The BitCurator Consortium is happy to welcome several new members from the Smithsonian Institution! The Smithsonian Libraries and Archives joined us as members in 2018 and we are now pleased to welcome additional members from the Archive of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery, the National Museum of American History, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Smithsonian divisions joining us have been working on building cross-discipline conversations and workflows on digital curation, including adapting their digital repository to better suit everyone’s needs and developing a time-based media working group to help guide members across the institutions on working with these materials.

As a group of members who are already so used to collaborating across institution lines, the Smithsonian folks are well positioned to explore other areas of interest with the BitCurator Community. Some are already using BitCurator and are looking for ways to expand that use: The National Museum of African American History and Culture wants to get more out of acquisition, appraisal and preservation metadata, and the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives want to learn more about BitCurator’s functions and access, as well as email archiving and NLP. Some are looking forward to implementing BC for the first time: The National Museum of American History is interested in workstation setup and learning how to do digital preservation work from home. The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden is interested in discussions on ethics of digital forensics and open source alternatives.

Please join me in welcoming all of these folks to the BCC!

Smithsonian Libraries and Archives (member since 2018)

• Bleakley McDowell, Media Archivist & Conservator
• Riccardo (Ricc) Ferrante, Director of Digital Services
• Lynda Schmitz Fuhrig, Digital Archivist

Archive of American Art

• George Apodaca, Digital Archivist/Digital Asset Manager

Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden

• Eddy Colloton, Project Conservator of Time-based Media
• Briana Feston Brunet, Variable and Time-based Media Conservator

National Museum of African American History and Culture

• Judith Andrews, Digital Asset Manager
• Ina Archer, Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist
• Leah Jones, Photographer
• Candace Ming, Media Conservation and Digitization Specialist
• AJ Lawrence, Media Conservation and Digitization Assistant

National Museum of American History

• Sherri Berger, Head of Digital Programs
• Leigh Gialanella, Digital Archivist
• Alicia Cutler, Digital Asset Manager
• Drew Robarge, Museum Specialist

National Portrait Gallery

• Luke Moses, Time-based Media Art Conservator

American Art Museum

• Dan Finn, Media Conservator