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News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

October 29, 2015

Over the past two years, my colleagues and I have been working on a huge digital project: the creation, population, and launching of PHS's first digital asset management system, or DAMS.

What is a DAMS? A fancy term for an online archives--a way for researchers and historians and Presbyterians to explore some of our collection items up close, much as a visitor would at our Philadelphia location. The big difference is that users of an online archives can do their...

August 24, 2015

A church will often keep its membership data--including addresses, phone numbers, emails, demographics, and all kinds of things that would never go into a register as a matter of polity or history--in membership management software, whereas its permanent record of membership--including baptisms, marriages, deaths, suspensions, and so on--will be committed to paper, often in register volumes spanning 25 or 50 years. Membership software facilitates a great many short-term actions, such as sending a mass mailing. The paper register is persistent across the long term and lets...

July 10, 2015

In today's digitally saturated world, we're creating more data than ever before. Records of known importance we save in preservation friendly file formats, ensuring findability and security. But what about digital ephemera--the by-product of our digital interactions with each other? What's being done about those data points?

PHS...

April 10, 2015

As I prepared for the recent arrival of a new baby in my family, and my maternity leave from work, I prepped lots of tools to ensure that the people and processes I support can continue smoothly while I'm away. Even though much of my work can be done remotely I wanted to ensure that only select information comes to me; others on staff are trained how to access the tools that I'm responsible for. This built in redundancy is good for the institution, as it allows for less disruptive transitions, but it's also for employees, who get more time to focus on their lives away from work...

January 12, 2015

Say you've decided to adopt DigiByte's 2015 New Years Resolutions or to follow our recommended best practices for filenaming once and for all. Implementing these new strategies effectively within your organization will take more than your personal involvement. That will require the support of a majority of your colleagues.

Many...

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