Category Archives: TARO News

TARO Index Terms Survey

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Dear TARO participants,

 We need your input to plan our path forward in relation to the Index Terms (also known as <controlaccess> terms) such as personal and corporate names, subject terms, and genre terms used in finding aids submitted to TARO.

 As you may know, TARO has not in the past strictly required use of a particular controlled vocabulary, and repositories have used what fit their collections. This has resulted in a rather wide variety of headings in TARO, raising concerns for the user’s experience in trying to browse TARO by index terms. Imagine for example, browsing across all name, subject, or format headings in TARO – there would be similar headings with minor differences in them, some finding aids with many headings and some with few, some with ending punctuation and others with none, some with local headings, some with only authorized headings.

 We are therefore exploring whether it makes sense to either:

1.) Engage in TARO-wide index term clean up work (with repository participation / approval) and require use of only specific vocabularies going forward or

2.) Leave repositories to use vocabularies as they wish, and implement software (Metadata Hopper) to apply broad subject categories for browsing purposes. A program using this software is the [explore.chicagocollections.org]Chicago Collections.

 Many repositories will have varied answers to these questions, please just answer as best you can. The information will not be publicized; it will only be used to get an honest view for planning purposes.

 Please answer our very brief survey by Friday June 2, 2017.

TARO workshop coming up May 2017

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Hello fellow TARO folks —

Amy Bowman and I are excited to offer a TARO workshop May 24, 2017,
at the Society of Southwest Archivists annual meeting,
located this year in beautiful Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Watch for registration through the Society of Southwest Archivists, opening soon.

The workshop has a max size of 15 participants, so sign up early if you are interested.
If there is a wait list, we can discuss a Winter offering in a Texas location.

Here is a description:

Introduction to TARO: Encoding and Submitting Finding Aids

Date: Wednesday, May 24

Time: 10.00 am – 5.00 pm (full day) 1.00 – 5.00 pm (half-day)

Cost: $100.00 (full day – price includes box lunch)/$50.00 (half-day)

Location: SSA Conference Hotel (info)

Trainer: Amy Bowman and Amanda Focke

Description:

This workshop will teach the hands-on basic skills needed to participate in TARO, including basic XML familiarity and editing, EAD familiarity, how to upload files to TARO, and troubleshooting. The full day is recommended for those with little or no TARO, EAD, or XML experience. The half-day (afternoon only) is recommended as a refresher for those who might feel rusty and/or have work environment changes which have changed their approach to TARO (such as using collection management software now instead of hand-encoding XML). The workshop is open to anyone but is focused on TARO guidelines and workflows.

This is not an intensive EAD course, or an intensive XML class, but will show the basics to get you started and share resources to help you once you return to your workplace.

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Would you like a detailed class specifically on EAD/XML?
Amigos is offering such a class live-online (four 2-hr sessions), in March 2017.
Get the details here: http://www.amigos.org/node/3587

All best,
Amanda Focke
Rice University
TARO Steering Committee Chair, 2017

TARO grant and Steering Committee Update

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Dear TARO members,

As we move into the next phase of the TARO infrastructure update, Amanda Focke and I wanted to send out an update about our NEH planning grant and share the next steps for the TARO Steering Committee.

The final version of our NEH planning grant may be reviewed here. Our deepest thanks go out to all of you who helped make this grant happen with your participation on TARO committees this year—we accomplished a whole lot during the grant term! Amanda and I were especially pleased that we were able to include a Memorandum of Understanding with UT Libraries in the final report. A special thanks goes out to Aaron Choate from UT Libraries for writing the MOU and steering it through UT Libraries’ administration. Note that the MOU covers just the interim grant phase, it is not a final determination of TARO’s institutional home. However, this MOU does provides us with a solid home base from which to apply for implementation funds.

TARO will now head into a new phase with its the Steering Committee, which will be a smaller group over the coming months: Amanda Focke will serve as Chair, Sandra Yates will serve as Vice-Chair, Carol Mead will serve as Secretary, and Carla Alvarez, Ann Hodges, and Kelly Kerbow-Hudson will be our At-Large Reps. In addition, Aaron Choate will become much more involved with the TARO Steering Committee, acting as the UT Libraries representative on the committee. Steering Committee members will no longer chair subcommittees.

We hope that everyone who’d like to be involved the TARO implementation project will continue to do so through TARO subcommittees; we expect that subcommittee work will begin ramping up again in the New Year after the new Steering Committee has had a chance to meet.

There’s a lot to look forward to with TARO over the next year, including the continuation  and conclusion of the schema conversion project, planning for submission of the implementation grant, continued discussions regarding TARO’s institutional home, and ongoing updates to TARO spaces like the blog and wiki. In addition, Amanda and I are also happy to announce that we’ll be giving a TARO training workshop at SSA in Fayetteville in May 2017.

Best,

Amy and Amanda

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Amy Bowman, Outgoing Co-Chair, TARO Steering Committee Photographs Archivist, Briscoe Center for American History