By: Savannah Gignac, Assistant Photo Librarian and Amanda Nelson, Associate Archivist
From August 14th through August 16th, our staff attended the Society of American Archivists (SAA) annual meeting in Washington, D. C. Along with participating in educational sessions detailing some of the newest trends in archives and libraries, two of our staff members promoted their work at the Niels Bohr Library & Archives through a poster and lightning round presentation.
Amanda Nelson participated in a lightning round session with nine other speakers titled “Spreading the Word: Access to Oral History Collections in the Digital Age.” She discussed our 1,000 oral history transcripts online and the features available to researchers including audio clips, full text searching and links to our online catalog. She also gave a preview of the transition of the transcripts into Drupal (AIP’s new content management system) and how new features will be added with its implementation over the coming months.
Savannah Gignac presented a poster, designed by Web developer, Ada Uzoma, focused on our new Emilio Segrè Visual Archives (ESVA) website and database. The poster documents the data migration of 25,000 image records from the historical photo database held in Microsoft Access, to the more flexible CMS platform of Drupal. The presentation highlighted how the Niels Bohr Library and AIP’s Web Development teams designed a new CMS, evaluated existing metadata, prepped for data migration, and ensured better user access and search capabilities of our online photographic archive.
The entire photo project took just under a year and a half. Many hours were spent considering new workflows, new designs for user interface, and developing ways to safely migrate 25,000 records chock full of extensive metadata. See this previous blog post for more on the ESVA project.
The photo website now functions with a more user friendly experience, including advanced search as well as information on purchasing image rights and digital copies. By sharing our poster, we hope to help other professionals when choosing to make the leap to a new CMS with a safe data migration plan of action.
For more information about these projects and our presentations feel free to contact us.