Join us for Archiving 2021: 8-24 June

About the Archiving Conference

Since 2004, Archiving has been bringing together an international community of technical experts, managers, practitioners, and academics from cultural heritage institutions, universities, and commercial enterprises, to explore and discuss state-of-the-art imaging, digitization, preservation, and access for 2D, 3D, and AV materials, including documents, photographs, books, paintings, videos, and born digital works.

The interdisciplinary focus of the conference creates a rich environment for information exchange. In addition to presenting the latest research results on digitization and curation, Archiving investigates new technologies, strategies, and policies, as well as reports on successful projects that can serve as benchmarks in the field and explores different platforms and ways of visualizing collection data, allowing for deeper connections with collections.

ARCHIVING 2021 PROGRAM

Held over two weeks, Archiving includes beginning to advanced Short Courses; virtual Behind-the-Scenes Tours; Exhibits; a robust Technical Papers Program; and vibrant networking opportunities. Short courses will occur 8-18 June; the technical program occurs 21-24 June.

• All courses and technical talks are presented live, with real-time text commenting and live Q&A. Recordings of live sessions will be available to attendees until 30 September 2021.
• Expanded across more days, but fewer hours/day, to allow you to participate while attending to other work and personal responsibilities. Events generally fall within 10:00 – 15:00 EDT/16:00 – 21:00 CET. 
• Course and All-Access Passport registration options will offer discounts on fees.

PROGRAM TOPICS

Authors are invited to submit abstracts for peer-review describing original work, including updates to existing projects or projects in progress, as well as completed projects, in technical areas related to 2D, 3D, and AV materials in:

• Imaging / Digitization
• Preservation / Archiving
• Access of 2D, 3D, and AV materials
• Management and Partnerships

All submitted proposals are peer reviewed by the program committee to assure that the conference provides significant, timely, and authoritative information. If accepted, authors may submit a full 4-6 page paper for publication in the conference proceedings, or a revised 1-2 page extended abstract to be provided to registrants but not published in the Archiving Proceedings in the IS&T Digital Library. All papers presented at Archiving 2021 are published Open Access. LEARN MORE.

Learn More: Archiving Webinars

Upcoming webinars

April 21 @10:00 EDT
Imaging Choices: Practice, Settings, and Formats, Peter Burns, Burns Digital Imaging
Whether you are a professional managing a collection, or an enthusiast scanning for family genealogy, how you capture images counts. When capturing a digital collection of prints, documents, and objects, you have several choices. We address these with recommendations, based on options that are generally available with modest equipment (scanner or camera) and software resources. These include equipment, image resolution, file formats and general imaging practice. >>View Recording

May 6 @10:00 EDT
One Size Does Not Fit All: Workflows for Digitized and Born-Digital Materials, Kira Sobers and Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
Both digitized and born-digital materials present many challenges for organizations including management, access, and preservation. Kira Sobers and Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig will talk about their workflows with diverse digital materials that document the rich history of the Smithsonian Institution. (image: Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 285, Box: 25; Circa 1970) >>View Recording

May 18 @10:00 EDT
Covering the Gamut of Spectral Imaging: Intro to In-depth, Fenella France, Library of Congress, and David R. Wyble, Avian Rochester LLC
The term “spectral imaging” is used often, and can include a range of imaging options.  Understanding what spectral imaging is, how to capture it, and how it can expand insights into collections with greater access to non-visible information will help attendees consider the costs and benefits. A focus on the multimodal component and links to conservation and preservation imaging, as well as color rendering implications for soft-copy display, will further knowledge of how to make decisions about what imaging techniques to use. >>View Recording

June 2 @10:00 EDT
OCR and Text Recognition: Workflows, Trends, and New Applications, Jack Maness, University of Denver;  Jamie Rogers, Florida International University; and Luis J. Villanueva, Smithsonian Institution 
Optical character recognition, allowing images of typed or printed text to be converted into machine-encoded text, has been widely available for decades, but new applications of character and text recognition allow different types and large quantities of text to be captured—expanding the possibilities for computational digital research with large text datasets and types of texts that could previously not be analyzed. During this webinar, Luis Villanueva discuss technical aspects of OCR implementation, including the testing of different approaches and explaining how others might find the different approaches useful. Examples of two projects are detailed: Jack Maness details the University of Denver's efforts to incorporate handwritten text recognition software into the Libraries digitization workflow of the project "Uncovering Health History: Transcribing and Publishing Early Twentieth-Century Tuberculosis Patient Records as Data", which seeks to find sustainable, ethical models for beginning to unlock centuries of hand-written archival documents to emerging research methodologies and Jamie Rogers describes FIU's post-OCR processing work on the Digital Library of the Caribbean newspapers, including organization, archiving/discovery, analysis, and machine learning aspects to provide access to large textual datasets. (image credit: Vaibhav Birla July 5, 2020 “Object Detection on Newspaper images using YoloV3.”) >>View Recording

Past Webinars

View the recordings of four webinars recorded in Spring 2020 that introduce the conference and its main focus. These informative presentations serve as an introduction to the topics and understanding the contents and importance of the papers presented at this meeting:

• Digitization, Preservation, and Access: The Three Pillars of Cultural Heritage Archiving, Jeanine Nault, Smithsonian Institution  View Recording 
• Digitizing for Cultural Heritage: Imaging, Standards, and Quality, Peter Burns, Burns Digital Imaging  View Recording
• Designing Preservation, Responding to Collection and User Community Needs, David Walls, US Government Publishing Office View Recording 
• Access: Mind the Gap, Ariela Netiv, Heritage Leiden View Recording  
  Download Ariela Netiv's Resource List

ARCHIVING 2021 CONFERENCE COMMITTEE

General Chair

Walther Hasselo, Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken (the Netherlands)

Technical Program Chair

Fenella France, Library of Congress (US)

Short Course Chairs

Steffen Hankiewicz, intranda GmbH (Germany)
Bethany Scott, University of Houston Libraries (US)

Steering Committee

Peter Burns, Burns Digital Imaging (US), chair
Fenella France, Library of Congress (US)
Steffen Hankiewicz, intranda GmbH (Germany)
Walther Hasselo, Erfgoed Leiden en Omstreken (the Netherlands)
Jeanine Nault, Smithsonian Institution (US)
Bethany Scott, University of Houston Libraries (US)
David Wyble, Avian Rochester (US)