SIS Seminar Series: "Digital Devices in Archive Reading Rooms: Assessing Regulations in the TARO Archives." Guest Speaker Dr. U. Karadkar

Join us for a McGill School of Information Studies (SIS) Seminar Series talk on archival device regulations and mobile applications to assist in archival research with guest speaker Dr. Unmil Karadkar, Assistant Professor in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin.

ABSTRACT

Doing research in the archive is the cornerstone of humanities scholarship. To protect their materials and to provide a welcoming environment for scholars, archives establish regulations regarding the use of technological devices, such as mobile phones, laptops, and cameras in their reading rooms. Such regulations directly affect the scholars as the devices mediate the nature of their interaction with the source materials in terms of capturing, organizing, note taking, and record keeping for future use of found materials. In this talk, I will present our evaluation of the device use regulations published by thirty archives. This evaluation, along with data from interviews of scholars and archivists, is intended to serve as a basis for developing mobile applications for assisting scholars in their research activities. In this paper we introduce early prototypes of two mobile applications—AMTracker for viewing archive regulations and STARDocMan for capturing documents and adding metadata in the reading rooms.

BIO
Unmil Karadkar is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Information at The University of Texas at Austin. He conducts research at the intersection of human-centered computing, digital collections, and information visualization, bridging the gap between the information needs and goals of a community by augmenting digital collections, designing software to use these collections, and evaluating the impact of the designed software on a community’s practices. He collaborates with researchers from  diverse areas such as the sciences, humanities, and nursing. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from Texas A&M University.

Everyone welcome. Please arrive early to secure a seat.