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On Wednesday, I traveled to Chapel Hill with Tanya and Chelcie to attend CurateGear. It was a very enjoyable day and I learned a lot about software and services that are available. I want to add to Tanya’s post by discussing some of the most interesting things I heard about during the day.

As part of my work, I manage the web archive for ZSR. We subscribe to ArchiveIt, a service through the Internet Archive, so I was excited to see and talk with Lori Donovan. Lori has been a point person for our work. She was demoing ArchiveIt for potentially new customers, but I did have a chance to speak with her about tackling the ever changing arena of social media captures. She described that ArchiveIt is working on “headless browsers” to better capture social media sites. This was good news to me and a very exciting development for web archiving!

I also briefly sat in on a discussion of ArchiveSocial, another web archive tool. I had seen a presentation about this at SNCA and was excited to hear more. The State Archives is successfully using this tool to wholly capture social media outlets of government officials as mandated by law. This software requires the login and passwords of the social media accounts in order to capture (and display) everything related to the account, including direct messages. This tool is great for the State Archives because of the nature of public records and transparency, but I don’t believe we’ll be implementing it here anytime soon.

Finally, I was very excited to hear from Brad Westbrook about ArchivesSpace, a new software that is merging Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon. This has been a very exciting and talked about development in the archives world. Brad did a brief demo showing both the user and back end experiences of the new software. Much of it was similar to Archivists’ Toolkit, but there were certainly more changes to come and some lingering questions as the development continues.

I must say, I found CurateGear a valuable experience and it certainly stretched my understanding of some tools and technology. I’m grateful for the opportunity to attend and look forward to using all that I learned here at ZSR. If anyone would like to talk more about my experience, I’m happy to!