I had the pleasure of attending and presenting at the 2013 CurateGear meeting held at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on January 9, 2013. And what a good experience it was.
CurateGear is a somewhat unique experience because it focuses not on presentations, but on demonstrations. LIVE demonstrations. Every presenter gives a 5-minute presentation to the full group to introduce what tools and services they will be showing off. Then each presenter moves off to a room to do a lengthy demo, and the attendees can move between the demos. This happens many times during the day so everyone gets the opportunity to learn about a number of tools during the day.
I love this event structure.
I got to present two Library of Congress tools that are not visible to the community because we only use them only on-site – our Content Transfer Services and our QR Sampler. After a few moments of fear — Why is the Ubuntu laptop not communicating with the projector? Why is the CTS service taking so long to start up? — I gave live demos of both tools.
CTS is actually a suite of services that the Library has developed to receive, bag, inventory, run processing workflows, and perform basic audits on digital content files. The QR Sampler is a Library tool that is integrated with CTS to support the review (and acceptance or rejection) of newly digitized materials. There was a lot of interest in our releasing these tools as open source, which is gratifying! Both tools are highly integrated with the Library’s infrastructure, so this is not an overnight task to consider or accomplish.
Trevor Owens from NDIIPP gave a great demo of ViewShare. It’s extremely exciting to see the improvements in the interface, and especially the new Gallery View option for image collections.
I saw a number of exciting presentations.
- ArchivesSpace
- Safety Deposit Box and Preservica
- Dryad Repository
- SAFE Archive
- Preservation Intent Statements at the National Library of Australia
- Preserving Virtual Worlds Game Curation Survey
- TRAC Self-Assessment using Drupal
- CINCH
- Tools for File Format Identification, Validation and Characterization
- Archivematica
- The Cabrinety Software Collection at Stanford University and NIST
- Curator’s Workbench
- BitCurator
- Crowdsourcing of Historical Names
- Digital Forensics in use at New York Public Library
I didn’t find links for everything I saw – if anyone has them, please post them to the comments section!
Comments
Saw where ArchivesSpace has released a new test version. Though I have yet to use it, the premise and options are promising. (Looking forward to testing it out.)