Julie Swierczek

  

I'm the University Archivist and Special Collections Librarian at Salve Regina University, and, as a "lone arranger", I get to wear many hats, including acting as my own IT support. It's an exciting time to work in archives because the challenge of preserving digital objects are so great. While most people think about papers in archives, I dream of buying a FRED machine, of starting a digital archives that meets the OAIS standard, and of archiving email in XML. I am interested not only in preserving digital objects, but in thinking of the ways that they will be used differently than paper materials. This is especially interesting when thinking about university email archives of the future, and how we will use them - not necessarily by pulling out individual documents, as we do with traditional archives, but through tracing the ascendancy of concepts and ideas, doing advanced searches on the entire data set, and otherwise 'mining' the data.

I am interested in text encoding, of resurrecting my facility with regular expressions, and in general finding ways to integrate technology and the humanities. I am looking forward to THATCamp because I get a renewed sense of purpose - and a whole bunch of really cool ideas - talking with people who are working with technology and the humanities.