Have you experienced a crisis in your community and wanted to immediately start collecting materials to document the event, 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.
This session will provide an overview of best practices for emergency collecting that institutions can put into practice before an unexpected event occurs. Emergency digital collecting experiences from the University of Virginia will be used as a case study to demonstrate how best practices can be implemented.
While the focus is on documenting an emergency, the tools and approaches learned in this class can be used for non-emergency events as well, such as community anniversaries, inaugurations, and celebrations.
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
Identify opportunities to establish policies and procedures at their institution, to prepare for collecting materials to document an unexpected event
Name some tools used in emergency digital collecting
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.
