Database migration is a crucial aspect of digital collections management, yet there are few best practices to guide practitioners in this work. There is also limited research on the patterns of use and processes motivating database migrations. In the “Migrating Research Data Collections” project, we are developing these best practices through a multi-case study of database and digital collections migration. We find that a first and fundamental problem faced by collection staff is a sheer lack of documentation about past database migrations. We contribute a discussion of ways information professionals can reconstruct missing documentation, and some three approaches that others might take for documenting migrations going forward. [This paper is a conference pre-print presented at IDCC 2020 after lightweight peer review.]

Many museums and archives globally hold heritage items belonging to Indigenous peoples of North America. There are current efforts to begin decolonizing the practices and legacies of these collections, and one way this is done is through digital access to Indigenous cultural heritage. This poster examines The Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) Knowledge Sharing System, a digital platform that aggregates museum and archival records into a centralized database at a point of data migration. Data migrations are not only necessary as a point for technical updates, but also for theoretical changes in the system itself as the needs of its users change. This is the case for the knowledge sharing system as it moves from a password protected system to one that is open to the public. Rooted in qualitative research from semi-structured interviews with the creators, maintainers, and users of the database, this poster illustrates how GRASAC is working to meet the needs of their user community, and what unique challenges are faced when prioritizing Indigenous knowledge within a database created for western information organization.

Social work professions are increasingly studied as key sites for understanding precarity, affective labor, and the future of care work. However, little research has explored social workers' recordkeeping practices. This study expands on existing research on records and documentation through engaging with users of "R/Socialwork," a subforum on the internet forum Reddit.com. Utilizing a multimodal approach drawing on participant observation, indepth interviewing, and discourse analysis, this research sought to answer the following research question: How do social workers understand their use of and interaction with records? Findings indicated widespread frustration with documentation paradigms in the profession, with variation based on sub-field and proximity to clinical practice. Users expressed this frustration in a variety of ways, with some utilizing the forum to support entrepreneurial approaches to problems in the field, while others used the site as an alternative form of recordkeeping, documenting their emotional responses.

Museums and archives rely on databases and similar technologies to manage their collections, but even when tailor-made for memory institutions, databases require considerable adaptation to remain usable over long periods of time. To better understand how collection staff maintain and migrate databases over multiple years and decades, we talked to archivists from the US-based Archon User Collaborative and collection managers from the University of Michigan Research Museums. We found that the collection staff uses terms taken from quilting for database curation: they “tie” and “weave” a “patchwork of data systems” together. We extend their quilting metaphor as an analytical lens and show what can be gained through a shift in framing database work as a craft. We describe database curation as a process of creating a quilted infrastructure: a long-lived knowledge system that is sustained by the use of multiple “digital surfaces,” a reliance on a community of practice, intergenerational transfer of “quilts,” and by leveraging invisibility to conduct work. We argue that this nonnormative mode of computing needs better support from both software developers and administrators. We also show that although the invisibility of craft practices offers practitioners independence, it also can increase their precarity.