Welcome to the SRMA 2021 Conference: Digital Projects and Practical Solutions. At the bottom of this page, you can find the conference schedule of speakers and summaries. Zoom links and passwords will be sent to registrants closer to the dates of the conference.
Conference announcements
Pricing: $25 for SRMA members; $35 for non-members; $15 for students; free for presenters
This year, we will be raffling off three physical copies of Max Eckard’s Making Your Tools Work for You– one for each day! All paid participants will be included in the raffle (sorry speakers!).
For those in the greater Denver area, we will also be convening a happy hour for 5:30pm on Wednesday, Nov 10 – the last day of the conference. Please plan to meet your fellow archivists at the Denver Beer Company in Arvada, located at 5768 Olde Wadsworth, Arvada, CO 80002
Online Forum Schedule
Monday, November 8th
9:45am – 10:00am: Welcome and Opening Remarks from the SRMA President (Ashlyn Velte)
10:00am – 11:00am: Mapping the Ku Klux Klan in Denver, Shaun Boyd (History Colorado)In the summer of 2020, History Colorado started a process to digitize 1,400 pages of membership ledgers of the Denver chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. The digital versions of the list of members and a map of the residential and business addresses have sparked a conversation throughout the city.
2:00pm – 3:00pm: Extending Access in the Time of COVID, Rachel Gattemeyer, Elizabeth Kuntz and Nora Plant (University of Wyoming) Providing archival reference services in a COVID-19-impacted world requires flexibility and creativity. To bring the American Heritage Center’s (AHC) collections to remote patrons, AHC created its Virtual Reading Room. The Virtual Reading Room recreates the onsite experiences that researchers are familiar with of finding, parsing through and connecting with AHC collections through promoting self-service online resources, adapting Zoom for reference consultations and synchronous research sessions, providing on-demand digitization, delivering personalized digital file requests and offering interactive virtual tours. This session details our approach to creating a Virtual Reading Room, discusses outcomes, challenges and successes while offering recommendations for what archivists can do at their institution. As the University of Wyoming has returned to fully onsite operations, we also share insights into how these virtual offerings have transitioned into a long-term set of solutions to be used in concert with onsite services. Attendees should come away with practical ideas that they can implement at their institution.
Tuesday, November 9th
10:00am – 11:00am: Preserving Black Western Legacies, Stevie Gunter (Denver Public Library)The Preserving Black Western Legacies project is conducted by Denver Public Library’s Special Collections and Digital Archives and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The purpose of the project is to digitize 14 of the most frequently used collections at the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library branch, develop exhibits and teaching kits with external collaborators. This presentation will offer reflections on the workflows of the project, begun in November 2020, with consideration to the limitations imposed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. I will describe other challenges encountered by way of our content management system, ContentDM, and unique metadata opportunities given the content of the collections and my positionality as a Black queer archivist.
2:00pm – 3:00pm: Introduction to Regular Expressions (Library Carpentry adaptation), Walker Sampson (University of Colorado Boulder Libraries)Regular expressions (“regex”) are a search pattern – with a corresponding syntax – that is used in programming languages, command line operations and innumerable other software. Familiarity with regular expressions will allow a user to search for literally any set of words, punctuation, numbers and characters imaginable in a systematic way. In this introduction, the basics of the syntax for regular expressions will be covered. No software requirements; all exercises will be done in a web browser.
Wednesday, November 10th
10:00am – 11:00am: Workflow solutions with Microsoft 365, Jamie Wagner, Adam Lisbon and Arthur Aguilera (University of Colorado Boulder Libraries)With the long-term transition to remote work after March 2020, many of our institutions have implemented Microsoft 365 as a central system for integrating shared documents and files with chat, email and project tracking. Though there may be a high learning curve, Microsoft 365 is able to provide some powerful solutions to our technical workflows and data management. In this panel, three library professionals from the University of Colorado Boulder will discuss the ways they have leveraged Microsoft 365 in their work.
2:00pm – 3:00pm: Democratizing Metadata Creation at DPL, Abby Hoverstock, Craig Haggit and Michelle Shierburg (Denver Public Library)We discuss the ways we have experimented with opening metadata and content creation projects to a wider array of staff. The work-from-home era left some DPL staff without usual tasks to accomplish, while position vacancies and frozen budgets forced DPL to seek help from other teams to create digital content. We share what worked well and what did not. Abby Hoverstock will recount how recruiting staff from other teams during our COVID-19 closure vastly improved our ArchivesSpace data migration project. Craig Haggit will share how the library invited the whole team to create metadata for our digital collections. Michelle will discuss how we solicit projects from staff to help grow our digital collections and the lessons learned from training staff to digitally capture materials.
The Society of Rocky Mountain Archivists is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.
