Dennett is an eloquent teacher who addresses the questions of our time with great audacity. He is optimistic about science and demonstrates in his work the importance of knowledge, critical thinking, and an open attitude to ‘other’ ideas. He is a source of inspiration to both his colleague-scientists and to a larger audience.
The foundation also praised Professor Dennett for “his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience“. Professor Dennett is so dedicated to communication with the broadest audience that he has donated his papers to the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives, making an Open Access commitment to share his scholarship with the wider community. Most of Professor Dennett’s articles are available at the Tufts Digital Library.
Congratulations, Professor Dennett, and we thank you for your commitment to Open Access and discussing philosophical ideas with the larger community of global citizens.
James Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, presented Philip Lampi, the driving force and researcher behind the A New Nation Votes project, with a commendation “for scholarly perseverance and tireless research into election returns from the earliest decades of the American republic” at a ceremony at the American Antiquarian Society on February 16, 2012.
DCA would like to send out our congratulations to Phil and thank him for his years of work that have made A New Nation Votes a reality. Phil is a tireless researcher, a keen scholar, and just about the nicest person one could ever hope to meet.
The Digital Collections and Archives is pleased to announce the completion of its TAPER Project (Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records). During the project the DCA designed, developed, and implemented machine-readable submission agreements and records context records. The DCA fully implemented the machine-readable submission agreements to document accessions and integrated the production of records context records encoded in EAC-CPF into its normal descriptive practices. By the end of the grant project the DCA encoded 51 records context records about Tufts departments and offices in EAC.
The project deliverables, including our local instructions for implementing EAC, are available to use, adapt, and modify.
TAPER was funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission as an electronic records Program Expansion Project grant.
To mark Open Access Week the Tufts University Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Team has launched a website celebrating the recipients of our Provost’s Open Access Fund. The fund has two components: the first, for publishing, funds scholars who choose to publish with author-pays open access; the second, for digitization, supports the creation of sustainable open access digital collections of unique research materials created by Tufts faculty.
All of the publications which have been funded for open access publication have also been made available in the Tufts Digital Library. The digitized research materials will also be made available in the TDL once they are created, digitized, and described.
The much anticipated instructional videos on using the Tufts University Submission Agreement Builder Tool (SABT) to make, submit, and finalize Transfer Agreement Forms (TAF) are finally available! They can be accessed through the DCA Channel on YouTube.
Two of the videos are geared toward archivists, and they explain how to set up and finalize TAFs using the SABT. The other video is focused on Tufts employees and goes through the steps of completing the form to send a transfer of materials to the DCA. One of the great features of these TAFs is that they tie directly into an electronic dropbox, so transfer documentation and the actual transfer of digital files are linked.
These videos are part of the DCA’s grant project, “TAPER: Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records,” funded by the NHPRC.
The Digital Collections and Archives is wrapping up a three-year National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) electronic records Program Expansion Project grant (RE10005-08) to support the Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records (TAPER). A key component of the TAPER Project was the development of a systematized process for accessioning electronic records. Out of this project came the Submission Agreement Builder Tool (SABT) which we are actively using to create Transfer Agreement Forms, not just for our electronic records accessions, but for all our accessions.
Okay, so it’s actually the World Peace Foundation (WPF) that is returning to Tufts, to the Fletcher School to be precise. But the WPF has a long history with Tufts, and DCA has the records to prove it!
For one thing, the WPF–which was originally called the International School of Peace–was founded by Edwin Ginn, Tufts graduate of 1862. After college, Ginn opened a small book agency in Boston which grew into a textbook publishing house Ginn and Company. Ginn was know for his philanthropies and worked to address housing issues for the poor in Boston, but his most enduring legacy is the World Peace Foundation and his calls for peace, disarmament, and international arbitration.
Here at DCA, like most archives, we have tons of stuff. In fact, we have 7,000 linear feet of stuff on our shelves (that’s almost two miles of documents, books, and photographs!) and 100,000 digital objects in our digital library. And it grows daily! Keeping track of all this stuff is one of the central challenges of being an archivist and we rely on a variety of systems to help us do this.
At DCA, we rely on our collection management system, as it’s called, to do more than just help us find things. Our collection management system reflects how we think about our collections; it reflects the intellectual organization of the materials we collect. This intellectual map also translates into how we provide access to the rich content we house and how we put that material in context, filling it with historical meaning. As we begin to grapple with more complicated collections — collections that reflect both physical and digital content as well as the increasingly “online” nature of Tufts — it’s become clear that our old collection management system is no longer able to keep up with our evolving conceptual model.
It’s with this problem in mind that we’ve decided to design our own collection management system that we’re calling CIDER. CIDER takes a new approach to modeling archival collections and will provide us with tons of flexibility in how we map, document, and present information about our collections. Oh, and it will also make it easier to find stuff, too. Though CIDER is a tool for us at DCA, its benefit will directly affect those who use our material as it allows us to improve almost every aspect of our workflows — helping us get more stuff available to researchers faster — and nearly unlimited potential for bringing new material to light in exciting ways.
When the first stable version of CIDER is complete, we intend to make the source code available using the AGPL license so anyone can download and install it for free, as well as modify the software and adapt it to their own needs and way of thinking about their collections.
We’ll save more details about CIDER and how it’s different than other collection management systems for future posts so stay tuned!
DCA is pleased to welcome Aaron Rubinstein to the staff of Digital Collections and Archives. Aaron is our new Archivist for Digital Collections, and will be focusing on metadata management, digital object preparation and related workflows, and digital preservation activities.
Aaron comes to Tufts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was the Digital Project Manager and oversaw the development of Credo, the Special Collections and University Archives’ digital repository.
Contact Information
Digital Collections and Archives
Tisch Library Building
35 Professors Row
Medford, MA 02155
