SUNY Plattsburgh Wins State Library Archives Award

The SUNY Plattsburgh Feinberg Library Special Collections and College Archives was recently honored with an award from the New York State Archives and Archives Partnership Trust.

The trust selected the college’s Special Collections and College Archives for the 2015 Annual Archives Award for Program Excellence in a Historical Record Repository. 

The award recognizes Special Collections Librarian Debra Kimok and Records Manager Gina Doty for their exceptional work in digital preservation. It acknowledges their dedication, vision and creativity as they assessed the college’s digital preservation needs and shared their successes and challenges with the wider professional community.

archivists, records managers, administrators and information technology professionals,” said Acting State Archivist Thomas J. Ruller. “SUNY Plattsburgh and its staff have made an enormous contribution to the preservation of their university’s digital records — a contribution that has produced successes well beyond the scope of this endeavor.”

Learning Process

“The award was a big surprise to receive, but the best part was working on the project itself and everything I have learned in the process to know how to save the history of the campus’ electronic records,” Doty said.

Kimok agreed and added that an additional benefit of this project was the opportunity to forge a strong professional relationship between the College Archives and the Records Management offices, something that will greatly strengthen both operations.

Grant Partnership

Much of Kimok and Doty’s digital archival work started with a State and National Archival Partnership grant that was awarded to the New York State Historical Records Advisory Board in 2013 by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. The purpose of the grant was to fund the development of a model planning process for the digital preservation of archival electronic records in SUNY colleges and universities.

To ensure this model reflected the realities of electronic recordkeeping, the Historical Records Advisory Board invited SUNY Plattsburgh to partner with them in testing the project inventory and planning tools. The board chose SUNY Plattsburgh because of its size and the dedication and professionalism of Kimok and Doty, as well as the college’s decision to implement a campus-wide digital asset management system.

Kimok and Doty spent two years conducting a sample inventory of electronic archival records in 29 campus departments, completing data entry and a technology scan and providing some advice for the project’s final recommendations.