Please join the Technical Subcommittee on Describing Archives: A Content Standard (TS-DACS) for our annual business meeting on Tuesday, May 12, from 2-3:30 PM (ET). This meeting will be held via Webex.
Make sure to register for the event through SAA Connect.
There are no costs to attend the session, and it is open to all; SAA membership is not required.
The annual meeting will include updates from TS-DACS on their work this year. Beyond subcommittee updates, this year's meeting features "The Power of DACS." We've invited a panel of practitioners to share real-world stories on how they've utilized DACS to significantly improve description and accessibility.
Featured Presenters:
Katelyn Legacy-Roulston:
Training Practitioners Through a DACS-Based Workshop Series
In her role at the Northern New York Library Network, Katelyn provides archival continuing education opportunities, many introductory and geared towards those with little to no formal training. She will share her experience developing and teaching Creating Access Through Archival Description, a flipped-classroom virtual workshop series based in DACS, that encourages participants to create standardized descriptions to connect researchers to their collections.
Ronda L. Sewald:
Beyond Item-Level: Using DACS to Unlock Artificial Collections in Academic Research Libraries
Item-level RDA/MARC cataloging has long defined descriptive practice in academic research libraries. However, applying this approach to large quantities of visual and ephemeral material can quickly create backlogs. Could DACS offer a more efficient path forward? This presentation highlights how IU Libraries is experimenting with DACS-based collection-level description to streamline workflows while supporting the discovery of our artificial collections.
Anna Smith:
Bringing Standardization to Legacy Collections
With no standardization across the majority of its processed archival collections, the History of Medicine Section (HoM) at the University of Rochester Medical Center's Miner Library works to bring "the power of DACS" to its archival collections. HoM has a small staff with varying degrees of archival training and experience from 10+ years down to zero, but they are slowly implementing DACS upon legacy finding aids and newly processed collections to provide consistent descriptions to its users.
Rachel Sykes:
DACS in Practice: Flexible Applications from Inventory to Discovery
DACS is known for its ease of implementation and flexible nature, lending itself to a variety of outputs that serve archival stewards and users alike throughout the archival process from inventory to discovery. To highlight DACS' flexibility and output neutrality, this presentation will explore a variety of DACS use cases across institution and collection types. Examples will include use of DACS elements to guide collection reviews and inventories at historical societies and for institutional archives, creating finding aid entries in museum content management systems, and use of DACS to prioritize archival collection needs in MARC records at a public research library.
Whether you are a seasoned DACS user or just getting started, we'd love to have your voice in the room.
We look forward to seeing you there!
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Donnelly Walton
Archival Facility Librarian
University of Alabama Libraries
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