Radical Collaboration Amidst Pandemic | ACOR Archive MELA Presentation 2020

www.acorjordan.org

Full Title: "Lockdown and locked out of access to knowledge? One Jordan-based research center adopts radical collaboration to keep serving its user communities during the global pandemic."

This 15-minute talk on ACOR's Archive was given at the virtual meeting of the Middle East Librarians Association on October 21, 2020, for the session "COVID-19 & institutional response." To see MELA's full 2020 meeting program, visit: https://acorjordan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/MELA-2020-program-and-registration-info.pdf

About the Presenter:
Jessica Holland is the Archivist at ACOR in Amman, Jordan. She specializes in Digital Curation and co-manages a multi-year photo digitization and online publishing project, the ACOR Photo Archive. Jessica holds an MA with distinction in Middle Eastern Studies from SOAS, University of London for which she submitted a dissertation on the politics of digital archives. Prior to ACOR, Jessica worked with several art galleries and museums, and she received her BA in History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2013.

Abstract:
Jordan has experienced one of the strictest lockdowns in the world in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, with driving banned, and leaving the house restricted. As such, the ACOR Library and Archive had to react fast in order to ensure that we were still able to serve our user communities. During this international crisis, with airports and borders closed until further notice, we were particularly seeking solutions to keep serving those who had planned to travel to Jordan for research or to lead educational tours, and who now found those opportunities for advancing knowledge postponed indefinitely. In recent years, ACOR has invested time and energy into digitizing a large proportion of its interdisciplinary archives which reflect the region during the past tumultuous 80 years, recording significant instances of cultural, and intangible, heritage. Due to the rapid adoption of the division of digitization labor, (into: slide scanning, photo editing, quality-control, and metadata description), the geographically-challenged team were able to process and publish 3,000 images through the ACOR Photo Archive; almost reaching our target of 30,000 images online. This was achieved through rapid-scanning in the 3 days’ notice before military curfew was enforced, and was sustained as one team member was living at ACOR. This experience lends a new importance to “disaster planning” and we seek to share lessons learned, and start conversations on how we as a community can provide support in planning for the unprecedented, and ensuring that the needs of our staff, and our user communities are met.

Видео Radical Collaboration Amidst Pandemic | ACOR Archive MELA Presentation 2020 канала ACOR Jordan