The Record Keeper of Digital Duke

Name: Matthew Farrell    Position: Digital records archivist, Duke University Libraries Months at Duke: 8What I do at Duke: I’m tasked with ensuring the permanent electronic records of the university and the care at the end of their lifecycle. That can be anything from office files, Word documents, minutes of meetings, emails and other web content. We archive the permanent website record of the university. An interesting/memorable day at work: We get these legacy media and try to figure out what is on them. I’d been working with a graduate student intern last semester with a collection of software and electronic literature that was created in the 80s. The author called them narrabases, like a database short story. We were able to get them running in an emulated version of DOS, so this was really exciting, to get this narrative that was written 25 years ago running again. It’s titled “its name was Penelope”. It’s almost like an impressionistic, choose-your-own adventure story where the narrative actively changes with each reading.My first ever job: I worked in a movie theater for a few months in high school. It was not very fun. You think it’s going to be great because you can see movies all day, but you’re popping popcorn.My dream job: I’m in my dream job. This is kind of an emerging part of working in libraries and archives. Other institutions are starting to get on board with hiring my type of position, but Duke was at the forefront five or six years ago. If someone wanted to start a conversation with me they should ask me about: Mid-century, post-bop jazz. I’ve always been academically interested in jazz music, and when I was a student at UNC and DJing for their station there, they had a pretty large selection of different types of music. They were really heavy in 70s jazz, which can get really disco-y fast. What I love about Duke: Everyone is very eager to attack problems head-on. We’ve been collecting physical materials for 50 or 75 years, but figuring out how to collect the electronic stuff is not a solved problem. But no one seems to want to shy away from it. That implies this very collegial atmosphere. It’s great and everyone seems to want to collaborate. When I’m not at work, I like to: I’m a casual bicyclist. Recently I’ve just been biking around different neighborhoods. I live in Old West. A pet peeve: File system problems. This is the same problem that has existed for years, right? Macs and PCs don’t talk to each other. My cube out at (Smith) Warehouse has both a PC and Mac because some of the media we get we can’t read on one or the other.Something most people don’t know about me: I really enjoy dancing, at parties or weddings, to whatever the DJ’s playing as long as it’s interesting.