Category Archives: Campus Administration

Archives finding aid

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What is a finding aid? Basically, it’s our version of a catalog. It helps archivists and patrons find out what material we hold and where it lives.

For a number of years we’ve been trying to get an interactive, 2.0 type of finding aid online. We’re still trying to make that dream a reality, but in the interim we’ve got a pdf linked from the archives’ website and available for direct download.

Keep in mind that that we make frequent updates to this document in-house and will only update the posted version twice each semester (mid-term and after finals), so let me know if you can’t find something you expect us to have!

Digital Commons

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The Ames Library’s Digital Initiatives Team launched IWU’s electronic record storage and access system in fall 2008. Digital Commons serves as the central location for outstanding student work, faculty scholarship, University records, and campus history. It holds 3,552 works to date. To launch this repository, the archives supplied research honors theses and scores dating back to the 1960s, as well as peer-reviewed student journals.

 

Our goals are to:

  • Promote and disseminate academic and creative achievements of students and faculty
  • Ensure preservation of and persistent access to said work
  • Increase discovery of IWU scholarship and artistic expressions
  • Foster scholarly collaborations with colleagues
  • Document and record IWU’s history and progress

If you create or control documents related to University history and have been wondering how to store them electronically, leave me a comment below and I will walk you through what DC @ IWU can do for you. If you are interested in getting faculty or staff members’ scholarly or creative works into DC, or wish to recommend outstanding student scholarship from your department, contact our Scholarly Communications Librarians Stephanie Davis-Kahl: sdaviska {at} iwu.edu.

Subscribe to this blog!

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I will add content to this blog a couple of times a week, and an archives student assistant is taking on the task of scanning and adding photos. We created the “Help ID Photos!” page as a place viewers can see and comment on images we have little or no information about.

In summary, the content on all these pages will build over time but at irregular intervals. If you want to keep up with new additions but don’t want to bother checking the site regularly, there is a way to be notified of changes here just when we add things. Click on the word “posts” with the orange button next to it at the top of the blog pages for ways to get notified via RSS feeds.

If you’re not sure what RSS is or what it can do for you, check out this YouTube video describing RSS (Really Simple Syndication): RSS in Plain English or consult Rick Lindquist’s Technology at IWU blog post on the subject!

Records Management project

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I am conducting interviews across campus to describe and assess current records creation and storage practices on campus. The process and potential outcomes were reviewed by the President Wilson’s Cabinet in Fall 2008. If you have a pressing need to discuss these issues, feel free to contact me for an on site visit!

My goal is to make sure the work you do in helping the University grow and change is available for use over the long term! Here’s the original proposal for the project.