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Category: learning technology

MARAC Spring 2010: Hurray for Archival Metadata (Session S2)

research-statue.jpgThe official title for this session is “Discovery Tools for Archival Collections: Getting the Most Out of Your Metadata” and was divided into two presentations with introduction and question moderation by Jaime L. Margalotti, senior assistant librarian in Special Collections at the University of Delaware.

Introduction to Metadata Standards

Michael Bolam, metadata librarian for digital production, is in charge of all the metadata for all the collections at the Digital Research Library at the University of Pittsburgh. He is not an archivist – but does know where the archives is at Pitt! He has put lots of archival material online through digitization and assignment of metadata.

The best definition he has found of metadata, good for all audiences: “Metadata consists of statements we make about resources to help us find, identify, use, manage, evaluate and preserve them” Marty Kurth – Head of Metadata Services, Cornell University Libraries

Reviewed examples of metadata for images, text documents and archival collections. There is also data related to the business of scanning and making content available – administrative/behind the scene. Standards let you take your data and use it for other purposes.

Overview of alphabet soup of metadata standards:

  • MARC: bibliographic information in machine-readable form (a MAchine-Readable Cataloging record).
  • Dublin Core: the goal of Dublin Core was to create a core set of metadata fields that could be used across platforms, across various disciplines.
  • MARCXML: schema for representing MARC in XML. Makes it easy to convert to and from MARC without loosing any data. May have more data than you need. MARCXML is not very ‘human readable’. You need to recall all the code numbers for the different data elements. Can be exported from Archivist Toolkit.
  • MODS: Metadata Object Description Schema – sort of a ‘MARCXML light’. Tries to be a step between MARCXML (robust & complicated) and Dublin Core (really simple). May result in compacting multiple MARCXML fields into single MODS fields. May loose some of the granularity of the data. The tags ARE human readable. The tag is the word ‘author’ – not a number. Also can be exported in Archivists Toolkit.
  • ONIX: ONline Information eXchange – standard used by the book publishing industry. XML-based standard for making available intellectual property in published form, both physical & digital. Data created by the publisher. They use different ways of representing authors, keywords..etc in comparison to LOC and library cataloging.
  • METS: Metadata Encoding & Transmission Standard. XML standard wrapper for describing divergent types of content within a digital library. The metadata for books, images, collections etc keep this data in different formats – METS lets you bring them together.
  • OAI-PMH: Not a metadata standard – but rather a protocol for sharing metadata. Gives us a way to pull baseline information about a digital object out of a database and put it out somewhere where it can be harvested and used.

Examples of projects built on shared metadata:

  • Worldcat.org: Has everything that is shared with OCLC. They do expose their records to google and yahoo harvesting.
  • OAIster: Searches a harvested data set – it is not going live out on the web. The OAIster records are also available in Worldcat. Example: search for Pittsburgh City Photographer (that is a provider of data). Most digitization software will generate an OAIster harvestable version. In his example we see that address and location get compressed into Notes. This is because there is not always a place in Dublin Core that maps to the level of detail you collect at your local institution. http://www.oclc.org/us/en/oaister/default.htm – has the info about contributing your content for crawling.
  • Archive Grid: The goal is to pull in finding aids from many sources. It is a service – requires some sort of subscription and payment to see the data. Uses Lucene for searching. The content in Archive Grid is now available in Worldcat. To participate – see http://www.oclc.org/us/en/archivegrid/default.htm

Google and Yahoo do index OAIster and WorldCat, so that is one path to being found in search engines.

MARC Records for Archival Materials in WorldCat Local

Jennifer MacDonald from the University of Delaware presented a cataloger’s perspective of a WorldCat Local environment. She is a “concerned enthusiast” with regard to metadata. The University of Delaware was the first institution to buy WorldCat Local. She ended up on the WorldCat Local Special collections and Archives Task Force. The task force made their final report in 2008 and got a response from OCLC in 2009. They did get some immediate changes based on their feedback – like moving the 520 “summary” data element higher in the display. For some problems the task force identified, such as Archival Materials that were not being identified properly (Internet Resource is the type for all OAI records), it is hard to tell if the issue has been fixed.

She showed some screenshots from WorldCat local to show what data elements are there and how they are organized. In the FirstSearch screenshot (only available at the school), Notes and General Info holds a mishmash of content from various data elements consolidated into single fields. The task force asked for the “Browse” feature but apparently this feature is dead. They got no response from OCLC to this request in their report.

If you use the University of Delaware instance of WorldCat Local to search for walter penn shipley and drill down to the detail record display for the Walter Penn Shipley Papers you will see what was shown during the session. This display is customizable at the institution level in WorldCat Local. Some data is shown. You see lots of Web 2.0 options to add your own data, but the display is missing some of the data from the original MARC record. The full MARC record is indexed for keyword search, but since some of it is not displayed, users may not be able to determine why a record was returned.

Fields missing from the WorldCat Local display:

  • 351 – Organization and Arrangement of Materials
  • 545 – biographical note
  • 506 – restrictions on access
  • 540 – Use of materials – with link to an askspec page: http://www.lib.udel.edu/cgi-bin/askspec.cgi
  • 525 – preferred citation form – and this is where the manuscript number is
  • 655 – some of the parts of the genre terms are missing
  • 656 – occupation

OCLC says that they have not included all this because people don’t want this displayed. Given that local organization is already deciding what to show, the task force would prefer the option to displayable all data elements. Due to this missing data, Jennifer prefers the FirstSearch interface – but this option is not always available at all institutions. You should take advantage of the Web 2.0 features. Archivist can create an account on WorldCat Local and add data elements.

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: You talk about having the metadta in a format that is accessible to harvesting. What I have is a bunch of CDs with images on them that have a folder and descriptor structure. Is there a metadata harvester that can go in and pull that metadata out? New York Stock Exchange photographer sent these.

ANSWER (Michael): So the metadata you are looking to extract is the filename and descriptors? You could have someone write a little script and extract what you need. I would hand it to the guy I work with because he writes perl. If then you made that available via your website – then people could find it. To get it into a database – it is just a small script.

QUESTION: Are there any specifically useful webinars/seminars for becoming familiar with these formats for skillbuilding?

ANSWER (Michael): Tons on the web. The LoC websites are very useful. You may have heard the term ‘crosswalking’ – that is where you take one format and turn it into another. Looking at the crosswalks can make it much easier to understand how a format you understand maps to one you are trying to learn about. Shareable Metadata – metadata for you and me. Not online yet – but someone in the audience said the plan is to post the materials. There have been a couple of books and ALA publications. Most of the ones I know of are about 10 years old. Jaime: SAA has a good workshop series.

QUESTION: One of the first things you said was to take data out of EAD and you didn’t go into detail in that. Were you talking about DAO tagged items?

ANSWER (Michael): I was just talking about reusing data in a new environment. For example, we just started digitizing manuscripts and each item is becoming an individual digital object. The only metadata we have is in the EAD finding aid – so we are using that data to make descriptive data about the digital objects. We are going to create a MODS or METS record for every digital object. Jaime: We use EAD to make MODS records. She has been manually extracting EAD data as Dublin Core data for ContentDM.

My QUESTION: What format does OAIster want?

ANSWER (Michael): OAIster is just harvesting Dublin Core. You can share MODS and other metadata types and you may find other aggregators that are expecting their users to work in a more detailed environment. You may publish more data elements for other harvesters as well – but OAIster will only pull the Dublin Core data elements.

QUESTION: We are working on a digitization project to digitize local historical societies, museums and libraries. Might the catalogers be able to deal with MODS or will the loss of granularity be a problem?

ANSWER (Michael): I am not a MODS expert. MARC is very granular. Maybe look at the MARCXML – MODS crosswalk?

QUESTION: At the University of Delaware, do you have any other systems?

ANSWER (Jennifer): When we first got WorldCat Local you had to know the URL to get to the library. That changed fast! The patrons couldn’t find anything. Jaime: In WorldCat Local you cannot scope the search to specific sub-collections.

QUESTION: Thank you Jennifer for your remarks. Is there a problem with catalogers trying to ‘sneak’ data elements into other places – are standards in danger?

ANSWER (Jennifer): I would hope we wouldn’t move 524 data into a 500 field just to get it displayed. There is some danger of loosing the granularity by pushing everything to Dublin Core. I don’t know how real that danger is at this point.

QUESTION: A political question for Jennifer: Who has the clout to push for changes with OCLC?

ANSWER (Jennifer): I think leaning encouraging users to give feedback is important. We were told that users don’t want that “we have proven that users don’t want that”. Users need to make comments about their challenges in dealing with the interface. FROM AUDIENCE: The strongest is to say that you are looking at Sky River. FROM AUDIENCE: Make your data more discoverable outside the catalog world – internal websites and Google. Jaime: We are working hard to make MARC records to push access to our collections. The push is to make the data available in as many locations as possible.

QUESTION: Are these all different levels of subscriptions? Are they trying to push people to buy more subscriptions?

ANSWER (Jennifer): There is a sense that WorldCat Local is pushed at local public libraries. Yes – WorldCat Local is something they have to pay for. Michael: With Archive Grid you are going a step further – EVERYTHING in the finding aid is indexed. Every search I did in there returned thousands of records. Then I filtered by institution – and it never loaded. FROM AUDIENCE: I think they are revamping Archive Grid – but I don’t know how far they are in the process. Michael: I love the detail – you don’t have to dig through other data to find something useful. Depending on the institution – and how they are allowing their data to be harvested – you may see less information. Jaime: You have to actively work with OCLC to get Archive Grid to pick up your data.

QUESTION: We are tinkering with users adding tags – are you having any success with people adding tags?

ANSWER (Jaime): No – it isn’t something we have dealt with. WorldCat Local does let you add stuff like that.

QUESTION: Will OCLC provide that UGC (user generated content) back to the institution?

ANSWER: We wouldn’t know.

QUESTION: Have they provided access to the user studies?

ANSWER: Yes – but it is based on watching individuals use the tools.

Image Credit: Statue representing Research by Henry Hering from image of the interior of the Field Museum of Natural History interior.

As is the case with all my session summaries from MARAC, 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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National Archives Transitions to Flickr Commons Membership

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Ladies in Gas Masks

Even with the recent announcement that the Flickr Commons is not currently accepting new applications, there are clearly still applications being processed. NARA has been on Flickr since February of 2009 and loaded 49 sets of images. As announced in a recent press release, on the first of February 2010 Flickr flipped the switch and all the images in the The U.S. National Archives’ photostream was shifted over into the Commons.

The 49 sets are sorted into 4 collections:

  • Historical Photographs and Documents (19 sets) – including NARA favorites like Rosie the Riveter and Nixon and Elvis and documents from regional archives across the country.
  • DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency (27 sets) – one set dedicated to top picks and the rest organized by photographer. Interestingly, NARA’s website has indexed the 15,000+ images from this project by subject and by location. I wonder how the picked which image from DOCUMERICA to port over to Flickr?
  • Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs (2 sets) – currently 473 out of the 6,066 digitized Mathew Brady images are uploaded into the Commons. The images posted in the Commons are available in a much higher resolution than they are within ARC. A great example from this collection is the image of the Poplar Church (image shown to right) available as a 600 x 483 GIF on ARC and as a 3000 x 2416 JPG on Flickr. This image also has gotten a nice set of comments and tags.
  • Development and Public Works (1 set) – the only set in this collection consists of images taken to support the Flathead Irrigation Project. “The Project was initiated to determine rights and distribute water originating on the Flathead Indian Agency in Montana to both tribal and non-tribal land.” These images seem to be the same resolution on both archives.gov and Flickr.

In honor of this transition, NARA posted a new set of 220 Ansel Adams photographs. One of the first comments on the set was “low-res scans? Pretty big letdown.” Fine question. As noted above, other images from NARA in the Commons much larger than the 600 x 522 that seems to be available for the Ansel Adams images. It would be great to have a clear explanation about available resolutions published along with each new set of images.

NARA has published this simple rights statement for all NARA images in the Commons:

All of the U.S. National Archives’ images that are part of The Flickr Commons are marked “no known copyright restrictions.” This means the U.S. National Archives is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the publication, distribution, or re-use of those particular photos. Their use restriction status in our online catalog is “unrestricted.” Therefore, no written permission is required to use them.

NARA has also posted an official Photo Comment and Posting Policy and a fairly extensive FAQ about the images they have post on Flickr. I do wish that there was a simpler way to request reprints of images from the Commons. Most of the NARA images have this standard sentence – but for someone not familiar with NARA and more accustom to one click ordering, the instructions seem very complex:

For information about ordering reproductions of photographs held by the Still Picture Unit, visit: www.archives.gov/research/order/still-pictures.html

I also wish that more of the images had location information assigned – only 113 of the images show up on the fun to explore map view. At first glance it looks as if this information is populated only for images taken near airports. There are many images that include a location based subject in the image description posted on Flickr, yet do not include geographic metadata that would permit the image to be shown on a map. The one image I did find that was not at an airport but did include geographic metadata is this image of the World Trade Center assigned to the NYC Financial District Flickr Location. While I could add a location related tag to NARA’s images, there does not appear any way for the general public to suggest location metadata.

One odd note about this and other World Trade Center images – the auto-generated tags have broken up the building name very oddly as shown in my screen clip on the left.

Another fun way way to explore the NARA Flickr images is to visit the ‘Archives’ page (slightly hilariously titled “U.S. National Archives’ Archives”). Here we can browse photos based on when they were uploaded to Flickr or when they were taken. Those images that include a specific date can be viewed on a calendar (such as these images from 1918) or in a list view (those same images from 1918 as a list), while those taken ‘circa’ a year can be viewed in a list with all other images from sometime that year (such as these images from circa 1824).

Beyond all the additional tags and content collected via comments on these images, I think that being able to find NARA images based on a map, calendar or tag is the real magic of the commons. The increased opportunities for access to these images cannot be overstated.

Take this image of a sunflower. If you visit this image on archives.gov, you can certainly find the image and view it – but good luck finding all the images of flowers as quickly as this Flickr tag page for NARA images of flowers can. Even looking at the special Documerica by Topic page doesn’t get me much closer to finding an image of a flower.

It will be fun to watch what else NARA chooses to upload to the Commons. I vote for more images that are assigned metadata such that they show up on the map and calendar. I will also put your mind at ease by telling you that the lovely ladies at the top of this post are their because their image is one of the most popular uploaded by NARA to date (based on it having been marked a favorite by 88 individuals). The only image I could find with more fans was the classic image of Nixon and Elvis with 250 fans at the time of this posting.

What is your favorite NARA Commons image? Please post a link in the comments and if I get enough I will set up a gallery of Spellbound Fan Favorites!

Image Credits: All images within this blog post are pulled from NARA’s images on the Flickr Commons. Please click on the images to see their specific details.

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Leveraging Google Reader’s Page Change Tracking for Web Page Preservation

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The Official Google Reader Blog recently announced a new feature that will let users watch any page for updates. The way this works is that you add individual URLs to your Google Reader account. Just as with regular RSS feeds, when an update is detected – a new entry is added to that subscription.

My thinking is that this could be a really useful tool for archivists charged with preserving websites that change gradually over time, especially those fairly static sites that change infrequently with little or no notice of upcoming changes. If a web page was archived and then added to a dedicated Google Reader account, the archivist could scan their list of watch pages daily or weekly. Changes could then trigger the creation of a fresh snapshot of the site.

I will admit that there have been services out there for a while that do something similar to what Google has just rolled out. I personally have used Dapper.net to take a standard web page and generate an RSS feed based on updates to the page (sound familiar?). One Dapper.net feed that I created and follow is for the news archive page for the International Red Cross and can be found here. What is funny is that now they actually have an official RSS feed for their news that includes exactly what my Dapper.net feed harvested off their news archive page – but when I built that Dapper feed there was no other way for me to watch for those news updates.

There are lots of different tools out there that aim to archive websites. Archive-It is a subscription based service run by Internet Archive that targets institutions and will archive sites on demand or on a regular schedule. Internet Archive also has an open source crawler called Heritrix for those who are comfortable dealing with the code. Other institutions are building their own software to tackle this too. Harvard University has their own Web Archive Collection Service (WAX). The LiWA (Living Web Archives) Project is based in Germany and aims to “extend the current state of the art and develop the next generation of Web content capture, preservation, analysis, and enrichment services to improve fidelity, coherence, and interpretability of web archives.” One could even use something as simple as PDFmyURL.com – an online service that turns any URL into a PDF (be sure to play with the advanced options to make sure you get a wide enough snapshot). I know there are many more possibilities – these just scratch the surface.

What I like about my idea is that it isn’t meant to replace these services but rather work in tandem with them. The Internet Archive does an amazing job crawling and archiving many web pages – but they can’t archive everything and their crawl frequency may not match up with real world updates to a website. This approach certainly wouldn’t scale well for huge websites for which you would need to watch for changes on many pages. I am picturing this technique as being useful for small organizations or individuals who just need to make sure that a county government website makeover or a community organization’s website update doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. I like the idea of finding clever ways to leverage free services and tools to support those who want to protect a particular niche of websites from being lost.

Image Credit: The RSS themed image above is by Matt Forsythe.

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Concertina History Online Features Virtual Collaboration and Digitization

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In the early 1960s, my father bought a Wheatstone concertina in London. He tells how he visited the factory where it was made to pick one out and recalls the ledger book in which details about the concertinas were recorded. After a recent retelling of this family classic, I was inspired to see what might be online related to concertinas. I was amazed!

First I found the Concertina Library which presents itself as a ‘Digital Reference Collection for Concertinas’. With fourteen contributing authors, the site includes in depth articles on concertina history, technology, music, research and a wide range of concertina systems.

I particularly appreciate the reasons that Robert Gaskins, site creator, lists for the creation of the site on the about page:

(1) Almost all of the historical material about concertinas has been held in research libraries where access is limited, or in private collections where access may be non-existent. The reason for this is not that the material is so valuable, but that in the past there was no way to make material of limited interest available to everyone, so it stayed safely in archives. The web has provided a way to make this material widely available—partly by the libraries themselves, and partly in collections such as this.

(2) There seems to be a growing number of people working again on the history of concertinas, perhaps in part because research materials are becoming available on the web. These people are widely scattered, so they don’t get to meet and discuss their work in person. But again the web has provided an answer, allowing people to work collaboratively and exchange information across miles and timezones, and for the resulting articles the web offers worldwide publication at almost no cost.

What an eloquent testimonial for the power of the internet to both provide access to once-inaccessible materials and support virtual collaboration within a geographically dispersed community.

Next, I found the Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers. This site features business records (in the form of ledgers) of the C. Wheatstone & Co. stretching from 1830 through 1974 (with some gaps). The originals are held at the Library of the Horniman Museum in London. It is a great reference website with a nice interface for paging through the ledgers. Armed with the serial number from my father’s concertina (36461) I found my way to page 88 of a Wheatstone Production Journal from the Dickinson Archives. If I am reading that line properly, his concertina is a 3E model and was made (or maybe sold?) April 25, 1960. I wish that there was documentation online to explain how to read the ledgers. For example, I would love to know what ‘Bulletin 3052’ means.

I liked the way that they retained the sense of turning pages in a ledger. Every page of each ledger is included, including front and back end pages and blank pages. I have total confidence that I am seeing the pages in the same order as I would in person.

You can read the overview and introduction to the project, but what intrigued me more was the very detailed narrative of how this digitization effort was accomplished. In How The Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers Were Digitized, we find Robert Gaskins of  the Concertina Library explaining how, with an older model IBM ThinkPad, a consumer grade scanner, and his existing software (Microsoft Office and Macromedia Fireworks), he created a website with 4,500 images and clean, simple navigation. From where I sit, this is a great success story – a single person’s dedication can yield fantastic results. You don’t need the latest and greatest technology to run a successful digitization project. One individual can go a long way through sheer determination and the clever leveraging of what they have on hand.

Back on the Concertina Library‘s about page we find “There is still a lot of material relevant to the study of concertinas and their history which should be digitized and placed on the web, but has not been so far. Ideas for additional contributors, items, and collections are very welcome.” If I am following the dates correctly, the Concertina Library has articles dating back to February of 2001, shortly before Mr. Gaskins started planning the ledger digitization project. At the same time as he was collaborating with other concertina enthusiasts to build the Concertina Library,  he was scanning ledgers and creating the Wheatstone Concertina Ledgers website. Three cheers to Mr. Gaskins for his obvious personal enthusiasm and dedication to virtual collaboration, digitization and well-built websites! Another three cheers for all those who joined the cause and collaborated to create great online resources to support ongoing concertina research from anywhere in the world.

All this started because my father owns a beautiful old concertina. I love it when an innocent web search leads me to find a wealth of online archival materials. Do you have a favorite online archival resource that you stumbled across while doing similar research for family or friends? Please share them in the comments below!

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rocketlass/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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Interactive Archivist: Spellbound Blog as a Case Study

I realized while at MARAC at the end of October that I never posted here about the completion and publication of the Interactive Archivist: Case Studies in Utilizing Web 2.0 to Improve the Archival Experience. The brainchild of J. Gordon Daines III and Cory Nimer, this free SAA ePublication only exists online and brings together ten Web 2.0 archivist-oriented case studies covering blogs, mashups, tagging, wikis, Facebook and more. It also includes thorough introductions to each of the technologies covered by case studies, an annotated bibliography and a link to a living list of resources on Delicious.

My contribution to the collection is titled Spellbound Blog: Using Blogs as a Professional Development Opportunity. I don’t spend much time on this blog talking about blogging, so if you ever wanted to know more about why I blog or are considering starting a blog yourself – my case study might be of interest.

Thank you again to Gordon and Cory for including me as part of their project. I think that it is a great contribution to the cultural heritage community at large. These case studies take a wide range of new technologies and make them accessible through real examples and lessons learned. I don’t know about you, but I believe I learn at least 10x as much from someone’s first hand experience than I would from an abstracted explanation of how one might use a new technology. I hope you find the Interactive Archivist as rich a resource as I believe you will.

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Archival Collections Online: Reaching Audiences Beyond The Edge of Campus (SAA09: Session 405)

The Archivist's Life, 23 May 1954Expanding Your Local and Global Audiences (Session 405, SAA 2009) shared how three institutions of higher education are using the web to reach out to new audiences. While the general public may still hold close the stereotype of archives as of rooms full of boxes of paper (not so different from this Duke image on Flickr: “Mattie Russell, curator of manuscripts, and Jay Luvaas, director of the Flowers Collection, examine the papers of Senator Willis Smith in the library vault.”), the presenters in this session are focused on expanding peoples’ experience of archives beyond boxes of papers locked away in a vault. They are using the web as a tool to reach beyond the walls of their reading rooms and the edges of their campuses.

Duke University Rare Books, Manuscript & Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) : Lynn Eaton (Reference Archivist)

While I didn’t find my way into this session until the start of the next speaker’s presentation, Lynn was kind enough to share with me her personal printout of her presentation slides. The links below and any associated commentary are based solely on my own interpretation of the various screen-shots included.

University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Digital Collections: Tom Sommer (University and Technical Services Archivist)

UNLV has experimented with new technologies as they appear. Tom made a point of saying that when they started seeing others provide a feature on their websites, UNLV would find a way to try it out. A great example of this is the addition of a tag cloud and google map to The Boomtown Years collection listed below.

Marist College Archives and Special Collections: John Ansley (Head, Archives and Special Collections)

Marist first launched their website in 2001 to raise awareness of their collections. They also used listserves and the on-campus newspaper. Utlimately their best tactic was working one-on-one with professors whose interests intersected with their collections. This led to contact with special interest groups. Working with the special interest groups led to new tag and metadata values for their collections.

My Thoughts

The archivists at all three of these educational institutions have tried new things and worked hard to share their materials with people beyond the traditional range of a reading room. The promise of the web, and all the tools and techniques it supports, is still being uncovered. It will be up to innovative archivists to keep discovering ways to push the envelope and welcome new audiences from all the corners of the globe.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dukeyearlook/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, 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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SAA09: My Session on Online Communities (Session 101)

Thank you to everyone who came to our session this morning (Building, Managing, and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online). Word on the street is that we had about 150 people in the audience.

As I mentioned during our talk – here is the Online Communities Comparison Chart. Please let me know if you have any issues accessing this document and feel free to share it with anyone you like.

If you had questions you were unable to ask during the session – please feel free to post them as comments below or send me a message via my  Contact Form. I will be sure to pass questions along to all the members of our panel. I also plan to update this post with links to everyone’s slides as they appear online.

Slides from our talk:

SAA has posted video of our presentation on facebook. The one I have linked to is the first of 7 segments. To view each in order, keep clicking ‘previous’ to view the next video.

Blog L’Archivista has a great post about our session.

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DH2009: Digital Curiosities and Amateur Collections

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curio-imageSession Title: Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation
Speaker: Melissa Terras

Overview: Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.

Session Highlights

Areas of “Amateur” endeavor  have a long history of launching collections, such as:

  • cabinet of curiosities
  • foundation of astronomical research
  • british flora and amateur botanists
  • weather observations
  • open source software movement

Being an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean being bad at what you do!

Within the realm of self-defined museums some common topics often emerge:

  • ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia)
  • comics
  • technology – especially old tech, there is a surprising trend of being fascinated by technology approximately 10 years older than the collector
  • personal and “embarrassing” collections
  • genealogy

For these self-defined museums the scope is self-defined – these are self-delineated collections. Virtual museums can document aspects of cultural heritage considered socially taboo or in some way too sensitive to collect. A great example of this is the Museum of Menstruation which claims to have been created 14 years ago and is currently trying to establish a public permenant display for the public.

Platforms have evolved over the life of the web, starting with static html, then blogs and now Flickr images as a mode of presentation.

This is a list of successful amateur collections online:

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a more traditional site created by a cultural heritage institution. It contains 100,000+ images copyright cleared for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK. VADS is a very detailed static source of images with metadata, but provides no interaction.

Amateurs do provide metadata, but it is intuitive metadata. It might not fit into rigid buckets of data, but that doesn’t meant that the metadata available isn’t useful.

What are the boundaries between amateur and professional? Work vs hobby?

Many of these amateur sites get much more traffic than most standard museum sites. More than 50% of museum digitized images are never visited.

Memory institutions are starting to put things into the wider online community:

Much of amateur research has been driven by advances in technology. A great example of this is the advent of affordable metal detectors led to dramatic changes in archaeology. The internet and Web 2.0 technology are arming a whole new generation of enthusists who can find one another and collaborate more easily than might ever have been dreamed of 20 years ago.

Next Steps & Conclusions

Future research will involve looking at the psychology of collection: archives vs collections. For now it is important to realize that institutions are not the only hosts of “worthwhile” digital objects. Pro-am (aka, pro-amateur) are doing better with using web 2.0 & getting more traffic.

What can memory institutions learn from this?

  • interact with user communities
  • use the ‘grand central stations’ of flickr, twitter, facebook
  • usability of flickr is better than what most memory institutions build for themselves

My Thoughts

This session considers the ways cultural memory institution can take advantage of the web by looking at what the successful enthusiasts are achieving. This research-backed approach confirms what I would have expected. Libraries, museums and archives are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to putting their collections online. Sites run by non-professionals are doing an amazing job of drawing in new audiences, keeping people around and then initiating conversation within that audience.

The Flickr Commons is a big step forward, but it isn’t the only option. There are also varying opinions about how successful the crowdsourcing aspect of the Flickr Commons is for memory institutions. A lot of this goes back to to a core question “how do we know if we have succeeded?”. There is much to be said for setting out clear goals when launching online initiatives. Is your goal increased traffic to your site or crowdsourcing of metadata? A great example of an initiative whose goal is clearly collection of crowdsourced metadata is the German Federal Archives who chose to use the Wikimedia Commons for their photo metadata initiative.

If you are trying to extend your mission of providing access to materials to the public, then how do you measure success? Putting your materials in what Melissa called “grand central stations” (or what I have also heard termed “public crosswalks”) definitely increases the chances of serendipitous discovery by new individuals. That said, we can see from the successful blogs mentioned above that tackling a niche with enthusiasm and consistent posting can go a long way to building a following. JonWilliamson.com seems to have only launched back in November of 2008 with a post featuring a Scotch Tape Christmas ad from 1951. The author posted in May of 2009 that his images in Flickr had surpassed 100,000 views.

To conclude this post I leave you with a list of inspirational digitized collections online that were created by various cultural heritage institutions:

Have a favorite online collection website? Please share it in the comments below.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, 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.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mms0131/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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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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University of Maryland: Benefits of Blogging Workshop (May 6, 2009)

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There are still spaces available in a workshop I am giving May 6, 2009 at the University of Maryland’s iSchool. The workshop, titled Benefits of Blogging: Why you should start a blog today!, is free and open to anyone in the University of Maryland community.

This is the workshop description:

Blogging is an easy way to build your professional network, improve your writing and get your ideas out there. Information professionals need to understand how to take advantage of the promise of blogs, both to support their careers as well as a tool for institutions. This workshop will be led by an active blogger who has found great success in becoming part of a broader community via her blog. Learn about free tools, things to keep in mind and why you should start a blog today.

When: 5pm Wednesday May 6, 2009

Where: iSchool Student Lab, Hornbake South room 2108

Registration: Maryland iSchool Workshop Registration

Are you interested in this session, but not affiliated with the University of Maryland? Please let me know, either via my contact form or a comment below, and I will see what I can do about putting together another session off-campus.

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