! Our INTO THE STACKS guide for October will be posting soon.