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Category: outreach

Footnote.com and US National Archives records

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Thanks to Digitization 101‘s recent post “Footnote launches and announces partnership with National Archives” I was made aware of the big news about the digitization of the US National Archives’ records. Footnote.com has gone live with the first of apparently many planned installments of digitized NARA records. My first instinct was one of suspicion. In the shadow of recent historian alarm about the Smithsonian/Showtime deal, I think its valid to be concerned about new agreements between government agencies and private companies.

That said, I am feeling much more positive based on the passage below from the the January 10th National Archives Press Release about the agreement with Footnote (emphasis mine):

This non-exclusive agreement, beginning with the sizeable collection of materials currently on microfilm,will enable researchers and the general public to access millions of newly-digitized images of the National Archives historic records on a subscription basis from the Footnote web site. By February 6, the digitized materials will also be available at no charge in National Archives research rooms in Washington D.C. and regional facilities across the country. After an interval of five years, all images digitized through this agreement will be available at no charge through the National Archives web site .

This sounds like a win-win situation. NARA gets millions of records digitized (4.5 million and counting according to the press release). These records will be highlighed on the Footnote web site. They will have the advantages of Footnote’s search and browse interfaces (which I plan to do an in depth review of in the next week).

When signing up for my free account – I actually read through the entire Footnote Terms of Service including this passage (within the section labeled ‘Our Intellectual Property Rights’ – again, emphasis mine):

Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only as permitted through the functionality of the Website and may not be used, copied, reproduced, distributed, transmitted, broadcast, displayed, sold, licensed, or otherwise exploited for any other purposes whatsoever without the prior written consent of the respective owners . Footnote.com reserves all rights not expressly granted in and to the Website and the Content. You agree not to engage in the use, copying, or distribution of any of the Content other than expressly permitted herein, including any use, copying, or distribution of User Submissions of third parties obtained through the Website for any commercial purposes. If you download or print a copy of the Content for personal use, you must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained therein.

These terms certainly are no different from that under which most archives operate – but it did give me a moment of wondering how many extra hoops one would need to jump through if you wanted to use any of the NARA records found in Footnote for a major project like a book. A quick experiment with the Pennsylvania Archives (which are available for free with registration) did not show me any copyright information or notices related to rights. I downloaded an image to see what ‘copyright and other proprietary notices’ I might find and found none.

In his post “The Flawed Agreement between the National Archives and Footnote, Inc.“, Dan Cohen expresses his views of the agreement. I had been curious about what percentage of the records being digitized were out of copyright – Dan says they all are. If all of the records are out of copyright – exactly what rights are Footnote.com reserving (in the passage from the terms of service shown above)? I also agree with him in his frustration about the age restriction in place for using Footnote.com (you have to be over 18).

My final opinion about the agreement itself will depend on answers to a few more questions:

1) Were any of the records recently made available on Footnote.com already digitized and available via the archives.gov website?

2) What percentage of the records that were digitized by Footnote would have been digitized by NARA without this agreement?

3) What roadblocks will truly be set in place for those interested in using records found on Footnote.com?

4) What interface will be available to those accessing the records for free in “National Archives research rooms in Washington D.C. and regional facilities across the country” (from the press release above)? Will it be the Footnote.com website interface or via NARA’s own Archival Research Catalog (ARC) or Access to Archival Databases (AAD)?

If the records that Footnote has digitized and made available on Footnote.com would not otherwise have been digitized over the course of the next five years (a big if) then I think this is an interesting solution. Even the full $100 fee for a year subscription is much more reasonable than many other research databases out there (and certainly cheaper than even a single night hotel room within striking distance of National Archives II).

As I mentioned above, I plan to post a review of the Footnote.com search and browse interfaces in the next week. The Footnote.com support folks have given me permission to include screen shots – so if this topic is of interest to you, keep an eye out for it.

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Google Earth, Historical Maps and Ideas on Context

I have maps on the brain right now (just finished a 15 page paper about appraising geospatial electronic records) and a while ago LifeHacker gave me an excuse to install the latest version of Google Earth on my computer.

From LifeHacker’s Post: “To view these new old maps, you’ll need the latest version of Google Earth (use the program’s check-for-updates feature if you’re not sure you have it). In the layers section, select All Layers, then look for Featured Content > Rumsey Historical Maps.”

For the biggest bang – try the ‘Lewis and Clark 1814’ layer. I never really understood how large an area they traversed. This is such a great example of giving an archival record context. In this case it isn’t the context of who, when or why the record was created – it gives the user context that connects the record to the rest of the world. For maps this is easy to imagine (especially with Google Earth’s snazzy new Historical Maps), but what if we thought of ways to not only frame archival records within the context of their creation – but ways also to connect them with the current world.

When reading a newspaper article about a current event, the reader often will wonder about things that happened in the past that are related to what they are reading. One of the glories of the web is having terms hotlinked to other pages that give you more information about that term.

As more and more archival records are digitized (or are just born digital in the first place), the archival community will have the opportunity to find better and better ways to encourage the rest of the world to use said records in a quest to better understand current events. I see this as a major way for archives to earn the respect and understanding of the average person.

To some degree there is nothing now to stop a top notch newspaper (pick your favorite with a good online presence) from adding a “Learn more about this issue in history” sort of sidebar that links to a select list of relevant archival records. Many articles do this already to some degree simply by including images related to the story.

WPA Poster: Tuberculosis Don't kiss me! : Your kiss of affection - the germ of infection

Take the recent Washington Post article Quarantined about a woman diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1954. If you click the link to the photo gallery and go to the 4th photo in the set you will see an image from the Library of Congress. While it is attributed (in teeny tiny type) there is no easy way to go and explore other images like this one. Ah – but by doing a search over on the LOC.gov site on the words tuberculosis poster kiss, I find my way back to this same poster shown to the left (Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, WPA Poster Collection, [LC-USZC2-5369 ]).

I am trying to imagine what the next leap beyond the sort of usage demonstrated by the Washington Post article would look like. Could we come up with a centralized virtual archive with the ability to do the following?

  1. permit registration of specific records – and allow assignment of meta data (such as date, location/GIS info, topic, and perhaps some keywords)
  2. build an interface for those who want to fish for related records to feature on their sites
  3. ensure that when a link to a record is shown, that the proper credits and links to the home institution are included

I guess what I am imagining is the equivalent of Google Ads for archival records. Sort of funny when I think of it that way. In fact – it makes me wonder if access to such a repository of well organized archival records available for use by online publishers could create some sort of revenue stream for those who carefully populate the metadata for records such that the online publishers can quickly find what they need. Would the keepers of the records provide the images themselves or thumbnails of the images with a link to the primary copy deep in their repository’s website? Talk about an interesting engine for fueling outreach and bringing in new web traffic.

I know that there are a million issues I am not thinking of (or thinking of and carefully ignoring) – but the best wild ideas pay no attention to the fine details when they are in the brainstorming stage. Let’s just leave it with the fact that I really like the idea of increasing exposure of the general public to primary sources. If we can both encourage and make it easier for purveyors of online content to use archival records to enhance their websites (especially with deep links back to the websites of online repositories) I think it can only serve to increase the profile of archives and their repositories.

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Archival Transcriptions: for the public, by the public

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There is a recent thread on the archives listserv that talks about transcriptions – specifically for small projects or those that have little financial support. There is even a case in which there is no easy OCR answer due to the state of the digitized microfilm records.
One of the suggestions was to use some combination of human effort to read the documents – either into a program that would transcribe them, or to another human who would do the typing. It made me wonder what it would look like to make a place online where people who wanted to could volunteer their transcription time. In the case where the records are already digitized and viewable, this seems like an interesting approach.

Something like this already exists for the genealogy world over at the USGenWeb Archives Project. They have a long list of different projects listed here. Though the interface is a bit confusing, the spirit of the effort is clear – many hands make light work. Precious genealogical resources can be digitized, transcribed and added to this archive to support the research of many by anyone – anywhere in the world.

Of course in the case of transcribing archival records there are challenges to be overcome. How do you validate what is transcribed? How do you provide guidance and training for people working from anywhere in the world? If I have figured out that a particular shape is a capital S in a specific set of documents, that could help me (or an OCR program) as I progress through the documents, but if I only see one page from a series – I will have to puzzle through that one page without the support of my past experience. Perhaps that would encourage people to keep helping with a specific set of records? Maybe you give people a few sample pages with validated translations to practice with? And many records won’t be that hard to read – easy for a human’s eye but still a challenge for an OCR program.

The optimist in me hopes that it could be a tempting task for those who want to volunteer but don’t have time to come in during the normal working day. Transcribing digitized records can be done in the middle of the night in your pajamas from anywhere in the world. Talk about increasing your pool of possible volunteers! I would think that it could even be an interesting project for high school and college students – a chance to work with primary sources. With careful design, I can even imagine providing an option to select from a preordained set of subjects or tags (or in Folksonomy friendly environment, the option to add any tags that the transcriber deems appropriate) – though that may be another topic worthy of its own exploration independent of transcription.

The initial investment for a project like this would come from building a framework to support a distributed group of volunteers. You would need an easy way to serve up a record or group of records to a volunteer and prevent duplication of effort – but this is an old problem with good solutions from the configuration management world of software development and other collaboration work environments.

It makes a nice picture in my mind – a slow, but steady, team effort to transcribe collections like the Colorado River Bed Case (2,125 pages of digitized microfilm at the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library) – mostly done from people’s homes on their personal computers in the middle of the night. A central website for managing digitized archival transcriptions could give the research community the ability to vote on the next collection that warrants attention. Admit it – you would type a page or two yourself, wouldn’t you?

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