I’m a reference and systems librarian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and as such I work with historians at all stages of their career who are utilizing the primary and secondary sources in the Museum’s Library and Archives. I’ve also been helping Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the Museum and an ABD in history at George Mason University, in constructing her personal digital archive of more than 30,000 documents (not images; PDF documents, ranging from a single-page memo to a 100+ page report, almost all created from photographs of primary sources from various archives), all while retaining relevant metadata. About a year ago, I took what Rebecca and I had learned about how to build a useful personal archive and did a well-received workshop at the Museum for visiting Fellows. We realized today, during a talk about personal archives and big data sets, that some AHA participants might be interested in this workshop. Rebecca and I are proposing to lead a how-to session to provide a framework for the step-by-step process of constructing a personal digital archive of all the photos and scanned documents you have created as part of your research, incorporating them into software that allows you to analyze the documents and, if you want, export your work into fielded data sets (all with no or minimal programming or coding skills). You can adapt or reject any aspect of the framework to make it work for you, but if you truly have no idea how to get from zero to personal archive, we might be able to help. This could certainly build upon (or lead into) Jordan’s proposal for a discussion about “Notecards for the New Century.“

I’m interested in having a conversation about how historians’ construct their personal databases. This topic has come up in some more traditional conference sessions – Friday’s ”Digitally Informed Dissertation,” for instance – but I’d like to discover whether scholars are using software like Zotero, Evernote, DevonThink, or FileMaker to organize their research, explore new questions with their historical data, and share their research with others, both pre- and post- publication. We could split our meeting time between more theoretical questions (What are the merits of open, iterative research practices? How can we protect the intellectual property of archives and libraries? When is adding more metadata just fiddling?) and basic tips and tricks (Is geocoding worth it? How can I hack my tags? And so forth).