Projects

My dissertation research centers around the Central State Hospital archives project, which has been in action since the spring of 2010. The main thrust of the multi-year project is to create one or more digital archives for the historical medical-related records from a 142-year-old mental institution in Petersburg, Virginia. My work has included preservation assessments of the physical materials, processing, and indexing the records in preparation for digitization. This project will continue to require careful consideration of privacy rights and institutional trust.

In the spring of 2010, I assisted with eMicrobes, a digital library of infectious diseases intended to be used as a teaching tool for health professionals. I researched access strategies for supporting eMicrobes in low-information and technology communication areas (especially Sub-Saharan Africa).

During the summer of 2008, I updated the bibliography for Promoting Preservation Awareness in Libraries (1997) by Jeanne M. Drewes and Julie A. Page. This book is a popular handbook that addresses the preservation needs of academic, public, and school libraries. The revised annotated bibliography includes numerous text, online, and A/V resources from 1997 to 2008 that can assist those in the library and archives community in advocating preservation to their staff and patrons. It can be viewed here.

In the spring of 2007, I worked on a project to process the digital files of Sir Arnold Wesker (1932- ), a British playwright. This work was done at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at UT Austin. The purpose was to migrate Sir Wesker's electronic files to stable media for preservation and access purposes. Other aspects of the project included decision-making for the relevant metadata that should be collected, how to batch process thousands of files, and the balancing of privacy agreements with preservation. The resulting online collection can be viewed here.

 

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