Tag Archives: TARO Steering Committee

TARO Updates – Virtual Brown Bag to be held June 23

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Connect with TARO at a Virtual Brown Bag
While the 2020 Society of Southwest Archivists annual meeting in Denton has been cancelled due to public health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic, TARO will hold its Brown Bag informational meeting, traditionally held at SSA, as a virtual meeting from noon to 1pm on Tuesday, June 23, 2020. Look for the registration announcement to be made soon through various archives group communication outlets, the TARO member email list, and the TARO Today blog. It’s not required that you already be affiliated with a TARO member repository to attend—all are welcome!

NEH Implementation Grant – Progress Report
TARO’s National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) implementation grant activities are underway! This work will fund key improvements to our web presence and behind-the-scenes operations and enhance support of our members’ ability to share their collection description with this vital statewide finding aid consortium. Grant activities include:

  • Redesign of the TARO website and software platform to improve functionality and appearance
  • Work toward standardizing existing index terms (names and subject headings)
  • Providing training to TARO members to support their participation
  • Review of the latest revision of Encoded Archival Description standards to anticipate a future upgrade of TARO finding aids from EAD 2002 to EAD3

Grant work began in May 2019 and will extend through April 2022, with the funding administered through the University of Texas Libraries, TARO’s institutional home. Members of the TARO Steering Committee and its subcommittees will carry out work as outlined in the grant. Funding supports hiring of a software developer for a two-year term (UT Libraries’ Senior Software Developer/Analyst Minnie Rangel now fills this position), a metadata librarian for a one-year term, and a web graphic designer hired on a project basis (the last two positions are currently being recruited).

In February 2020, TARO Steering Committee members, its subcommittee chairs, and UT Libraries technical support staff met in person at the Perry-Castañeda Library on the UT Austin campus for a first all-hands meeting to discuss grant planning and activities. Through 2020, development of the new TARO software platform and web interface will begin (including a new TARO logo design and web page color/font palette and wrapper) and usability studies to test the new interface will commence. Once hired, the metadata librarian will analyze index terms as they currently exist in TARO finding aids and begin compiling reports of necessary corrections for TARO member repositories to implement. TARO membership training workshops will be planned, and we’re exploring options for remote training, including webinars and tutorials, so stay tuned for announcements of those opportunities. A second all-hands meeting is scheduled for October 2020.

Summerlee New Member Initiative Project
This Summerlee Foundation-funded project began in 2018 (and will extend at least through 2023) and supports vendor-encoding of legacy finding aids to help new or dormant TARO member repositories participate in TARO. Building on the first eleven participating repositories, we have since added these two participants: the African American Museum (Dallas), and The University of Texas at El Paso, C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department. Over 100 finding aids have been submitted by the participants for encoding, and more than a third of those now appear on TARO. The goal is for over 1,000 finding aids to be added to TARO from at least 25 new members by the end of this initiative. This project is overseen by the immediate past chair of the TARO Steering Committee (which for 2020 is Carla Alvarez) and supported by a quality assurance team of seasoned encoding volunteers from TARO member repositories. Current TARO Steering Committee Chair Rebecca Romanchuk is recruiting new participating repositories for this project—contact her at rromanchuk@tsl.texas.gov if your repository is interested in becoming a new TARO member through this initiative, or if your repository would like to join TARO as a self-sustaining member (repositories using ArchivesSpace can join TARO by exporting EAD finding aids using these steps).

TARO’s participation in NAFAN
In November 2019, the California Digital Library (CDL), University of California, released its action plan representing the culmination of the “Toward a National Finding Aid Network” (NAFAN) planning initiative. In March 2020, UT Libraries sent a letter of support on behalf of TARO to CDL for its submission of an IMLS National Leadership Grants for Libraries full proposal to conduct a two-year research and demonstration project to establish the foundations for a national-level archival finding aid network. TARO pledged to participate in future grant activities in several ways, including sharing finding aid and repository data, providing input on system and functional requirements, testing and evaluating prototype systems, and participating in advisory structures and working groups.

Stay in Touch
TARO working wiki
TARO Today
TARO Best Practices Guidelines

– Rebecca Romanchuk
2020 TARO Steering Committee Chair

TARO 2019 Report

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TARO Colleagues,

We’ve had an eventful year and look forward to other exciting years as we work to revamp the TARO site! This year we were awarded an NEH grant to redesign the TARO site, we continued to expand our membership, participated in the Toward a National Archival Finding Aid Network (NAFAN) initiative, and held Steering Committee elections in November.

2020 Steering Committee

News and Accomplishments

NEH implementation grant
In March 2019, we announced that TARO was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). This implementation grant will allow us to redesign the TARO site and provides funding to hire a software developer for 2 years and a metadata librarian for 1 year.

New member repositories
In 2019, we added new repositories as part of the New Member Initiative (Summerlee Foundation grant funded project). Under this project, repositories create Word finding aids, which are reviewed by our QA Finding Aid Subcommittee, and then sent to a vendor to get encoded. The EAD finding aids returned by the vendor are then reviewed by the QA team before uploading to the TARO server. Here is a list of our participating repositories to date, they have all signed a project agreement:

  1. Harris County Archives (2018)
  2. Menil Collection Archives (2018)
  3. Fort Worth Jewish Archives (2018)
  4. Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum Research Center (2018)
  5. Catholic Archives of Texas (2018)
  6. Lamar University (2018)
  7. Harlingen Public Library (2019)
  8. Dallas Historical Society (2019)
  9. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019)
  10. University of Houston – Clear Lake (2019)

In November 2019, a batch of 29 EAD XML files from Harris County Archives, Catholic Archives of Texas, and Lamar University Archives and Special Collections were uploaded to TARO.

We continue to add repositories as part of our regular process. This year the Emily Fowler Central Library, Denton Public Library and the Texas Christian University (TCU) joined TARO. We also started the process with the Vertebrate Paleontology Archive at UT Austin.

It’s very exciting to share news of our increased membership! This truly shows how vibrant our community is because current members continue to add content to the TARO site and new repositories are joining.

Looking Ahead

  • January-December: continue to recruit repositories to participate under the Summerlee funded New Member Initiative.
  • February: Kick-off, in person meeting of the Steering Committee and Subcommittee chairs with the software developer.
  • May 21/22: TARO Brown Bag at SSA in Denton, Texas.
  • May 30: New TARO membership period deadline for July.
  • May/June: Metadata librarian hired under the NEH grant will start work.
  • November 30: New TARO membership period deadline for January

You can find other information about upcoming work and the TARO redesign timeline here.

Stay in Touch
TARO Today: https://sites.utexas.edu/taro/
TARO wiki: http://texastaro.pbworks.com/
TARO Best Practices Guidelines: http://bit.ly/2AIonsy

Thank you!!!
I want to thank Samantha Dodd and Paul Fisher for their two years of service as At-Large members of the Steering Committee.

We all have a role to play to ensure TARO continues to be a vibrant and dynamic community resource! You can continue to add your finding aids, help us recruit new repository members, get involved with one of the subcommittees, participate in the TARO Brown Bag at SSA, and/or provide your feedback as requested by TARO reps.

– Carla O. Alvarez
2019 Chair of the TARO Steering Committee

TARO 2018 and beyond

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Hello TARO!

We’ve come to the end of another productive year. I’ve enjoyed serving as your Steering Committee Chair throughout the year! The in-coming 2019 Steering Committee members are:

Chair: Carla Alvarez, UT Libraries, Benson Latin American Collection, c.alvarez@austin.utexas.edu

Vice-Chair: Rebecca Romanchuk, Texas State Library and Archives Commission, rromnchk@tsl.texas.gov

Secretary: Irene Lule, University of Texas, Harry Ransom Center, irenelule@utmail.utexas.edu

At-large member (2018-2019, 2 year term): Samantha Dodd, Southern Methodist University, smdodd@smu.edu

At-large member (2018-2019, 2 year term): Paul Fisher, Baylor University, Paul_Fisher@baylor.edu

At-large member (2018-2020, 3 year term): Robert Weaver, Texas Tech University, robert.g.weaver@ttu.edu

UT Libraries representative: Aaron Choate, UT Libraries, achoate@austin.utexas.edu

Immediate Past Chair: Sandra Yates, McGovern Historical Center, Texas Medical Center Library, syates@library.tmc.edu

Programmers are J.J. Bennett and Joanna Jackson, UT Libraries, lib-taro@austin.utexas.edu

Thank You!
I’d like to thank the Steering Committee members that are rolling off the committee this year. Amanda Focke served as Immediate Past Chair, Chair of the Governance subcommittee, and Chair of the QA subcommittee for the Summerlee Project. Carol Mead served as Steering Committee Secretary for three years. I’m sure we’ll still see them around in TARO circles. Another huge thank you to Amy Bowman and her hard work as Chair of the Funding subcommittee pulling the NEH grant together and getting the award from the Summerlee Foundation. Finally to all the TARO members, thank you for your feedback throughout the year, your service on subcommittees, and, most importantly, submitting finding aids. TARO is growing, and we can’t do it without you!

2018 Major Accomplishments
University of Texas Libraries became TARO’s official institutional home

We received funding from the Summerlee
Foundation for our New Member Initiative Project, which is a 5-year project to encode finding aids and increase member participation in TARO. The QA subcommittee is already reviewing a small test batch of EAD XML files from the vendor, Digital Divide Data (DDD).

We submitted the implementation grant application to the NEH to improve TARO’s platform, technical infrastructure, and website.

New TARO URL Surveys
Thanks again for your feedback about possible TARO domain names! This will be in many cases the first impression of TARO in the years to come, and we want to make sure that it suits us.  During the Steering Committee meeting on December 17th, we had a lively discussion about the results–the whys, pros, and cons for each (see minutes, 2018-12-17.docx). None of them are a perfect fit, and I understand the feedback that I’ve received over the last few months. The Steering Committee decided to table the topic until next year, hoping for more perspectives from users, general public (potential users) as well as in terms of effective branding. So during the holidays and in the coming months, ask your researchers, family, and  your neighborhood marketing and graphic designers about what would be the best domain name for TARO. Feel free to send me any feedback, syates@library.tmc.edu.

Looking ahead to 2019
January:
TARO Today blog will be moved to a UT sites page
The blog is where we share the latest news, How-To Tutorials, and details about TARO membership.

February 25: Introduction to TARO: Encoding and Submitting Finding Aids
Amy Bowman and Amanda Focke will be teaching a workshop at the Texas State Library and Archives Commission in Austin.

Learn 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.

You can register through SSA. $85 (full day) or $50 (half day)

March: We will hear from NEH about the implementation grant awards.

May: Pending grant funds, the three-year implementation project to improve TARO’s platform and website will begin.

May 30: New TARO membership period deadline for July.

November 30: New TARO membership period deadline for January

Summerlee Project will upload new findings aids for participating repositories and welcome five more new members to TARO.

Stay in Touch
TARO working wiki: http://texastaro.pbworks.com/
TARO Best Practices Guidelines: http://bit.ly/2AIonsy

If you have anything to add about the accomplishments of TARO and its members, please share with us.

Thanks again and see you in 2019!

Sandra Yates
Chair, 2018 TARO Steering Committee