Icon made by Prosymbols from www.flaticon.com
Designed to support teaching and learning in a digital space, as well as to demonstrate the practical application of theories, the online lab is now fully operational and usable with substantial content available for exploration and more to come. The Lab, which is currently open to Suurtaam’s archives students, will eventually be accessible to the wider Faculty of Information community to explore. It is described in detail in this explanatory video.
For Co-op students, COVID-19 posed a double challenge. Not only was the UofT campus shut down, so too were the physical offices of many employers. What’s more, with everyone having to figure out how their operations were going to work in these unusual times, some potential employers had to give up plans to hire co-op students. In response, the Faculty created a number of co-op positions. Some were directly pandemic-related while others, like the Digital Archives Lab, were more tangentially related.
For many organizations, COVID-19 has accelerated their digital transformation and emphasized the importance of digital infrastructure. One of the goals of the Digital Access Lab is to create a space where students can have free and easy access a variety of digital records to support teaching and learning. As it evolves, the space will include more of everything including exercises and opportunities to interact with records and play with digital records software.
The lab includes different sections for:
- Unprocessed Records which give students the chance to engage with records as they are initially encountered by archivists and records managers in the real world
- Archival Records which have links to collections where a substantial amount of the records have been digitized. Students can use these to gain understanding of how records are appraised, arranged, described and made accessible in a digital space
- Other Record Sets which are publicly available on the web including email archives, web archives and public record repositories. This section allows students to explore different genres of records and download and play with large record sets
- Other Collections which has still more records and artifacts including museum and textile collections as well as a list of archival web exhibits.
The lab also provides links to open-source digital records tools that are widely used in archival contexts. Students can learn how industry professionals use these tools for archival description, digital preservation, archival processing and more.
Work on the Digital Archives Lab will continue into the 2020/21 academic year as Suurtaam and work/study students continue to build up and add to the space. For more information, contact karen.suurtamm@utoronto.ca.
