The Northern California Technical Processes Group 's 79th Annual Meeting is less than a month away. Register now to start or renew your membership and attend the Annual Meeting. $35 in advance, $40 at the door. And after the meeting, there are optional tours of the SF Public Library History Center, the GLBT History Museum, and the Tenderloin Museum. Please visit our homepage for our press release, registration, and tour signups: https://norcaltpg.wordpress.com/

Beyond Books: Capturing the Unique in Community Collections

The San Francisco Public Library

100 Larkin St., (at Grove).

Koret Auditorium, located on the Library’s lower level

Enter 30 Grove St., proceed down stairs

9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. Friday, May 6, 2016

Perhaps they are hidden in a storeroom or stacked on your desk awaiting attention. Sometimes they are held by communities which lack the resources to preserve and disseminate their materials. Audio, video, physical objects, and ephemeral print materials often do not fit into normal technical processing workflows. This year's NCTPG Annual Meeting covers collections of non-traditional materials, including their acquisition, metadata, digitization, and preservation. How do we open up hidden and community collections, and make them more accessible and discoverable? What are the possibilities for collaboration with experts outside our institutions, other institutions, and the members of the communities we serve? How can we honor local perspectives and capture their unique voice in the collections we create and preserve?

This year’s speakers and presentations are:

Archiving for All / Michelle Krasowski (Internet Archive)

At the Internet Archive we have been working towards the goal of Building Libraries Together, encouraging our users to archive and upload content from their locations. We hope to create a collection that can be used for research and discovery, representative of a diverse global community that has an interest in preserving and sharing the aspects of their cultural landscape with other users of different backgrounds, interests, and geographic locations. There are solutions that can give marginalized communities with limited resources the opportunity to digitize and share their materials online in a way that is financially and technologically possible for them.

Sharing Knowledge through Community-Assisted Cataloging, and Generous Distribution of Media Assets / Al Bersch (Oakland Museum of California and GLBT Historical Society)

Using case examples from the Harold O’Neal film collection at the GLBT Historical Society and Andrew J. Russell’s glass plate negatives documenting the construction of the transcontinental railroad at the Oakland Museum of California, this talk will consider various strategies for “opening” collections processing, as well as access. From acquisition, to cataloging, to sharing digital assets on the Digital Public Library of America, we'll focus on the procedural changes these institutions underwent to make it possible to improve access to previously “hidden” collections.

Sharing Our Special Collections With the World -- Lessons Learned / Geoffrey Skinner and Jon Haupt (Sonoma County Library)

Sonoma County Library has worked to digitize and make available online its extensive special collections of photographs, rare books, wine-related materials, and local historic items. Today the Library leverages outsourcing and partnerships to bring over 40,000 digitized items with extensive metadata to the Web. Statistics show worldwide viewing and great local interest, yet many challenges remain: prioritizing collections, choosing platforms, developing standards-based workflows, preserving the digital and physical objects, developing and maintaining partnerships. In addition to describing the ways we are addressing these challenges, we will also illustrate a particular case—an ongoing project of the Sonoma County Wine Library. The project's numerous challenges—with regard to metadata, partnerships and infrastructure—will be described, along with the ongoing efforts to meet those challenges.

Inconvenient Objects and Surprising Workflows / Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Archives)

While materials such as moving images, artifacts and print ephemera can be of high interest to researchers and traditional library patrons, they are often the most difficult kinds of objects to process and preserve. Although many institutions have traditionally addressed this issue through studied neglect, this is not an option with unique and fragile materials in obsolete formats. This talk offers hopeful examples of new and sometimes unconventional workflows to handle film, video and ephemeral print materials (including the story of the San Francisco Participatory Archives Group, which processed 4,800 home movies in two years), and suggests that the time has come for experimenting with a host of innovative practices in technical processing.

Please visit our homepage for our press release, registration, and tour signups: https://norcaltpg.wordpress.com/

If you have any questions about the event, please contact Robert Rohrbacher at 650-725-7992 or email us at: rrohrbac@stanford.edu.

*This is not a San Francisco Public Library Sponsored Program. Please use public contact information provided here.

*Please note: Refreshments are not allowed in the Auditorium