Hello TARO!
We have completed our first full year of our New Member Initiative project, funded by the Summerlee Foundation. You can review the Year 1 report on the TARO wiki.
Also, we have our first large batch of about 29 XML files up on TARO for the following repositories.
Lamar University Archives and Special Collections
Thank you to Sandra Yates, Chair of the Summerlee Quality Assurance (QA) Subcommittee and all the QA team members for their work!!!
TARO is participating in a national discussion on the current archival description landscape and future collaboration possibilities.
Read on to learn about a new report, “Finding Aid Aggregation at a Crossroads” (“Crossroads”): https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5sp13112
This report is a primary deliverable of the “Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network” (NAFAN) project, a one-year (October 2018 – September 2019) planning initiative convened by the California Digital Library (CDL), with the participation of representatives from multiple state and regional finding aid aggregations. The report provides a survey of the current landscape of archival description — in particular, finding aid aggregations — and was developed to ground discussions of how best to provide access to archival collections, ensure the long-term sustainability of that access, and plan for future developments in this space.
Many archival description aggregators across the country struggle to find sufficient resources to update their platforms and to engage with some of the most promising advances in the field. With crucial funding support from the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), administered in California by the State Librarian, the “Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network” initiative aims to tackle these challenges by exploring the creation of a national archival finding aid network that could fundamentally transform the archival description landscape while continuing to serve the needs of aggregators and archival repositories. By pooling resources and establishing co-development partnerships, we believe we can address our individual challenges collectively, thereby extending the capabilities, breadth, and depth of existing aggregations.
The release of the “Crossroads” report, along with the related symposium held in June of this year, represents significant progress towards several of the planning initiative’s key objectives, including validating high-level requirements for finding aid aggregations. Developing a collective understanding of the needs and challenges of this domain is a necessary first step for establishing the trajectory of any future finding aid aggregation effort.
This fall, NAFAN will be posting and sharing outcomes from the planning project, including an action plan for next steps. The hope is that this planning initiative will move us beyond that analysis to the common goal of developing a robust, sustainable, shared infrastructure to leverage the advances in archival description that promise to enhance research and discovery in the future.
Please see the project wiki for more information.
– Announcement from Adrian Turner, California Digital Library
If you work at a TARO-member institution, you have an opportunity to help with important and exciting work ahead for TARO! Over the next three years, volunteers will be contributing to supporting the success of TARO’s recently-awarded NEH grant. The grant will entail substantial changes to TARO, chiefly: a redesign of its web platform to improve functionality and appearance, a review of EAD3 encoding standards, working towards standardizing existing control access terms (subject headings, geographic names), and further training for TARO members in contributing finding aids.
So how can you help? TARO has five subcommittees that will assist with this grant work. The following subcommittees are looking for new members: Outreach/Education, Standards, and Technology/Website. Information about each subcommittee and its current chairs and co-chairs is available here.
We are looking for people with an interest in any of these areas (no expertise is required!) to become a member of a subcommittee. The amount of time you have available for this work will always be a good fit—there are no specific time commitments involved. Our subcommittees will be providing support to two positions hired through the grant (an applications developer and a metadata librarian) and will have specific tasks assigned to them. Grant activities will be led by an already-staffed Grant subcommittee and the TARO Steering Committee.
Contact the subcommittee chair/co-chairs to express interest in joining one of our subcommittees. Now is the time to gain experience in grant work on a manageable scale for you, and at the same time make a meaningful contribution to the vitality of TARO!