Have you experienced a crisis in your community and wanted to immediately start collecting materials, but didn’t know where to begin? This class will help your institution prepare to respond to an unexpected event in your community and quickly collect and provide access to digital materials including photos, videos, and social media. The session will cover preparing for emergency collecting, including establishing a team and creating policies, and will examine a case study from the University of Virginia (UVA), as well as a table top exercise to assess your institution’s current readiness to respond. UVA’s crisis collecting workflows and tools were tested in the “Unite the Right” rally and community response in Charlottesville in 2017, and have grown and evolved since then. While the focus is on documenting in an emergency, the tools and approaches can be utilized for planned events as well, such as community anniversaries, inaugurations, and celebrations.
This session will include lecture, discussion through the chat, and optional breakout groups for attendees to verbally participate in a tabletop exercise to practice responding to an emergency collecting incident.
Please note: This class covers the administrative side of digital emergency collecting—while we will talk about some specific tools, this is not a deep dive into the specifics of how to implement those tools.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this class, students will be able to:
Understand the pre-planning required to respond more effectively to a digital collecting emergency
Learn about some of the tools used in emergency digital collecting
Assess your institution’s readiness to respond to an emergency collecting event
Instructor:
Kara M. McClurken is the Director of Preservation Services at the University of Virginia Library. She oversees all activities related to physical and digital preservation for the University Library, which includes audiovisual conservation, book and paper conservation, book repair and protective enclosures for circulating collections, commercial binding, digital preservation, disaster preparedness and recovery, environmental monitoring, outreach and consulting. After the event related to the “Unite the Right” rally and community response in Charlottesville, VA on August 11-12, 2017, Ms. McClurken formed a Digital Collecting Emergency Response Group to organize a Library response to that and future events. She currently serves on the Society of American Archivists’ Tragedy Response Initiative Task Force.
