Image: [Librarians classifying books at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.] / Louden. [1933] CourtesyLibrary of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
The Archivists Round Table is excited to announce a new member program aimed at helping our community adapt to evolving work challenges and pick up new skills during this socially distant time. Our Skill Share program will offer a forum for sharing expertise by inviting archivists and allied professionals with specific skills to host an afternoon “in residence” on the ART Slack channel, where they will be available to answer questions and share their experiences. Members are invited to join in to ask questions and to share their own workflows, tips, and expertise.
To pilot this new program, ART Vice President, Nicholas Martin will host a Skill Share on “Using Airtable to Manage Reference Workflows.” With reading rooms remaining closed, and in-person reference too risky for most archives due to the COVID-19 pandemic, archivists are scaling up remote reference services, as well as digitization of primary sources and media to meet increased demand. For many, the jump in scale is necessitating new tools to efficiently manage workflows and provide metrics on the labor required to fulfill requests.
Nicholas Martin is the Curator for Arts and Humanities at NYU Special Collections, where his responsibilities include collection development, outreach, instruction, and exhibitions. In this Skill Share, Nicholas will describe how NYU Special Collections is using Airtable to manage scanning assignments across archives units to meet the needs of instructors, students, and external researchers.
We invite ART members to join us on Zoom at 1:00PM on Thursday, August 20th for a brief overview of the Airtable software, after which Nicholas will be available on Slack to answer questions and offer advice. Advance registration is required, and all workflow tips and personal experiences shared within the group will be kept confidential within our member community. Come join the conversation!
If you have questions or would like to nominate a topic for a forthcoming Skill Share, please reach out to our Director of Communications, Anne Boissonnault: communications@nycarchivists.org
