The Best Practices Exchange ‘un’conference took place last week at the University of Indiana—Indianapolis (May 18-20, 2026), an informal get-together for librarians, archivists, and other information specialists to discuss digital information management, preservation, and access. I was fortunate enough to deliver a talk at the event, and even more fortunate to attend some really interesting sessions that seem applicable to our context at the ZSR Library, giving me great food for thought when thinking about how to approach some aspects of our work in Special Collections & Archives.

The main takeaway from this experience was, as is always the case, that library people are awesome. Especially at more informal gatherings like this, it’s always great to be reminded that there are problems everywhere, but that our colleagues across the country (and world!) have our backs. Folks are always so open about their professional issues—some of which are universal, many that are unique to their institutions—that leave me feeling so lucky to work in such a compassionate and uncompetitive field. Being new to Wake Forest University and the ZSR Library, I left this conference feeling particularly blessed to be heading back to such a great place with such great people, at an institution that is well positioned to handle some of the changes and phenomena that we are seeing these days.

I want to give a shoutout to Dean Lauren and fellow ZSR AI Engagement Task Force members, since some conversations veered into territory relating to AI in the academic library setting. A number of people were thus subjected to my elevator talk on our work creating the ZSR AI Engagement Framework, ZSR AI Values Statement, and ZSR Guide to Using AI. I got the impression that we are on the cutting edge of this kind of work and people were thankful to have something to work from when creating their own local equivalents.

Also, shoutout Tanya Zanish-Belcher for recommending this conference to me in the first place. You were right, there are so many wonderful people involved at Best Practices Exchange and so much great and applicable information to bring back to ZSR!

If you are interested in reading a bit about what I learned from each of the sessions I attended relating to metadata, digital migration, digital humanities preservation, and cloud-based storage considerations—or my talk on “agile” project management—please read on!

“Managing Metadata: Rethinking Workflows and Standards During Migration”

• Lauren Gallina, Metadata Projects Librarian, University of Rochester

Lauren is part of a team transitioning to Figshare for University of Rochester’s institutional repository (IR), where they are rethinking workflows with librarians from several of their libraries, namely a Metadata Application Profile (MAP) and how they obtain MARC records from ProQuest, and dealing with issues relating to a lack of interoperability, authority control, and other projects with hard deadlines. They are pleased to have reached better consistency, clearly defined standards, and above all else, stronger cross-campus communication. Her main takeaways from the project is that documentation is—as we all know—super helpful if not necessary to pull off such a massive project, and that it is really important to keep stakeholders informed and to be transparent about the decisions her team made.

“Prioritizating Migrations: When Everything is an Endangered Digital Species”

• Megan Mummey, Director of Manuscript Collections, University of Kentucky Libraries

Megan spoke on behalf of herself and Andrew McDonnell (Digital Archivist) about dealing with their backlog of archival computer media (floppy disks, CDs, external hard drives, etc.). She emphasized how chaotic handling this kind of material has been, since they have a long history of collecting computer media by a changing cast of people with changing methodology over time. Megan presented a useful document that they call EARV (Estimated Archival Research Value) that essentially allows them to prioritize collections for processing using a fairly granular rubric. They have also developed a useful method for all aspects of processing computer media and the computer files they contain and touched on the dark art of archival appraisal, or in other words, decision factors for what to keep and what not to keep for the archival record.

This was an especially interesting talk for me, having been a digital archivist myself in my previous position and for being responsible here at ZSR Library for developing our own program for handling digital media. As an aside, I plan on writing a whole separate blog post about processing archival computer media and computer files, not just to keep you up-to-date on how we work with this kind of material at ZSR, but also because it is applicable to our personal lives, since so much of our personal data is in digital format these days (family photographs, tax information… you name it!).

“Sunrise, Sunset! Librarian Intervention for the Preservation and Long-Term Accessibility of Digital Humanities Projects”

• Jennifer Hootman, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship & Data, University of Kentucky Libraries

Jennifer’s talk was excellent, talking at length about her experience working with teaching faculty and researchers relating to the preservation of their digital humanities (DH) projects and their vulnerability as institutional rules for web-based content change over time, and especially when the project concludes and there is no longer a person who is actively managing the site. To be a little more clear about DH projects: we are talking about the culmination of years, sometimes decades, of dedicated scholarship managed by a faculty member, where contributors are often an evolving and elongating list of undergraduate and graduate students, resulting in a one-of-a-kind product.

I’ve often heard adjectives like “bespoke” and “boutique” when describing the widely varying and non-standard nature of DH projects, which makes for an inherent catch-22 situation where, on one hand, you are dealing with research projects that understandably necessitate unique digital architecture to handle unique data, and on the other hand, because of this uniqueness, a moderate to severe preservation challenge. Jennifer showed us how she developed a metadata template (Dublin Core) to describe these projects, how they capture these sites (Browsertrix’s Webrecorder and ReplayWeb.Page), and some helpful tips on how to frame preservation projects with faculty (who are all very different people in very different disciplines).

“Adapt or Adopt: Tailoring Digital Preservation Best Practices to the Cloud”

• Tyler Cline, Digital Archivist, UNC Charlotte
• Mariecris Gatlabayan, Digital Preservation Librarian, University of Washington
• Gen Schmitt, Software Developer, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Kyle Rimkus, Librarian for Digital Programs and Partnerships, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

This was a fascinating and very technical talk by folks from very different institutions relating to their experience working with cloud storage for long-term digital processing, preservation, and access with an emphasis on the National Digital Stewardship Alliance’s (NDSA) Levels of Digital Preservation as a guiding framework. Each of the speakers talked about their trials and tribulations ensuring that they were meeting the criteria necessary to be following best practices as outlined in the NDSA document, but having to face financial and technical challenges especially relating to checksum verification (or in other words, tracking the integrity of a given computer file over time… in even other words, is this file still working or not/has it changed?). This talk was at once reassuring and worrying, reminding me of the great lengths that we need to go through to ensure that we are storing data wisely, both frugally and architecturally. As one of the speakers put it best, they feel as though the most accurate description of their work is “coder / accountant.”

More on this topic in the forthcoming blog post on processing archival computer media and computer files mentioned earlier.

“Many Minds Make Light Work: Agile Processing in Archives”

• Holly Mengel, Head of Archives and Manuscripts Processing, University of Pennsylvania
• Sam Sfirri, Head of Archival Collections, Wake Forest University

This is the talk that I gave with my former supervisor and overall wonderful person, Holly Mengel. During my time at the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts (2020-2025), Holly introduced a group archival processing method borrowed from the software development industry called “Agile Project Management.” Here is a great article on the subject called, “Agility in the Archives: Translating Agile Methods to Archival Project Management” (Shein, Robinson, Gutierrez, 2018). If you’ve ever heard people use the terms “sprint” or “scrum” relating to project management, this is what we were talking about.

Basically, there is a way to break down large projects into digestible chunks, where you get a group of people together for a short/defined period of time and throw all of your resources into the project and work together until the allotted time ends. This kind of work requires careful planning, an openness to adapting to necessary changes to the plan, and people who are willing and able to work together on a common goal in the same room, asking each other questions and sharing knowledge all along the way.

For example, we had an enormous, high-research value collection that was stored offsite in many different sized boxes with no metadata. Using the “agile” model, we brought all of the boxes onsite for two weeks during the summer and—as a group working together in the same space simultaneously—identified and rehoused all of the contents from 640 to 304 boxes, gathered and wrote tons of notes (metadata) on the contents. In just two weeks, a small group of people were able to make the collection somewhat accessible by the end of the project, and made it possible for an archivist to formally process the collection and create a finding aid for the entirety of the contents.

This upcoming Friday (May 29, 2026), I’ll be presenting a version of this talk by the same name at the SNCA/SCAA Joint Annual Conference at UNC-Charlotte during the Application of Technology and Technology Concepts lightning talk (Education Session #4, 8:45-9:45 am).

I’ll leave it there, but know that I absolutely plan to put this method to use here at ZSR and would love to talk with you about how this process could work for you. And no, this is not only useful for archives, it’s useful for tackling any kind of enormous or overwhelming project!

“Automation – No Ifs, Ands or But(t)s”

• Crystal Heis, Library Imaging Specialist, University of Kentucky

Crystal talked about a collaboration to automate the addition of digitized images into the John C. Wyatt Lexington Herald Leader photo archive, a collection of over a million photographic negatives. It was fascinating to hear how they troubleshooted (troubleshot?) the many issues that relate to the automation of a fairly complicated project that used to be done Crystal, one image at a time. Because the collection included crime scene photographs taken for police purposes, not to mention the fact that photographs contain sensitive imagery that requires human intervention, necessitating the use of a sensitive materials note and graphic content warning otherwise, the automation of such a project took some time and tinkering to get right. Thanks to Crystal and her team, we have an excellent use case for automating a massive photograph collection of our own.