Integration and collaboration between departments is an essential component of organizational success today -– sharing resources, eliminating redundancy, and open communication help prevent the waste and lack of innovation that can doom an organization to irrelevancy and worse. However, the people who should be in control of setting policies for file management and for selection and implementation of asset management tools — the archivists and records managers out there — have ceded too much ground to a pure IT mindset.

I have a much deeper appreciation of Pete Incaviglia than you do.

In celebration of World Day for Audiovisual Heritage 2010, AudioVisual Preservation Solutions, in collaboration with the Association of Moving Image Archivists is pleased to announce the YADA! Scholarships for Education in Fundraising (PDF of news release). Three annual scholarships will funded by AVPS and awarded through the AMIA Awards Committee aimed at providing moving image [...]

More and more I’ve been hearing stories of activities that sound everyday enough, such as software upgrades and file transfers between servers, that go horribly awry. Upgrades are incompatible with older files or files created with a different software and those legacy files are corrupted or become inaccessible… Directory structures are changed during a migration or systems clean up and relationships or dependencies are lost… Important folders are not moved to a new server or are deleted during the application of a retention policy…

This is where you, fellow archivists, professional small collections managers, librarians, students, history buffs, Americans, or American enthusiasts come in to help preserve America’s history.

Ah, Memorial Day Weekend — the traditional beginning to the marketing of summer. In New York this means one thing: the city will now be overwhelmed by the invasive stench of garbage being baked and steamed by the heat and humidity.

The historical record preserved in archives informs us of What-Was, but, of equal importance, it reminds us that What-Is Wasn’t-Always.

Little known fact: I was a middle school Chubby Bunny champion. A moment of pride? Perhaps not, but when my only other award to that date was 2nd Place Most Interesting Cake in a Cub Scout cake bake off, I was eager to win something.

I’m sure I’ve written about this before, but I’m a strong believer that online access to cultural materials is an excellent thing and I wholly support it. What we often don’t consider is that the way we can support these efforts further is to utilize them.

I like to think that archivists, despite our focus on the past, are typically a step ahead of the general culture because we always have to have the future in mind at the same time. That being the case, I feel we should already be thinking ahead of where initiatives like data.gov are and be considering how we can be more open in ways beyond content and access.