FOR DIGITIZING HISTORICAL PHOTOS
On Thursday, May 9, James (Jim) U’Ren of Platte City, a volunteer at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, was presented the Weidman Volunteer Achievement Award by Dr. Colleen Shogan, the chief archivist of the United States, during the 24th Annual Archivists Awards Ceremony held at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
The Weidman Award, bestowed annually, recognizes exceptional volunteer contributions to the National Archives, and this year, Jim’s invaluable efforts in preserving and digitizing historical photographs at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library earned him this prestigious honor.
Since 2014, Jim has been a volunteer in the audio-visual archives at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, where, under the direction of Laurie Austin, the A/V archivist at the Truman Library, Jim played a pivotal role in the library’s ambitious 2023 project to process and move over 50,000 photographs from the Truman Library archives to the National Archives Catalog where they are available for public access via the Internet.
With his background as a former employee at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory leading large data projects, Jim drew on his experience developing custom processes and coding solutions to seamlessly embed contextual metadata into thousands of photographs.
This project elevates the steps that the Truman Library was already taking to Make Access Happen and to Connect with Customers, strategic goals of the National Archives and Records Administration. The metadata embedded in these photos—and all future photos the Truman Library will submit to the catalog—provides an extra layer of information for researchers and the general public, and means that the photos will have verifiable provenance.
The benefits of this project are not limited to the Truman Library. Jim is an advocate for open source software and interested in sharing his work with others who may be undertaking a similar project. His work on this project is open sourced and publicly available on GitHub, where anyone may take what he has learned and apply it to their own work.
This year’s National Archives Weidman Volunteer Achievement Award recognizes Jim U’Ren’s dedication, technical expertise, and commitment to preserving history for future generations.
