Happy Digital Archives Day!
by Christine McEvilly, Digital Archivist and Librarian, American Jewish Historical Society

But what in the world is the Day of Digital Archives? Once a year, those of us who work with digital collections in archives, museums, and libraries like to share just what our jobs are all about and help people understand what we do. We have all sorts of titles, jobs, and backgrounds, but we all are passionate about sharing and preserving history and art in digital formats. Archivists from around the country are blogging and tweeting about their day at work and about their special projects. Check out tweets from our Center partner, the Leo Baeck Institute, for examples of the daily activities of their digital archivists. If you are interested in more information on digital archives check out dayofdigitalarchives.blogspot.com for posts and links to other blogs from digital archivists.

I am a “Digital Archivist and Librarian” here at the Center working for the American Jewish Historical Society. Like most people who work with digital archives, I have a diverse background in history, archives, libraries, and science. Daily, I need to work with original 100-year-old documents, with website and computer code, and with researchers and patrons.

“Digital Archives” can mean many different things, but most digital archives share some common goals:

• Access—Digital collections of materials and records can be shared on the web with world-wide audiences.
• Preservation—When a photo or document is digitized, researchers can use the digital image to study the material while the original is stored safely. Digital copies of images can be held in multiple locations as backups. If the original is damaged, the digital copy can serve as a substitute or surrogate that records some of what was lost.
• Reusability and Sharing—When digital images, media files, or digital record objects (like finding aids) are managed well in digital archival systems (called digital asset management systems or DAMs), they are easy to export and share with other repositories, or re-use for different projects.
• Organization—A digital archive is more than just a file full of random scans, photos, and text documents. Digital archives are organized, the items are described, and archivists can find materials simply and directly.

Right now I am working on a number of projects, all of which have digital components. I help to manage some digital objects at access.cjh.org. This digital archive includes not only a wide variety of photographs and scanned documents, but also all of our finding aids (or guides to collections), which are digital objects in their own right. I create these finding aids in EAD (a computer readable tagging language or code), regularly upload them into the system, and provide extra information (metadata) to organize them and to help people find them.

However, my biggest digital project is the Portal to American Jewish History. You can explore a test site for this project at www.jewsinamerica.org. AJHS is creating the Portal to expand its traditional leadership of smaller Jewish historical societies into the modern world of digital archives. AJHS has always had a national collecting focus; now we are partnering with small historical societies to provide researchers with access to collections held by independent repositories across the nation. Since digital images can be held on multiple websites, and since the web lets us link instantaneously between different sites, we are creating a “one-stop-shop” that will let people access digital images from all across the country. The Portal will also include information about non-digitized materials to help researchers find collections. By blending digital archives with traditional library metadata search, we are exploring new ways to deliver reliable content to users wherever they are.

Pictured above: Yiddish movie poster for “East Side Sadie,” 1929. An example of the material that AJHS has made digitally available.