Author Archives: Tech Services

Job Posting: Processing Archivist for Latin American Manuscripts Collections

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Processing Archivist for Latin American Manuscripts Collections

Department: Rare Books and Special Collections
Requisition #: D-18-LIB-00024

Position Summary

Princeton University Library seeks an energetic, collaborative, forward-thinking archival description professional to create, manage, and enhance data for Manuscripts Division collections. Personal papers of Latin American literary, cultural, and political figures will constitute the majority of the position’s workload, though work in other collection areas may be assigned. Primary duties include processing and cataloging new acquisitions along with revising legacy finding aid data and catalog records as required by current practices and user needs. Management of audio-visual resources and digital assets is included in the position’s responsibilities. This position will supervise student workers. Archivists participate in committee work relating to policies, workflow, and system development and may contribute to digital humanities projects.

This position is available immediately.  Applications received within 1 month of posting are guaranteed consideration.

Princeton is especially interested in qualified candidates who can contribute, through their commitment to the Library’s mission and vision, to the diversity and excellence of our academic community.

Essential Qualifications

  • Master’s degree from an ALA-accredited program, or equivalent combination of other advanced degree and professional-level experience in a research library or archival setting.
  • Fluent reading knowledge of Spanish, either in connection with modern or contemporary literature, or demonstrated application of the language in a library, archives, or other research setting.
  • Hands-on manuscripts processing experience with collections varying in size and scope.
  • Familiarity with current developments in processing procedures.
  • Application of standards for manuscript and archival description such as DACS, EAD, and MARC and facility with managing the resulting descriptive data
  • Ability to work both independently and collaboratively in a team setting.
  • Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
  • Ability to work effectively in a dynamic environment and with a diverse group of staff and patrons.

Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with collection management tools such as Archivists’ Toolkit, Archon, ArchivesSpace, or similar system.
  • Knowledge of procedures for accessioning and describing born-digital materials and audiovisual media, and understanding of related preservation concerns.
  • Understanding of EAC-CPF. Processing experience with handwritten materials.
  • Proficiency with XSLT, XQuery or other such computing tools relevant to the management of archival descriptive data.
  • Experience with bibliographic MARC-format cataloging using RDA, AMREMM, or AACR2.
  • Knowledge of non-English languages that are significant to the position’s scope such as French or Portuguese.

The successful candidate will be appointed to an appropriate Librarian rank depending upon qualifications and experience.

Applications will be accepted only from the AHire website: https://puwebp.princeton.edu/AcadHire/position/6081 and must include a resume, cover letter, and a list of three references with full contact information. This position is subject to the University’s background check policy.
Requisition #: D-18-LIB-00024

Princeton University Library is one of the world’s leading research libraries. It employs a dedicated and knowledgeable staff of more than 300 professional and support staff working in a large central library, 9 specialized branches, and 3 storage facilities. The Library supports a diverse community of 5,200 undergraduates, 2,700 graduate students, 1,200 faculty members, and many visiting scholars. Its holdings include more than 10 million printed volumes, 5 million manuscripts, 2 million non-print items, and extensive collections of digital text, data, and images. More information: http://library.princeton.edu/ 

Manuscripts Division Offers 2018 Archival Fellowship

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The Manuscripts Division, a unit of Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, is proud to offer the 2018 Manuscripts Division Archival Fellowship. This fellowship provides a summer of paid work experience for a current or recent graduate student interested in pursuing an archival career. For more information about the Manuscripts Division visit: http://rbsc.princeton.edu/divisions/manuscripts-division

Fellowship Description: The 2018 Fellow will gain experience in technical services, with a focus this year on arrangement and description of manuscript collections, including hybrid collections with born-digital and audiovisual materials. Additional projects may include assisting with reference and imaging services work. The Fellow will work primarily under the guidance of the of the Manuscripts Division processing team, which includes the Lead Processing Archivist and Project Archivist for Americana Manuscript Collections.

The Manuscripts Division of Rare Books and Special Collections is located in Firestone Library, Princeton University’s main library, and holds over 14,000 linear feet of materials covering five thousand years of recorded history and all parts of the world, with collecting strengths in Western Europe, the Near East, the United States, and Latin America. The Fellow will primarily work with the Division’s expansive literary collections, the papers of former Princeton faculty, and collections relating to the history of the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The ten- to twelve-week fellowship program, which may be started as early as May, provides a stipend of $950 per week. In addition, travel, registration, and hotel costs to the Society of American Archivists’ annual meeting in August will be covered by Princeton.

Requirements: This fellowship is open to current graduate students or recent graduates (within one year of graduation). Successful completion of at least twelve graduate semester hours (or the equivalent) applied toward an advanced degree in archives, library or information management, literature, American history/studies, or other humanities discipline, public history, or museum studies; demonstrated interest in the archival profession; and good organizational and communication skills. At least twelve undergraduate semester hours (or the equivalent) in a humanities discipline and/or foreign language skills are preferred.

The Library highly encourages applicants from under-represented communities to apply.

To apply: Applicants should submit a cover letter, resume, and two letters of recommendation to: mssdiv@princeton.edu. Applications must be received by Monday, March 12, 2018. Video interviews will be conducted with the top candidates, and the successful candidate will be notified by April 20th.

Please note: University housing will not be available to the successful candidate. Interested applicants should consider their housing options carefully and may wish to consult the online campus bulletin board for more information on this topic.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMPLOYER.

Meet the Manuscripts Division 2017 Summer Fellow

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Under the supervision of the Manuscripts Division processing team, the summer fellow will be assisting with several key projects, including “traditional” paper-based processing, processing born-digital media, inventorying AV materials, and researching access options for born-digital and digitized AV content.

Kat at Prambanan, a Hindu temple in Indonesia

Name: Kathryn Antonelli (but feel free to call me Kat!)

Educational background: I received my undergraduate education from Temple University. My degree was in Media Studies and Production, with a minor in French. I’m now about halfway through my Master’s program in Library and Information Science through the University of South Carolina’s distributed education option. This summer, I’m conducting an independent study on the ethics of archiving audiovisual materials (especially within collections of indigenous and minority cultural groups), so if you have any leads on interesting articles to read please do let me know. 🙂

Previous experience: Before finding my interest in archiving, I worked in event production at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. More recently, after moving to Chicago and starting my MLIS, I’ve had the opportunity to intern at the Gerber/Hart Library, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Oriental Institute, and the Newberry Library.

Why I like archives: I like archives for two reasons: the stories they tell, and the mysteries they solve. I do truly enjoy working with paper-based collections, but after my undergraduate program I became much more aware of how audiovisual media presents—or omits—information, which made those materials and the ways we can use them even more interesting to me. And, after a childhood full of Nancy Drew novels, I’ll count anything from puzzling out the (accurate!) birth date of a well-known dancer to identifying people in a photograph as a type of mystery solving.

Other interests: While baseball season is a lot of fun, and the weather is much nicer, I’m rarely sad for summer to end because it means college football is about to start. I’m an ardent Temple fan, of course, but I also watch every other game I can. My friends are always entertained by the irony, since outside of watching sports I am not a competitive person at all.

Projects this summer: I’m excited that my first task at Princeton is to process the Albert Bensoussan papers. The collection is in both French and Spanish and I love working with foreign language materials. Later this summer, I’ll be taking on more tasks with our born-digital holdings, so I’m also looking forward to learning how to use the new FRED machine to work with files in the Toni Morrison collection.

Moving Beyond the Lone Digital Archivist Model Through Collaboration and Living Documentation

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Click here to view slides.

Below is the text of a presentation Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Kelly Bolding, and Faith Charlton gave earlier this month at the 2017 Code4Lib conference in Los Angeles, CA. The talk focused on the Manuscripts Division Team’s efforts to manage born-digital materials and the challenges of doing this work as processing archivists without “digital” in their titles. 

Hello everyone, welcome to the last session of the last day of code4lib. Thank you for sticking around.

What we want to talk about in the next 10 minutes are the numerous challenges traditional processing archivists can face when integrating digital processing into their daily archival labor. Shout out to UCSB, NCSU, and RAC for presenting on similar topics. Knowledge, skills, and institutional culture about who is responsible for the management of born-digital materials can all be barriers for those that do not have the word “digital” in their job titles.

Our talk will discuss steps the Manuscripts Division at Princeton University has taken to manage its born-digital materials through collaboration, horizontal learning, and living documentation.

But first, we’ll introduce ourselves: Hi, I am:

  • Elvia – I am the Processing Archivist for Latin American Collections
  • Kelly – I am a Manuscripts Processor
  • Faith – I am the Lead Processing Archivist for Manuscripts

We, along with two other team members, including Allison Hughes and Chloe Pfendler, who both contributed to efforts we will discuss here, form part of the Manuscripts Division in our department. And though we are all “traditional” processing archivists who do not have the word “digital” in our titles, we’ve increasingly encountered digital assets in the collections we are responsible for processing.

First we wanted to give everyone a breakdown of our department. Princeton’s archival repositories are actually physically split between two libraries with three main divisions. The Manuscripts Division (where we are located) is in Firestone Library; Public Policy and the University Archives are located several blocks away at Mudd Library. The library currently employs one dedicated Digital Archivist for the University Archives and that is Jarrett Drake, whom without his expert guidance and skill sharing, we wouldn’t be giving this presentation. Jarrett has really set the tone for horizontal learning and opening opportunities for skill building and sharing across the divisions of the department to empower his colleagues to take on digital processing work.

With that said, the Manuscripts Division has no digital archivist, so digital processing responsibilities are distributed across the team, which initially left us feeling like [gif of Ghostbusters team at the onset of meeting a ghostbusting challenge].

To dive into this type of work we needed to take some first steps. 

We literally jumped at the chance to begin managing our digital backlog by participating in SAA’s 2015 Jump in 3 initiative, which allowed us to gain intellectual control over legacy media within the division’s 1600 or so manuscript collections. We also began updating pertinent documentation, such as our deed of gift, and drafting new guidelines for donors with born-digital materials. We also began assembling our first digital processing workstation – a dual booting BitCurator and Windows 7 laptop connected to various external drives, including a Kryoflux for imaging problematic floppy disks.

With Jarrett’s assistance we began processing born-digital materials using the workflows he and his predecessors had developed for University Archives. We’ve also experimented with new tools and technologies; for example, setting up and using the KryoFlux and creating bash scripts to reconcile data discrepancies. So far, our work continues to be an ongoing process of trial, error, and, most importantly, open discussion.

Okay, let’s talk about horizontal learning. As an increasing number of archivists in our department were gaining the skills necessary to handle digital processing, the opportunity to share our expertise and experiences across divisions materialized. The following are two examples of how we’ve built this collaborative approach.

Over the last year a group of archivists from the across the department, including the Digital Archivist, came together to form DABDAC, the Description and Access to Born-Digital Archival Collections working group, as a means of maintaining an open forum for discussing born-digital description and access issues.

Members meet biweekly to discuss case studies, fails, potential new tools they are interested in experimenting with, readings, additions to workflows, etc. The workgroup follows a “workshop” model; whoever has a current description or access issue can bring it to the meeting’s agenda and ask the collective for advice.

Creating a horizontal skill-sharing environment has boosted our confidence as nascent digital archivists. Now with a baseline understanding of digital processing and the tools we need to do this type of labor, we sought the advice of our peers within the profession to help inform the development of our very own digital archives workstation. The team developed a survey asking 20 peer institutions about their local setup, which ultimately informed our decision in purchasing a FRED machine. Thanks to those who responded and provided us with in depth and extremely helpful responses.

Another key theme that has emerged from our experiences is the importance of living documentation. By this, we mean workflow documentation that is:

  • collaboratively created;
  • openly accessible and transparent;
  • extensible enough to adapt to frequent changes; and  
  • flexible enough to use across multiple divisions.

Managing living documentation like our Digital Records Processing Guide on Google Drive allows us to maintain tried-and-true guidelines vetted by the Digital Archivist, and supplemented by other archivists who work with digital materials.

We currently use the Comments feature to link from specific steps in the workflow to separate Google Docs, or other online resources that can inform decision-making or provide working alternatives to specific steps. We also write and link to documents we call “reflections.” These reflection documents detail improvised solutions to problems encountered during processing so that others can reuse them. By expanding our workflows this way, we extend the value of time dedicated to experimentation by documenting it for future repurposing.

Digital processing also presents opportunities for archivists to develop workflows collaboratively across institutions, especially since archivists often adopt digital tools developed for other fields like forensics. These tools often come poorly documented or with documentation intended for users with very different goals. One example is the KryoFlux, pictured here, a forensic floppy controller that many archivists have adopted. While our KryoFlux arrived from Germany with a few packages of gummy bears, the setup instructions were not so friendly. Luckily, we have benefitted tremendously from documentation that other repositories have generously shared online, particularly guides created by Alice Prael and others at Yale. UCLA’s Digital Archivist Shira Peltzman also recently asked us to contribute our “Tale of Woe” to a collaborative KryoFlux User Guide currently being drafted.

Before we conclude, we want to acknowledge both the particular institutional privileges that allow us to conduct this work as well as the broader structural challenges that complicate it. We are fortunate that the structure of our department affords processing archivists the time necessary to collaborate and experiment, as well as the material resources to purchase tools.

At the same time, while archivists are shifting functionally into more technical roles, institutional structures do not always acknowledge this shift. In our collective experience as an all-female team, we’ve faced challenges due to gendered divisions of labor. Even though the library and archives profession swings heavily female, technical positions in libraries still remain predominantly male. When these gender-coded realities are not acknowledged or challenged, undue and sometimes stubborn expectations can be placed on those who are expected to do the “digital” work and those who are not. For those in “traditional” processing roles with technical responsibilities that now fall within their domain, their labor can be often underappreciated or unacknowledged.

To wrap up, the realities of contemporary manuscript collections have made it clear that the lone digital archivist model no longer works for some institutions, particularly larger ones. As a team, we have met the challenge of integrating digital processing into our regular work by focusing on collaboration, horizontal learning, and living documentation. Although digital processing is new for us, we’ve been able to apply many skills we’ve already developed through prior work with metadata management, and we encourage our fellow archivists to find confidence in these skills when jumping into this work. We wanted to share with you the work we’ve done locally in hopes that our case study may empower anyone in a “traditional” processing role to take on the work that’s often been confined to that of the “digital archivist,” particularly by reaching out to others, whether they be in a different division, department, or institution.

We look forward to further collaboration with other colleagues at our home base and hope to continue building relationships and collaborating with others in the profession at large.
We leave you with a bibliography of additional resources and our contact information, and some gummy bears. Thank you.

Manuscripts Division Offers Its First Archival Fellowship!

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The Manuscripts Division, a unit of Princeton University Library’s Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, is proud to offer the inaugural Manuscripts Division Archival Fellowship to one graduate student or recent graduate this year. This fellowship provides a summer of work experience for a current or recent graduate student interested in pursuing an archival career. For more information about the Manuscripts Division visit: http://rbsc.princeton.edu/divisions/manuscripts-division

Fellowship Description: The 2017 Fellow will gain experience in technical services, with a focus this year on description and management of born-digital and audiovisual materials. The Fellow will work under the guidance of the of the Manuscripts Division processing team, which includes the Lead Processing Archivist, Latin America Processing Archivist, and General Manuscripts Processor. Projects for 2017 may include:

  • Processing one or more paper-based or hybrid format manuscript collections;
  • Conducting a survey of legacy audiovisual materials and assisting in the writing of a grant proposal for an audio digitization project;
  • Assisting with processing and analysis of born-digital media and implementation of related tools and software (i.e. FRED, ArchivesSpace, BitCurator, KryoFlux); and
  • Researching access options and permissions for digitized and born-digital materials.

The Manuscripts Division of Rare Books and Special Collections is located in Firestone Library, Princeton University’s main library, and holds over 14,000 linear feet of materials covering five thousand years of recorded history and all parts of the world, with collecting strengths in Western Europe, the Near East, the United States, and Latin America. The Fellow will primarily work with the Division’s expansive literary collections, including recently-acquired collections of contemporary authors, and collections relating to the history of the United States during the 18th and 19th centuries. The Fellow will have an opportunity to gain considerable experience and aid staff in formalizing comprehensive management of its born-digital and audiovisual materials, including developing methods of providing better access to this content.

The ten- to twelve-week fellowship program, which may be started as early as May, provides a stipend of $950 per week. In addition, travel, registration, and hotel costs to the Society of American Archivists’ annual meeting in July will be reimbursed.

Requirements: This fellowship is open to current graduate students or recent graduates (within one year of graduation). Successful completion of at least twelve graduate semester hours (or the equivalent) applied toward an advanced degree in archives, library or information management, literature, American history/studies, or other humanities discipline, public history, or museum studies; demonstrated interest in the archival profession; and good organizational and communication skills. At least twelve undergraduate semester hours (or the equivalent) in a humanities discipline and/or foreign language skills are preferred.

The Library highly encourages applicants from under-represented communities to apply.

To apply: Applicants should submit a cover letter, resume, and two letters of recommendation to: mssdiv@princeton.edu. Applications must be received by Monday, March 6, 2017. Skype interviews will be conducted with the top candidates, and the successful candidate will be notified by April 14.

Please note: University housing will not be available to the successful candidate. Interested applicants should consider their housing options carefully and may wish to consult the online campus bulletin board for more information on this topic.

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY/AFFIRMATIVE ACTION EMPLOYER.

Revealing the Folks Behind the Curtain

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Welcome to the Rare Books and Special Collections Technical Services blog at Princeton University Library. The Technical Services team consists of the archivists, catalogers, and associated staff who create and manage the resource records and discovery systems that connect users to Princeton’s impressive range of rare books, manuscripts, archival collections, and other unique materials.

In addition to creating discovery tools such as catalog records and finding aids, our team is also responsible for overall collections management, including maintaining the data and metadata about our collections, both old and new; overseeing space management, such as organizing the vaults that house rare books and special collections materials; and leading special projects to enhance access and support discovery, to name a few. While our work happens behind closed doors, we play an essential role as mediators to facilitate interaction between users and library materials, preparing collections for the reading room, and increasingly, for online access.

Our aim with this blog is to share some of the highlights of our work with fellow professionals and patrons alike, in order to provide a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes activities of the Rare Books and Special Collections Department as well as to foster important conversations about access, discovery, and use of special collections both in theoretical and practical terms. In the spirit of promoting creativity in our field and sharing what we’ve learned with others, we warmly welcome you to “the other side.”

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