ECURE 2004: Helen R. Tibbo

Bio

Helen R. Tibbo is a Professor at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She teaches in the areas of archives and records management, digital preservation and access, electronic retrieval, and reference. She is co-PI with partners at Duke University Libraries for two projects funded by the National Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Managing the Digital University Desktop project (www.ils.unc.edu/digitaldesktop) and the NHPRC Electronic Records Research Fellowship Program (www.ils.unc.edu/nhprcfellows). Dr. Tibbo is a co-PI with collaborators from the University of Michigan and the University of Toronto for a Mellon Foundation funded project to develop standardized metrics for assessing use and user services for primary sources. She and Dr. Ian Anderson from the University of Glasgow (Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute) are exploring U.S. and European historians and their information-seeking behaviors with regard to primary source materials in the Delmas-funded project, Primarily History. She is also director of the Minds of Carolina (http://ibiblio.org/minds/) project that is developing tools, methodologies, and guidelines, to help scholars prepare their materials for self- archiving within the trusted digital repository at UNC. She has been the organizer and an instructor in the Digitization for Cultural Heritage Professionals 2002-2004 workshops held at SILS (www.ils.unc.edu/DCHP) and served on the JCDL program committees in 2002 and 2003. She was a Society of American Archivists Council member, 1996-2000 and currently serves on the editorial boards of the American Archivist and the Journal of Archival Organization.

Presentation Abstract

The Managing the Digital University Desktop Project is a 3-year project studying the desktop computing environments and behaviors of faculty, administrators, and university staff at UNC-Chapel Hill and Duke University. Funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the Digital Desktop project is a collaborative effort of the School of Information and Library Science and the Academic Affairs Libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University Libraries. This project seeks first to understand how people are managing their electronic files and email and building on this insight, to provide guidelines and instruction that will make them more effective and efficient information managers while preserving and eliminating materials following records law and prevailing archival theory and practices.

This paper will provide an overview of the project and explore how university records creators and recipients "appraise" their electronic files and messages.