Dear DLF community,
Are you struggling with providing access to born-digital archives and other library resources? Feeling lost without resources and best practices
for doing so? Interested in leading professional development efforts in your community to address these issues? Consider getting involved with the newly-minted
DLF Born-Digital Access Group!
For just over a year, an ad-hoc group of digital archivists with these concerns have been meeting regularly to build a community of engagement
around providing access to born-digital library resources with a focus on archives. Our goal began as an effort to build a curriculum for a bootcamp, but as we started to plan we realized that solving this problem would take building a community, not just
putting on one workshop, to tackle issues related specifically to access.
While the idea for a born-digital access bootcamp came out of the 2015 Society of American Archivists conference, it was DLF that we turned
to for support when we decided to use Twitter chats
to engage a community of users and practitioners to help guide our curriculum and carry the conversation forward. We debuted the collaboratively-built Born-Digital Access Bootcamp at the 2017 New England Archivists’ annual meeting, and we
think it was a success!
So how can you get involved, and what can this community do for you?
We’ve made our initial curriculum open and are encouraging
regional or local groups to lead bootcamps in their own communities, remix, and add to what we’ve started with. If you’d like to help plan or lead a bootcamp in your own region, or just have a space to discuss barriers you’re facing to providing access to
born-digital archives and other library resources, join us at b-daccessbootcamp.slack.com.
And we’re always open to ideas, so let us know if you have thoughts for other gaps we can fill.
We’re excited to build this community through DLF, where we can more easily exchange ideas with colleagues outside of the confines of archives,
so no matter what your background or current position, please feel empowered to join the conversation!
Thanks to everyone that helped to get this group together and we are looking forward to meeting many more of you. For more information about the group contact
Dan Johnson.