Author: dwakimoto

A Grant, a Break, and some Fun

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! I hope your day is going well. I’m enjoying the day so far, especially as we have tomorrow off in celebration of Cesar Chavez Day. Also, today is Anna’s birthday (happy birthday, Anna!) and you should really check out her blog because it is fabulous. So today I just want to talk about a few odds and ends before cleaning up my office and getting ready for a mini-break. So let’s get into the library/archives goodness.

So, those who know me well know I’m not big into giving myself pats on the back or bragging about my accomplishments. But I have to share one awesome piece of news because it is just, well, awesome so I’m making an exception. Our archives received an American Heritage Preservation Grant from the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) for the preservation of one of our collections: The Jensen Family Collection! If you can’t tell, I’m very excited about this grant (and it makes all the time we’ve spent this year writing grant proposals worthwhile).

We’ll be de-encapsulating hundreds and hundreds of letters that are currently in non-archival enclosures and rehousing the entire collection in order to stabilize and preserve the collection. I’m so psyched because the grant also allows us to provide much better access to the collection and hopefully we’ll be able to get more people interested in this collection and the archives in general. So expect some updates as we work on the grant in the coming months. Photo below is just a sample of the amazing materials from the collection.

Photograph of a confirmation book from the Jensen Family Collection

Confirmation book from the Jensen Family Collection

Now on to other news. As you know, I often refer to articles from Lifehacker, Gizmodo, WebWorkerDaily, etc. on productivity and other tips for getting more done. One of the best tips, and most frequently posted, is the need to take breaks and vacation in order to actually accomplish more (which can sometimes seem counterintuitive, but it works). We all need time off to recharge and actually get away from work, even if we adore what we do. So this is just a head’s up to The Waki Librarian readers that I’m actually taking a mini-holiday and will be off the Internet from tomorrow (Thursday) until next Monday. For the first time in years I’m taking a break and not bringing my laptop with me. I intend to enjoy some relaxing time along the coast of California and therefore there will be no Friday post and if you contact me during my break, don’t expect a response until next week. I hope you also have planned breaks and downtime into your days and weeks in order to recharge. Personally I can’t wait.

And, a bit of fun before leaving you to get back to work. If you didn’t check it out last week, you should take a look at Lifehacker Night School’s latest offering, The Basics of Video Editing. Watch the videos, read the lessons, and then apply what you’ve learned making awesome PR videos for your library and archives.

Finally, check out this great video (even if you’ve seen it before): 25 Years of Pixar Animation

Have a wonderful rest of your day and I’ll be back next week with more library, archives, and tech goodness. Allons-y!

Rainy Friday Fun

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Happy Friday! I hope you are having a lovely day. I’m off on a research trip today at the Lavender Library in Sacramento. I think it’s a fantastic way to spend a Friday. But back to the post at hand, I have just a few things to share with you today before you get into your weekend. Mainly today is just a bunch of stuff to keep you occupied if you must be indoors because of the rather wretched winter weather that will not go away! Anyway, let’s get into the good stuff.

First, thank you to everyone who responded to my request on Twitter for examples of favorite online archives. I received links to some great archives to share with the history students when they come into the archives in a few weeks. So I thought I’d share just a few links today that you may find useful to share with your library and archives patrons, or just enjoy yourself. Of course there are the large online archives that are fairly well-known, such as the Online Archive of California, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. But you should also check out some of the smaller collections (and less well-known) online, such as First World War Poetry Digital Archive and the Medical Heritage Library. That should be enough online archives fun to last you through the weekend.

And speaking of fun stuff, check out this lovely article on the untapped power of smiling. I found this to be a fascinating and smile-inducing read. Just think of how much nicer the world would be if people genuinely smiled more.

As you can tell, I’m definitely ready for the weekend (especially since mine involves research at an archives and interviewing interesting people). I think no weekend is complete without some comforting food. So for some comfort food, check out Joy the Baker’s recipe for baked curry sweet potato fries. These fries sound delicious!

Finally, for your Friday enjoyment, check out this short TRON: The Next Day. I found it rather entertaining.

Have a wonderful rest of your day and a fantastic weekend. I’ll be back next week with some more tips, tricks, and news. Allons-y!

Analog, Digital, and Progress?

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday, dear readers! I hope your day is going well. We continue to have rather gloomy weather in the Bay Area, but it is also spring break so it all evens out in the end. Today I want to talk a bit about the analog versus digital, digital immigrant vs. digital native debate. This isn’t what I planned to write about today, but it is what I need to write about today or I’m never going to get the conversation points I was thinking about yesterday out of my head.

So analog versus digital. It’s kinda an overdone, oversimplified dichotomy, no? But this week, it seems to have come up rather frequently in multiple venues. (Bear with me, I’ll bring it all back to the libraries and archives in just a bit.) First there was the rather wonderful episode of Bones, The Blackout in the Blizzard. The bit with the microfilm reminded me of one of my fellow interns at the archives in Boston who was a huge proponent of eye-readable media and didn’t go for any of that “digitized stuff.” When the power goes out, you can still read microfilm so I suppose a point should go to analog in this case.

But the real reason I wanted to try to work out some thoughts about analog and digital is due to a conversation I had yesterday about digital natives. Apparently I missed the discussion on Twitter yesterday about digital natives (not surprising considering I was running around trying to get everything lined up for next quarter), so we discussed it during the afternoon tea break (not to worry, the tea break does not occur in the archives). The conversation made me think, always a good thing. One of the things that came up was the thought that digital natives consider digital solutions before analog ones and have a different mentalité than those of us who are digital immigrants. Okay, I’ll buy that for the sake of argument (even if I think the dichotomy is partially socially constructed). But is thinking of a digital solution to a problem necessarily progress?

In some regards, I would say yes. Some things are way better in digital form. Take searching old university catalogs if you are an archivist doing reference for a remote researcher. It’s much easier to search online than flipping through pages and pages of stuff. But for other things analog, though older, may be better. In a similar example, actually thinking of going through old catalogs to find information for finding aid notes if the information isn’t online instead of giving up and declaring the information to be unavailable. Or, in an example close to many people’s hearts as it is income tax season in the United States, check out Lifehacker’s article on how to send documents securely to your tax preparer. Hint: give them to the tax preparer in person. Like many things in life, digital didn’t make all of life easier, instead you just need to know and be proficient in finding information and solutions in multiple mediums.

Now, obviously I’m not a technophobe and do honestly believe there have been shifts in thinking and reasoning patterns due to the ubiquity of digital technologies. But I don’t think we should think of it as a zero sum game, or having to get rid of one to make room for the other. In other words, I think it is a false dichotomy, or at least an oversimplification and generalization to have analog pitted against digital or a “digital native” against a “digital immigrant.”

To end on a more positive note, because you know it can’t be all doom and gloom on this blog, yesterday’s conversation reminded me of Seth Godin’s recent blog post, Bring me Stuff That’s Dead, Please. Just because something isn’t the newest and shiniest thing to hit the digital (or analog) world, doesn’t mean it is dead. It just means, as Godin notes, that those thinkers, ponderers, and people that do the actual work have the time and experience to now really reflect and leverage the technologies. And that, my dear readers, is where the really fun stuff begins.

So to me, in the end, it isn’t about digital versus analog, it’s about what is the best tool for the job at hand and whether or not you have the experience and knowledge to actually know what is the best tool. Because progress is made by those who are fearless, experiment, and are open to incorporating new ideas into their knowledge base without throwing everything else out with last year’s technological bathwater.

I’m off my soapbox now. But I’d love to hear your thoughts about digital v. analog and digital native v. digital immigrant. I’m always up for conversation.

To end, here is this great video sent to me by one of my colleagues. If cats in an IKEA store don’t make you smile, I don’t know what will.

Have a fantastic rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday (hopefully) with some more technology news and thoughts.

Fun Stuff to Share on a Friday

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I’m so excited that it is almost the weekend, even if the weekend is supposed to be gloomy and rainy. So today, dear readers, we are going to throw away any pretense of this being a blog post of great substance on the issues of the day in library and archives land. Instead, this post is to get you ready for the weekend, armed with fun (and helpful) tidbits and goodies to share with whomever you cross paths. Yes, it is a classically random Friday post. Did you expect anything less?

First, something very important and good to share with your family, friends, and library patrons: Give them Lifehacker’s article on how to give to Japanese recovery efforts without getting scammed. Good cause, better if your money actually makes it to those who need it.

If somehow you missed it on Twitter this morning, the videos from Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2011 are now available on the Internet Archive. There are many interesting talks and I highly suggest listening to them, especially if anything I wrote while summarizing them last month didn’t make sense.

In exciting library publishing news, College & Research Libraries is going fully open access. To this I say, yay and it’s about time. Also, could we please make the UI better? It looks a bit wonky in Chrome.

Speaking of open access journals, I have to give props to Evidence Based Library and Information Practice which has always been (so far as I know) open access. Plus it publishes some great research articles, although I may be a bit biased as this journal published my first article and I am on their evidence summaries team. But really, it’s a great journal and the latest issue just came out, so go take a look.

This is something fun to share with your friends (and get a wee bit competitive about who does better on the test, if that’s your thing): The Cambridge Face Memory Test. Take the test to see how good you really are at facial recognition. (This one’s for the people I know who say they are excellent at faces, but quite bad with names. Let me know how you do.)

Lifehacker Night School has done it again. Check out the latest course on Digital Painting 101.

And finally, if you have people coming over in the near-ish future and it is as gloomy where you live as it is in the Bay Area, consider making Chipotle Black Bean Pizza. It sounds yummy and warming, plus who doesn’t like pizza?

Have a lovely weekend, filled with fun, relaxation, and reading. I plan on it. I’ll be back next week with actual thoughts on libraries, archives, tech, and other randomness. Allons-y!

Competition in the Library

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are well, dear reader. This week has been crazy busy on our campus as it is finals week and everything seems to be due by the end of this week. I don’t know why, but deadlines always seem to pile up on each other (and that’s not because I’m super-lazy and procrastinate–I don’t, really). So today I just want to riff just for a short while on competition both with others and with one’s self and how this may or may not be beneficial in the context of libraries and archives.

So why do I want to talk about competition? Mainly I want to write a bit about it because I was asked earlier in the week if I was competitive about anything. The short answer is no, I’m really not that competitive. Now before you think I’m a total slacker who has no drive or wander off because you have no idea what this has to do with library land, bear with me while I give a bit of context before turning to the library.

I’m not competitive with other people. I actually feel happy when others succeed and don’t think “winning” has to be a zero sum game. However, I’m extremely competitive with myself and always expect to work hard and accomplish a lot, not that it’s news to anyone who knows me. (You usually doesn’t take a tenure track position if you aren’t just a little bit into working hard and striving to always become better than you are currently. And you should also be passionate about teaching, but that’s an entirely different post). But as to competing with others, I’d much rather support and mentor others in the field than compete with them.

But where does competition fit in the grand scheme when talking about libraries? I’ll give two examples about competition in the library and archive fields: one that I think is true competition that we can’t really get around and one that is actually competition that isn’t helping us at all. First to what I think of as true competition in the information science fields: grants.

It’s not called a grant competition for nothing. If you write grant proposals, you will be competing against many other libraries, archives, and museums for funding. This is not always a fun prospect and neither is it competition on a level playing field. Grant writing is pretty much unavoidable, but necessary in our fields. So in this instance, I think it behooves us to write grant proposals often to become better at it and to have any chance of success. I’d also, from a totally selfish perspective, like to see more organizations give grants to smaller institutions that have a hard time competing with the very large, well-known institutions for the limited funding available, especially in this economy. But don’t give up and do keep applying because, as our grant officer said, the people who get the most funded grants and also the ones who have written the most unfunded grant proposals.

So grants=competition with other institutions. It’s unavoidable unless your institution can afford to do everything it wants with internal funding.

The other type of competition I want to touch on just briefly in a type of competition that doesn’t seem to work in my mind: competition by libraries against perceived usurpers of the libraries’ and librarians’ roles. Or at least, the way we are competing isn’t working. Libraries (and especially archives) can’t compete with coffee shops, Amazon, or bookstores. And really, why should we? It’s a bit like trying to take on Google. Why fight that battle? Instead, why not work harder and smarter in areas where we already excel and can differentiate ourselves?

I think libraries and archives are awesome. You probably do too if you are reading this blog. We are the converted. We need to stop telling ourselves how great we are and start more outside marketing. Some public libraries, especially, do a good job of this and a great job of integrating themselves into the community. Academic libraries, which are dear to me because I work in one, need to step up and start changing the stereotypes that we all lament about libraries and librarians. We need to be seen as the first place to go if you have a question, not the stop of last resort. We need to advertise our ability as information curators, data managers, and information literacy gurus. We need to stop trying to be something else and actually own what we are because we have a lot to offer.

Okay, stepping off the soapbox now and leaving you with a couple of fun things: first, check out Joy the Baker’s latest recipe: Irish potato candy because it looks yummy and tomorrow is Saint Patrick’s Day after all. Then, if you haven’t checked it out yet, go listen to a single by one of my former student’s band, Waking Wander. (And yes, I completely have to give a shout out when one of my students makes a trip into the library specifically to give me (a librarian!) information about his band. Plus, I think the single is rather good.)

Take care, read lots, enjoy the rest of your day, and I’ll be back on Friday with the usual round-up of tech tips and news. Allons-y!

Job and Weekend Stuff

/ dwakimoto

It’s Friday and the end of another week, thank goodness. Before getting to the few things I want to talk about today, I just want to share this link from Gizmodo, Japanese earthquake: How to respond and stay informed and also, hopefully soon, how to help/donate to the relief efforts.

In more fun news for this kind of gloomy Friday in the Bay Area (where luckily we haven’t had any real damage due to tsunamis), today I just want to share a few resources to help you with landing a job and to help you have a good weekend.

First, to the job information. It seems like you can’t get away from people talking about jobs and the economy, but I promise not to ramble on for too long. I just have two resources to share: this great article from WebWorkerDaily, landing your dream job in a networked world, and Lifehacker’s top 10 ways to rock your resume. Having now been on both sides of the hiring table in libraryland, I can’t tell you how shocked I was with the sloppy looking resumes applicants submit. If you want a professional position, make every effort to come across as a professional. Also, networking: overused word, but crucial to finding opportunities.

Speaking of job hunting, resumes, and interviewing, if you are a graduate student at San Jose’s School of Library and Information Science, come to or log in for the Resume & Interview Workshop tomorrow. It should be a very helpful event and I’ll be one of the panelists speaking at the event. So do come by and say hi.

Now on to a few bits of fun for your weekend and I do hope, dear reader, that you have a fun weekend planned. First, I have to share Lifehacker’s post on extending the life of your books by handling them properly. I feel it’s my duty as a librarian and archivist to share the link and give you a preservation resource to share with your friends and patrons.

And if you are having guests over this weekend, or you just fancy making something nice for yourself, I suggest trying Joy the Baker’s cinnamon sugar pull apart bread and/or lemon cornmeal breakfast cake. Her recipes are fantastic and have never let me down when it comes to baking up something lovely.

Finally, I leave you with this bit of the 2010 Doctor Who Proms. Really, it makes for a nice work/study break.

Have a lovely rest of your day, a fantastic weekend, and I’ll be back next week with more random thoughts on archives, libraries, and technology. Allons-y!

Protecting Cultural Collections Workshop: Part 1

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are doing well, dear reader. I apologize for not posting on Friday. I was ill and I fear the post would have made little to no sense. But I am back now and want to share a little bit from the workshop on disaster planning and preparedness that I attended yesterday.

So why was I at this workshop? Even though my library does have a disaster plan, and our archives assistant created a basic disaster plan for the archives, we do not have a detailed plan for the archives and special collections. Furthermore, I will admit to being way more interested in part 2 of this workshop series (which will be held in May) when we will get practice salvaging materials. I think everyone needs to understand their institution’s disaster plan or create a plan if there isn’t one in place.

The workshop was held at the California Historical Society in San Francisco and was well attended by individuals from libraries, museums, archives, historical societies, and conservation companies. It is a very nice space for a small workshop, but it was quite cold (although we had chairs and not pews, so it wasn’t as crazy uncomfortable as at the Personal Digital Archiving Conference).

I have just two things I want to share from yesterday’s workshop before I let you get back to your work: one resource and thoughts about water and material damage.

First, one of the coolest resources we learned about yesterday was the Disaster Mitigation Planning Assistance database. It’s a great way to find conservation companies and individual conservators. You can easily update your disaster plan contacts and resources list with this database. I’ve found this very helpful for fleshing out our disaster plan.

The other point is about water, which of course reminded me of the Doctor Who special, The Waters of Mars, especially the Doctor’s line: “Water always wins.” We listened to many examples about water damage due to flash floods, broken pipes, cars hitting fire hydrants outside of historical societies, etc. yesterday. And water does always win. It gets into everything and can cause a lot of damage. However as our workshop leader and conservator, Julie Page, noted, she would much rather have to deal with a water damaged book than a burned book because she has a much better chance of saving the water damaged one. Also, if your building doesn’t have a fire suppression system (often fire sprinklers), then you are massively vulnerable to fire damage.

So, while water might cause a lot of damage (especially to basements where archives often are located), it can also be the lesser of two evils when considering the damage caused by a fire. And considering arson is apparently the leading cause of fire in libraries (I didn’t know that fact), it seems like fire suppression systems should be top priority in any retrofitting project in old library buildings.

I’m sure I’ll have more interesting things to report on after the next workshop, but that’s about all I wanted to say today. Except for yet another plea to back up your personal records and your library’s records in another physical location, just in case disaster does strike. Now I’m going to get off my soapbox and leave you with a fun video. What else could I possibly leave you with than the promo trailer for Doctor Who’s The Waters of Mars? Enjoy.

Have a fantastic rest of your day and I will be back this Friday with some tech and library news. Allons-y!

Ease of Archiving

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I hope you are well, dear readers, and are having a lovely week. Today I want to talk about digital archiving and the problem of actually getting people to archive their work. What I don’t want to talk about is the issue with Harper Collins as it has been tweeted by seemingly every librarian on Twitter and has even spawned the The eBook User’s Bill of Rights. So, yeah, don’t really have much to add to that conversation. Instead I have some bits of flotsam that have been rolling about in my head since coming home from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference last week. I thought I’d share and see what you think about it all. Allons-y!

One of the concepts that kept surfacing during the conference was the fact that people are lazy (unsurprising) and don’t want to work to back-up and then archive their work. Now this is not a shocking concept for anyone who has any contact with people, ever. We, on the whole, try to find the easiest and fastest way to get anything done. Now I’m not saying that this is inherently a bad thing. For example, I dislike grocery shopping so I appreciate stores laying out their products in logical arrangements so I can find what I need easily and get on with my day instead of spending 10 minutes trying to figure out on which aisle are the olives.

But when this desire to have everything done in one-step (or preferably without any intervention on the user’s part at all) makes digital archiving seem like a dream, I do have a problem. We heard updates on some amazing work by computer scientists and archivists on creating institutional repositories (IR) that can automatically generate metadata when digital objects are uploaded to the IR at the conference. We also heard about future projects to create one question surveys for users to complete that would generate more useful metadata about their digital objects. I think these advancements are wonderful because I’m not the kind of person who takes the ‘all or nothing’ approach to archival work. Some metadata is better than none and having some people take the time to upload their work to IRs or other digital archives is great. But what about everything we are losing? (And don’t get started on how we can’t save it all. I’m not calling for saving everything. I firmly uphold the principle and practice of appraisal.)

What if you can’t get a metadata form for users to fill out down to one question? Maybe you can’t get everything to be automatically generated in the background without the user contributing something to the metadata creation process. How easy does it have to be to get people to do it?

I wonder about this question not only in the context of archiving but in many facets of life. For example, how easy does searching a database have to be for the majority of students to use it? How much specificity and control over a search do you have to give up to make it “easy enough” to use? Not even talking about digital archiving, but just scheduling back-ups for your computer, how much easier does it need to be than clicking 2 buttons for people to backup their machines? Where is the line, in any case, that separates “good enough” from “results we won’t accept”?

I’d like to hear your ideas on the tensions between striving to make things easy and producing “good enough” results for whatever product or service you are creating. I’m all for good user design and experience, but am having trouble feeling any empathy for people who won’t take the time to at least name their files something intelligible. I have high hopes for the future of digital archiving, both in personal and institutional contexts, but I worry about making sense of it all if people don’t take the time to do (just a bit) of quality control on filenames, metadata, etc..

Or maybe I’m just having one of those days that make everything seem overwhelming and you don’t feel that this is an issue at all or you’ve found a way to solve it in your archives. I’d love to hear about any and all of it in comments.

Now, since it can’t all be doom and gloom on a Wednesday (and because anyone in the Bay Area could definitely use a bit of fun on this rather dreary day), we will end with Simon’s Cat in “Sticky Tape.” It’s short, cute, and funny. Use it for a quick break in your busy work day.

Have a wonderful rest of your day and I’ll be back on Friday with some tech, library, and archives news.

PDA 2011 Closing Keynote

/ dwakimoto

Closing Keynote by Rudy Rucker, Sr.. Let’s get to the summary!

Lifebox Immortality

Science fiction dream of achieving immortality via personal digital archiving. But, we don’t understand how brains store information. It’s not practical to tag everything yourself; you need ways of automating tagging and metadata creation.

Wrote a book called, The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul. His day job was as a computer science instructor at San Jose State (he is retired now).

Lifebox is an idea of a personal digital archive that is “really good” and that you can search easily. It’s not hard to search your lifebox if you are a writer like Rucker and uploaded a lot of information on your own website and created a custom Google search engine for your site.

In human conversation, people do not answer your questions directly. There is an actual conversation. But you could create a chat bot copy of yourself in a lifebox. What is missing is the creativity of the person in these stand-ins. So you don’t really achieve immortality.

Most people aren’t writers. Rucker says you should write like you talk. You could also tell a story instead of writing the story of your life. This is already reality via speech recognition software. Still missing “the spark.”

Suggested reading: On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins (about neural networks).

Not hard to get chat bots as long as you get people to upload enough data. (That’s always the problem, isn’t it? People have to exert effort which is a hard sell.)

Take away: Easy enough to create a chat bot, but much more difficult to recreate “the spark” or the creativity of humanity. Many approaches to personal archiving, may never be a standardized way of archiving when making “a copy of yourself.”

Forensics, Privacy, Security

/ dwakimoto

Last session before closing keynote. On to the summaries of forensics, privacy, and security!

Questions posed: What is the proper boundary between public and private data? How far should archivists go in collecting what might be private data?

Session moderated by Elizabeth Churchill (Yahoo! Research)

Archival Applications of Digital Forensics Tools and Techniques or Why I started reading Forensic Cop Journal
Kam Woods (University of North Carolina)

Parallels between forensics and archiving: case files and archival packaging; exploit private data to support criminal prosecution and identify private and legally-encumbered data to redact/protect, etc..

Acquisition
Archives increasingly have to deal with ingesting heterogeneous fixed and removable media. Need to ensure reliable data extraction and reducing hidden risk. Need to know what you’re given. Want to establish “ground truth” about what is on the media. Looking at residual and system data.

Handle issues of privacy via forensics formats such as cryptopgraphic hashing and unique identifiers. Working with bulk_extractor tool to process data with proactive detection and decompression, stream processing during disk imaging, and parallelized processing. Also using fiwalk: creates DFXML from disk images using SleuthKit and creates Dublin Core metadata for files, and file level hashing. Tools, APIs, etc. available at afflib.org.

Developing other projects mentioned in earlier session: BitCurator and Realistic corpora for archival education and training.

The Personal in the Organizational: Value and Ethics
Sam Meister (University of Maryland)

Discussion of the issues and implications of personal data embedded in the records of failed businesses. Framing the talk as privacy as an ethical matter. Part of larger research endeavor.

Sherwood is a restructuring firm and offers private bankruptcy option. Sherwood becomes new owners of the company and winds the company down (managed liquidation). Therefore it also has a lot of private data and records.

Records of start-ups are messy. No records management. “These small organizations are like big people”: both are a bit messy and disorganized. Lots of personal, private data goes to Sherwood when Sherwood is given company.

No comprehensive legislature when it comes to preserving personal data. Therefore it is an ethical issue. Can look at Codes of Ethics: Privacy statements from Society of American Archivists and International Council on Archives.

Strategies/Questions
Looking at selection and appraisal: How can we collect these records? Difficult to know how much personal information is located in the records and where it is in the files. Options: redaction, not collecting employee records: each method has downsides.
Access: How do we give access to the records? How do we keep the private data private?

Transition of private records to public. There is complexity of rights and ethical questions about access and privacy (or the tension between the two). All about maintaining trust.

Take away: Many issues to think about in regards to forensics, privacy, and access. More questions than answers at this point, but definitely learned more about valuable projects furthering our understanding and practical ability to deal with the records coming to our archives.