SAA in San Francisco

I'm now relaxing in the Wine Country north of San Francisco--avoiding the hub-bub of the Republican National Convention--but I recently attended the Society of American Archivists meeting in San Francisco, 1,719 strong.

I got to meet Ms. Spellbound blog herself, and attend the session she spoke at. It was probably the best session I went to. (Although I have to admit, I picked a few dogs the first day and heard about great ones I missed!) The session Jeanne Kramer-Smyth spoke in was entitled "After the Revolution: Unleasing the Power of EAD." Besides Kramer-Smyth the session included Max J. Evans and Elizabeth Yakel.

Kramer-Smyth spoke first, on "Visualizing Archival Collections: Leveraging the Power of EAD." Her talk was about a NEH-sponsored grant to support something she came up with in a library science class called ArchivesZ. She slices, dices, sorts, and aggregates structured data to visualize certain fields in EAD finding aids. It was a fascinating way of looking at subject headings and dates from finding aids. She is continuing her work and is looking for more EAD finding aids to "play" with, so send them to her at: Spellboundblog or at the ArchivesZ site.

More on the other two in future posts.