Activities and projects
The Curator's workbench: Engaging Archivists through Tools for Digital Content
Date Added:30 November 2011
Archivists prefer to use best of breed tools to process digital content. However, they are forced to combine these tools in cumbersome, manually orchestrated procedures that impede workflow. Valuable time and mental focus are lost when switching from one application to another.
Archivists across the discipline are interested in better ways to accession, arrange and describe digital objects, while maintaining provenance, content and structure. The project aims to bring archivists together to share this interest, as well as their practices and needs.
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) would like to develop a user community around the Curator’s Workbench – a new accessioning, arrangement and description tool for digital content.
The Curator's Workbench is an open-source, pre-ingest tool, developed at UNC, to support appraisal and processing of digital materials. The open source code and wiki is available on github, https://github.com/UNC-Libraries/Curators-Workbench .
Participating archivists will gain skills related to the Curator's Workbench, in many cases through adoption of the Workbench as a tool for orchestrating ingest. Participants will also benefit from the expertise and practices shared by their colleagues. The sessions will result in detailed recommendations for the software and notes about processing needs. The project promoters aim to capture participant reactions to the user experience posed by the workbench and ask them to explore the possibilities raised by more powerful software tools.
The project promoters: the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and the JISC.
The project is supported by PCOM.