Research Tools: University of Maryland Libraries Releases a New Open Source Web Application Developed for White House Pool Reports Digital Collection

From the University of Maryland Libraries:

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) was founded in 1914 to promote excellence in journalism, robust reporting on the U. S. presidency, and support democracy through a free press. The White House Press Corps is made up of journalists credentialed by WHCA. This press pool provides reporting on the President’s daily activities and events. The UMD Libraries’ WHCA Pool Reports Collection consists of email pool reports created while covering the U.S. President and Vice President dating back to June 2020. It is updated monthly and the collection is available to anyone at https://whpool.lib.umd.edu/.

To address issues of privacy and security in making these emails publicly available, an automated solution for redacting sensitive information was created by an in-house team of UMD Libraries’ designers and developers. The resulting production tool, called SCUTES, has now been released as an open source web application for processing email and redacting personal identification information (PII) of journalists in the reporters pool. The source code is available at https://github.com/umd-lib/scutes.

There are four critical issues when digitally archiving these born-digital records of public information. First, how to provide a uniform display for end-users regardless of the source email application. Second, personal privacy and safety of journalists’ private lives is an important concern, especially in the current political climate.  Third, on today’s media stage, embedded links and images are ubiquitous. To sustain an accurate historical record this requires converting the links to stable URLS. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, as a news product, reports documenting presidential activities and events continue daily, requiring continuous acquisition of new email messages.  In order to produce a workflow that wasn’t labor-intensive automation solutions were sought and when not found on the shelf were designed in house.

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SCUTES was developed by UMD Libraries’ faculty and staff members Tim Kanke, Patti Cossard, and Ben Wallberg. Special thanks to Tim Kanke, contract research developer, for his work on analyzing existing workflows, evaluating available solutions, and designing and building SCUTES. We would also like to thank Cathy Merrill and the Merrill Foundation, Inc. for funding this important work.

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