 Happy International Archives Day, everyone. We're so glad you're able to join us today as we celebrate this important day. I'm Dr. Pat Franks. My colleague, Dr. Anthony Bernier and I, both professors in the iSchool at San Jose State University have worked with a team of students each term since fall of 2016 on an exciting project, the International Directory of National Archives. The publication will be released in mid-2018 by Roman and Littlefield Publisher. We believe the International Directory of National Archives will not only benefit historians and researchers, but also provide a view of the status of National Archives today that can be used as a benchmark in the future against which to measure progress made by archives around the world to protect their vital records and cultural heritage. Today's panelists will share with you the lessons learned while gathering data for the International Directory of National Archives. Each of our panelists, Heather Coles, Catherine Eminheiser, Elise Dunham and Joan, has been a member of this team for at least one semester. Today, they'll share with you their experiences while contributing to this project. Our first panelist is Heather Coles. Heather, I'll pass the mic on to you. Great. Thank you, Pat. As Pat said, my name is Heather Coles and to give a little background on me, my professional life began after receiving my bachelor's degree in criminal justice and visual arts. I then spent the better part of 10 years in the forensic science community as an investigator. I left the forensic community in 2015 and sought out a new profession and that is when I found the MARA program at San Jose State University. In my time as an investigator, I saw the destructive aspects of our society, which really was the catalyst to inspire me to do the opposite. I want to preserve something. I want to preserve the aspects of our society. And the MARA program gave me the knowledge and skills to help me do just that. During my tenure in the MARA program, I researched topics such as international information management standards, including ISO and OAIS standards, archive 2.0 and alternative outreach methods and the dispersion of archival objects. In particular, the research I conducted into the dispersion of archival objects was research that unintentionally tied into my research during the ID&A project. And I'll talk more about that shortly. During the spring 2017 semester, I was the program coordinator for the ID&A project. I served pretty much as the intermediary between the research and Dr. Franks and Dr. Bernier on the day-to-day activities of the project. I tracked researchers' progress, time spent, meeting attendance, researchers' results, et cetera, et cetera, because that was a central function of my work. From this, I generated statistics quantifying the progress being made throughout the semester in order to help keep the project moving forward and on track. I also conducted meetings and trainings to help researchers through the project process. Trainings mainly revolved around operational processes or clarification of specific topics related to the project. I also was tasked with reviewing country profiles that were submitted for consideration for structure and content. Through this, I had the opportunity to learn about the numerous countries being researched, how they operate, and over time, this led me to see patterns emerge in the research and how these countries were operating. In addition to my coordinator duties, I also researched one of the countries in the project, Pacific Island Nation. This particular island nation's online presence is very minimal, and so this process helped me or required me to utilize my investigative knowledge and skills to piece together all of this information. I started with the online presence that they do have, which unfortunately was a little outdated, but that led me to articles, which led me to other articles, which led me to social media platforms that have been more regularly maintained, which then eventually led me to the director of the National Archive itself. This came in extremely handy and very important when I finally hit that wall in my research, where I didn't have any more leads or the connective minutiae that I needed to keep moving forward. That's when I contacted the director of the National Archive in order to fill in the gaps that I was missing. He and his staff were crucial in that aspect. They filled in the gaps in my investigation, much like a witness might in a crime investigation. Combined with my research and the patterns I observed in others' research, three key ideas came to the surface for me and really stood out as overlying themes for a lot of different countries within the project. First, there's the use of social media by National Archives. In Western Nations, social media is a vital tool for improving access and patronage to archives in a cost-effective manner, but in countries where there is no digital infrastructure, social media can be and sometimes is the only viable platform in which an online presence and outreach may be established. This is important for researchers to know. Researchers must not assume archival material will be readily available at the click of a button through a sophisticated website or online repository. Researchers must be prepared to consider alternative routes of access in order to locate remote information. On the other side of the coin, researchers must also be prepared when a National Archive does not employ social media at all due to varying factors, including political instability, governmental oversight, digital support, and so on. A country's National Archive could be prevented from utilizing social media as a way of documenting their activities or outreach to their community. Secondly, it goes back to my research, which I conducted during my time in the MARA program. My ID&A research made me realize that dispersion of archival materials is even greater than I considered in my original research. For example, the Pacific Island Nation that I researched was a pivotal location during and following World War II for the United States. Many of the records that one would assume would stay with the nation were taken and maintained by other countries involved in their administration. And this is not uncommon. It has been happening for centuries due to events like colonization and war. Only now with the use of digital surrogates, some of these dispersed objects are being reunited. Projects like this right now are mainly focused on manuscripts. So it could be said that more scholarship and work is needed to, needs to be conducted in order to understand the depth and the breadth of the dispersion challenge in the health set, creating more digital surrogates will lead to a greater reunification of dispersed objects, even if these are small reunification projects between one or two nations or even a handful of nations at a time. On a great side note, however, United States Naval personnel who were stationed in the island nation I researched during World War II have been donating their war memorabilia to the nation's National Archives, which is generating a vast and valuable collection for the archive. Finally, the topic of right to access versus cultural privacy was something that I saw in various nations and research being conducted by the researchers for the ID&A project. In Western society, we expect access to archival content, especially when it comes to cultural items. But there are several factors that come into play when discussing access in other nations and cultures as they might not hold to the same ideals. The most understandable reason for restricting access is national security. Many countries, including the United States, have provisions in their laws establishing time frames or circumstances in which governmental records will not be available to the public to ensure national security. It's hard for us to wrap our heads around that when cultural objects are not being made available, because we don't understand the harm in sharing such information with outside groups of people or individuals. However, there's societies and religions where only those who are part of the society or religion are allowed access to such objects, which sometimes can feel like it's a direct opposition to that Western philosophy of open access. For example, the Pacific Island Nation I researched published a cultural writing on their website for patrons to enjoy. However, to reprint this writing as a whole or in part outside the control of the archive, you must first seek approval by the director as he and he has the right to deny your request. This is a slight modification from the absolutely no access at all process or procedure of some cultures, societies, or religions, but there's still a level where that nation is controlling the content that the originating culture created. This ideology shift per se is also applicable when conducting research or interacting with different cultures within a single nation, including our or your own. Nations are made up of different sum cultures with their own ideologies and protocols. For example, a project spearheaded by Dr. Kimberly Christensen worked with the Aboriginal community in Central Australia and later Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest, which within the United States are seen and considered as sovereign nations. The project assists the sovereign nation communities through the preservation of their cultural heritage into digital forms and at the same time allows those in the culture to pick and choose which items are made available and to whom in an online platform. Ultimately, giving the cultural community control over access, which is only right. So therefore, as a researcher, one must not assume that because we want the cultural information, means that we will be given it to us just by right. Researchers must be prepared to address the requirements of an archive and be respectful of the process and the outcome. Thank you so much, and now I'm going to pass it over to Kate Emanheiser. So she can talk to you about her experience in the ID&A Project. Kate, take it away. Thanks, Heather, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We have a lot of fun creating these slides for you, so I hope that you're able to gain a little bit of knowledge, skills, and tricks that can go ahead and help you as you move forward with your own research project. So as you can see a little bit about me on the slide in front of you, I've got a bachelor's in public history, which I obtained through an entirely distance learning program through Empire State College. And I am currently, as opposed to Heather, where she was in the MARA program, I am in the MLIS program. So hopefully I'll be able to get everything finished up and graduate for spring of next year. My work as a library technician right now at a military community library. So a military community library is considered a special library, but basically it functions the same way as a public library. So we have fiction, nonfiction, we provide children's materials, everything that you would pretty much find at a public library is what we actually have. So prior to becoming a library technician, I have experience in both museums and education. So I've done a lot of work with children. I was a teacher's aide for a few years, and then with the museums as well, I gave demonstrations in both a science environment and a historical environment. My military affiliation, so I served in both the U.S. Army Reserves and the Pennsylvania National Guard, and I'm also a military spouse. My husband is getting ready to retire, so we're looking forward to the next step in our lives. And as far as this project is concerned, I mean, it's really interesting to me to know how other countries create these archives. And what they feel is important to have in those archives, and whether or not they feel they should just be the protectors of the information, or whether they feel they should be the gatekeepers and allowing and presenting that information to really anybody who wants it. So as researchers for this project, that's what we wanted to go ahead and do. We wanted to make sure that we could get all of the information about the archives, about how to access their information, and put it all in one place. So what I did last semester is that I went ahead and I researched the National Archives of countries from three distinct regions. Why? Well, because I knew that there couldn't possibly be the same situation of all of those different countries. So I wanted to see what the variations were and what we could learn from them. So the steps that I took in order to go ahead and succeed was basically I searched the internet, first and foremost, to see if they had their own website. Sometimes I was successful for that, and sometimes I wasn't. And we'll see that in some of the upcoming slides. So another thing I did is that I referenced the ICA, so the International Council of Archives. I looked at their membership listings to see what countries had affiliations with that association and to see if I could gain any contact information from them. Because, of course, we know that whatever's on the internet isn't always true, so we want to make sure that the information we're providing to this publication is as accurate as possible. And the best way to do that, of course, is to be in constant contact with the representatives that work in that facility. Okay? I speak English. I don't speak any other foreign language. So, yes, when I signed up to be a part of this program, I was highly intimidated when I was first to sign countries of various nationalities that use multiple languages. So Google Translate and I became very, very good friends, which proved out to be one of the game changers for me. You know, I didn't have to have that translation dictionary next to me. Some of them I had, some of the websites and some of the information that I was able to obtain from the internet, I could go ahead and just translate directly from the page. Some of it I actually had to copy and paste into Google Translate just to get an idea as to what was going on. So, any type of translation service when you're looking at doing research from another country is going to be vital. Sometimes too, I found that all of the information available in English wasn't necessarily telling me the whole story about that country's archive. So I was able to use Google Translate to go ahead and glean a little bit more. So while the country might only feel like us as English speakers only needed to know X, Y, Z, well I wanted to know ABC also. So I was able to go ahead and use Google Translate for that as well. So what I'm going to do in the next coming slides is I'm going to go over three of the different countries, just as examples. So you can see some of the differences and how we went ahead and continued to get the information that we needed based on the obstacles that I was encountering. So country number one, their website was entirely in their native language. There was not any type of English translation, nothing. So it was a very time consuming process. So not only to get address information but phone numbers, things like that. But they also had a very detailed infrastructure. So while that's great and each department knows what they're responsible for, me as somebody who doesn't come from that country and who doesn't speak that language, it made it a little bit more interesting because I had to figure out, okay, well what is their infrastructure? Who is responsible for what? And then which personnel belongs to each different department? So in doing that and in going through the translation process, I then came up with a slew of emails, phone numbers, contacts, great, wonderful, right? But the one thing that we have to realize is Heather had the opportunity to go ahead and have a great line of communication with the director of the archives for the country that she was working with. Well, of the three and now four archives that I'm working on, I've gotten two emails. So I have not been able to have those same open lines of communication to verify information. So that is where it made for the little bit more frustrating because I think I have everything but yet lo and behold, I could be totally wrong in everything that I've gone and had and done and translated on my own. So for anybody who's looking at researching information from another country where you're going to need to make contacts, you want to make them early because it's not going to be that 24 to 48-hour turnaround like we might be used to here in our society. This specific country has a very robust social media presence, which is great. Again, though, it is all in the native language. So while I could sit and watch videos on YouTube and things like that, you know, it did give me an interesting perspective of their society and of their archives, but I wasn't able to translate any of that, okay? So the collection itself of this country was very comprehensive and it pretty much covered the entire history of that country, which was fantastic. The other thing that was great about this specific archive was they had very detailed instructions about how anybody, whether it was somebody coming in off the street who needed access to specific government documents, whether it was a researcher of the school there in the country, or whether it was an international researcher. There were very detailed instructions on how you could get access to their archives, okay? So the next country, country number two. Now when I would go ahead and do my initial search for any type of internet information, I would simply type national archives as section first country. Well, that works out great if all of the countries label their archives as the national archives as section first. Both country number two did not have a non-traditional name. So it really took a lot of research to ensure that that institution was, in fact, designated as the primary national archives for that country. That specific institution also does not have its own website. It is embedded within the government website. So again, you have to make sure that you know exactly what you're researching and where you need to research it. And that, of course, is just literally having to go through lots of Google Translate pages, okay? The information provided on the website was not comprehensive and it was out of date. And I'll be able to reiterate why I know that in a little bit. It wasn't very comprehensive because it literally was just maybe 15 bullets. Everything that they provided in English is what was offered in their native language. So while, yes, their website did offer an English translation, neither the English translation nor their native language information was very detailed. So they did have contact information on ICA but not on their website, okay? And through the ICA information, we were able to go ahead and take that contact. Through a little bit of digging online, we found newspaper articles that referenced said person at that archive. So we could then write an email to the specific person. It wasn't just a, we're not sure who we're emailing but could somebody please help us? No, we were able to make those associations due to additional digging online. So sometimes it's not just the associations or the archives where you're going to be able to find your information but it's going to be newspaper articles, TV snippets, things like that where you're going to be able to make those references. So this is one of the countries where I've gotten feedback from. Literally, I think we've exchanged maybe three emails and that's it. But through those three emails, I was able to find out that the address that on the government website is wrong because literally they had just moved into a site two days before the representative had been in touch with me. So we have the most current information about where their archive is located. So that is fantastic. The difference between what this archive shows in its collection as opposed to what country number one has is that country number two is still reeling from wartime losses. So their archives was stolen in the midst of war and they're still trying to recover from that and it's been very difficult for them to not only try to retain some of their original work but then to be able to at least have some copies to have something in their collection. They have no online access available because again, right now they're trying to just collect and they have no social media presence. So it's a distinct difference from country number one. So country number three, again, another different type of archive. So their website offers general information in several different languages. And it was outstanding. Almost all of the information that I could access in English was information that was available in their native language. However, the information about how to access their archive, what online rivets they had, things like that, that was only something that I found out through utilizing the Google Translate option on their native language webpage. And so that's something that you need to consider, again, you need to make sure that you're doing thorough research. So the large focus of this archive is actually in its records management. They have been designated by the government to see about implementing electronic records management procedures throughout all of their government offices. So this archive hosts a collection for a history that stands over 700 years. So you would think that they would embrace that. The previous two countries actually did embrace the longevity of their country by utilizing older buildings to host to their archives. Country number three has all new buildings. So while they have an older collection, they really want to go ahead and embrace the new technology that they're able to go ahead and have with the, excuse me, with the housing and preservation and management of the material just through the technology that has come out within the past few years that's allowing them to do that. So that covers a little bit about what processes I used in order to go ahead and do a thorough research on different types of repositories. So now I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Elise so she can map it up for us. Thanks, Kate. Can everyone hear me? Just double checking. If you could just give me a Y and this. Oh, excellent. Okay. So I'm Elise Donovan-Jones. I'm an MLIS student and I have been an IDNA researcher since fall 2016. And my main background is in virtual libraries and public libraries. So this slide has my ideal research process. It's kind of what I thought I was getting into when I first started with the project. And it should look pretty similar to what Kate has just discussed for us. Now this slide shows my actual research project or my actual research process, sorry. And you'll notice that on the left side where it ends with entry complete, that's a lot of what my previous slide was. That's my ideal process. That's you start with the archives website, you contact the archives and you're able to complete the entry. And that's great. Sometimes it works out that way, but as Kate mentioned, sometimes it doesn't. And if there's no website or the website's incomplete, you do have to get creative and look at the government website and maybe the country has a tourism site. Sometimes that has information. And ultimately, you end up collecting all of that information. You want to keep and track all of your sources and leads that you have. And sometimes it works out and you end up in that complete entry stage. And other times you end up in this, I have a little bit of a sadder path, a branching off of the use research to begin entry section, where sometimes you don't have any contact info, you don't have any archives response, and you don't have any additional leads. And this was especially the case in Africa where my research was focused. And when that happens, all you can do is reach out to your program coordinator and to the editors and sometimes they're able to find additional leads and sources for you to kind of take on and then you can start the process over again. Other times they're not able to find anything and that's where you end up at the end of Research Road and you have this unresolved country. And what happens at that point is the editors will take over and perhaps they'll do some international calls to the archives or employ some of those kinds of techniques, maybe find a researcher currently working in the archives to continue with it. But so it's important to document the sources that you've looked at so that they know exactly where you've searched when it gets to that stage. Okay, so here this slide talks about the value that I gained as a student. Since my background is mostly in public libraries, not in archives, and I'm taking a lot of archives classes because my background or sorry, my career path for this program is in digital curation and also archives and preservation, it was very important to me to have these types of examples from my research to bring to class discussions to be able to really engage. And then networking with students and alumni in a program like this where it's 100% online, anything that we can find to be able to talk with other students, get to know each other is very valuable and this certainly was no exception. And then the iSchool has a culminating experience that we're supposed to do an ePortfolio as our final course in the program and we have certain core competencies that we have to meet. And so one of the ones that I found especially effective for with this experience was the global perspective of libraries and archives and just looking at the countries in Africa and their emphasis on emerging democracy and how that differs from an established democracy like our own and how that's affecting the archive. Some of its similar, the archivists are able to look at their collections and look at it in terms of transparency and others you're looking at preserving cultural heritage information and perhaps getting back information from marginalized groups that perhaps were deleted during the previous government regimes and things like that. Okay. And then I wasn't just a student here. I was a contributor also and still am and that's professional research experience. And in that we have communicating with the archives and that was one of the more exhilarating things for me just being able to say, hey, I emailed Africa today. It certainly wasn't something that I could say before I started this project. And then networking with Dr. Franks and Dr. Bernier has also been very valuable because not only are they happy to give letters of recommendation for students that have participated, they also have a lot of research experience of their own. And so for example, if you're not able to hear back from an archive, you're just not getting any response, Dr. Bernier had stepped in at one point and said, hey, you know what, here's what I've done in the past but that's worked for me. Why don't you try these techniques? And then the ability to compare these different national archives, very similar to what Kate was saying. I know I noticed that within Africa, some countries seem similar on the surface but when you start looking at their backgrounds and the complications they're facing, they can be very different. Some countries have gone through civil wars that have affected their archives and others are post-colonial. Some are in the midst of wars and really seeing how they approach these types of issues and how they are finding solutions for it is fascinating. And it's very admirable too. You have to think when, especially when an archive isn't getting back to you, you have to think about, well, this particular country is in the middle of a war and perhaps they've recently, their capital city has been stormed by rebels and that's where their archives is. And so these are the sorts of issues that these archivists are facing in the middle of trying to help out with a project like this. It is very admirable. And then tangential research and experiences is something that's highly encouraged with this project and I've been able to participate on this panel. So be able to get my name out there as a researcher but also I was able to publish a blog post for the IDNA blog on anarchic archives. And then these are some very specific lessons that I learned in my assigned countries one, it seems kind of simple and archic actually. And I can talk about that later if anyone has a question about it, it's fascinating. And then so as far as double checking URLs goes, this is something that sounds super simple but actually one of my countries had two websites. One was not up to date and one was super new and the only difference was this hyphen and it got very confusing at times and it was very easy to find the incorrect information and thinking that it was correct and that it was the most up to date site. And so for that I found that not only of course is scholarly research applicable to this and very important but a simple internet search just going somewhere like duck duck go and typing in that archive's name can help you figure out if there are multiple sites and which one is the most recent and it also helps you find news articles and blogs and things like that. And then again similar to Kate, yet Google Translate and Chrome are my friends. I had one country where the main language was French, the other Portuguese and I don't speak either of those languages and so being able to just translate the entire website as I navigated it in Google Chrome was really great. One of the scarier aspects that I've encountered was hacked sites and it was very terrifying at first. I logged on to this website and there was just this bloody hand on the screen and I thought oh my gosh what have I done, is this going to affect my computer, what's wrong? And thankfully it was something very simple. It was just a vulnerable WordPress plug-in and basically there are people, it could even be high school students that just for fun create these scripts and send them out and they target these kinds of vulnerabilities and it just removes the content of the webpage and then puts up something silly like this little demon that they've got. These are actual images that I'd taken from the site and a way to avoid that is having a robust IT department but that's not always a possibility in some countries where budget is a huge concern and technology itself is fairly new. And so the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine was very valuable in situations like this. You go to a site yesterday, it had all the information you could have wanted and then the next day it's just this funny picture on the screen. And so the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine was able, it tends to catalog a lot of these sorts of sites and so for this one that I had encountered where it had been hacked, I was able to get some information and then there was another country who had the budget at one point to create a site. They then lost the budget and the site had to go away but the Internet Archive's had it and so I was able to, if not see some out of date information, still find some contact information and other information. So here I have lessons learned for the project as a whole. Time versus countries commitment. This was very interesting for me. I did six countries, I've done six countries so far and only one of them has made it to semi-final and that means that it's pretty much ready to go. Perhaps it just needs double checked by the editors, maybe confirmed by the country to make sure everything is just so. But even though I only have one country there, my time as a researcher is a success. I've kept very detailed time sheets and I create a progress report for these other countries that I've done so that if another researcher takes it over they know exactly what I've done and they can see all of the research I've looked at, what worked, what didn't, what contacts I found, who I've reached out to successfully, who hasn't responded, things like that and hopefully that will help the editors as they look at these more troublesome countries and are able to make contact. And then ethics and collaborative works. I won't talk a whole lot about this point, it's just a dialogue that was recently opened in our discussion forums and I honestly think that it could be an entire panel unto itself. It's a great point and something I hadn't thought about a whole lot before this project but basically this is a very collaborative project. There's a lot of other people also working on African countries and we're sharing sources. We have a Wiki for the project, we all are able to see what sources other people are using and it's important to understand when is it okay to use other collaborators' sources and what we've come up with so far is of course when researching for the IDNA, it's 100% okay to share sources but of course we should credit all of the sources. Now moving on to the concept of a commercial versus a public project, I think that this is the first commercial project I've ever worked on. And you'll notice that we have very specifically not mentioned any country names here and there is a reason for that, not only to maintain their privacy but also because the information that's going into the directory, we have an agreement with a publisher, we can't disseminate a lot of information about the country's outside of the publication, at least not until it's published. And so I think for as an iSchool student and as a student in general, a lot of what we research tends to fall under fair use or at least we think of it that way and not so for a project like this. I don't own my research, I don't own my writing for the IDNA project. I might have a copy of it on my computer to help inform further research for the project but I can't go out and publish it elsewhere. I can't create a blog post just on what I've done. So it's very important to understand that there is a difference and that this is a fairly private project and what we discuss in the group is private and it needs to be approved by our editors if we're going to discuss anything. And that leads me to tangential work. Okay, so I can't share my research and writing that I've done specifically for the project but can I work on related works? And the answer is absolutely. Dr. Bernier and Dr. Franks have been very encouraging of this and this panel is certainly a product of that and so is the blog and we can go ahead and put a link to the blog in the chat too. I have it, I can do that in a few moments if no one else does. But basically they need to be original ideas separate from the project. They have to be approved by the editors and that second part is very important because just because I think that it's separate doesn't mean that it is. There might be something that I hadn't thought of that could make it competitive with the project or something like that and so that's something that we all have to keep in mind. And so definitely go to the IDNA blog. That's where my Antarctic blog post is. Oh, thank you Heather, that's awesome. We have two folks, Heather and Pat, both footed in it's perfect. Yeah, go to that blog and check it out. That's where Heather's post is as well and you'll be able to see a lot of great examples of tangential work. It's not what's going into the directory but it's work that we've come up with as we research. There's a lot of really cool stuff out there so I highly recommend that and that's it for me. I'm going to go ahead and turn this back over to Pat. So thank you very much. Those were three marvelous presentations. I enjoyed them very much even though I know what each of you are working on with your own projects. You brought in so many new ideas that we should be considering so thank you for that. I'd like to open up the floor now to questions from the audience. If you have any questions for any of our presenters please just either raise your hand or grab the mic quickly. I would just like to chime in for a second and congratulate Heather and Kate and at least all of you did a fantastic job really. That was right. These are very crunchy detailed descriptions of what you've done and it raised collectively some very important issues not just for this project or even necessarily for your work at the master's level but further your work in the field too. The notion for instance of reconciling expectations or aspirations with experience and what you really find that's a daily thing. And the fact that you all talked about that in different ways suggests to me how relevant that this work was been to you in terms of applying it for the future. I also thought that the notion of being able to look at comparators is a very valuable skill. When you get out into the work world when you take your first job there may not be a very clear job description. There may not be much of a record of what's been done before but looking at comparators like this will help sharpen and guide where you might want to begin to develop the work that you're taking on and the role that you've assumed. So that is a very important skill whether it's an international archival collection you're looking at or an institution it doesn't really matter in that way. I'm very appreciative too of the way you all talked about the notion of working collaboratively in different configurations of a team or a collective. Not only between students working on the project or between Dr. Franks and myself but also between colleagues in foreign places and being sensitive to the challenges that they face without being judgmental about them and so on those are very important things. And then other collaborators that you pulled in so working collectively as a professional within teams of various configurations is a valuable thing. And then finally or at least among the final things is the ethical concerns that you raise all very good things. I'm an American historian and unusual in that role is my critical perspective on the notion of American exceptionalism and there's nothing better to as an antidote for uncritical American exceptionalist positions than looking at the challenges in history and cultures of other people to see how complex things are. And you guys all did that in various ways. So I'm extremely impressed and very happy with the field experience you've been able to derive from this and I just want to applaud you for that. When record keeping tools you use to keep track of notes are you a record keeper? Records management is my area and we're not keeping standard records in the way that you might think because this is quite a project with students but also with graduates. We're not able to use our learning management system for example that we would normally use with our classes. So we're being creative and we're using a lot of Google products for the work in progress. So we have a Google site where we have files, we have a discussion group, also a Google discussion group that we brought into that site and we keep notices of meetings, copies of the slides, things like that. We have for the actual work that's in progress a Google drive within the Google drive, our separate Google drives for each of the researchers for each of the semesters. So we have a, for example, fall of 2016 work in progress and then we have fall 2016 semifinals when they get to that stage. We also have the same thing for spring, we have now the same thing for summer. So each one of our 26 researchers for this 10-week period in the summer as a Google drive within that they have an administrative folder with guidelines and then they have or should create a separate folder for each one of their countries. Within that they're expected to keep the copies of the work in progress. So the entry for that country and each version of it as it's edited until it gets to a semifinal version at that point that's moved, a copy of it is moved to a semifinal folder for that semester. And I think those are our main, those are our main, I have Dropbox copies of all of this so in addition to that publisher wants to work with Dropbox so we have copies of the finished products there as well. Did I hear another question? Yeah, Kate is talking about her Google drive folder. And Pat if I might jump in, one of the things that we also utilized during the spring 2017 semester is a researcher's notes form which would provide myself and the editors when filled out by the researcher contact information of who they came in contact with during their research process, that person's contact information and then all of the correspondence that they conducted with that particular archive along with any other notes about communication with the archive and how all of that went if there's any specific information that myself or Pat or Dr. Bernier needed to know. In addition, at the end of all of our profiles we would provide reference materials in the, in citations so that that information was able to be tracked down and verified in any stage during, during the research process. I see we have another question on what comes next. The plan is to complete most of the research on the countries. I would of course like all of it by the end of the summer semester which is the end of, well the middle of August during the fall time will be spent pulling this together as a publication making sure that we have permissions from archives for use of images. We have a certain number of images we can use. We are now starting to send out a semi-final drafts to the archives for them to review to get their approval or get their recommendations for modification as you might understand from the presentations that will not be possible for all of them. But we do expect some type of entry for each of them so some will be robust. Others may be an explanation as to why there is little information available. But it should go to the publisher in mid-December for publication next summer. The idea is to have this as a status, documented status of the National Archives at this point in time. I understand that some people would love to have this all online so that everybody can update their entries. But that would be a continuous ongoing effort that we do not have funding to continue. We would not be able to do that. You can just imagine the resources that would be necessary. We've had at least 25 students working each semester on this and that is just to get it to the point where we would have this information for December. So what we're hoping is that this will be the status quo as of next summer and that within five years time, for example, there would be the opportunity to do another spot check to see how our National Archives State of Affairs in that time compares to this benchmark that we'll call it in 2018 when this is published. So we're hoping that all of the work is done and submitted December 15th. I think the due date is and that by the middle of next summer we will have a publication. And of course, all of the students that have participated will be noted within that publication. Yeah, we're very excited about it. Heather, question for you, since you've graduated, did you use IDNA for your e-portfolio? At least, yes, I did. It actually may be international part or component of the e-portfolio for me possible. I had some research prior on international aspects like, for example, what I talked about with the dispersion factor of archival objects. But the IDNA project is a great component for the international section of the e-portfolio. And what I believe I ended up using was also my blog work with IDNA. So since you've done your blog, that's another piece of tangible evidence to show your work on the project. I'm sorry I don't have the e-mail addresses of all of us on there. But if any of you would like to contact any of us, feel free to do that. You can always send me a note and I will direct your inquiry in the right direction. But Heather, Kate, and Elise might also want to share their e-mail. There they go, in the chat area as well. Dr. Bernier, if you'd like to do the same thing. And then if anybody would like to just grab those copy and paste, you'll have our e-mail addresses. And we should send the link of the presentation to our publisher. He's very excited about this project. We had hope we'd have another year or two to do it. Yeah, it could just extend forever, but we're going to have to come to some closure. And our publisher is just quite excited about getting this.