About Us

The Born Digital Archives is the blog of the AIMS team. We hope this blog will stimulate dialog about practical issues and solutions of the problems archiving materials that originate in digital form. We invite all interested archivists to chime in with questions, comments, and concerns via the "comments" to each post. AIMS is inclusive with the intention to create open source solutions that are useful to both the smallest and largest institutions.

For a more detailed introduction see Tom's post


Meet the AIMS Project Team
We thought we would take the opportunity to introduce ourselves to you...

Peter Chan, Digital Archivist
Peter joined the AIMS team as Digital Archivist in January 2010. Previously, he worked as associate archivist at Stanford University Libraries for 2.5 years. Peter processed the personal digital archives of Dr. Richard Fikes, Dr. Nils Nilsson, and Dr. John McCarthy. He also processed the SUMEX (Stanford University Medical Experimental Computer 1974-1983) project files.

Gretchen Gueguen, Digital Archivist
Gretchen joined AIMS as Digital Archivist at UVa in May of 2011, taking over for Liz Gushee. Before starting at UVa Gretchen worked at East Carolina University as head of the Digital Collections department. Before that she was at the
University of Maryland, first as a grad student at MITH, then in the library's Digital Collections and Research department. Gretchen has worked with digitizing special collections, building a digital asset management systems, online finding aids, and text encoding in the Digital Humanities.

Liz Gushee, Digital Archivist
Liz Gushee joined the AIMS team as Digital Archivist in January 2010. Before that, she served as the University of Virginia's Digital Collections Librarian and headed up a team to work with librarians and archivists to prepare content for the Library's Fedora-based repository. Liz has a background in history and the fine arts and has had experience working with special collections materials photographs, prints, and personal papers, specifically.

Tom Laudeman, Project Programmer
Tom comes to the AIMS project from bioinformatics and the life sciences at the University of Virginia. His background covers the full spectrum of web-based data repositories. Previous projects cover the whole range from simple static web sites to huge domain specific data repositories integrated with data analysis tools and computerized annotation. Data sets included experimental meta data, genomic sequences, and even some libraries of peptides and protein sequences.

Mark A. Matienzo, Digital Archivist
Mark joined the staff of Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library in January 2010. Previously, he worked as an applications developer at The New York Public Library, as assistant archivist for the American Institute of Physics, and as a project archivist for the National Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum for Natural History. He specializes in the design of archival description systems, archival access systems, and digital repository architecture.

Simon Wilson, Digital Archivist
Simon has been seconded from his post as Senior Archivist at Hull University Archives for the AIMS project. He co-ordinated the ICT elements of the move to the new £10.7m Hull History Centre shared with Hull City Council. Prior to this Simon worked on a number of projects usually with a strong ICT emphasis including the Mersey Gateway digitisation project and as Collections Project Manager on a £1.4m documentation project with Hull Museums.