Matthew Farrell
Biography
Matthew Farrell is Digital Records Archivist with the Duke University Archives and David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. He holds an MLS with a concentration in Archives and Records Management from the University of North Carolina School of Information & Library Science. For the BitCurator Consortium, he has served on the Start-up Committee and User Forum Program Committee. His research interests include methods to provide virtualized access to electronic materials in current and legacy environments and leveraging the capture of web-based communication to identify and capture additional web resources.
Election Statement
As an active member of the BCC since August and a user of BitCurator since the early beta days, I’ve seen the community grow from a handful of researchers and students to a robust group of practitioners from a range of institutional contexts. The BCC has made impressive membership strides in the 10 months since its launch, yet membership still leans toward academic institutions. As a member of the Executive Council, I would work toward expanding institutional membership to more accurately represent the community of users. In addition, the BCC should work to involve more than the designated digital/electronic archivists at member institutions. We saw initial success at the User Forum in January 2015 bringing member and non-member practitioners representing a number of library and archival specializations to the table. The Executive Council can build on that success through focusing future events on specific practical implementations of BitCurator, as well as through determining how best to share documented workflows, applications and scripts to automate repetitive tasks, and advanced tutorials for obtuse processes.
Cal Lee
Biography
Christopher (Cal) Lee is Associate Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He teaches archival administration; records management; digital curation; understanding information technology for managing digital collections; and digital forensics. He is a lead organizer and instructor for the DigCCurr Professional Institute, and he teaches professional workshops on the application of digital forensics methods and principles.
Cal’s primary area of research is curation of digital collections. Cal developed “A Framework for Contextual Information in Digital Collections,” and edited and provided several chapters to I, Digital: Personal Collections in the Digital Era published by the Society of American Archivists.
Cal is Principal Investigator of BitCurator Access and was Principal Investigator of BitCurator; both projects have developed and disseminated open-source digital forensics tools for use by archivists and librarians. He was also Principal Investigator of the Digital Acquisition Learning Laboratory (DALL) project and is Senior Personnel on the DataNet Federation Consortium funded by the National Science Foundation. Cal has served as Co-PI on several projects focused on digital curation education: Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr), DigCCurr II: Extending an International Digital Curation Curriculum to Doctoral Students and Practitioners; Educating Stewards of Public Information for the 21st Century (ESOPI-21), Educating Stewards of the Public Information Infrastructure (ESOPI2), and Closing the Digital Curation Gap (CDCG).
Election Statement
In all aspects of my work (research, teaching and service) I’m particularly interested in the professionalization of digital curation work and the diffusion of existing tools and methods into professional practice. It became clear several years ago that one of the fundamental challenges faced by collecting institutions was the acquisition and processing of born-digital from external media, as well as dealing with media already in their holdings. Matt Kirschenbaum, Kam Woods and I brought a proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop, package and document open-source digital forensics software to be used by libraries, archives and museums. The result was the two-phase BitCurator project. I’ve been excited by how beneficial this work has been to institutions across the globe, and I’m equally excited that we’ve been able to form the BitCurator Consortium to sustain and extend these efforts. I would be honored to support the ongoing activities of the BCC by serving on its Executive Council.
Bradley Daigle
Biography
Bradley Daigle is Director of Digital Curation Services and Digital Strategist for Special Collections at the University of Virginia Library. Currently his is also the Content Lead for the Academic Preservation Trust and the Chair of the Virginia Heritage Governance Board. Having been in the library profession for over fifteen years, he has published and presented on a wide range of topics including mass digitization, digital curation and stewardship, sustaining digital scholarship, intellectual property issues, mentoring in libraries, and digital preservation. In addition to his professional field, his research interests also include the history of the book, natural history, and early modern British literature. He received his MA in literature from the University of Montreal and an MLS from Catholic University.
Election Statement
I have been involved with BitCurator since its inception, starting as an original member of the Professional Experts Panel. My work leading the AIMS project (Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship, 2009-11), brought me into the world of digital stewardship and forensics. I am a passionate advocate that promotes the creation of strategies for assessing, managing, and preserving born digital materials. I brought onboard UVa’s first digital archivist as part of the AIMS project and continue to advocate for open source solutions that put the control into higher education’s hands for successful solutions. I have broad experience working with many different levels of librarians and archivists—from the practitioner to deans—and have been able to guide all levels of an organization towards a common goal. I have been part of the leadership in state and national consortia and can bring that experience to bear on taking BitCurator from a project to a cornerstone of archival stewardship. I believe that the BitCurator community needs active participation from all levels of an organization. In particular, I can bring BitCurator’s needs to the managerial and senior leadership levels to move us all towards a shared vision.
Rachel Foss
Biography
Rachel Foss is Head of Contemporary Archives and Manuscripts at The British Library. Her responsibilities comprise all aspects of acquiring, preserving and promoting engagement with the Library’s collections post 1950 of literary and theatrical archives, along with political archives and collections relating to social history and public life. She serves as a Committee member on the Group for Literary Archives and Manuscripts (GLAM) and sits on the advisory board for the Archiving the Arts project, led by the National Archives. The British Library’s contemporary collections include a significant number of born-digital records in the personal archives of writers and scientists. Rachel is currently working with colleagues to establish a curatorial workflow at the Library for processing and giving access to this material. She has given numerous conference papers on personal digital archives, including at the British Library’s Digital Lives Research Workshop (September 2014) and at the Diasporic Literary Archives Network symposium at the Beinecke Library, Yale University (October 2014), and has been closely involved with the British Library’s enhanced curation initiative. Her interests include user engagement with born-digital collections, including their potential for creative users.
Election Statement
I should like to be elected to the inaugural Executive Council of the BitCurator Consortium because I believe I can bring to bear useful experience from the perspective of a subject curator. I regularly acquire new archives for the British Library’s collections and have considerable experience of working with archive creators and a good understanding of the ways in which habits of and attitudes to computer usage shape the archival record. My work at the Library involves translating existing research and development work in born-digital archives into an end-to-end curatorial workflow, which has afforded me the opportunity to gain experience in hands-on, trial and error testing and experience from a national cultural heritage institution. I have an excellent understanding of the work currently being developed in this area in UK institutions and of the need to develop practical, user-centred solutions to the challenges of born-digital collections in the context of often resource-strapped public institutions. I am passionate about advocating for the potential of these collections and the integral role they have to play in safeguarding the cultural memory for future generations.
Dorothy Waugh
Biography
Dorothy Waugh is the Digital Archives Project Archivist at the Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL) at Emory University, where she is responsible for the selection, appraisal, arrangement, and description of digital and born digital manuscript and archival material, with a particular focus on literary manuscript collections. Dorothy joined MARBL nearly three years ago, after having received her Master of Library Science from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 2012 and her Master of Arts in English Literature from the Ohio State University in 2010.
Election Statement
As a digital archivist at Emory University’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library (MARBL), I am actively engaged on a daily basis in the application of tools and methods borrowed from the field of digital forensics in an archives setting. Since arriving at MARBL, I have worked hard on the development of robust workflows for the processing of our diverse born digital collections and have learned from experience the challenges of working with such varied and idiosyncratic materials. BitCurator has played a significant role in my work to date and I am very excited about the opportunities afforded by such a resource, developed by and for the archives community. BitCurator has already demonstrated its valuable role for archivists working with born digital materials; as the tool moves into its next stage of development, I would love to play a part in shaping both how BitCurator can continue to support work in digital archives and how it can best meet some of the challenges facing practitioners working in this relatively new and fast-growing field. In particular, I am interested in how BitCurator might begin to incorporate more batch-oriented workflows in order to more efficiently deal with multiple pieces of media and in ways in which to increase support for older types of media, for example, those with legacy HFS file systems.
Porter Olsen
Biography
Porter Olsen is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the University of Maryland studying anglophone world literature and Digital Humanities. His dissertation, titled “Hacking the Empire: Reading the Digital in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Postcolonial Literature,” is under the direction of Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum. From 2011 to 2014 Porter worked as part of the BitCurator project team at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), first as a graduate assistant and then full-time as the BitCurator community lead from October 2013 to September 2014. Since the completion of the BitCurator project, Porter has continued to work at MITH as a graduate assistant where he has contributed to a number of Digital Humanities projects, including the 2014-2015 DH Incubator and the Oh Say Can You See project.
In addition to his work at MITH, Porter teaches classes on electronic literature and globalization in the English department at the University of Maryland, and has been recognized for his contributions to the department’s growing online teaching program. Before returning to graduate school, Porter worked as product manager on the United Linux initiative, an effort to create a single Linux platform shared among distributors from Germany, Brazil, the U.S., and Japan.
Election Statement
As a member of the original BitCurator team I believe I have a lot to offer the BCC executive council. In particular I would like to continue the work I started as the BitCurator community lead, helping to build the BitCurator user base through our continued outreach efforts and online education efforts. I would also like to help guide documentation efforts. Much of the documentation on the BitCurator wiki needs to be updated, and there are a number of “best practices” documents that could be added to what’s already there. As a member of the executive council I will reach out to the community and invite members to make updates to existing documentation and submit new guides. While those would be the areas I would like to focus on, I also look forward to assisting the executives in achieving the goals they set for the consortium.
Kari Smith
Biography
Kari R. Smith is Digital Archivist for the MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections where she acquires and manages born-digital content and digitized archives. She has been working with digital records and archives since 1994 and is passionate about helping people manage, protect, and use information now and into the future. She is a senior instructor for the Digital Preservation Management workshops and she has been teaching DAS courses for SAA since 2012. She had held positions of electronic records manager, digital projects archivist, archival records surveyor, and collections manager. Kari’s research interests include intellectual and long-term access to cultural material especially through interoperable metadata of digital objects. Recently she has writing and researching use cases and opportunities for embedding metadata in digital assets and on document security. Kari earned her M.S. in Information from the University of Michigan School of Information in 1998. Engineering the Future of the Past, Digital Archives at MIT is her blog discussing the work and research into establishing and managing digital archives at MIT.
Election Statement
I am running for the BitCurator Consortium Executive Council because I believe that my interests and responsibilities at MIT Libraries will allow me to make useful contributions to the community. As a member of the Start-Up Committee, I have already been involved with some governance decision making and discussions about how the Consortium might engage more users of the BitCurator Tools and foster on-going development. My support from MIT Libraries is such that I will be able to participate in Executive council meetings and events and as a Charter Member we have a commitment to the BitCurator project and the growing community of users. My engagement with an international community of peers will allow me to keep the BitCurator Consortium on the radar and also solicit input and feedback.
Michael Olson
Biography
Michael G Olson is Service Manager for Born Digital / Forensics Lab for Stanford University Libraries. In this capacity he works with library curators and other non-library constituents to build and deliver digital collections, with a primary focus on unique special collections materials. Michael also works as a technology analyst for analog and electronic media and is currently leading efforts to migrate Stanford’s department of special collections and archive of record sound to the archivists’ toolkit.
Previous accomplishments include managing the Parker Library on the Web project during its first year, and processing many of Stanford’s born-digital collections, such as Robert Creeley’s Computer Files and the Stephen Cabrinety Collection of Computer Software that includes over five thousand software titles spanning 1974-94. Before joining Stanford University Libraries in 2001, Michael received an MPhil in History and Computing in 2000 from the University of Glasgow, and a BA from the University of British Columbia in Medieval Studies in 1997.
Election Statement
I’m a firm believer in the the need for a open source suite of digital forensic curation tools designed by and for libraries, archives and museums (LAMs). There is a place in our community for commercial forensics tools but the use cases and needs of archivists are unique and require an open source solution; a set of tools who’s development is guided by archivists and technologists from the LAM community. One example of this is the need for archivists to redact data from born-digital archives. This is a concept and software requirement that is foreign to the field of forensic investigation and will never be supported by commercial forensic applications. I want to close by saying that all of the candidates up for election are extremely qualified. I rest easy knowing that if I loose this election the BitCurator Consortium will be in good and steady hands.