Tag Archives: updates

Register today for the TARO Brown Bag (free webinar)!

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Registration is now open for the 6th annual TARO Brown Bag, to be held online Tuesday, June 23, 12:00-1:00pm, where you’ll hear the latest about our grant-funded activities to redesign the TARO website, improve its search function, and provide assistance to our members with free training in creating finding aids and in improving finding aid metadata.

Our Steering Committee and subcommittees will discuss their roles and the grant projects they’re undertaking. You’ll also learn about ways you can become involved by volunteering to join one of our subcommittees or by being nominated for one of the Steering Committee officer positions that will be open in 2021. Is your institution interested in becoming a new TARO member repository? Learn how easy it is to join. All are welcome!

Register here (required): https://zoom.us/webinar/register/2315912272368/WN_f8wG1kAiQkygLeQrFWBJeQ

We look forward to you joining us!

Rebecca Romanchuk
2020 TARO Steering Committee Chair

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