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Mary W. Elings is the Archivist for Digital Collections of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. As Head of the Digital Collections Unit, she manages all aspects of the digital collections, including digital curation activities, digital processing, mass digitization, finding aid creation and maintenance, metadata standards and policies, information management, grant project management, online access, and web initiatives.
Prior to coming to the Bancroft in 1996, Ms. Elings worked in museums focusing on art conservation, documentation, conservation imaging, information management, and digitization initiatives. Her current work concentrates on issues surrounding born-digital materials, mass digitization, applying “more product, less process” (MPLP) to digitization initiatives, and harnessing social networking strategies for digital collections. She recently published the John Muir Correspondence digital collection and is involved in digitizing the San Francisco Examiner Photo Archive, both examples of applying MPLP to digitization. She can be followed on twitter @maryelings and regularly updates the Bancroft Library Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/bancroftlibrary.
Ms. Elings co-authored the article “Metadata for All: Descriptive Standards and Metadata Sharing across Libraries, Archives and Museums” and advised on the publication of Cataloging Cultural Objects (CCO), the first content standard for museums. She has taught as an adjunct professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University, New York, from 2003-2009; as a lecturer and faculty in the Western Archives Institute in 2009 and 2010; and as a regular guest-lecturer in the San Jose State University's Archival Studies program since 2004. Ms. Elings is past chair of the Museum Computer Network (MCN) Metadata Standards Special Interest Group (2002-2008), member of the California Digital Library’s Online Archive of California Redesign Working Group (2007-2009), and member of the RLG/OCLC Social Metadata Working Group (2009-2011).
