Posted in https://saaers.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/partnerships-in-advancing-digital-archival-education/ on March 6, 2018
by Sohan Shah, Michael J. Kurtz, and Richard Marciano
This is the fourth post in the BloggERS series on Collaborating Beyond the Archival Profession.
The mission of the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) at the University of Maryland’s iSchool is to integrate archival education with research and technology. The Center does this through innovative instructional design, integrated with student-based project experience. A key element in these projects is forming collaborations with academic, public sector, and industry partners. The DCIC fosters these interdisciplinary partnerships through the use of Big Records and Archival Analytics.
DCIC Lab space at the University of Maryland.
The DCIC works with a wide variety of U.S. and foreign academic research partners. These include, among others, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of British Columbia, King’s College London, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Federal and state agencies who partner by providing access to Big Records collections and their staff expertise include the National Agricultural Library, the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Park Service, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Maryland State Archives. In addition, the DCIC collaborates with the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project to provide digital access to Holocaust-era collections documenting cultural looting by the Nazis and subsequent restitution actions. Industry partnerships have involved NetApp and Archive Analytics Solutions, Ltd.
Students working on a semester-long project with Dr. Richard Marciano, Director, DCIC.
We offer students the opportunity to participate in interdisciplinary digital curation projects with the goal of developing new digital skills and conducting front line research at the intersection of archives, digital curation, Big Data, and analytics. Projects span across justice, human rights, cultural heritage, and cyber-infrastructure themes. Students explore new research opportunities as they work with cutting-edge technology and receive guidance from faculty and staff at the DCIC.
To further digital archival education, DCIC faculty develop courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels that teach digital curation theory and provide experiential learning through team-based digital curation projects. The DCIC has also collaborated with the iSchool to create a Digital Curation for Information Professionals (DCIP) Certificate program designed for working professionals who need training in next generation cloud computing technologies, tools, resources, and best practices to help with the evaluation, selection, and implementation of digital curation solutions. Along these lines, the DCIC will sponsor, with the Archival Educators Section of the Society of American Archivists (SAA), a workshop at the Center on August 15, 2018, immediately prior to the SAA’s Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. The theme of the workshop is “Integrating Archival Education with Technology and Research.” Further information on the workshop will be forthcoming.
The DCIC seeks to integrate all its educational and research activities by exploring and developing a potentially new trans-discipline, Computational Archival Science (CAS), focused on the computational treatments of archival content. The emergence of CAS follows advances in Computational Social Science, Computational Biology, and Computational Journalism.
For further information about our programs and projects visit our web site at http://dcic.umd.edu. To learn more about CAS, see http://dcicblog.umd.edu/cas. Information about a student-led Data Challenge, which the DCIC is co-sponsoring, can be accessed at http://datachallenge.ischool.umd.edu.
Sohan Shah
Sohan Shah is a Master’s student at the University of Maryland studying Information Management. His focus is on using research and data analytical techniques to make better business decisions. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Ramaiah Institute of Technology, India, and has worked for 4 years at Microsoft as a Consultant and then as a Technical Lead prior to joining the University of Maryland. Sohan is working at the DCIC to find innovative ways of integrating data analytics with archival education. He is the co-author of “Building Open-Source Digital Curation Services and Repositories at Scale” and is working on other DCIC initiatives such as the Legacy of Slavery and Japanese American WWII Camps. Sohan is also the President of the Master of Information Management Student Association and initiated University of Maryland’s annual “Data Challenge,” bringing together hundreds of students from different academic backgrounds and class years to work with industry experts and build innovative solutions from real-world datasets.
Dr. Michael J. Kurtz is Associate Director of the Digital Curation Innovation Center in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Prior to this he worked at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration for 37 years as a professional archivist, manager, and senior executive, retiring as Assistant Archivist in 2011. He received his doctoral degree in European History from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Dr. Kurtz has published extensively in the fields of American history and archival management. His works, among others, include: “ The Enhanced ‘International Research Portal for Records Related to Nazi-Era Cultural Property’ Project (IRP2): A Continuing Case Study” (co-author) in Big Data in the Arts and Humanities: Theory and Practice (forthcoming); “Archival Management and Administration,” in Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences (Third Edition, 2010); Managing Archival and Manuscript Repositories (2004); America and the Return of Nazi Contraband: The Recovery of Europe’s Cultural Treasures (2006, Paperback edition 2009).
Dr. Richard Marciano is a professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and director of the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC). Prior to that, he conducted research at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) for over a decade with an affiliation in the Division of Social Sciences in the Urban Studies and Planning program. His research interests center on digital preservation, sustainable archives, cyberinfrastructure, and big data. He is also the 2017 recipient of the Emmett Leahy Award for achievements in records and information management. With partners from KCL, UBC, TACC, and NARA, he has launched a Computational Archival Science (CAS) initiative to explore the opportunities and challenges of applying computational treatments to archival and cultural content. He holds degrees in Avionics and Electrical Engineering, a Master’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Iowa, and conducted a Postdoc in Computational Geography.