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Rebecca and I again had the opportunity to attend UNC’s CurateGear last week, and the presentations were excellent. CurateGear provides an overview and technical demos of selected digital curation tools, but this year seems to be focused on broader issues and I found it much more useful.

Erika Farr reported on Emory’s use of Redbooth in her presentation “Measure for Measure: Tracking Effort in Born Digital Processing,” which enabled them to collect assessment data on how long it actually took staff to process digital files for the archives. Their numbers came down to 5MB per hour (18 files), not necessarily encouraging in regards to speed and effort, but there always needs to be a starting point.

Nancy McGovern (MIT) updated the group on Digital Preservation Management Tools. She has been involved for many years with the DP workshops, and they are expanding their repertoire to include Collection Management Workflows, Disaster Preparedness, and a Self-Assessment Audit. I also attended a NYPL session on providing research room access to electronic records with a stand-alone PC. As the speaker, Susan Malbury noted, archivists have been focusing on the ingest and preservation of electronic records, as opposed to researchers accessing them, but this will change in the future. Katherine Skinner spoke about MetaArchive, a cooperative network preserving digital records by following the LOCKSS concept. Angela Spinazze spoke about CollectionsSpace, an open-source platform to handle eclectic collections such as archaeological objects and botanical specimens. CollectionsSpace is now under the LYRASIS umbrella.

If anyone is interested, please see the CurateGear agenda as there are links to all of the presentations: http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/curategear2015.html