Allan Hancock College, Santa Maria
Have an archive from the Hancock family, whose estate is the site of the college. Also have an archive devoted to the history of the college.
Hancock was a wealthy oilman in Southern California in the early 20th century.
They have approximately 60 large, flat archival boxes, 28 wider boxes, photo boxes, newspaper clippings, correspondence, etc. Previous librarians cleaned the items and moved them to acid-free containers. None trained as archivists.
Sorted:
1. Cleaned and entered into an Access database.
2. Cleaned but not entered into the dB.
3. Neither cleaned nor entered into the dB.
A storage container suffered water damage.
Metadata: decide what info to enter and how to label items with unique identifiers. Former librarians volunteered.
* Year object created
* Accession no.
* Title
* Author
* Brief description
* Part of another collection?
* Subject
* Cross-listed events and individuals
Got a scanner.
Some of the first scans: telegrams and evidence of Captain Hancock’s pursuits.
Challenges:
* Scanner went missing
* Having limited time
* Not currently having volunteers
* MS Access is kind of clunky
* Scanning large amounts of info in a timely fashion. (Want to have something ready for 100th anniversary of college in 2020.)
* Want a cloud-based system to share collection
Hosting possibility: Airtable. Currently being used by a performing arts archive.
Software possibility: ArchivesSpace (formerly Archivist’s Toolkit)
Crowdsourcing ideas for the above. (History students as interns, California Digital Library)
Another problem: nitrate films are flammable. May not be able to keep them.
Suggestion: LC site on personal archiving. (Possibly
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/)
Suggestion: Anything you do yourself takes lots of babying. ContentDM is expensive, but very nice.
Open source: Omeka S, Islandora
