Research Initiatives

The DCA regularly engages in research projects to explore new areas of knowledge and practice in the fields of archives management, records management, digital preservation, and digital library and repository services. These projects are intended to further the knowledge of these professions and enhance our collective understanding of our work.

Research Grants

TAPER: Tufts Accessioning Program for Electronic Records
The DCA is undertaking an electronic records Program Expansion Project grant funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (Grant number: RE10005-08).

FEDORA and the Preservation of University Records
The NHPRC has awarded an 18 month Electronic Records Project grant to the DCA, in partnership with Manuscripts & Archives of Yale University, to support work to synthesize electronic records preservation research with digital library repository research in an effort to test the potential of Fedora to serve as the architecture for an electronic records preservation system.

Services for a Customizable Authority Linking Environment (SCALE)
The SCALE project will develop tools within the NSDL that will automatically recognize names from structured data, match them against an authorized list of names, and automatically link them from a document to supplementary information, such as glossaries and thesauri.

Presentations

• New England Archivist Spring 2006: Institutional Repositories: It's not Just the Technology


• Fedora Users Conference 2005: Architecting Extensible Digital Repository Services


• Fedora Users Conference 2005: Researching Fedora's Ability to Serve as a Preservation System for Electronic University Records


• NERCOMP Workshop 2005: Helping Jumbo Remember: Fedora at Tufts University


• NELINET Seminar 2005: Helping Jumbo Remember: Fedora and the Tufts University Institutional Repository


• International Council on Archives, Section on University and Research Institution Archives 2005: Preserving Electronic Records at Tufts University


• Association of College and Research Libraries, New England Chapter 2005: Here Today, Here Tomorrow: Issues Concerning Institutional Repositories


• JCDL 2004: Architecting an Extensible Digital Repository


• ASIG 2004: Visual Understanding Environment


• Preservation and Access for Electronic College and University Records 2004: All Things to All People: Combining Resources to Build an Integrated Digital Repository Publications

Publications

• Robert Chavez, Anoop Kumar, Ranjani Saigal, Nikolai Schwertner, "Architecting an Extensible Digital Repository," Proceedings of the 4th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (2004), Tuscon: 2-10. (preprint)


• Robert Chavez, Nikolai Schwertner, "An Approach to Modeling Content for Digital Repositories," Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (2005), Denver: 373. (preprint, demo session poster )