SERI Webinars
2020 State Electronic Records Initiative (SERI) Webinar Series
SERI webinars typically occur on a Tuesday at 2 pm Eastern.
For a listing of current and upcoming CoSA Member webinars, please visit the CoSA Member Webinar page.
For a listing of current and upcoming additional webinars, please visit the Additional Webinars page.
Miss a webinar? Please visit our State Electronic Records Initiative Training Recordings page.
Saving Congressional Constituent Services Data: Lessons from the “America Contacts Congress” Project
Tuesday, March 10, 2020 | 2:00 pm Eastern | Register
Presented by: Danielle Emerling, West Virginia University Libraries
Constituent correspondence with the U.S. Congress captures the interactions between Americans and their elected representatives. Since the 1990s, Congress has managed correspondence with digital, proprietary systems, such as iConstituent, IQ, and InterTrac. Data exported from these systems is donated to libraries across the country and consists of structured metadata and associated correspondence. The complexity, format, and sensitive nature of the exported data have posed challenges for repositories. No repository has processed these large data sets in a replicable way, and without a concerted effort, data is at risk of disappearing. Recently, the “America Contacts Congress” project, funded by a LYRASIS Catalyst Fund grant, engaged researchers and archivists to create a roadmap for preserving and providing access to this unique resource.
Audience(s): Archivist Practitioners, Archivist Managers
No technical expertise is required, but attendees may wish to review resources related to this topic and project: Archiving Constituent Services Data of the U.S. Congress: A Report of the CSS/CMS Task Force and America Contacts Congress Project.
Don’t Let All That Work Go to Waste: Documentation Strategies for Success
Tuesday, April 14, 2020 | 2:00 pm Eastern | Register
Presented by: Carly Dearborn, The Ohio State University; Sam Meister, archival consultant; Nathan Tallman, The Pennsylvania State University
We preserve our collections, but like the cobbler’s children without shoes, our own documentation of policies, practices, and workflows could be improved. This webinar will highlight innovative approaches from the field (e.g. OSSArcFlow, Rockefeller Archives Center) for creating sustainable documentation that helps pivot projects to programs and foster shared understanding among teams. Participants will be asked to share the pain points and struggles they face in their own organizations as they work to create documentation and use or update existing documentation for their policies, practices, and workflows. Often, these pain points have commonality and through community discussions, we find opportunities to collaborate on shared problems.
Audience(s): Archivist Managers
No technical expertise is required, though some highlighted strategies feature the use of Git software for version control. (Although not required and there will be no hand-on exercises, you can learn more here, if desired.)
