 Okay, I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. No, I thought I was going to share my screen time on. At least some sort of technical. Um, Hi, everybody. You are seeing the presentation right? Yes. Okay, cool. So hey everybody, my name is Kendra Meyer, as Gail said, my pronouns are she or her. Thanks for having me. I'm the Shelby White and Leon Levy digital archivist at the American Museum of Natural History. One part of my job is to work closely with the systems librarian to implement and subsequently manage a new digital asset management system that we have on this first dams that's being administered by the library. And because of this, we finally have the resources to realize a working digital program. So another part of my job is to guide policy and programming for digital archives and to handle all digital archive processing. So today I just wanted to briefly talk a bit about my experience trying to get the program grounded. Prior to this, I was the AM and H field book project archivist and I was also the digital libraries, the library's digital lab manager. And I was very familiar with the collection, the institutional history and the department dynamics of the library. And knowing these strengths and weaknesses was really helpful coming into this grant project, because I could anticipate roadblocks and issues with open eyes. But on the other hand, I anticipated all the blocks and issues with open eyes. It's really challenging to try to be objective and suggest that there's a lot of evidence or changes when you're kind of like already in the groove and in that cycle. So, challenges always happening. These were some that just started from the beginning. Like I mentioned, this is the library's first dams. Before we had no central storage repository, we had no consistent access and delivery solutions. We were pretty customized for each different type of asset format. So, requests for films and images were handled in completely different ways. It was piecemeal, it was time consuming. And discovery on the public side was somewhat limited and spotty. We have a pretty small staff in the library and archive here for what seems like a big institution. There's 12 of us, two of us are based grant based, two of us are part time. And I'm currently the only digital content administrator in the library. Because we had no resources to manage them, we had no real born digital collecting process in place. We were really aware of the growing need. And so, we were able to do that. Literally, we had born digital collections from other departments that were sort of waiting in the wings for a transfer until we could properly accommodate them and steward them. We had some born digital content in our accession backlog that we were just avoiding. Another challenge is that digital preservation is really intimidating. I think you're starting from scratch and you don't have a lot of dedicated resources. It's overwhelming to even know where to start. And it's easy to think that it would be easier to just wait until you get some sort of one stop shop solution in a system. Honestly, with my colleagues and I, like previously, like you said, digital preservation and like chills went down our spine, you know, everybody cringed should we change the subject because we were just embarrassed by our lack of engagement with it. That we thought, but it ends up, we were better. Just some other thing notes that I just always bring up is that one of the challenges was requiring a mental shift in our thinking between recognizing the difference between digitized from analog and born digital collections. There's like really different, they're related, but there's a different method to collection management for each of them. And their needs are different. What we previously had called digital special collections was an image database with analog surrogates. And this is different. So, and lastly, we did have these existing systems that we needed to integrate with. We were starting up this brand spanking new dams, old builds and whistles. But it's not the golden ticket and answer to everything. It doesn't solve all the problems. So we wanted to make sure that we were complimenting our other applications and letting each system do what it does best. The beginning of the grant, we had about a five month wait period between when it started and when the contract was finalized. And at that point, we knew we'd be able to begin onboarding. We suspected that once that began, it would be all systems go and there'd be no time for anything else, which was really good foresight. It was pretty intense. The systems librarian who's my boss and I, we took the opportunity in those early months to review our existing digital assets, metadata, resources, and we developed a timeline for the project. We anticipated growth and we selected very strategic collections to include as proof of concept to demonstrate how our digital program or new digital programs would be expanding and what services that the library would be able to support and offer on the enterprise level now for the museum. This projected expansion and transformative shift in the digital landscape and our programs was the primary justification for this entire grant project. So we realized that without increased capacity and features, we would need foundational guidance about how the dams and the digital archive would now govern. So there were a lot of decisions about policy, workflows, standards, and permissions that were in order. Luckily, my aforementioned boss is really awesome and she let me front load these early months before implementation with a lot of like archival research and anticipatory documentation and planning. Documentation is critical for a bunch of probably obvious reasons besides just an anal retentive. But first it's, this is a grant, it's a term position. And I did want to make sure that the structure would have a life beyond the project. Second governance is system agnostic. So having principles, standards, methods, and goals work no matter what platform you use. So if at the end of this grant all the funding drops out and we have to switch to like a plan B system, we can still have this framework. And third, I did want to be as transparent as possible for senior management and funding reporting. If we're going to do the thing, let's just show them exactly where their money is going and where our steps are. So I worked on workflows and policy mainly. I began with workflows because having previously been managing digitization projects, I would say it was like my comfort zone. And I modified and created, I'm just going to pull up this document. So I modified and created research based digitization projects. And then I made a request workflows project based digitization internal board digital transfers, external donation guidelines. And I really regret putting all this effort into this. For me, it ended up being pre presumptive, preliminary to actually having the system. And I'm actually currently going through and kind of rewriting most of these. I guess intellectually it was helpful for me to be able to communicate with people as we talked it out, but I really did put like a little bit too much effort into this at the time. So then I tackled the digital preservation policy. Next, I attended some, I had already attended some really amazing digital preservation training classes. I was about halfway through my DAS, my digital archive specialist certificate from the society of and archivist. I knew having such a policy was one of the more important ways to guide us. One of the things I had learned in all my education was that there's no such thing as when I neglect with digital archives. Doing anything is better than nothing because if you do nothing you're bound to have loss in your digital materials. So even if I drafted a preservation policy and it ended up showing every pain point and everything that we were lacking it would be a valuable tool for us. I began with a self-assessment tool I found online and I did an assessment based on the NDSR levels of preservation and after this I'm going to send an email with a bunch of links to some sites that I found very helpful and I still do and helping figure out how this program was going to work. So I was pleasantly surprised when I did the self-assessment to find that we were or once we had the dams in place we would be doing basic preservation measures already and I found policy examples and templates that I bounced from. There are lots as I said of really fabulous resources to take advantage of. So at the onset of drafting this policy I did want to get stakeholder input especially from my colleagues in special collections in the library but on a practical level I kind of knew that wasn't going to happen. Everyone is overstretched as I said we're a short small staff. I'm the only one with digital in my title so it's kind of like fell in me and as I mentioned we were a little digital preservation shy. No one seems really enthusiastic about writing policy but I kind of just went rogue and started going for it. Once I had a preliminary version I shared it with some of my colleagues to get feedback and full disclosure that didn't go very well for me. It was there was a little bit of pushback I think there was a fear of shining a light on areas that needed growth a fear of there was concern because some of our other current library policies and documentations were in revision and that this would counterman those. And also mainly I think just you say policy and people immediately think it's going to be like written in stone and it's not it's a very organic fluid thing. But I just kept going and set up another meeting to get people involved and we ended up kind of going through it and eventually the systems library and just put this posted this onto our website mainly for transparency sake. I think the most important there's a lot of components to this and again I'll share some of the resources I found that helped me figure out which categories to do but it seems very redundant but each section kind of helps figure out what you're doing and it gives you a framework to work from. To me the guiding principles are really important and the scope and the collection development priorities this to in my experience was the hardest part to get in engagement with my colleagues and it's the weakest area in our policy so I'm overdue for a review and revision of this this year and I really want to try to flesh this out a little more concretely. I put purposely vague language in here but again that's the beauty of it is it's iterative and it's constantly going to be reviewed and changed as we be. And the here the levels of preservation this is based on the national digital stewardship alliance they have a set of levels of preservation and this is where I actually was able to get the most engagement or buy in from my colleagues because I think just because it's visual and it was easy to see that this was a progression it wasn't like I was trying to solve all of our problems at once. So then that's that's about it like how did it all work out yeah preservation we were actually doing a lot better than we thought we were. We you know there's it's it's very iterative it's very baby steps so even things like having standardized vocabulary and metadata schema is a preservation tool like it's a good thing that having inventories just having an excel inventory of something is good. It doesn't have to be fancy bag it you know dropping things with you know OAS you know workflows and stuff. So being transparent about it actually wasn't as scary as we thought like you know just talking about where we're good and where we need to go is helpful. Workflows like I mentioned I have to revise those all together but it's just knowing the system now it's better. An organization I do wish we had spent more time with this. We discussed the collections management system organizations and relationships a lot and we we planned it out but we didn't visualize it much and we recently realized that we needed more documentation about this. So I do feel this is something that we probably should have done earlier in the stage but recently my colleagues and I put together this which is just sort of like a little roadmap for all the different systems that the library uses and what they're each good for so this is on the website so researchers can find it and say oh I you know this is what I'll find here this is what I'll find here and somebody made a cool graphic um and I probably just talked really fast that was it and that's it and just thank you. Thank you Kendra that was a lot of good information um so folks if anyone has um any questions feel free to either you know unmike or unmute your mic and shout it out you can put it in the chat or you can put it in the shared notes document I can read them out for you which whichever you're most comfortable comfortable with and I'll wait a little bit to give folks a chance if you have any questions. Yeah I I really like talking about this stuff so it's it's um any question if you want to reach out please do. Hi I have a question. So I just quickly looked at at the what's on the website because I couldn't really read what was on the screen but it looks like really well developed and yeah wow I'm I'm very impressed having looked at these or tried to look at them what's available online is pretty limited um but I noticed that you you named it like digital preservation policy but in fact you have digital collection development in there as well and I was just hoping that you could discuss that a little bit um it was it was something that I found in a lot of other policies as well um that it's I feel like the preservation having preservation in the policy title is actually more of a misnomer because it is more about like overall collections administration um but I did want to put preservation in there like it's like the whole thing is about the preservation um and the collection the collection development is um is part I'm sorry I'm trying to um the collection development is sort of part of the what we can what we're committing to trying to preserve so like we're all we're not taking certain things or we're we're gonna avoid taking certain things that we don't have the capacity to retain on a long term stop you know on a long term basis so that's part of what that is um and yeah but that's a good question I know it's it's a lot in one policy um and my boss and I have talked a lot about like coming up with more like just like a digital asset management system defining governance as well and I'm like it's not a bit much but you know it does there's these little details to it that um kind of um make it necessary to really granulate it um or we're learning we're we're learning as we go like what people are asking us and we have not come up with something to give them we're like I have to write that um thank you yeah great thank you so much so it looks like there's actually a few questions in the chat uh trying to clear up which digital asset management system yeah we went I'm gonna write it in there and I'll send the link for our system but um we went with our um Cortex by Orange Logic um it's well it's it's managed by Orange Logic it's um pricey it has a lot of dancey dancey stuff um we went from having nothing to like you know a Ferrari and so it's been a huge learning curve for us we we love it we're really happy with it but it it was it was like a huge jump um in our awareness of what we could do um but it's good because we're actually getting um some interest and um collaboration from other departments earlier than we didn't we thought we were gonna have to like really sell this to the museum but people are like no no no we how can we get involved so it's good that it's really scalable and that it's it's gonna be able to um grow to meet the different needs but yeah we went with Cortex so our um digital systems we have um the the dams um we also have archive space for archival collections management um previous previous to the dams we had um an instance of a mecca for um our image image collection database um we also have d space which is a digital repository for institutional um literature um digital and our our catalog um which is wms um we just switched over we we did have um Sierra and we just switched to wms which i honestly don't even know what those letters stand for world share world management system um and so we're we're trying to get them to all work together okay soon Laura and you have your hand up hi thank you for this great presentation so we're in the process of um oh i've added an extra reaction instead of lowering my hand but it's fine um so we've started a kind of fledgling digital preservation programs here that is mostly um we have a dark archive where we've been ingesting digital assets too but we're also in the process of implementing a dam and I was wondering if you could speak a little more to kind of the process of using a dam for digital preservation because it's been my understanding that we can't use something like rolling out netx um something like netx wouldn't provide kind of that level of digital preservation um that we would need um yeah um and this is actually going to answer or help answer a question I think in the in the chat um honestly the the dams does most what we're prodding ourselves on with the digital preservation other than redundancy I mean like we we the way they built the system and our IT department was um involved in figuring out that architecture there's um a lot of redundancy and we're also keeping local copies of everything because we're like afraid of the cloud because it's all cloud so we're we're just like okay we're keeping stuff still um so we have that built in um already and then the the the cortex does actually um generate checksums on ingest um and there's a lot of reporting tools that are available with it um I do any kind of metadata extraction ahead of time and create um we haven't really got that many um collections for me to do but like I've been um creating document um records inventories of that kind of data and saving it um either in the dams or externally we're working on trying to get a share point integration um for some things that are more like um administrative or working docs um but we don't want to put in the dams yet that we're um so yeah I mean it is baby steps and I yeah I was very self-conscious about our lack of doing a whole lot of formal digital preservation with capital dp on stuff um but you know there's a lot of um any kind of groups that I've met with um the cortex we have a um there's a slack channel for cortex users and like in cultural institutions and um you know having met with some of them and we've brought up digital preservation and they they pretty much do the same thing I do like they and these are people that you know have been around and really know what they're talking about and I'm like oh you don't do it either like you know I'm thinking I was missing something but at this point it's like what I said like anything is better than nothing so um you know we're we're hoping to eventually move into something um more robust and I know some of my colleagues just really want like preservica or something solution like that that um and I just kind of am fearful of bringing in another system at this point because you know we we're struggling to manage all of this so um yeah yeah we have the same issues so I appreciate that feedback thank you and I think you sort of touched on this a little in the last answer but there's a question in the chat do any of these systems include digital preservation steps like checksums migration tools etc yeah um they yeah they do um that well the the dams does the dams um creates a checksum I think dspace also does to be honest um and it does dedupe on migration so that's helpful um and um but but that's so far all we've explored with it I'm sure there's other features that are there but we haven't wrecked our head around it yet um redundancy needs yeah we built that in um when it's uh it's with amazon I can never remember the name of it it's like cloud and so we have three copies being like one in the dam and then there's like one Canada and one and you know like three cloud-based ones and then um thank you yes and then um we also do have local storage we still have the servers that are um our um assets were originally stored on which were just a kind of like a hot mess um but we still have them and my boss won't let it sunset them until we have like something to a secondary tertiary quarter-ary backup um on site um and we also have hard drives here like we have a um that we use for anything new that's coming in that we just back it up to there so we we do um lots of copies yeah and I know there's a whole debate over like cloud versus on-prem we kind of just went with what our it direction was going I mean we do have a pretty well we have a strong it department at the museum and once you get your their ear you you know just sort of go with it so and they're they're ultimately supporting us and helping us with all of this okay do you want to make sure I didn't miss any questions from the chat or anything um I yeah the the DAS certificate I did it it I disclosure got um compensation from here for professional development because it's ridiculously expensive um so um but I got like part of it um giving back to me from from museum so they paid for part of it so um I there was a lot of it that was um maybe redundant um honestly I've gotten I I took a I took like a one-day seminar from the digital power institute um I think that was and it was like digital preservation for small size institutions I was someplace else at the time and um and it it like was really compact and amazing and I still pull on those resources all the time um so like if it's a matter of you know spending over a thousand dollars or this was like fifty dollars and transportation it was um you know like that's really like I would suggest something like that um but the DAS certificate was um really great it went into nitty gritty and I was able to um because it's like electives and so you can kind of like customize like I knew I wanted to learn more about like pdfa and so I took that class and there was like one specifically on audio visual archive which we have a heavy AV archive here in the library that I wanted to learn about so um it it was valuable yeah it was but I don't know if I would have done it if I had to pay out of pocket myself to be honest I think Carly had their hand up first uh yeah I I don't know how much you want to um go into this Kendra but um I did sort of like raise my eyebrow when you said that your position is term limited um just because I think all of us here will agree that like digital preservation kind of is ongoing and requires like you know stable staff to be able to like continue this work so I wonder if you could um talk any about your experience of like having to think about for instance your documentation um without necessarily knowing like who is going to be doing this work in the future or have you had conversations about who will do this work after um yeah term position yeah it's um I mean fingers crossed we're making an argument that they can't continue having this system without having me or having someone in my position so so there is a lot of um talk with um senior management um and we're also in the process of uh a second round it's the levy foundation that we have our funding from and it was it's the archives initiative and there's like three projects that they funded for our library um so we're preparing proposals for more projects um so like kind of a loophole in there is like to write me into a next three-year grant if if need be but um yeah it is a little um hard so that's why I like trying to like I'm very conscious of not keeping things in my head as much as I maybe would if I had the job security knowing that five years from now I'm the one who's going to have to remember that so I try to document a lot of things um but yeah it is it is a little um I I think this was this started as like an experiment and they wrote a they wrote a digital archivist position for the grant um and that was kind of like getting the foot in the door to get like digital awareness um and now we're just trying to hang on to it grant grant work is hard yeah it's interesting when um grant like grants are used yeah for like preservation oriented positions because it's like there has yeah there has to be someone doing that work for the for the preservation to be occurring so it's it's good to know that you've been able to like um yeah try to lay some groundwork for creating a more uh like either an extension or like a position that could um be doing this work hopefully that you could do yeah hopefully we'll see it's over at the end of the year or so um but everybody keeps telling me just act as if I have this job continue it easy for you to say I have bills to pay you know like whatever um there's a couple of us it's it's a very this um you know libraries and archives are you know it's a lot of grant work it's a lot of grant funding and so you just kind of roll with it I just keep telling myself I didn't switch professions to make a lot of money so Amy Amy you've had your hand up and we'll sort of have you close out the questions um and then we'll have a few announcements before we uh break off show I think skill um Kendra I was going to say just before my question it looks like you set a really good foundation for for future thinking so I really hope that that's successful um my question I don't know if this is entirely fair it's really about institutional context and I'm asking it partly because um there's a lot of people from art museums naturally in this group today so in an art museum context part of um what makes or you know creates the texture of our digital preservation efforts or attempts is that there are digital objects in the art collection as well and so a digital preservation policy may or may not sort of incorporate the whole museum situation is that possibly the case in a natural history museum or does it not make sense in the same way and if it is then is that like a hook in terms of integrating what you've led really in the museum to have a sort of wider applicability that's a really good point um the most of the collections and in our institution have nothing to do with the library I mean like they they are but there there's collections management on every scientific departmental level and they have their own concerns with their physical objects um we're trying to sort of step in and make ourselves available for their digital their digitized and digital content so we um so like anthropology has a really strong image database um and we're talking to them about possibly integrating it with us so their images could we could help manage those but you know like we and we're trying to get the the data about their actual collections um but there's like they have separate concerns about theirs and so that's one of the things that we're we're kind of like realizing now is that we can take that load off of them you know this is what we're we're good at we can describe images and we can describe um digital assets and so it's something that we're gonna we're trying to provide for different departments within the museum that have their own collection management issues and systems and which is not universal throughout the institution we um they there's a lot of different systems in place I know we said that would be the last question but I think we won't we're in the chat are you are your collections using a different dam like your non-library museum collections um yeah there's a bunch of different systems in use um throughout the institution a lot of the scientific collections use KEMU for their collections management some use uh collective access and then um some just use like an access database um there's the communications department has a couple instances of extensive portfolio for their um sort of production dams um and um but other than that I don't know of any other digital asset management systems in the across the institution I mean ideally we want to try to you know make it more centralized um but that's something we're working with IT and we're trying to get you know upper senior senior people to have an awareness of it so you know because it you know everybody uses these assets and so I well thank you so much Kendra for presentation and thank you everyone for uh asking such uh uh thought provoking questions I think it was a really great conversation today so thank you all for joining us