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Category: at risk records

At Risk Records are archival records that are in danger of being lost forever, usually due to physical damage or (in the case of electronic records) loss of the ability to access the originals.

Archivists and New Technology: When Do The Records Matter?

Navigating the rapidly changing landscape of new technology is a major challenge for archivists. As quickly as new technologies come to market, people adopt them and use them to generate records. Businesses, non-profits and academic institutions constantly strive to find ways to be more efficient and to cut their budgets. New technology often offers the promise of cost reductions. In this age of constantly evolving software and technological innovation, how do archivists know when a new technology is important or established enough to take note of? When do the records generated by the latest and greatest technology matter enough to save?

Below I have include two diagrams that seek to illustrate the process of adopting new technology. I think they are both useful in aiding our thinking on this topic.

The first is the “Hype Cycle“, as proposed by analyst Jackie Fenn at Gartner Group. It breaks down the phases that new technologies move through as they progress from their initial concept through to broad acceptance in the marketplace. The generic version of the Hype Cycle diagram below is from the Wikipedia entry on hype cycle.

Gartner Hype Cycle (Wikipedia)

Each summer, Gartner comes out with a new update on Where Are We In The Hype Cycle?. Last summer, microblogging was just entering the ‘Peak of Inflated Expectations’, public virtual worlds were sliding down into the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ and location aware applications were climbing back up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’. There is even a book about it: Mastering the Hype Cycle: How to Choose the Right Innovation at the Right Time.

The other diagram is the Technology Adoption Lifecycle from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm. This perspective on the technology cycle is from the perspective of bringing new technology to market. How do you cross the chasm between early adopters and the general population?

Technology Adoption Lifecycle (Wikipedia)

Archivists need to consider new technology from two different perspectives. When to use it to further their own goals as archivists and when to address the need to preserve records being generated by new technology. A fair bit of attention has been focused on figuring out how to get archivists up to speed on new web technology. In August 2008, ArchivesNext posted about hunting for Web 2.0 related sessions at SAA2008 and Friends Told Me I Needed A Blog posted about SAA and the Hype Cycle shortly thereafter.

But how do we know when a technology is ‘important enough’ to start worrying about the records it generates? Do we focus our energy on technology that has crossed the chasm and been adopted by the ‘early majority’? Do we watch for signs of adoption by our target record creators?

I expect that the answer (such as there can be one answer!) will be community specific. As I learned in the 2007 SAA session about preserving digital records of the design community, waiting for a single clear technology or software leader to appear can lead to lost or inaccessible records. Archivists working with similar records already come together to support one another through round tables, mailing lists and conference sessions. I have noticed that I often find the most interesting presentations are those that discuss the challenges a specific user community is facing in preserving their digital records. The 2008 SAA session about hybrid analog/digital literary collections discussed issues related to digital records from authors. Those who worry about records captured in geographic information systems (GIS) were trying to sort out how to define a single GIS electronic record when last I dipped my toes into their corner of the world in the Fall of 2006.

It is not feasible to imagine archivists staying ahead of every new type of technology and attempting to design a method for archiving every possible type of digital records being created. What we can do is make it a priority for a designated archivist within every ‘vertical’ community (government, literary, architecture… etc) to keep their ear to the ground about the use of technology within that community. This could be a community of practice of its own. A group that shares info about the latest trends they are seeing while sharing their best practices for handling the latest types of records being seen.

The good news is that archivists aren’t the only ones who want to be able to preserve access to born digital records. Consider Twitter, which only provides easy access to recent tweets. A whole raft of third-party tools built to archive data from Twitter are already out there, answering the demand for a way to backup people’s tweets.

I don’t think archivists always have the luxury of waiting for technology to be adopted by the majority of people and to reach the ‘Plateau of Productivity’. If you are an archivist who works with a community  that uses cutting edge technology, you owe it to your community to stay in the loop with how they do their work now. Just because most people don’t use a specific technology doesn’t mean that an individual community won’t pick it up and use to the exclusion of more common tools.

The design community mentioned above spoke of working with those creating the tools for their community to ensure easy archiving down the line. In our fast paced world of innovation, a subset of archivists need to stay involved with the current business practices of each vertical being archived. This group can work together to identify challenges, brainstorm solutions, build relationships with the technology communities and then disseminate best practices throughout the archives community. I did find a web page for the SAA’s Technology Best Practices Task Force and its document Managing Electronic Records and Assets: A Working Bibliography, but I think that I am imagining something more ongoing, more nimble and more tied into each of the major communities that archivists must support. Am I describing something that already exists?

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Sunshine Week 2009: Archives, Records and Other Online Government Information

Sunshine Week Sunshine Week 2009 is a national initiative spearheaded by journalists to “open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) chose to mark Sunshine Week this year by announcing the release their new tool for searching EFF’s FOIA documents. Learn more about EFF’s efforts to make open government a reality in this EFF call to action.

The Sunshine Week blog announced the release of a 2009 Survey Of State Government Information Online. The survey results explains:

Using a standardized worksheet surveyors rated each section on its usability, looking at factors such as whether the information was clearly linked, if full reports or only summaries were available, whether viewing and/or downloading was free, and whether the data were current. The categories for the survey were selected for generally serving the overall public good — the kind of information people need for their own health and well-being and that of the community.

See the worksheet for details on the categories selected for inclusion in the survey and the results for lots of interesting tidbits about exactly which states provide access (or not) to various public information online. A few very randomly selected highlights:

  • Maryland: Nursing home information, mhcc.maryland.gov/consumerinfo/nhguide, got high marks for facilitating online search and for allowing users to “compare data in a variety of ways.”
  • Iowa: The state auditor’s office reportedly offers online more than 5,000 full reports of all its audits dating back to 2001. The audits are easily accessible from tabs on the main Web page, www.auditor.iowa.gov.
  • Colorado: Bridge inspection reports in Colorado are considered public, but they are not published online. Anyone who wants to see the reports is advised to file an FOI request.

All of this made me recall my blog post about the parallel goals of journalists and archivists when considering digital public records and databases. I wanted to celebrate Sunshine Week by looking for other online sources of government information. My first stop was the website of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA). They had a couple of great resources including:

A bit further afield we find GovernmentDocs.org advertised as a “community government document reviewer system”. On their about page we read:

With the GovernmentDocs.org system, citizen reviewers can engage in the government accountability process like never before. Registered users can review and comment on documents, adding their insights and expertise to the work of the national nonprofit organizations which are partnering on this project. This new information then becomes instantly searchable. The text of each document is searchable, as well, thanks to a powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality.

GovernmentDocs.org adds a powerful layer to government transparency and accountability by indexing documents in a user-friendly manner that is remarkably easy to share. Every page of every document has its own unique url, allowing you and other users to link to that page on blogs, send emails about the documents to friends, and expose the information to a wider audience.

Here is an example GovernmentDocs page taken from a request submitted by CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) regarding the Endangered Species Act. Each GovernmentDocs page has a unique URL, full text transcription of the page and supports comments and reviews. The possibility of building up a community around these records is very real. I am curious to see how many citizen reviewers and comments are associated with these documents a year from now.

Please help celebrate Sunshine Week by exploring all these amazing resources!

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Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty in the Archival Record and Beyond

Blog Action Day - Poverty long

In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of Poverty, I want to point people to examples of ways in which poverty is documented in archives, manuscript collections and elsewhere.

The most obvious types of records that document poverty are:

There are also organizations dedicated to research on poverty – such as the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research and National Poverty Center. The archival records from groups such as these could show ways that organizations have addressed poverty over time, as well as the history of poverty itself.

Archives do their best job with records produced in the process of carrying out tasks related to business or personal life, and many of those who are living in the greatest poverty aren’t generating (or saving) their own records. Is being documented by photographers, news articles and the Census Bureau the same thing as telling your own story through an oral history or having your photographs, personal papers or other life documents archived? One of the most fascinating things about primary source materials in general, and archival records in specific, is the first hand view that it can lend the researcher. That sense of stepping into their shoes – of having a chance to retrace their steps.

There are certainly institutions whose records cast light on the lives of those in poverty such as homeless shelters, social service agencies and health clinics – but I would put forth that we are rarely capturing the first person voices of those living in poverty. I am realistic. I know that those dealing with the basic issues of food, shelter and personal safety are likely not thinking about where to record their oral history or how to get their personal papers into an archive or manuscript collection. That doesn’t mean that I don’t wish there wasn’t a better way. These are people who deserve to be represented with their own voice to the people of the future.

I am enamored of the idea of recording people’s own stories as is being done in each of the following examples:

I want to end my post with an inspirational project. Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been photographing the built environment in poor, minority communities across the United States since 1977.  He has re-photographed the same locations many times over the years. This permits him to create time lapse series of images that show how a space has changed over time. He has published a number of books (the most recent of which is American Ruins) as well as having created an interactive website.

The Invincible Cities website documents Harlem, NY, Camden, NJ and Richmond, CA. After selecting one of these three locations you are greeted by a map, timeline and photographs. You can walk through time at individual locations and watch storefronts change, buildings get demolished and fashions shift. The interface lets you select images by location, theme and year. My description can’t do it any justice – just go explore for yourself: Invincible Cities. The site explains that his next goal is to create a ‘Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto’ (VE for short) that covers all of the United States.

In the March 2008 PopPhoto.com article Camilo Jose Vergara: 30 Years Documenting the American Ghetto, we find the following interesting quotes from the photographer:

“Once photography at its best and most prestigious became art and the rewards went to photographer artists, the field became uninterested and unable to significantly contribute to the creation of a historical record, that is to the making of an inventory of our world and to illustrate how it changes,” asserts Vergara, adding that the Internet is an ideal way to bypass traditional museums. “You can realize a larger world that can support a different kind of photography.”

The Internet is especially well-suited to housing a multi-layered history of the ghettos’ evolution. Advances in technology allow the designers to arrange images in complex ways: links take the viewer to a page that gives census data; click on a color-coded street map on the left side of the screen to pinpoint exact addresses of panoramic views, artifacts, architectural details, building interiors or street-level views. “These kinds of things were unimaginable when I started the project,” he says.

Can we expect projects like this  to give individuals of the future a real taste of what life was like for the poor in US cities or around the world? Should part of our efforts at diversity of representation in the historical record specifically address preservation of the records and manuscripts of those living in poverty? Lots to think about! I hope this post has introduced you to new resources and projects. Please share any I missed in the comments below.

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Jewish New Year 5769: Images and Words from the Past

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Flickr LOC: Praying on the Brooklyn BridgeThe Jewish year of 5769 began at sunset of September 29th, 2008. The Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) is a very reflective holiday, one in which individuals are encouraged to consider their own actions from the past year. It made me wonder what materials are available online to let us glimpse the celebration of Rosh Hashanahs long past.

A search in the Flickr Commons yielded this lovely Library of Congress image of women praying on the Brooklyn Bridge (likely participating in the ritual of Tashlikh).

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Collections & Archives has photos about Rosh Hashanah – including this optimistic card depicting a couple from the Fuerth displaced persons camp flying to Tel Aviv.

Yad Vashem has pulled together selections relating to Rosh Hashanah in an online collection called Marking the New Year.

I also found an assortment of treasures on the Internet Archive:

Rosh Hashanah Poem (1898)

 

These examples only scratch the surface of the archives and collections that include Jewish records. If this has peaked your interest, here are a few other websites to explore:

Know of others I missed – please add them in the comments below!

These sites are from suggestions in the comments:

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Vice President Ruled Part of Executive Branch: Cheney’s Records Must Be Preserved

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CNN’s headline is Cheney must keep records, judge orders.  The very short version of all this is that the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued “Vice President Richard B. Cheney in his official capacity, the Executive Office of the President (“EOP”), the Office of the Vice President (“OVP”), the National Archives and Records
Administration (“NARA”), and Dr. Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, in his official capacity” to force everyone involved to “preserve all vice presidential records, broadly defined to encompass all records relating to the vice president carrying out his constitutional, statutory or other official or ceremonial duties” (see the CREW site article: Court Orders Cheney to Preserve Records in CREW Lawsuit).

Turns out that a judge agrees with CREW and has ordered that:

Defendants shall preserve throughout the pendency of this litigation all documentary material, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof created or received by the Vice President, his staff, or a unit or individual of the Office of the Vice President whose function is to advise and assist the Vice President, in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the Vice President, without regard to any limiting definitions that Defendants may believe are appropriate

I love that last bit – keep it all, even if you don’t think you should.  The court order finishes by saying that they should still give the records to NARA as long as NARA is going to treat them as covered by the Presidential Records Act (see NARA’s PRA page or Wikipedia’s PRA page – I will let you guess which is easier to read).

Is it bad of me to be excited that this is being treated as front page news? As of 9:30pm September 20th 2008, CNN is featuring the article in its ‘prime top left with a big photo’ spot and the New York Times has a link off the main page to their article: Cheney Is Ordered to Preserve Wide Set of Records. They say that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I would like to believe that front page news stories such as this one help improve understanding of archives in general (and NARA in particular).

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SAA2008: Preservation and Experimentation with Analog/Digital Hybrid Literary Collections (Session 203)

floppy disks

The official title of Session 203 was Getting Our Hands Dirty (and Liking It): Case Studies in Archiving Digital Manuscripts. The session chair, Catherine Stollar Peters from the New York State Archives and Records Administration, opened the session with a high level discussion of the “Theoretical Foundations of Archiving Digital Manuscripts”. The focus of this panel was preserving hybrid collections of born digital and paper based literary records. The goal was to review new ways to apply archival techniques to digital records. The presenters were all archivists without IT backgrounds who are building on others work … and experimenting. She also mentioned that this also impacts researchers, historians, and journalists.For each of the presenters, I have listed below the top challenges and recommendations. If you attended the sessions, you can skip forward to my thoughts.

Norman Mailer’s Electronic Records

Challenges & Questions:

  • 3 laptops and nearly 400 disks of correspondence
  • While the letters might have been dictated or drafted by Mailer, all the typing, organization and revisions done on the computer were done by his assistant Judith McNally. This brings into question issues of who should be identified as the record creator. How do they represent the interaction between Mailer & McNally? Who is the creator? Co-Creators?
  • All the laptops and disks were held by Judith McNally. When she died all of her possessions were seized by county officials. All the disks from her apartment were eventually recovered over a year later – but it causes issues of provenance. There is no way to know who might have viewed/changed the records.

Revelations and Recommendations:

What is accessioning and processing when dealing with electronic records? What needs to be done?

  • gain custody
  • gather information about creator’s (or creators’) use of the electronic records. In March 2007 they interviewed Mailer to understand the process of how they worked together. They learned that the computers were entirely McNally’s domain.
  • number disks, computers (given letters), other digital media
  • create disk catalog – to reflect physical information of the disk. Include color of ink.. underlining..etc. At this point the disk has never been put into a computer. This captures visual & spacial information
  • gather this info from each disk: file types, directory structure & file names

The ideal for future collections of this type is archivist involvement earlier – the earlier the better.

Papers of Peter Ganick

  • Speaker: Melissa Watterworth
  • Featured Collection: Papers of Writer and Small Press Publisher Peter Ganick, Thomas J Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut

Challenges & Questions:

  • What are the primary sources of our modern world?
  • How do we acquire and preserve born digital records as trusted custodians?
  • How do we preserve participatory media – maybe we can learn from those who work on performance art?
  • How do we incrementally build our collections of electronic records? Should we be preserving the tools?
  • Timing of acquisition: How actively should we be pursuing personal archives? How can we build trust with creators and get them to understand the challenges?
  • Personal papers are very contextual – order matters. Does this hold true for born digital personal archives? What does the networking aspect of electronic records mean – how does it impact the idea of order?
  • First attempt to accession one of Peter Ganick’s laptops and the archivist found nothing she could identify as files.. she found fragments of text – hypertext work and lots of files that had questionable provenance (downloaded from a mailing list? his creations?). She had to sit down next to him and learn about how he worked.
  • He didn’t understand at first what her challenges were. He could get his head around the idea of metadata and issues of authenticity. He had trouble understanding what she was trying to collect.
  • How do we arrange and keep context in an online environment?
  • Biggest tech challenge: are we holding on for too long to ideas of original order and context?
  • Is there a greater challenge in collecting earlier in the cycle? What if the creator puts restrictions on groupings or chooses to withdraw them?
  • Do we want to create contracts with donors? Is that practical?

Revelations and Recommendations:

  • Collect materials that had high value as born digital works but were at a high risk of loss.
  • Build infrastructure to support preservation of born digital records.
  • Go back to the record creator to learn more about his creative process. They used to acquire records from Ganick every few years.. that wasn’t frequent enough. He was changing the tools he used and how he worked very quickly. She made sure to communicate that the past 30 years of policy wasn’t going to work anymore. It was going to have to evolve.
  • Created a ‘submission agreement’ about what kinds of records should be sent to the archive. He submitted them in groupings that made sense to him. She reviewed the records to make sure she understood what she was getting.
  • Considering using PDFa to capture snapshot of virtual texts.
  • Looked to model of ‘self archiving’ – common in the world of professors to do ongoing accruals.
  • What about ’embedded archivists’? There is a history of this in the performing arts and NGOs and it might be happening more and more.

George Whitmore Papers

Challenges & Questions:

  • How do you establish identity in a way that is complete and uncorrupted? How do you know it is authentic? How do you make an authentic copy? Are these requirements as unreasonable and unachievable?

Revelations and Recommendations:

  • Refresh and replicate files on a regular schedule.
  • They have had good success using Quick View Plus to enable access to many common file formats. On the downside, it doesn’t support everything and since it is proprietary software there are no long term guarantees.
  • In some cases they had to send CP/M files to a 3rd party to have them converted into WordStar and have the ascii normalized.
  • Varied acquisition notes.. and accession records.. loan form with the 3rd party who did the conversion that summarized the request.. they did NOT provide information about what software was used to convert from CP/M to DOS. This would be good information to capture in the future.
  • Proposed an expansion of the standards to include how electronic records were migrated in the <processinfo> processing notes.

Questions & Answers

Question: As part of a writers community, what do we tell people who want to know what they can DO about their records. They want technical information.. they want to know what to keep. Current writers are aware they are creating their legacy.

Answer: Michael: The single best resource is the interPARES 2 Creator Guidelines. The Beineke has adapted them to distrubute to authors. Melissa: Go back to your collection development policies and make sure to include functions you are trying to document (like process.. distribution networks). Also communities of practice (acid free bits) are talking about formats and guidelines like that Gabriela: People often want to address ‘value’. Right now we don’t know how to evaluate the value of electronic drafts – it is up to authors.

Question: Cal Lee: Not a question so much as an idea: the world of digital forensics and security and the ‘order of volatility’ dictate that everyone should always be making a full disk copy bit by bit before doing anything else.

Comment: Comment on digital forensic tools – there is lots of historical and editing history of documents in the software… also delete files are still there.

Question: Have you seen examples of materials that are coming into the archive where the digital materials are working drafts for a final paper version? This is in contrast to others are electronic experiments.

Answer: Yes, they do think about this. It can effect arrangement and how the records are described. The formats also impact how things are preserved.

Question: Access issues? Are you letting people link to them from the finding aids? How are the documents authenticity protected.

Answer: DSpace gives you a new version anytime you want it (the original bitstream) .. lots of cross linking supports people finding things from more than one path. In some cases documents (even electronic) can only be accessed from within the on site reading room.

Question: What is your relationship is like with your IT folks?

Answer: Gabriela: Our staff has been very helpful. We use ‘legacy’ machines to access our content. They build us computers. They are also not archivists, so there is a little divide about priorities and the kind of information that I am interested in.. but it has been a very productive conversation.

Question: (For Melissa) Why didn’t you accept Peter’s email (Melissa had said they refused a submission of email from Peter because it didn’t have research value)?

Answer: The emails that included personal medical emails were rejected. The agreement with Peter didn’t include an option to selectively accept (or weed) what was given.

Question: In terms of gathering information from the creators.. do you recommend a formal/recorded interview? Or a more informal arrangement in which you can contact them anytime on an ongoing basis?

Answer: Melissa: We do have more formal methods – ‘documentation study’ style approaches. We might do literature reviews.. Ultimately the submission agreement is the most formal document we have. Gabriela: It depends on what the author is open to.. formal documentation is best.. but if they aren’t willing to be recorded, then you take what you can get!

My Thoughts

I am very curious to see how best practices evolve in this arena. I wonder how stories written using something like Google Documents, which auto-saves and preserves all versions for future examination, will impact how scholars choose to evaluate the evolution of documents. There have already been interesting examinations of the evolution of collaborative documents. Consider this visual overview of the updates to the Wikipedia entry for Sarah Palin created by Dan Cohen and discussed in his blog post Sarah Palin, Crowdsourced. Another great example of this type of visual experience of a document being modified was linked to in the comments of that post: Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie. If you haven’t seen this before – take a few minutes to click through and watch the screencast which actually lets you watch as a Wikipedia page is modified over time.

While I can imagine that there will be many things to sort out if we try to start keeping these incredibly frequent snapshot save logs (disk space? quantity of versions? authenticity? author preferences to protect the unpolished versions of their work?) – I still think that being able to watch the creative process this way will still be valuable in some situations. I also believe that over time new tools will be created to automate the generation of document evolution visualization and movies (like the two I link to above) that make it easy for researchers to harness this sort of information.

Perhaps there will be ways for archivists to keep only certain parts of the auto-save versioning. I can imagine an author who does not want anyone to see early drafts of their writing (as is apparently also the case with architects and early drafts of their designs) – but who might be willing for the frequency of updates to be stored. This would let researchers at least understand the rhythm of the writing – if not the low level details of what was being changed.

I love the photo I found for the top of this post. I admit to still having stacks of 3 1/2 floppy disks. I have email from the early days of BITNET.  I have poems, unfinished stories, old resumes and SQL scripts. For the moment my disks live in a box on the shelf labeled ‘Old Media’. Lucky me – I at least still have a computer with a floppy drive that can read them!

Image Credit: oh messy disks by Blude via flickr.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2008, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

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After The Games Are Over: Olympic Archival Records

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What does an archivist ponder after she turns off the Olympics? What happens to all the records of the Olympics after the closing ceremonies? Who decides what to keep? Not knowing any Olympic Archivists personally, I took to the web to see what I could find.

Olympics.org uses the tag line “Official Website of the Olympic Movement” and include information about The International Olympic Committee’s Historical Archives. The even have an Olympic Medals Database with all the results from all the games.

The most detailed list of Olympics archives that I could find is the Olympic Studies International Directory listing of Archives & Olympic Heritage sites. It is from this page that I found my way to records from the Sydney Olympic Park Authority.

The Olympic Television Archive Bureau (OTAB) website explains that this UK based company “has over 30,000 hours of the most sensational sports footage ever seen, uniquely available in one library”  and aims to provide “prompt fulfilment of your Olympic footage requirements”.

Then I thought to dig into the Internet Archive. What a great treasure trove for all sorts of interesting Olympic bits!

First I found a Universal Newsreel from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo (embedded below).

I also found a 2002 Computer Chronicles episode Computer Technology and the Olympics which explores the “high-tech innovations that ran the 2002 Winter Olympic Games” (embedded below).

Other fun finds included a digitized copy of a book titled The Olympic games, Stockholm, 1912 and the oldest snapshot of the Beijing 2008 website (from December of 2006). Seeing the 2008 Summer Games pages in the archive made me curious. I found the old site of the official Athens summer games from 2004 which kindly states: “The site is no longer available, please visit http://www.olympic.org or http://en.beijing2008.com/”. The Internet Archive has a bit more than that on the athens2004.com archive page – though some clicking through definitely made it clear that not all of the site was crawled. Lucky for us we can still see the Athens 2004 Olympics E-Cards you could send!

Then I turned to explore NARA‘s assorted web resources. I found a few photos on the Digital Vaults website (search on the keyword Olympics).  A search in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) generates a long list – including footage of the US National Rifle Team in the 1960 Olympics in Italy.

My favorite items from NARA’s collections are in the Access to Archival Databases (AAD). First I found this telegram from the American Embassy in Ottawa to the Secretary of State in Washington DC (Document ID # 1975OTTAWA02204) sent in June 1975:

 1. EMBASSY APPRECIATES DEPARTMENT’S EFFORTS TO ASSIST CONGEN IN CARING FOR VIPS WHO CERTAINLY WILL ARRIVE FOR 1976 OLYMPIC GAMES WITHOUT TICKETS OR LODGING. HAS DEPARTMENT EXPLORED POSSIBILITY OF OBTAINING 4,000 TICKETS ON CONSIGNMENT BASIS FROM MONTGOMERY WARD, WITH UNDERSTANDING THAT, AS TICKETS ARE SOLD, PROCEEDS WILL BE REMITTED? PERHAPS SUCH AN ARRANGEMENT COULD BE WORKED OUT WITH FURTHER UNDERSTANDING THAT UNSOLD TICKETS BE RETURNED TO MONTGOMERY WARD AT SOME SPECIFIED DATE PRIOR TO BEGINNING OF EVENTS.

2. EMBASSY WILL FURNISH AMOUNT REQUIRED TO RESERVE SIX DOUBLE ROOMS FOR PERIOD OF GAMES. AT PRESENT HOTEL OWNERS AND OLYMPIC OFFICIALS ARE IN DISAGREEMENT AS TO AMOUNTS THAT MAY BE CHARGED FOR ROOMS DURING OLYMPIC PERIOD. NEGOTIATIONS ARE CURRENTLY BEING CARRIED OUT AND AS SOON AS ROOM RATES HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED, QUEEN ELIZABETH HOTEL MANAGER WILL ADVISE US OF THEIR REQUIREMENTS TO RESERVE THE SIX DOUBLE ROOMS.

Immediately beneath that one, I found this telegram from October 1975 (Document Number 1975STATE258427):

SUBJECT:INVITATION TO PRESIDENT FORD AND SECRETARY
KISSINGER TO ATTEND OLYMPIC GAMES IN AUSTRIA,
FEBRUARY 4-15, 1976

THE EMBASSY IS REQUESTED TO INFORM THE GOA THAT MUCH TO THE PRESIDENT’S AND THE SECRETARY’S REGRET, THE DEMANDS ON THEIR SCHEDULES DURING THAT PERIOD WILL NOT MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO ATTEND THE WINTER GAMES. KISSINGER

There are definitely a lot of moving parts to Olympic Archival Records. So many nations participate.  New host countries with the option to handle records however they see fit. I explored this whole question two years ago and came up against the fact that control over the archival records produced by each Olympics was really in the hands of the hosting committee and their country. A quick glance down the list of Archives & Olympic Heritage sites I mentioned above gives you an idea of all the different corners of the world in which one can find Olympic Archival Records in both government and independent repositories. Given that clearly not all Olympic Games are represented in that list, it makes me wonder what we will see on this front from China now that the closing ceremony is complete.

I also suspect that with each Olympic Games we increase the complexity of the electronic records being generated. Would it be worthwhile to create an online collection for each games – as has been done for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank or The September 11 Digital Archive, but extend it to include access to Olympic electronic records data sets? The shear quantity of information is likely overwhelming – but I suspect there is a lot of interesting information that people would love to examine.

Update: For those of you (like me) who wondered what Montgomery Ward had to do with Olympic Tickets – take a look at Tickets For The ’76 Olympics Go On Sale Shortly At Montgomery Ward over in the Sports Illustrated online SI Vault. Sports Illustrated’s Vault is definitely another interesting source of information about the Olympic Games. If my post above has made you nostalgic for Olympics gone by – definitely take a look at the current Summer Games feature on their front page. I couldn’t figure out a permanent link to this feature, but if I ever do I will update this post later.

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MayDay 2008: Do you have a disaster plan?

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MayDay 2008I couldn’t let MayDay 2008 pass without pointing everyone to the amazing annotated list of MayDay resources that the Society of American Archivists (SAA) has made available.

Does your institution have a disaster plan?
If not, the list of resources include a detailed set of Free Disaster Plan Templates. Today is the perfect day to download one and start planning.

A full disaster plan too overwhelming? SAA also provides a tidy list of easy MayDay activity ideas including:

Create or Update Your Contact Lists
One of the most important elements of disaster response is knowing how to contact critical people – emergency responders, staff, and vendors. Make sure your staff members have an up-to-date list that includes as much contact information as possible: work and home phone numbers (including direct lines at work), mobile phone numbers, work and home email addresses, and any other relevant addresses. Staff at many institutions hit by hurricanes in 2005 discovered that they couldn’t use work email or phone numbers because work systems were completely out of commission; those who had an alternative phone number or email address often could connect.

Make Sure Boxes Are Off the Floor
Any number of causes – a broken pipe, a clogged toilet, fire sprinklers – may result in water in your storage areas. If shelf space is limited, use pallets for clearance. Make sure nothing is on the floor where it can be soaked.

Don’t have precious cultural heritage materials under your care? Okay then, how about you? Do you have a Family Disaster Plan and a Disaster Supplies Kit ready?

Image Credit: Society of American Archivists MayDay 2008 Logo.

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Capa’s Found Images and Thoughts on Digital Photographers’ Sketchbooks

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Robert Capa by Gerda Taro (May 1937)In the Washington Post article There Are No Black-and-White Answers in War — Then Lost Negatives Turn Up (February 1, 2008), we learn that three cardboard boxes of negatives were recently delivered to the International Center of Photography (ICP) – possibly including as many as 4,000 images. This collection of black-and-white film, consisting predominately of photos shot by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, was long thought lost during World War II and will join the already existing Robert Capa Archives. The boxes also contain negatives from two other famed photographers associated with Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour (known by the pseudonym Chim – pronounced shim).

There are many reasons these boxes are exciting for historians and Capa researchers. They hold the promise of answering some long standing questions. Where certain famous photos were staged? Are the current credits given for various photos are correct? But what caught my eye in this article was the following quote from ICP curator Brian Wallis:

“Capa was really adept at creating a whole story in one day: Here are the characters, here is the beginning, the action shots, the end, and the effect on civilians. If you look at his work not as great individual shots, but as stories, you get a completely different picture of him, and I think a more accurate and valuable picture.

“These negatives will further amplify that story, not just a few stories but dozens of stories that went out. It is like a sketchbook — he was trying out various ideas, and some worked and some didn’t.”

What About Digital Photographer’s Sketchbooks?

If you have ever used a digital camera, you have almost certainly enjoyed the instant gratification of being able to preview your photos on the tiny screen. The next temptation is to click the delete button. Sometimes you delete because the photo is clearly not what you were after – other times you delete to make room for some much more crucial photo.

I don’t know what the standard best practices are for professional photographers. Part of me hopes that they keep everything – at least until they can view the images on a big screen. But there is clearly a much easier path to deleting the ideas that didn’t work out. It leaves me wondering what the scholars of the future will be missing by not being able to see the failed experiments. The ‘sketchbooks’ of digital photographers could easily be perceived as at risk records. That said, many creative individuals (artists, architects, photographers… etc) do not care to share their failed experiments with the outside world. One of the issues facing those preserving digital records of the design community is the strong desire of designers to not share their work in progress and only share the final product (see my post SAA2007: Preserving Born Digital Records of the Design Community (Session 106) for more thoughts on this).

Image Overload

Of course there will be the photographers who do keep everything. Hard drive space is getting cheaper with every passing day. Perhaps my fears are misplaced and instead we should be worrying more about the flood of photographs that will overwhelm archivists and researchers. The time needed to discover the ‘good’ and ‘important’ photographs in a collection of thousands of images could be extreme.

I shoot all my photos digitally now. I no longer live in a world where there are only 36 shots on a single role – I don’t need to choose each photo carefully. I cheerfully tell my friends “Photos are free!”. Even that doesn’t stop me from deleting the ones that I really dislike. Sometimes the 2 GB card in my camera gets full before an event is done, so the on the spot weeding of photos occurs as well. But when I compare the number of ‘good’ photos that I have uploaded to share online (currently 5,000+ and counting) with the number of photos I have on my hard drive (20,000+) it is clear to me that I am keeping plenty of ‘sketch photos’. It is also interesting to note that I will often realize that there are photos I really like now that I didn’t appreciate immediately after they were taken. While something at the time made me NOT include it as a photo to share, now I see something in the image that catches my eye in a new way. The more this happens, the less I delete as I download, organize and tag my photos.

Metadata and the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF)

Of course the situation with digital photographs is not all bad. When digital cameras record a photo, they also record a set of metadata in the exchangeable image file format (EXIF) format. The metadata recorded usually includes camera make and model, date, time, and camera settings. Some cameras can even record GPS generated location information. Because there is no way to know the time zone (at least without location information), the value of the time setting is more useful for relating photos from within a set to one another than in establishing the actual time a photo was taken.

Adobe has contributed their own proprietary metadata format called Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP).

The most common metadata tags recorded in XMP data are those from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, which include things like title, description, creator, and so on. The standard is designed to be extensible, allowing users to add their own custom types of metadata into the XMP data. (Wikipedia Entry: Extensible Metadata Platform )

The magic of both XMP and EXIF is that the metadata is embedded in the file itself. There is no chance of losing the connection between a photo and the information about it – it is akin to writing on the back of an analog photograph. Embedded metadata provides the greatest tool for rediscovering the original order in which a series of photographs were taken, as well as providing access to metadata entered by the photographer at the image level.

The archivist of today accessioning born digital images must be comfortable with tools for viewing and updating embedded metadata. I mention updating because any information that is currently known about an image that could be added to the embedded metadata is more information that cannot later become accidentally separated from the images in question. This of course assumes that we will still have the proper technology in the future with which to access all this embedded metata.

Embedded metadata can be updated before it reaches the controlled environment of an archive. Data found as embedded metadata must be evaluated in the same manner that any information about photographs would be evaluated. For example, it would be a lot easier to modify metadata on digital photos to make the images appear to have been taken in a different order than it would be to do the same change with a strip of analog negatives. If this in fact was done – the fact that it was would likely be as interesting to researchers as the original order (assuming of course that you could ever figure out that such a modification had been made!).

Not all methods of organizing photos results in embedded metadata, so there is plenty of room for the standard challenges of old software that you can’t get to run but that holds the key to information about a hard drive of thousands of images. Sophisticated photograph management tools often now include workflow features that could also provide insight into the decision making and processing steps taken by a photographer. Much of this type of information is very unlikely to be embedded in the photos themselves – but still would represent interesting digital records related to the everyday work that a professional photographer performs.

Final Thoughts

I do feel that something is being lost via the ease with which one may delete experimental ‘sketchbook’ photos, but I suspect that the lure of virtually infinite hard drive space, image organization/tagging software tools and the clues provided by embedded metadata will balance the scales. Those who study photographers and their work will certainly have more to say about far in the future. There will be hard choices over the next decades – what can we do to guarantee access in that distant time to the full digital bodies of work of the Capas of today? I think the answers start with building strong lines of communication between prominent digital photographers and archivists. I know that this is just a special case of the challenges we see with digital records across professions, but each field adds its own special issues that must be sorted through and figured out one at a time. So, are there archivists out there working with professional digital photographers?

For more images related to this story, see the New York Time’s slideshow about Robert Capa’s Lost Negatives [UPDATE: New images available in the slideshow Inside the Mexican suitcase, posted April 29, 2009]

Image credit: Photographer Robert Capa during the Spanish civil war, May 1937. Photo by Gerda Taro. If the logic on this Wikimedia Commons page is to believed, this photo is in the public domain in the United States because the photographer died in 1937 (ie, more than 70 years ago).

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Caring for Special Collections: Exploring the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf

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Connecting to Collections BookshelfI subscribe to the RSS feed from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and so saw a press release encouraging institutions to apply for the free IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf.

The IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf is intended to provide small and medium-sized libraries and museums with essential resources needed to improve the condition of their collections. The Bookshelf includes books, DVDs, and other collections resources, as well as a Guide to Online Resources and a User’s Guide to all of the materials. It addresses such topics as the philosophy and ethics of collecting, collections management and planning, emergency preparedness, and culturally specific conservation issues.

The Heritage Preservation has created both a 48 page Bookshelf User’s Guide, with a page dedicated to each resources selected for the bookshelf, and a Guide to Online Resources to be used as a companion to the bookshelf. The Bookshelf User’s Guide has a brilliant section at the end giving you pointers to specific sections of the various Bookshelf resources to answer special questions – such as ‘Where can we find information on raising funds for collections care?’ and ‘How can I prioritize the needs of our collections?’.

What is interesting is that it took me a while to realize that each of the institutions that is awarded The Bookshelf will actually receive the books. My past experience with O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online made me assume that the books would be only accessed online. The Safari Books Online site requires a paid membership, but then provides access to an ever growing electronic reference library. The total number of resources is listed as currently over 5,000. One level of membership, Safari Library, provides unlimited access to all the resources (currently listed as $42.99 a month or $472.89 per year) while the less expensive membership level, Safari Bookshelf (currently listed as $22.99 a month or $252.99 a year), provides access to up to ten titles at a time.

Seeing those prices got me wondering, what will the receivers of this bookshelf be getting and what it’s total cost would be? I found my way to a list of the books and resources that will be included. Between the Internet and the 48 page guide to the Bookshelf I found the following information about each element of the Bookshelf. IMLS has broken the bookshelf down into three subsections as shown below:

Bookshelf: The Core Collection

Bookshelf: Nonliving Collections

Bookshelf: Living Collections

Grand Total

The maximum cost (with no membership discounts) to purchase all the components of The Bookshelf would be $951.87. Add in the cost of shipping and printing your own copies from the free downloads and we can probably talk about the monetary value of the Bookshelf being approximately $1000!

Online Acces

While researching all of this I came across a new option on Amazon.com – something they are calling Amazon Upgrade. For an additional fee above and beyond the price you pay for the physical book – you can have immediate and permanent online access to the content of that book. Take a look at the offering explained on the Amazon page for The National Trust Manual of Housekeeping: The Care of Collection in Historic Houses Open to the Public. I assume that they plan to increase the titles for which this is an option. If so, I can envision building an online reference shelf of one’s own – one title at a time. Rather than deciding that something like O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online has enough books to make it worth while for you – you will create your own custom online reference shelf.

The other half of the online access story is of course the number of resources that are posted online for free download (or as living HTML documents being updated over time). These are all the resources from the list above that can be downloaded for free:

What if all the resources that those who care for collections need were available via an online bookshelf? Now that would be an amazing resource for which many would be happy to pay an annual fee. Perhaps it could be provided as part of the membership fee for one or more of the appropriate professional organizations. An additional benefit to an online collection is the opportunity to receive automatic updates and new editions. I will also keep an eye on the Amazon Upgrade option to see how easy it is for someone to build their own online reference shelf – but I think a purposeful online collection designed for cultural heritage institutions would be even more compelling.

Getting the Bookshelf

A lot of organizations have already received the Bookshelf, but the press release that got me looking at all this mentioned that the next (final?) application period will be from March 1 through April 30, 2008. Recipients will be announced in July of 2008.

If you are considering applying you can find more details about the application process and review the questions you must answer online. But even for those that don’t qualify (federally operated and for-profit institutions are not eligible) – the Bookshelf User’s Guide, the Guide to Online Resources and those resources that may be downloaded for free provide a powerful combination of materials to support institutions and individuals as they care for collections of all shapes and sizes.

Note: All prices quoted in this post were valid as of January 27th, 2008. Image shown above from IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf page.

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