Thanks to the generosity of the Mattingly Award, I was able to go and present a student poster, “Applying DACS to Tamiment’s Web Archiving Program” and make my first trip to both New Orleans and the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists. Over four and a half days, I got to explore NOLA, socialize with other archivists from all over the country, and learn and talk about one of my favorite archival topics, web archiving. At Tamiment, I have spent the better part of two and a half years working on their Web Archiving Project, capturing labor unions and left activism websites for future research use. Tamiment has always sought to collect ephemeral documents relating to the Left, and most contemporary ephemera is now found on the web. So naturally, my first SAA was going to revolve around web archiving.
Nicole Greenhouse beside her poster “Applying DACS to Tamiment’s Web Archiving Program”
After a day and a half of sightseeing, I attended the first ever Web Archiving Roundtable meeting at SAA. It was amazing to hear about the different projects being started, the difficulties of starting a project, and seeing the large turnout for the roundtable meeting (especially since it was at the same time as the ArchivesSpace roundtable meeting). It inspired me to join the Web Archiving Best Practices Committee/Toolbox.
I also attended a Web Archiving Service (WAS, the service used by Tamiment) users meeting. I was able to meet with other users to hear how they use the service, as well as to meet with the good people from WAS and give constructive feedback about the service. I attended an interesting session about web archiving collection development policies and spent many hours meeting others interested in web archiving, both while presenting my poster and during the conference in general. Chela, Tamiment’s head, even gave a shout out to our Occupy Wall Street web collections during her presentation!
All in all, it was a great trip and I learned so much about the archival community and what is new and up and coming in the profession. I am already excited about next year!