We are excited for Bruce Washburn, our consulting software engineer in the OCLC-Research San Mateo, Calif. office to embark on a 90-minute presentation with Heidi Abbey from Penn State-Harrisburg about ArchiveGrid at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC).

Held at the Omni Richmond Hotel in Richmond, Va., the three-day conference will convene archivists in the regional MARAC consortium of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and West Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Events and speaker topics will relate to the next 40 years of the archival profession, which ArchiveGrid plays a role in terms of research we have done about who will use archives and special collections, and how our system will meet their needs as we pursue new ways of understanding and expressing data.

Anyone who attends the session, appropriately titled “Put Your Archives on the Map! Using ArchiveGrid to Promote Archival Collections,” will learn everything there is to know about ArchiveGrid from Bruce’s visually rich slideshow, and a question-and-answer session with Bruce and Heidi to address frequently-asked questions archivists and researchers have about ArchiveGrid.

Here’s the description of Bruce and Heidi’s session, chaired by Rachel Grove Rohrbaugh from Chatham University, starting at 2:15 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 26:

“ArchiveGrid is a freely available system for discovering and locating archival collections around the world. Developed and supported by OCLC Research, this tool facilitates the discovery of primary source materials both through the ArchiveGrid interface and via widely used search engines. In this session, the speakers will discuss ArchiveGrid from the developer’s versus the practitioner’s perspective. They will also provide an overview of the ArchiveGrid system, including how collection descriptions are contributed to the database, benefits to students and researchers, and ArchiveGrid enhancements now underway at OCLC Research.”