American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS)

second-time ASB host
see aaas.org

Two SI students, Thomas McCarthy and Cathy Lu, spent their week creating finding aids for the AAAS Climate and Water Collection, and (utilizing newly acquired evaluation skills from SI 622) reporting on usability issues for the AAAS web site. They also helped AAAS with an ongoing database upgrading project.

• “The project was really interesting because aside from working on the finding aids and the website [we] learned a lot about how archives are organized and about the database that drives the finding aids. I personally learned a lot about how archives become usable and the usability issues that exist with in an archival situation. It was interesting because as an HCI person I had never thought about archival issues and how relevant to archival situations HCI is. It was kind of eye opening to realize that the divisions that exist in our specializations are really kind of arbitrary and that we are more or less just studying one big thing.”
• “Because of this experience I am a lot more interested in learning more about archival situations and would be far more open to obtaining work in an archive.”

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