Making Your Tools Work for You: Building and Maintaining an Integrated Technical Ecosystem for Digital Archives and Libraries. By Max Eckard. [Review]

Abstract

I encountered Max Eckard’s Making Your Tools Work for You: Building and Maintaining an Integrated Technical Ecosystem for Digital Archives and Libraries at the tail end of a drawn-out migration to an open-source system, with time, patience, and resources running short. Rather than (merely) serving as a distraction to the many tasks at hand, the book provided useful conceptual language to communicate goals and rationales for this migration, as well as ideas for next steps to integrate the new system with other library and archival tools. While we could have used the knowledge it imparts earlier in the process, it will continue to serve as a resource at my place of work, and I would recommend it to archivists attempting to use technology more effectively and technologists seeking to better serve archivists.