Society of American Archivists Conference Recap

San Diego, California, was the site for this year's annual Society of American Archivists conference, August 6–11, and Smithsonian Institution Archives staff was well represented. The week kicked off with our own Jennifer Wright (Archives and Information Management Team Leader) and Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig (Electronic Records Archivist), along with Kelly Eubank (Electronic Records Branch Manager at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources) giving a workshop on archiving websites. The day-long workshop focused on issues of appraising; selecting websites pertinent to collection policies; evaluating in-house technology versus hosted-solution tools to curate and capture websites; managing tools to fine-tune curation; and included hands-on archiving activities.

I, who serve as a Supervisory Archivist here at the Archives, chaired a session on Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF). EAC-CPF is a standard that focuses on creating authority histories and biographies that give context to archival records. The session highlighted projects that aim to link and share these histories to create a network of information among archives around the world. Speakers included: Ray Larson (Professor, University of California, Berkeley) and Brian Tingle (California Digital Library) who spoke abou the Social Networks and Archival Context project; Daniel V. Pitti (Associate Director, University of Virginia) who discussed the National Archival Authorities Cooperative; and Jerry Simmons (Archives Specialist for Data Standards, National Archives at College Park) who highlighted National Archives and Record Administration’s (NARA) preparations for EAC-CPF and Linked Open Data.

I also spoke to the Science, Technology and Healthcare Roundtable, giving an overview and update of the Smithsonian Institution Archives and the National Museum of Natural Historys collaborative Field Book Project.

Related Resources

• Society of American Archivists
• Social Networks and Archival Context Project
• Field Book Project, Smithsonian Institution Archives and National Museum of Natural History