Quick Conference Report

I was fortunate to attend the Society of American Archivists Conference in DC this year and wanted to provide a short note on some of the more relevant parts of the conference. A number of the sessions were very informative. The most useful was on the new Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines for still images. In addition to providing a very detailed system for measuring the quality of scans, the guidelines include suggested best practices, and can be a great resource for some of our scanning projects. Another good presentation was about very large digital collections and how to assign metadata giving three different examples of outsourcing, using keyword searching, and grouping multiple objects with one set of metadata. I also got to hear about how web interfaces can be improved through sessions on user studies and better use of search engine optimization.

While the sessions were good, the best part was probably the networking. SAA is a small conference so I had the chance to meet archivists and librarians involved with an assortment of digital projects at the Online Archives of California, JSTOR, New York Public Library, and colleges and universities from across the country. It was really inspiring to learn about all the different digital efforts that are underway, but I can't wait until next year when I can brag about all the projects the Ohio 5 has accomplished!