Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tell Us What You Think!

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Dear TARO colleagues,

For the past few months, the TARO Website & Technology Subcommittee has been busy testing the new TARO website and regularly giving our feedback to the awesome Valkyrie Squad.

The time has come to collect the input of the TARO community: our staff and our patrons. What does the new TARO website do well? What is working for you? What is not working as well? Is there anything that you are less excited about?  We are inviting the TARO community to visit the website, interact with it, and fill out a short survey questionnaire.

But wait… there’s more! If you have an extra minute or two, we have prepared a slightly more detailed questionnaire that asks you to perform a few basic tasks and record your experience: click here.

The choice is yours, whether you have time to fill out either questionnaire or both. Please feel free to include the invitation to the survey in your institution’s newsletter, website, email blast, and the like: https://bit.ly/3mrfOgV

Feedback from a variety of user types is highly appreciated: students of any level (undergraduate, graduate, K-12), teachers, faculty, researchers of any kind, archivists and librarians, the more, the merrier!

We are looking forward to learning what everyone thinks about the new TARO website.

Ada Negraru

Chair, Website & Technology Subcommittee

NAFAN receives further IMLS funding support

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Exciting news to share! The next phase of research and development for the National Archival Finding Aid Network project has been awarded grant funding and will proceed this fall. TARO has pledged to participate in these NAFAN grant activities, and we’ll keep you posted as those unfold. Here is the grant announcement:

The California Digital Library is pleased to announce a $982,175 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS – National Leadership Grants for Libraries grant program) to conduct a two-year research and demonstration project designed to build the foundation for a national archival finding aid network. This work will be undertaken in collaboration with OCLC and the University of Virginia Library, and in close partnership with statewide/regional aggregators and LYRASIS (ArchivesSpace).

“Building a National Finding Aid Network” addresses a fundamental challenge that researchers of all types face: the significant barriers to locating relevant archival materials across the vast, distributed, and unevenly supported field of cultural heritage institutions. Digital aggregations of finding aids (descriptions of archival collections) are often siloed and at-risk as their infrastructure ages and budgets dwindle, and many archives don’t even publish their finding aids online. As a result, much of the stewarded archival content in the United States is essentially invisible, and the voices documented therein are poorly represented in the historical record.

This project is rooted in the goal of providing inclusive, comprehensive, and persistent access to finding aids by laying the foundation for a national finding aid network available to all contributors and researchers. Rather than continuously adapting siloed, duplicative infrastructure, we believe we can more sustainably manage and provide access to these materials by developing a large-scale, national finding aid network that is community-driven, -sustained, and -governed.

This project will include multiple concurrent lines of work from September 2020 to August 2022:

  • Investigation of end-user and contributor needs in relation to finding aid aggregations and evaluation of the quality of existing finding aid data.
  • Technical assessments of potential systems to support network functions, including a registry of institutions and the integration of finding aid data with related content and context (e.g., SNAC), and the formulation of system requirements for a minimum viable product instantiation of the network.
  • Community building, sustainability planning, and governance modeling to support subsequent phases moving from a project to a program, post-2022.

Springboarding on earlier findings and a subsequent action plan developed through a 2018-2019 planning initiative (supported by IMLS under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act and administered in California by the State Librarian), this network promises to have a transformative and lasting impact on cultural heritage institutions and the researchers they serve by reducing barriers to discovery, expanding the historical record, and establishing a national mechanism for solving shared infrastructure challenges.

Over the coming weeks, the California Digital Library will share additional information about “Building a National Finding Aid Network” through a publicly-accessible online project workspace.

1st draft available for review: TARO schema-compliant encoding guidelines

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On behalf of Rebecca Romanchuk and Carla Alvarez, TARO Standards Committee co-chairs, please read the following asking for your feedback on the new schema-compliant encoding guidelines, which will be used by all TARO repositories after each repository is converted to schema compliance later this year.
Please know that doing your conversion, you will have one–on–one contact with a TARO volunteer to help you get started submitting finding aids in schema format using these guidelines, but we welcome your feedback on the guidelines now. ___________________________________________________________________________The TARO Standards subcommittee is pleased to announce that we have completed our first draft of the EAD 2002 Schema Best Practice Guidelines for TARO!

Texas Archival Resources Online (TARO), Texas’ EAD finding aid consortial site – https://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/, is in the midst of an NEH planning grant to develop improved systems and updated standards for TARO as it achieves sustainability to serve the archival research community into the future. Part of this work is to create new encoding guidelines for TARO repositories that conform to the EAD 2002 Schema encoding standard, which TARO will complete conversion to in 2016. These best practice guidelines (BPG) are available as a PDF at http://bit.ly/1Wk6p6W. The BPG appendices are a TARO-friendly sample Schema-compliant template for EAD encoding for your use, and an EAD finding aid ex ample. These appendices are also available at the same link as XML files.

We welcome feedback addressing every aspect of our BPG.

Go to http://goo.gl/forms/gaJXiCVtp4 to complete a brief survey to give us your ideas for how the BPG can better address your needs for EAD encoding. The survey is configured to adapt its questions depending on whether your repository is a TARO member, or if you are in Texas and have not yet joined TARO, or if you are outside of Texas and want to give us your general feedback.

Please complete the survey by Friday, June 3, 2016.

If you encode for TARO, we need to hear from you. The BPG, which will be a key tool for TARO participants, offers detailed guidance on creating EAD XML files. Even participants who export XML from software such as ArchivesSpace (and don’t see the raw XML) will need to follow TARO protocols as described in the BPG, such as formatting the <eadid>. You will need to follow the BPG in order to submit your Schema-compliant files to TARO, which each repository will be required to do by the end of 2016.

The co-chairs of the TARO Standards subcommittee extend sincere thanks to its members for their superb contributions to the BPG. Invaluable support has been provided during our drafting process by TARO Steering Committee co-chairs Amanda Focke and Amy Bowman, UT Libraries TARO technical support staff Minnie Rangel, and our NEH planning grant project manager Leigh Grinstead and grant consultant Jodi Allison-Bunnell. We are also grateful to the EAD consortial community at large for the encoding documentation they make available online, in particular Online Archive of California and Archives West, which are models that have guided us.

Cordially,

Carla Alvarez, MA, CA (co-chair – TARO Standards subcommittee)
Rare Books and Manuscripts
Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection
University of Texas at Austin

Rebecca Romanchuk, MLIS, CA (co-chair – TARO Standards subcommittee)
Team Lead, Archives / Archivist II
Archives and Information Services
Texas State Library and Archives Commission

TARO Standards subcommittee members:  
Maristella Feustle (UNT-Music Library),
Cynthia Franco (SMU-DeGolyer Library),
Molly Hults (Austin Public Library-Austin History Center),
Benna Vaughan (Baylor University-Texas Collection),
Jeffrey Warner (Rice University-Woodson Research Center).