Just got back from the Society of Southwest
Archivist’s conference in Austin, Texas.
[http://southwestarchivists.org/]
Got out just before the heavy rains that caused massive flooding in San
Antonio. No rain here in the
Rolling Plains. It looks like August
or September – all dried up.
It was my first time at this
conference and it was great. The
organization is small enough not to be overwhelming. I heard someone say about 290 people were registered. The SSA covers six states – Texas,
Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Arizona – although anyone from
anywhere can join. And as I
mentioned it was in Austin, which is a great city with the best restaurants and
music scene anywhere. This
conference was so good I actually went to all the sessions – not my usual modus
operandi. I guess I shouldn’t
admit that.
The first session I went to made me
wish that I was back in school. It
was a case study of a re-created disaster management experience – part of a
course in the Informational Technology Department at the University of Texas at
Austin. The first test addressed
water damage. They gathered all
sorts of both objects and paper and drowned them in a sink. Then they tried
different methods of salvage and preservation. Next they got another set of
stuff and with the help of the fire department set things on fire and again
practiced disaster rescue techniques. What a great training tool and such fun. Since
I’ve had to deal with wet paper and burned paper that would have been helpful
experience. Maybe I’ll practice at home.
Another tidbit that I learned was
about a program called Archive-It.
(http://www.archive-it.org/) This program is a web harvester and is
used to archive websites by taking snapshots of web pages at set
intervals. University libraries and
archives use the program to preserve their institutions web pages. Now that so
much of information is born digital, documentation of course catalogs or department
news or whatever can easily be lost. With this program you can set it to crawl specific web pages
at whatever interval you want and it will take a snapshot of the page say once
a month or once a semester or whenever.
Archives responsible for preservation of their institutions’ digitally
born history should really look into this. I’m telling my institutions about
it. Of course it costs money, but
the presenters felt that its usability made it well worth the cost.
The highlight of the conference for
me was a case study of a new collection at the library of the School of
Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. Beth Dodd, Architecture and
Planning Library Curator, talked about an unbelievably rich collection of
photographs, drawings, and unpublished notes and reports on the architecture of
the Maya by George and Gerrie Andrews. I’m so jealous.
I’d love to work on something like that. Why? Well, I happen to have a PhD in archaeology although my
specialty is Maya ceramics not architecture. I used to work in Belize and I’ve seen some of the sites
documented in this collection, but not all. How many certified archivists with a background in Maya
studies could there be? It would be such fun, especially to see pictures taken
in the fifties and sixties. Maybe I should go volunteer to work on that
collection. As an added bonus, it is Austin.
See: [http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utaaa/00060/aaa-00060.html]
for the Andrews Maya Architecture collection
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