UC Libraries Forum 2021: Leading with Innovation, Stronger through Collaboration

In Fall 2019, UC Irvine’s Special Collections & Archives (SCA) technical services team moved to using Airtable (from Confluence) for tracking our current and pending archival accessioning and processing work. Airtable is a cloud-based spreadsheet-database hybrid service that enables easy collaboration between members of the SCA team through visually-pleasing and easily-manipulatable spreadsheets, forms, and kanban boards.

To develop our tables, we copied pertinent collection data from ArchivesSpace and Confluence into Airtable, and customized the tables using many of Airtable’s powerful “field types,” making the data easily filterable, sortable, and shareable with our team. We developed a “Pre-custodial” table, for curators and technical services staff to share information about upcoming or potential acquisitions, and created an “Accessions table,” to queue our work and be able to easily collect stats on work done and in progress. And we developed a shared table with UCI’s Cataloging and Metadata Services department for requesting revisions to or new finding aid records in Alma/Primo.

We have been using Airtable’s forms and table to collect feedback on our collections from users as well as an internal form for needed updates to our finding aids. We have also used Airtable track born digital collections, physical media, and web archiving requests.

In this presentation I will be discussing how UCI’s archival technical services team chose Airtable for our work, demonstrate some of the tables we are using for different types of collaborative work, and briefly demonstrate how easy it is to get started with Airtable.