By Prof. Hacker. [This is a guest post by Dan Royles, a lecturer at the University of Angers in western France, where he teaches American Studies and English as a foreign language. He's previously written on "Digital Workflows for the Archives" for ProfHacker. You can find him online at danroyles.com, or follow him on Twitter at @danroyles.--@JBJ]
When I was writing my dissertation on African American AIDS activism, I ran into the problem that plagues many historians of the recent past: lack of archival sources. I had identified a handful of interesting stories to anchor my five chapters, but several of them involved organizations from the 1990s and 2000s that had left little in way of a paper trail. I solved some of my problem with an oral history project, which filled in some major gaps while creating a set of resources that will be useful for the future. However, I didn’t want to rely on oral histories alone. Memory is faulty, and although the narrative choices that people make in telling their stories are often instructive, without a set of corroborating sources it can be hard to piece together even a rough chronology of what “actually” happened. More...

By Natalie Houston. When you’re deciding what needs to be done next on a project, or in response to an email, or about that flashing light on your car’s dashboard, how do you decide if it’s something to do right away or something to put on your list for later? Do you have a bunch of emails sitting your inbox that you keep meaning to respond to but you haven’t managed to get around to them yet? The two-minute rule might help. More...