Data Management

Bringing It All Together: Methods for Cataloging News Articles for the BNDA Version 2.0

Since its initial launch in September 2022, the Burnham-Nobles Digital Archive (BNDA) has established itself as one of the most comprehensive digital records of racial homicides collected to date. This blog series aims to highlight the work of the archivists on the BNDA team and their experiences preparing for the launch of BNDA Version 2.0. You can read more about the Version 2.0 update in Gathering the Red Record: A Two-Day Convening on Linking Racial Violence Archives.

Methods Overview

The first thing I have to say about the archival work methods for cataloging news articles at the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project’s BNDA is that they are a team effort. The workflow structure is maintained through shared instructions, templates, the data dictionary, and a responsive, organized supervising team.

All of the archives assistant work is digital. Archives assistants receive batches of news articles to catalog in the form of spreadsheets with links to images of the original newspaper articles stored in the Digital Repository Service. We then verify those articles against information we currently have and complete standardized fields for the information we want supplied. If we encounter a question about the records that we can’t answer with assurance, we flag it to be reviewed by either our supervisors or the legal team.

When completed, those standardized spreadsheets are reviewed by the supervising team and transformed into a format compatible for inclusion in the BNDA. Having multiple team members verify information improves the accuracy of the records and makes for sustainable collections processing practices.

Our goal is to add as much accurate and data-verified cataloged information as possible in order to provide supporting evidence of each incident, case, and victim identifier. These standardized identifiers, as well as authorized names for each unique individual, allow the team to take advantage of the relational-based search capability of the Airtable database. Not only does this system help us make better cataloged records, it allows for more retrievable information for future research.

Examples in the Records

Washington Sniper Victims
One example of data verification is to identify the victim(s) present in a news article whenever possible, even when minimal information is present. Breaking news articles often lack details. Names can be absent or incorrect, or focus on the perpetrator of the crime rather than the victim. One strategy I find helpful is to work by victim-subject, going through batches of news articles that are all related to one victim or group of victims. This allows me to glean patterns of context clues that allow for victim identification even if the victim is unnamed.

Newspaper clipping with the headline "Baffled D.C. Police Sift Tangled Clues In Hunt for Sniper"
News article describing the ongoing search for the perpetrator and victims in the D. C. sniper case. Evening star. Washington, D.C.: October 16, 1940.
List of metadata tied to an article titled "Evening Star. Washington, D.C.: October 16, 1940. Baffled D.C. Police Sift Tangled Clues in Hunt for Sniper
Cataloging metadata for the news article (left).

I found this strategy particularly helpful when working with a case related to a serial sniper who murdered multiple victims in Washington, D.C., in 1940. Three victims identified over the months of press coverage were Hylan McClaine, Lushion Sam Banks, and Theodore I. Goffney, but the chronological order of their murders was not shared. Press coverage of the sniper continued into the 1960s, long after the trial, with inconsistent reference to the victims. At the BNDA, we can link the victim names at the forefront of these articles in our catalog, centering the narrative around the victims rather than the perpetrator.

Bryant Family Murder
The research crucial work that aids in the cataloging effort is also on display in the case of the 1932 Bryant family murder. The news coverage of the tragic murder of the Bryant family was sometimes unclear about which family members survived and which were killed in the horrible robbery, torture, and death by arson. Some articles appeared sympathetic to the murderers and provided little to no details on the victims.

Our Airtable database supports a field for notes written by Project Historian Jay Driskell when they are available. Through Jay’s notes, I could confirm with certainty that the father and son, Lewis and Ozola Bryant, were murdered. The mother, Missouri Bryant, survived. The more detailed news articles corroborated these facts. The Bryant murder trial also stands out as a case that upheld the murder charges against a white killer despite appeals up to the Missouri State Supreme Court.

A screenshot titled "Ozola Bryant and Lewis Bryant in Mississippi in 1932" with a case summary and other categories of metadata
The BNDA incident page for the killing of Ozola and Lewis Bryant

Given the graphic nature of the emotional events and the polarized reporting, I was grateful to have ready, retrievable access to previous work to clarify the Bryant family’s story in order to help me accurately represent the family in the cataloged work. I also benefitted from the concurrent work of another archives assistant and the support of my supervisor, Project Archivist Joy Zanghi.

These cases and many more are available in BNDA Version 2.0 and you can browse the current version now. I had the privilege of working with archival methods developed over the past 18 years of the project, taking into account the humanity of the sensitive subject matter. The final result is that the CRRJ developed an archival format with the BNDA that allows for the data within it to be scalable, buildable, and retrievable for the future.

CRRJ Archives Assistant Stephanie Bennett Rahmat (she/her/hers) has 17 years of experience working with historic and cultural heritage resources throughout the U.S. She completed her Master of Library and Information Science degree at Simmons University in 2021, with a focus on Archives Management and Cultural Heritage. She came to work in the archives and libraries after a career in North American archaeology.

Research Support Newsletter – Fall 2025

This blog was originally sent as a newsletter for Research Support Staff at Northeastern University on September 3, 2025. If you would like to subscribe to receive future newsletters, please click here.

Did you know the library can help with…your grant proposal?

Join us for our Accelerate Your Proposal Development event! This program is a countdown of proposal-related questions the library can help with, including personalized support for crafting data management and sharing plans, improving your data visualizations and graphics, strategies for efficient literature reviews, and citation management. We’ll share information about the tools and people who can help you develop key proposal components and supplementary materials. Whether you’re in the early stages of developing your proposal or fine-tuning it before submission, we’re happy to work with you.

This virtual event takes place Wednesday, October 29, from noon – 1 p.m. Eastern time. Register here.

Did you know we have access to…tools and services to complete evidence syntheses?

This month, we are highlighting two ways the library can support your evidence synthesis project. Evidence synthesis projects, which often do not require funding, can reveal important research gaps, thus strengthening future grant applications. If you are working on (or considering working on) a systematic review, scoping review, rapid review, or meta-analysis, read on!

Evidence Synthesis Service: Northeastern University Library provides a tiered set of support services for evidence synthesis projects such as systematic reviews, ranging from expert librarian guidance to full research partnerships. See our website and service tiers for more information.

Covidence: Covidence is a web-based evidence synthesis support tool that assists in screening references, data extraction, and keeping track of your work. Covidence requires registration with a Northeastern email address. If you already have an account, please sign in.

Start Smart — Foundations of Evidence Syntheses: Starting September 15, the library will be running a virtual workshop series for faculty and research staff on planning for and embarking on an evidence synthesis project.

Have any questions about completing evidence syntheses? Reach out to our expert, Philip Espinola Coombs.

We want to hear from you!

Research Data Storage Finder: We’re developing an interactive online tool to help researchers quickly narrow down the best platform for their data storage and archiving needs, and we’d love to hear what you think of what we’ve built so far. If you’d like to get a sneak peek and share your feedback, please let us know via this form.

That’s it!

Questions about the library? Email Alissa Link Cilfone, Head of STEM, or Jen Ferguson, Head of Research Data Services — we’d love to hear from you!

What is the DRS and who is it for?

What is the DRS?

The Digital Repository Service (DRS) is an institutional repository that was designed by the Northeastern University Library to help members of the Northeastern community organize, store, and share the digital materials that are important to their role or responsibilities at the university. This can include scholarly works created by faculty and students; supporting materials used in research; photographs and documents that represent the history of the community; or materials that support the day-to-day operations of the university.

While the DRS itself is a technical system that stores digital files and associated information to help users find what they need, we also consider the DRS to be a service for the university community: library staff are here to help you organize, store, share, and manage the digital materials that have long-lasting value for the university community and beyond.

Result listing in the DRS for a report titled "Exploring the Effectiveness of Bite-Sized Learning for Statistics via TikTok" and includes metadata and an image of the report
Published research from the Northeastern community available in the DRS.

Northeastern is not alone in this endeavor. Repository services are now standard practice for most academic institutions, including Harvard University Library (who also use the name “Digital Repository Service”), Stanford University Library (a leader in technical development for repository systems), Tufts Libraries, and other institutions around the world.

Who uses the DRS?

The DRS has been used by faculty, staff, students, and researchers from all corners of the university community for 10 years. There are too many use cases to mention in one brief blog post, but here are some trends we’ve seen in what users choose to deposit the last few years.

Data visualization from a research publication, containing multiple styles of data depiction
Fang, D., et.al. Bottom-up estimates of floor area and embodied carbon patterns in the US building stock. Presentation.
  • Open access copies of research publications, as well as working papers and technical reports
  • Publications and data that supports published research
  • Event recordings, photographs, newspapers, and almost any kind of material you can think of to support the day-to-day operations and activity at the university
  • Student research projects and classwork, like oral histories and research projects. Students are also required to contribute their final version of their thesis or dissertation.
  • Digitized and born-digital records from the Archives and Special Collections, including photographs, documents, and audio and video recordings

These files, and all the other audio, video, document, and photograph files in the DRS, have been viewed or downloaded 11.2 million times since the DRS first launched in 2015. Nearly half of the files in the DRS are made available to the public and are therefore available for the wider world to discover. Materials in the DRS have been cited in reporting by CNN, Pitchfork, WBUR, and Atlas Obscura, among others, and are regularly shared on social media or in Reddit threads. As a result, Northeastern continues to contribute the work produced here to the larger scholarly and cultural record, and to the larger world.

Who supports the DRS?

The day-to-day work managing, maintaining, and supporting users of the service comes from staff in Digital Production Services:

  • Kim Kennedy supervises the digitization of physical materials and processing of born-digital and digitized materials.
  • Drew Facklam and Emily Allen create and maintain the descriptive metadata that helps you find what you need.
  • And all of us in the department, including part-time staff, are responsible for general management of the system, including batch ingesting materials, holding consultations and training sessions, answering questions, and leading conversations about how to improve the system and the service.
Two people stand in front of a presentation with a screenshot of the DRS behind them
Sarah Sweeney and David Cliff, DRS staff, posing in 2015 with the homepage of the recently launched DRS. 

The DRS is also supported by a number of library staff members across the library:

  • David Cliff, Senior Digital Library Developer in Digital Infrastructures, is the DRS’ lead developer and system administrator.
  • Ernesto Valencia and Rob Chavez from the Library Technology Services and Infrastructure departments also provide development support and system administration.
  • Many librarians in the Research and Instruction department do outreach about the service and support faculty as they figure out how to use it in their work.
  • Jen Ferguson from Research Data Services also connects faculty and researchers to the DRS, while also providing data management support for those wishing to use the DRS to store their data.
  • Members of the library administration, including Dan Cohen, Evan Simpson, Tracey Harik, and the recently retired Patrick Yott have contributed their unwavering support and advocacy for developing and maintaining system an service.

We are all here to help you figure out how the DRS may be used to make your work and academic life easier. To dive deeper into what the DRS is and how to use it, visit the DRS subject guide or contact me or my team.

The library is celebrating 10 years of the DRS! Check out A Decade of the Digital Repository Service to read more about the history of the DRS.

A Decade of the Digital Repository Service

Northeastern University Library’s institutional repository, the Digital Repository Service, is celebrating 10 years of caring for the university’s scholarly, archival, and administrative high-value materials. From day one, the mission of the DRS has been to provide a long-term, sustainable home for the born digital and digitized content being produced by members of the Northeastern community.

More than just a technical system, the DRS is a service provided by the library to help solve a common problem for faculty, staff, students, researchers, and project teams: where can I store the digital output from my work? The DRS allows these projects developed at Northeastern to be maintained and shared with a wider audience. In addition to maintaining the DRS system, services provided by DRS staff include running training sessions, answering questions, consulting, and depositing files for users.

Side-by-side depiction of two versions of the Digital Repository Service homepage
The 2012 DRS prototype and the 2025 version.

Originally developed as a prototype in 2011, the system was created by a library team — three developers, the repository manager, a Northeastern co-op, and a library administrator — with the goal of constructing a completely realized system ready for production. The first version was ready to be used fully by the Northeastern community in June 2015.

The DRS was launched with some rough edges, which were slowly smoothed into the system users are familiar with today. We have received tremendous response from users about the usefulness of the system, as well as thoughtful and constructive feedback about how the system can be improved (e.g. faster page load times, better search functionality, and more control over files, among others).

The DRS homepage displayed on a laptop screen with a hand typing on the computer's keyboard
The DRS, as it appeared in 2015.

We have done our best to grow with the university community as its needs shift by increasing support for datasets, loading large batches of files on behalf of users and project teams, and tripling our original storage capacity, but there is always more to be done to meet the needs of our users.

The shape of the content stored in the DRS has shifted over the years, as well. Initially just for theses and dissertations, university photographs, and archival material, the DRS now fully supports various types of project materials for digital humanities research, datasets for researchers in various disciplines, oral histories, and many others.

Since its launch, DRS content has been viewed, downloaded, or streamed more than 1.1 million times, and we’ve had more than 13,000 members of the Northeastern community sign into the system. The DRS averages approximately 2,000 unique visitors and 4,000 views, downloads, and streams a day.

Screenshot of a DRS display of a research poster titled "Investigating and addressing the needs of research support staff"
The DRS provides a home for and access to research and projects by members of the Northeastern community.

The success of the system can be attributed to the combined efforts of staff in many library departments, including development and system administration from Library Technology Services and Digital Infrastructures; outreach and faculty support from Research and Instruction; data management support from Research Data Services; issue triage and metadata collaboration with Resource and Discovery Services; and continual support and advocacy from library administration. And, of course, Digital Production Services, the department primarily responsible for maintaining the system and supporting the service through digital production, metadata maintenance, and user support.

The DRS is not the first system of its kind supported by the library. It adopted its first repository system in the early 2000s, followed by IRis in 2007. The library’s commitment to maintaining the scholarly output of the university was formed during those early years, a commitment we have refined and strengthened over the more than 20 years of dedicated support for faculty, staff, and students working to help fulfill the university’s mission. It’s been a great pleasure to support the Northeastern community in this way, and we look forward to the next 10 years and beyond.

Reflecting on reparative description initiatives in the Digital Repository Service

In an effort to engage in reparative description and a desire to improve the Library’s approach to processing and publishing digital collections by incorporating inclusive, non-discriminatory principles into our workflows, the Digital Production Services Department has been seeking new methods of description for digital collections that do not perpetuate harm to our patrons or to the communities described in the collections.

Admittedly, these are not new concepts. Building on the work of institutions and organizations such as the Digital Transgender Archive, Digital Public Library of America, and Digital Commonwealth (along with a host of other colleges and universities), our department has chosen to move forward with a three-pronged approach:

  1. Creating an actionable list of reparative metadata practices we can engage in on the item and collection level with the Library and Archives’ collections in the Digital Repository Service (DRS).
  2. Implementing updates for the upcoming version of the DRS, including new and expanded features which support inclusive description and mitigate harm.
  3. Writing and generating institutional buy-in for a library-wide statement on conscious and inclusive description of our resources.

Much of this work is still underway, but we have made a lot of progress generating item-level statements to provide context to sensitive and questionable materials. We documented criteria for selecting items that need statements, instigated a regular group review with members of Archives for content that rises to the need of consideration, created thematic categories of content that merits item-level statements, and generated documentation to track and manage the addition of these statements to DRS resources. We have currently added contextual statements to over 120 individual items with our institutional repository. If you would like to review these materials in greater detail, here is a link to a set of materials we’ve added statements to (some materials may require you to sign into the DRS).

Here are some statistics from the initial implementation of this work:

  • Over 50% of the sensitive content contains overt racism or other forms of discrimination. The next most common category is graphic description of bodily harm, which almost exclusively comes from the Boston Globe Library Collection.
  • The content types vary, but almost 80% of identified digital objects are photographic in nature, with a much smaller portion of textual or audiovisual materials.
  • Two most commonly used statements are as follows:
    • This item has been flagged for racist or harmful content. We are preserving and making this item available as part of the historical record, but it does not reflect the values of Northeastern University Library. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.
    • This item has been flagged for a graphic depiction of bodily harm that may not be appropriate for all audiences. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the Northeastern University Library Archives and Special Collections at archives@northeastern.edu.

Takeaways from patterns we have noticed in the process of identifying materials for statements:

  • As an institution that collects a wide variety of community-focused Civil Rights Era materials, there are a lot of items within the DRS that benefit from additional context and/or acknowledgement. For example, the Freedom House, Inc., records (M16, public collection) follows the institutional history of a community organizing group built to centralize activism for neighborhood improvement, quality education, and social, racial, and religious harmony in Roxbury, Mass. They collected a number of materials from an anti-busing racial hate group called ROAR, whose pamphlets and press releases we have digitized and added content statements to.
  • Photographs often lack context on the item level and therefore can be more jarring in their sensitivity. This is especially evident in the Boston Globe Library Collection, which contains thousands of print photographs taken by newspaper staff or contract photographers. Organized by topical subjects, the photo archive contains imagery related to difficult themes such as anti-busing demonstrations, fires, crime, and bombings.
  • There are items in the DRS which may be upsetting to some viewers, but after reaching consensus with the Archives staff, we do not feel that they rise to the level of needing contextual statements, given that their visual meaning is derived from their academic and research merit, such as marine animal necropsy photos in the Ocean Genome Legacy Project (public collection).

Ultimately, this is an ongoing process—one that will continue to need reflection and consideration from Library and Archives staff, as well as additional research on what other respected institutions are doing to provide context and mitigate harm. Inclusive descriptive practice is iterative, and as we continue this work, we will continue to reflect on the most effective ways to serve our users.