Hi, it’s Liz again! And I can’t believe it’s already been a year since I started here at the RMO! And I was right last year when I said it was going to be great!
Huge catch at the Archives! (me and this beautiful Bolex Paillard M8 1950s/60 Swiss-made film projector).
A lot has been happening behind the scenes here:
Last Summer, Jack worked with Barbara to produce the biennial survey, and after all his great work we had tons of responses to get through. The series blog posts are one of the results of the survey. We had questions that were asked in the feedback section, and sure, we could have emailed people individually, but what if other people had that same question? That’s where this new series of blog posts come in. We hope they have been informative and helpful.
We also had many students from the iSchool work with different departments on their projects, like Silver, who wrote an awesome post about her time with the Centre for Community Engaged Learning. People might say I’m biased when I say the RMO is pretty fun, but she had a great time too and I hope we’ve inspired iSchool students to consider joining us in the future. I will say though, the office might be a bit cold (temperature wise), but the view of Learner’s Walk makes up for it (we even got to sneak a peek when Amazon was filming a tv show here at the library last month).
We’re quite serious about naming conventions and organization here, but that also means we have to keep ourselves in tip-top shape (glass houses and all that). For that, we ran an internal governance project to make sure our folders are essential, all the records are where they should be, and nothing is being kept past its retention period. It was actually quite helpful because there are so many different records types here and being familiar with them is crucial. Doing a governance project here almost feels like cheating though because Barbara applies retention annually, so most record series were up-to-date. I did get to move some stuff around, but the only things I got to delete were the thumbs.db files 🙁
It’s pretty fun when stuff gets filmed on campus!
Lastly, what I’m most excited to talk about is actually going to get its own blog post later this year is the Peter Wall fonds project! When the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies shut down in 2023, all the archival records from the centre’s opening to closing were transferred through the Records Management Office to the University Archives. Over thirty years of projects, events, meeting minutes, applications, and (most excitingly) lecture recordings! Over the Summer I got to work on arranging and describing series and items from the fonds, getting them ready access and preservation through use of:
- Open Collections, a web-based portal that allows researchers to browse items to find things they’d like to request access to, and where the lectures will be available for viewing, and
- Archivematica, where the objects will undergo ongoing digital preservation.
Working with the Peter Wall fonds has been such an invaluable learning experience. Not only did I get to apply all these concepts from my classes and get hands-on experience with them, it was also a safe and collaborative environment where even though mistakes sometimes happen, learning how to fix those errors is part of the process too. We got to use different softwares, learn several Excel formulas, used Linux and Python, break the pipelines a couple times test the boundaries of what AtoM can handle. I wish more classes had hands-on parts like this, I learned so much! But I guess that is the point of participating in the Work Learn program at UBC; getting the chance to put theory into practice!
Anyways, that’s it for now. Hopefully the Peter Wall fonds will be uploaded soon and then you’ll get to read my blog post on that adventure.
Thank you so much for reading and I’ll see you next time!
xoxo
Liz