When I pictured the first collection that I would work on either as a graduate student or in my first professional position, the last thing I ever imagined was that it would be comprised of fully born-digital material. When the opportunity arose before the start of my first semester to join the UA Special Collections team on a new and exciting project in conjunction with the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory I jumped at it without hesitation. The Special Collections department was brought on board as part of a project to survey, archive, and preserve born-digital reports and documents related to the OSIRIS-REx Asteroid Return mission. This project is one of the first of its kind working to help contextualize mission records and data to help future researchers and historians.
Credit: University of Arizona/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
You might be asking yourself what is the OSIRIS-REx mission? OSIRIS-REx stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer and it is a NASA asteroid study and sample-return mission. OSIRIS-REx is on a mission to obtain a sample from the asteroid Bennu which is a carbonaceous near-Earth asteroid and then return that sample to Earth for detailed analysis. A quote from their website states that the mission “seeks answers to the questions that are central to the human experience: Where did we come from? What is our destiny? Asteroids, the leftover debris from the solar system formation process, can answer these questions and teach us about the history of the sun and planets.” The spacecraft was launched in September of 2018 and is expected to return to earth in September of 2023.
Credit: NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona
In the early stages of my work on the mission I am primarily using two programs. ArchivesSpace to create the finding aid and the UA Campus Repository to upload documents for digital preservation and access. Working with fully born-Digital collections has its set of own challenges within these programs and one of the more satisfying aspects of my job is finding ways to make them work for us and the particular needs of the collections. The hands-on training aspect is another high point and I really enjoy being able to share my new knowledge with my classmates.
Images and information taken from http://www.AsteroidMission.org
Archivist Apprenticeship 