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Category: SAA2007

SAA2007: Archives and E-Commerce, Three Case Studies (Session 404)

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George Washington US DollarDiane Kaplan, of Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives unit, started off Session 404 (officially titled Exploring the Headwaters of the Revenue Stream) by thanking everyone for showing up for the last session of the day. This was a one hour session that examined ways to generate new funds through e-commerce . Three different e-commerce case studies were presented, followed by a short question and answer period.

University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center

Mark Shelstad‘s presentation, “Show Me the Money: Or: How Do We Pay for This?”, detailed the approach taken by the University of Wyoming‘s American Heritage Center (AHC) to find alternate revenue streams. After completing a digitization project in the fall of 2004, the AHC had to figure out how to continue their project after their original grant money ran out.

Since they didn’t have a lot of in-house resources, they chose Zazzle.com for their effort to profit from their existing high resolution images. They can earn up to 17% from the sales through a combination of affiliate sales and profits from the sale of products featuring American Heritage Center images.

They had a lot of good reasons for choosing Zazzle.com. Zazzle.com already had an existing ‘special collections’ area, meaning that their images would have a better chance of being found by those interested in their offerings (for example – take a look at the Library of Congress Vintage Photos store). Zazzle.com also did not require an exclusive license to the images. The American Heritage Center Zazzle on-line store opened in 2005.

Currently they are making about $30 a month in royalties from 200 images. Mark pointed out that everyone needs to keep in mind that the major photo provider, Corbis, has yet to turn a profit in online photo sales. He also mentioned a website called Cogteeth.com that lets you click on any image and use those images on t-shirts, mugs.. etc.

Near the end of his talk, Mark shared an amazing idea to create a non-profit that would be a joint organization for featuring and selling products using archival images. I love it! It is easy to see that many archives are small and don’t have the infrastructure to create and run their own e-commerce websites. At the same time, general sites that let anyone set up a store to sell items with custom images on them threaten to loose the special nature of historical images in the shuffle. Even the special collections section of Zazzle lumps the American Heritage Center and the Library of Congress collections with Disney and Star Wars. I would love to see this idea grow!

Minnesota Historical Society

Kathryn Otto of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) spoke next. She first gave an overview of traditional services provided by MHS for a fee, such as photocopies, reader-printer copies, microfilm sales, media sales, inter-library loan fees, classes and photograph sales. MHS also earned income via standard use fees and research services.

The first e-commerce initiative at MHS was the sale of Minnesota State Death Certificates from 1904 – 2001. Made available via the Minnesota Death Certificate Index they provide the same data as Ancestry.com, but the MHS index provides a better search interface. They have had users tell them that they couldn’t find something on Ancestry.com – but that they were able to find what they needed on the MHS site.

To their existing Visual Resources Database, MHS also added a buy button for most images. Extra steps were added into the standard buy process to deal with the addition of a use fee depending on how the purchaser claims the image will ultimately be used. One approach that did not work for them was to offer expensively printed pre-selected images. The historical society sells classes online and can handle member vs non-member rates. TheVeterans Graves Registration Index is a tiny database that was created by reusing the interface used for the death certificates.

The Birth Certificate Index provides “single, non-certified copies of individual birth certificates reproduced from the originals” via the website.. while “[o]fficial, certified copies of these birth certificates are available through the Minnesota Department of Health.” The MHS site provides much faster and easier service than the Department of Health as can be seen from this page detailing how to order a non-certified copy of a birth record from the DOH – which requires printing, filling out and either faxing or snail mailing a form.

Features to keep in mind as you branch into in e-commerce:

  • Statistics – Consider the types of statistics you want. Their system just gave them info about orders – not how much they made.
  • Sales tax – Figure out how is it handled
  • Postage/Handling fees – Look at the details! The MHS Library-Archives was stuck with the Museum Store’s postage rates because the e-commerce system could not handle different fees for different types of objects.
  • Can’t afford credit card fees? Consider PayPal.
  • Advertise what you are selling on your own website.

Godfrey Memorial Library, Middletown, CT

The final panelist was Richard Black, Director of the Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut. The Godfrey is a small, non-profit, genealogical research library with approximately 120,000 genealogical items. They currently have 5 full time staff and 60 volunteers.

Services they provide:

About 3 years ago they had exhausted all of their endowment money and faced the strong possibility of closing the doors. They were down to one full time librarian and a few volunteers and were dependent mostly on donations and some minor income from other sources/services.

They had only a few options open to them:

  • find more money from other sources
  • merge with another library
  • close the doors
  • sell some of the content
  • others??

The first approach to raise funds was to create a subscription website. The Godfrey acquired Heritage Quest census records and added other databases as resources allowed. Subscriptions were sold for $35 a year. The board thought they might be lucky to get 100 subscriptions.. but they actually got approximately 14,000!

Now the portal provides access to sites for which a premium has been paid (so that subscribers don’t have to pay), sites that are available free on the Internet (but made easier to find) and sites unique to Godfrey, including digitized material in the library and other material that has been made available to them. They just added 95,000 Jewish grave-sites – brought to them by a local rabbi. Another recent addition was a set of transcriptions of a grave-site made as an Eagle Scout project. They also negotiated to have their books digitized for them for free. The company performing the digitization will pay a royalty to Godfrey as the books are used.

The costs to acquire data for the portal includes $60,000 a year for access to premium sites, the cost to digitize and transcribe unique content (there are opportunities to partner and reduce costs) and the cost to acquire patrons. The efforts of the Godfrey staff and volunteers is ‘free’ – but costs time.

The Godfrey subsequently lost access to the Heritage Quest material. This was like taking the anchor store out of the corner of a mall. It forced them to diversify their revenue streams and watch for new opportunities.

Current revenue source distribution:

  • online portal 45%
  • annual appeal 10%
  • patron requests 5%
  • contract services 35% (OCLC analytical cataloging that they do)
  • misc 5%

The endowment funds have been restored and the Godfrey’s staff is now growing again.

Questions

Question: Did you meet resistance in your institutions?
Answer: No.. Minnesota said they had such success that the 2 questions they here now are A) What do we put online next? B) How long can they protect their income from the rest of the institution?

Question: (From someone from a NJ archives) Is there a way to do e-commerce with government records and not have the money ‘stolen’ from them?
Answer: Minnesota – The department of health was happy for death and birth certificates business to go away? They do worry about the future when they might try to make a marriage index – because that territory is already ‘owned’ by a group that wants to keep that income.

Question: When you charge for use fees – are there people who don’t pay them?
Answer: Minnesota: Probably – no way to really know.
Mark (American Heritage Center): Our images are public domain – they can do what they like with them.

Question: Do you brand your images?
Answer: Mark: Yes.. a logo and URL goes with the images.

My Thoughts

I was particularly impressed by how much information was conveyed in the course of the 1 hour session. My personal highlights were:

  • As I mentioned above, I want Mark’s idea for a non-profit to sell co-located products based on archival images to gain support and momentum.
  • I was pleased by the point that the MHS makes money from their Minnesota Death Certificate Index partly due to their improved and powerful search interface. The data is available elsewhere – but they made it easier to find information, so they will become the destination of choice for that information.
  • The Godfrey’s story is inspirational. In an age when we hear more and more often about archives and libraries being forced to cut back services due to funding shortfalls, it is great to hear about a small archives that pulled themselves back from the brink of disaster by brave experimentation.

These three case studies gave a great glimpse of some of the ways that archives can get on the e-commerce bandwagon. There is no magic here – just the willingness to dig in, figure out what can be done and try it. That said – there is definitely lots of room to learn from others successes and mistakes. The more real world success and failure stories archives share with the archival community about how to ‘do’ e-commerce, the easier it will be for each subsequent project to be a success.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, 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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SAA2007: Publishers’ Bindings Online – Digitization, Collaboration, Standardization and Community Building (Session 707)

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PBO imageSession 707 of SAA2007 in Chicago discussed many aspects of the project that created Publishers’ Bindings Online (PBO). The full title of this session was The Anatomy of a Collaborative Digital Project and Lessons Learned in the Realms of Access, Outreach, and Creative Success: A Multi-Disciplinary Look at Publishers’ Bindings Online, 1815-1930: The Art of Books. The presenters have kindly posted the full slide deck from their panel online. In this post I attempt to capture the main points of the presentation and Q&A discussion of PBO.

Who Spoke?

Jessica Lacher-Feldman (session chair) – University of Alabama, PBO project manager

Amy Rudersdorf – now at North Carolina State University, Digital production coordinator, NCSU special Collections, but was at University of Wisconsin, Madison during PBO project

Kristy Dixon – University of Alabama , PBO staff

PBO Project Overview

PBO was made possible by a 3 year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant. Originally awarded in 2003, the grant was extended once (and I think they mentioned additional funding being applied for). The primary grant funded the digitization of 10,000 images from up to 5000 book bindings. Ultimately 10,570 images were added to PBO and made searchable by metadata. The bindings selected included books from 1815-1930, primarily US titles and mostly in English.

Their guiding vision was of “giving something to the world that is both needed and useful” (and really beautiful). And they succeeded! PBO is a lot more than 10,000+ digitized book bindings. The project strived to make the information available in many different ways, including via:

  • a web-based database
  • online exhibits & galleries,
  • vodcasts and podcasts
  • web-based tutorials
  • virtual and real exhibits
  • presentations & class lectures
  • opportunities to adapt the project to other disciplines – history, book arts, librarianship, literature.. K-12 and more

Technology and Processes

The division of labor for PBO was split between the University of Alabama and the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Many extensions to the OCLC SiteSearch based database were made by the UWDCC (UW Digital Collections Center) digital production center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison .

They went through an overview of the participants and staff – who did what.. what skills were needed and what was brought by the two institutions to the collaboration. They acknowledged their fabulous advisory group including Sue Allen – “the expert on publisher’s bindings”. Individuals from outside their teams contribute based on their special interest and knowledge about a specific individual (this contribution is still ongoing).

Working in collaboration forced them to wrestle with many challenges including:

  • staff in two locations – most of whom had never met
  • “long distance relationships are hard”
  • they had to work hard to ensure that all were ‘equally-valued participants’
  • standards – you need ground rules from the outset

Collaboration & Description

“Every pair of eyes are different”. PBO tapped into the resource of the ‘young fertile minds’ to power the project out of the local MLS programs at both institutions. Even with a detailed description form – there was confusion over subject headings and overlap – especially when those selecting subject headings were grad students who might not know the official terms for things. For example, the list of terms might include Ouroboros – but the students might not know this  it is the term for a snake eating it’s own tail.

Ultimately they had to do quality control at a single location. They spent a LOT of time on this.

Their top tips for cultivating continuity for virtual project teams:

  • write into your grants money for travel (they stressed that your grant includes funds to support people meeting each other)
  • continuous communication is critical
  • ‘shared working group website’ available online
  • email, conference calls and instant messaging (IM) for communication
  • regular reporting to each other
  • being project manager means that you have to be on top of everything – you need to be the glue
  • focus on the deliverables – use planning tools and timelines

They discovered that IM was key to developing trust between the two institutions.

Metadata – the core of the project

The key to their metadata approach was to consider a book less as a ‘bibliographic object’ and more as an ‘art object’.

They called books in PBO ‘objects’ but still kept the bibliographic metadata. They used Dublin Core by pulling the MARC data into the Dublin Core structure. As part of this they took all the subjects from the bibliographic info and moved it to the Dublin Core description and labeled it ‘book topic’. Then they used the ‘Subjects’ portion of the Dublin Core record to describe the binding and talk about what the images are OF. This is where the subject terms from the controlled vocabulary were added.

These are the steps of their metadata workflow process:

  • selection from collections of note – faculty, consultants and library staff did this step
  • description – used a paper form, described the books on paper and joined that description to what was in the MARC record – done by the grad students and library staff
  • metadata entry – entry of data through an online form – done by students (overseen by library staff) actually ended up being cheaper to manually enter the MARC data (rather than automated extraction)
  • quality control – content, grammar, spelling – done by library staff (took a lot more time than anyone expected)
  • no live update between their working Filemaker Pro database and the final SiteSearch database
  • record ownership – indicated in the identifier field (with a special code in the identifier) AND in the Submitter field

A lot of description went into this project.

They needed to develop a controlled vocabulary for the project. To do this they first worked with content specialists to develop a list. They used Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) terms where they could, as well as Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus. Then they added some local terms. The controlled vocabulary list evolved with the project and is the foundation of all teaching, search and more.

The speaker showed an example of the controlled vocabulary – the terms really are a window into the past. Users can browse the controlled vocabulary through the front end.

On the description paper form they had a list of ‘binding themes’ for those doing the description to pick from. A lot of work was done to get the huge list of themes onto a single page. Ultimately they had to provide some fill in the blank extension fields. For example, rather than believing they had listed every useful trade or profession, there was a section on the list labeled: Profession/Trade – _______________ with the expectation that those describing a binding might need to fill in the blank.

Digitization and The Database

Generally two scans were taken from each book, but sometimes as many as five. What did they scan? Front cover, spine, back cover and end papers.

There were two different image reformatting standards at the two institutions – 300 DPI vs 600 DPI. Both used a black background when scanning. All books were presented in as in condition – some have front/back covers missing. After the scanning they began with master TIFs and then transformed them to JPGs in three sizes in 72 DPI.

The presentation showed screen shots of:

  • simple search
  • brief view record in search results — which includes subjects
  • full record view – including display of all images associated with the book object record
  • gallery view – thumbnail, title and indication if there are one or more images related to the title
  • guided search (advanced search)
  • clickable subject headings

All the images in PBO are freely available for download.

With an eye to digital preservation, all the original uncompressed TIF images are archived in triplicate to digital archive tape and stored in three different locations. The metadata is stored with images in both text and SGML format (which is what SiteSearch works with). The full process documents are available on the project site.

Future Growth

The PBO team is talking to Louisiana State University (LSU) to figure out how PBO can grow. LSU would need to work and live with the way PBO works and learn their processes. They are talking to other institutions – if you are interested in adding content to PBO, please contact them.

The Richard Minsky Collection has been purchased and is being added to the project. This is a rich collection that was gathered to create a catalog. PBO has the catalog and all of Minsky’s research that goes with the collection. The goal is to feed as much of this rich data into PBO as possible. They are working with individual scholars and collectors to find other avenues for growth.

Value Added Components

One of the focuses of PBO has been to look beyond the digital images themselves to creating value added components for their user community.

A tutorial for users is provided, including information about how to email a record. A comprehensive bibliography has been created and is used by scholars. The page prompts users to submit feedback so the bibliography is a live document.

Over 30 galleries have been created – organizing access to essays and additional info by topic. Types of galleries include:

Links to trusted information outside of PBO’s site are shown whenever possible. For example – links to the full text of books are provided via Project Gutenberg. Throughout the site’s text link to sources such as the Library of Congress, .gov sites, PBS and so forth can be found.

Canned searches are provided to make it easy for users to explore content. An example of this is the Silver & Gold: The Art of Metal Stamping search that will find every binding with either silver or gold stamping. This is in contrast with making users figure out the right syntax to submit the search criteria themselves.

The Teaching Tools portion of the site provides sample lesson plans on all sorts of topics. They worked with some high school history teachers via focus groups and got feedback about what they needed and wanted. The Industrial Revolution lesson plan was created based on that feedback.

The research tools that were created as a result of the PBO project and are made available online are:

Signed or Designer bindings is a new resource to which scholars continue to contribute new information.

Through collaboration with teaching faculty they developed the presentation such as Indians, the Frontier, and the West in American Bookbindings. This presentation will eventually be podcast on the PBO site. It talks about how these books inspired people to move west and inspired kids to read.

Another podcast is on the way addressing the representation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It will discuss how the book was it marketed to different groups – Yiddish, German… etc. There already exists a gallery and essay on Uncle Tom’s Cabin .

Conclusions

The team has been very pleased by the tangible scholarly impact of PBO. They have seen extensive collaboration with the university community, new research, and promotion of the use of special collections materials in the classroom using digital resources. They point to PBO as showing a path to preserve these increasingly fragile books by moving out of the general stacks and into special collections – with a result of increased access to the book and decreased handling.

The presenters avowed that PBO could never have been created by their team alone – working with consultants and advisers was the key to their success. They needed input from experts and others to help PBO grow and keep it sustainable. This interaction makes the project strong – it has it’s own legs and won’t cease to exist when the money disappears.

Publicity and outreach got attention on the PBO project from the very beginning. They made documenting their experiences and making recommendations about how to market digital projects part of the original plan in their grant proposals. These documents were part of their deliverables. They even published a white paper about PBO and outreach.

PBO uses Google Analytics so they can see where their users are coming from. Also it makes cool talking points for your reports and fun things to tell the Dean!

I think the best conclusion to my summary of the presentation portion of this session is the list of points on the final slide titled “Beyond the grant: Room to Grow”:

  • Potential future contribution from other repositories in the US and abroad…
  • Potential future collaboration with teaching faculty at UA and beyond
  • With additional collections, the database and the project will only grow stronger
  • Potential as a web portal, clearing house, or consortium
  • Additional potential funding opportunities, scholarship, and ways to highlight collections, resources, knowledge, and abilities

Questions and Answers

Keep in mind throughout this section that I am summarizing and paraphrasing the questions and their answers. Please do not take any statements as full and complete quotes. In cases where I missed too much of the question or answer I generally skipped including it in the list below. If you are anxious to know exactly what was said, you would need to buy and listen to the conference recordings for this session.

Question: Who maintains the website and who makes decisions about how things are going to get updated?
Answer: UA maintains the static web pages and UW maintains the database. The project manager has been in charge.. made prototypes of new design and sent it around for feedback. They have standards for colors in their handbooks.

Question: If the grant funding dried up right now would the project be sustainable?
Answer: There is support from the institutions… for example, it is just one project of many at UW.

Question: How did you get such good scans of the book spines?
Answer : At UW they used blocks or boxes to prop up the books and laid black foam core on top on flatbed scanners. At UA – they used black paper covered blocks in combination with overhead scanners.

Question: How did you get the full cover scans?
Answer: They very carefully lay the cover flat – so the pages sticking are sticking up.

Question: Who customized SiteSearch – OCLC or UW?
Answer: UW did the work – they had one and a half dedicated IT staff to do the customizations.

Question : Have you had to negotiate copyright issues for bindings from the late end of the time range of the project
Answer: No.

Question : Are you aware of others doing similar projects? Have you been approached and or are looking for others who want to contribute?
Answer: Yes. Right now they are working with LSU and are not actively seeking out new participants. There are plans to grow the project eventually.

Question: Did you think about the fact that you were creating your own online publication?
Answer: They didn’t realize it ahead of time – they didn’t realize how powerful the database was going to be to fuel their ability to build further on the work.

Question: Can you search for ‘young people’s covers’ – is there metadata for what age groups might enjoy specific books?
Answer: It depends on if it was part of the descriptive information, but you can search on ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ or ‘juvenile’ and gain useful results.

Question: Can you talk about the work behind the MARC to Dublin Core migration?
Answer: In some ways it was easier than they thought it would be – so many of the fields transfer directly from MARC to Dublin Core.. it was the revelation about the book as art object that made them realize the work they needed to do. Building the controlled vocabularies was where the heavy lifting occurred. It involved going through giant spread sheets with subject terms in alphabetical order looking for typos and working toward consistency (ie, use plurals). The spreadsheet didn’t show how many items used each term – it was hard to know how many changes would be needed.

Question: Do you get hits from the standard online catalog into PBO?
Answer: This is not happening now. They would love to build a better connection between the OPAC and PBO in both institutions.

Question: How did you make decisions when there were disagreements?
Answer: “I don’t remember any more.. it was all so beautiful…” <laughter > . There were no big issues about standards. There were more issues about the grant and things like how many images or books they were supposed to scan. In some cases it was easy because they were in charge of very different project areas – each team had “their own little fiefdom”.

Question: Do you think you might sell images to generate revenue?
Answer: They have considered it. The have made a calendar and a poster, but gave them away. They also have used images for making holiday cards. They don’t see selling images as a main goal right now.

Question: Have you considered pursuing online collaborative methods for work with the scholars and collectors?
Answer: No, but they think that would be useful to explore.

My Thoughts

I loved the energy and connection displayed by the presenters. It was fun to see a team of people who clearly were so proud of their work and pleased by its reception. I was personally intrigued by the highlighted challenge of coming up with (and painstakingly validating) their controlled vocabulary for subjects. I firmly believe that the topic of subject terms and their standardization across repositories will only grow in importance. For those interested in some of what is being done on this front – take a look at both the UK based High Level Thesaurus (HILT) and the Simple Knowledge Organisation Systems Core (SKOS) project. I suspect many will be intrigued by the SKOS use case titled An integrated view to medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Even given the mammoth effort required to create a shared controlled vocabulary, it is clear that the benefits they have reaped from this effort are still being discovered. The speakers mentioned on multiple occasions how pleased (and surprised) they were to realize how powerful their database of metadata has proven to be. All the amazing value added features build on this ‘heavy lifting’.

While it will be rare for such item level attention to be given to most archival documents, PBO sets the bar high for what can be done via collaboration across institutions. Their dedication to sharing their lessons learned is a fine example of what all big projects who are forging new frontiers could be doing. Finally – it is the weight of all the value added elements (galleries, tutorials, lesson plans.. and the list goes on) that have raised what could have been just a set of classified images in a database to being an active community with a growing draw for many types of users from around the world.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, 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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SAA2007: Preserving Born Digital Records of the Design Community (Session 106)

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The official title for SAA2007 Session 106 is Constructing Sustainability: Real-World Implementations of Preservation Standards for Born-Digital Design Documentation, but I think it might have been better served to include the word Architecture somewhere in it’s title. Sponsored by the Architectural Records Roundtable, this session considered issues related to preserving born digital records of “the design community”. The design community in question includes both architects and landscape designers.

Each panelist gave a 5 minute brief about the way in which they are working toward preserving these design community records – and the rest of the session was opened up to Q&A. David Read, the session chair, mentioned how they used a wiki to collect questions and ideas for the session, gave an introduction to each of the panelists and helped guide the Question and Answer portion of the session.

Who was on the panel?

What is being done?

Phil Bernstein kicked off the 5 minute summaries with a quick history of design technology. He explained how currently there is a shift in progress. Hundreds of years of paper drawings were followed by ten to fifteen years of electronic drawings. The latest development is use of Building Information Modelling (BIM). BIM relies on a database that generates ‘reports’ that are in fact ‘drawings’. These are sometimes referred to as Building Development Information Models. Digital printers can produce physical models directly from the stored BIM data with no need to step through generation of an actual drawing outside the computer.

Phil showed Yale School of Architecture design examples from the BIM world. These were fantastical organically shaped creations that looked more like strange undiscovered plants from under the sea than traditional buildings!

The good news is that the data in the BIM databases are all just text. The bad news is that the generated ‘design artifacts’ are based on the text data and can lead to digitally printed artifacts. There has been an explosion in the various means of representation. The architecture world is catching up to the to other industries (such as the auto industry) that have been doing this for 25+ years.

Current architects are application agnostic – they don’t care what they use to create their outputs. All the paths and platforms will only grow – what is driving the design process will be increasing in complexity. The building industry is making a fundamental shift from electronic drawing to the Building Information Modeling approach – but there is an unlimited environment for representation. He hoped to discuss the intersection between the archival/record keeping issues and the problems facing the architecture world.

Carissa Kowalski Dougherty’s overview covered the Digital Archive for Architecture (DAArch) project out of the Art Institute of Chicago . The project was based on the 2004 study Collecting, Archiving, and Exhibiting Digital Design Data. They considered how Architecture and Design firms are using software tools to produce and design – but examined these questions from a museum and curatorial perspective.

The recommendation is a two-tiered collection approach.

  • First tier: Native files – like autocad files – these are going to be preserved at the bit level – but there is no commitment to ensuring access to these files
  • Second tier : Output formats – only pdf and tif files
    PDF: line drawings, vector-based graphic files, text documents power points
    TIF: renderings, digital photographs

The second tier outputs are what they are committing to “functionally preserve”.

Carissa presented an example of what they accessioned from the Garofalo Architects‘ Manilow Residence (2001-2003) project. A lot of what they got were files that no-one (including the small architectural firm itself) could still open.. the software is gone. Another major challenge was poor naming conventions for the files themselves. The final project archive included over 200 native vector 2D files (.dxf, .dgn, .dwg), 145 pdfs.. and more.

From the UrbanLab they sought to preserve their Visitor Information Center Competition Entry from 2001. This was a project that was never built and therefore has little physical output. They mostly used autoCAD (2D), Maya (3D), FormZ (3D) and Adobe Illustrator (layout).

The DAArch Software highlights:

  • browser based
  • DSpace as back end
  • Dublin Core augmented with CDWA and custom metadata to support architecture data and digital materials
  • authority records
  • group and item level cataloging
  • will be available open source with BSD license via SourceForge (this was a requirement of the funder – that it be open source)

Final lessons and challenges from the DAArch project:

  • file naming and organization – the biggest challenges at the smaller firms – need outreach to these firms
  • metadata for digital objects – there is not a lot out there for 3D digital images
  • software and migration tools – can we/should we preserve the software dependent first tier files? or just the PDF/TIF outputs?
  • three-dimensional objects, BIM, animations, etc

Annemarie van Roessel discussed Columbia’s major Manhattanville project. Their goal is to make digital records last as long as steel and glass. The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library is feeling the pressure to be a leader, so how does Avery document this project? Manhattanville is a 30 year planning, design and build project targeted to be completed in 2030. It will cover 17 acres northwest of the main Columbia campus.

There are many building blocks to the digital design archives: autoCAD, project management records, collaborative environments (sharepoint – Microsoft), images, presentations, websites and movies (ie, more than just “scary CAD drawings”). They are planning staged preservation points. The Avery is committed to developing capacity for digital archiving by 2009. For their metadata they use at minimum the mandatory DACS elements mapped to Dublin Core elements.

Dennis Newman was the final panelist. He has clients who need to preserve/archive finished drawings – such as the documents being sent along to regulatory agencies for final approval. PDF/A-1 was based on ‘electronic paper’ – you loose lots of data when you ‘cut back’ to PDF-A. PDF-E is in it’s first draft/generation being submitted for version 1. PDF-A didn’t address 3D, complex metadata or moving images. PDF-E is based on Acrobat version 7. Adobe has thrown out PDF to the ISO community. Dennis believes that the final ‘as-built’ drawing is what should be the archived version.

He pointed out that Stage I responders need more information than the regulator commissions need. Since 9-11 the state requirements have changed about what need to be in the ‘record’.

As an IT professional he was asked “what can we do” and his answer is “how much do you want to spend?”. IT can do anything – but it takes time and money.

Questions and Answers

Keep in mind throughout this section that I was summarizing the questions and their answers as best I could. Please do not take any statements attributed to the session speakers as full and complete quotes. In cases where I missed too much of the question or answer I generally skipped including it in the list below. If you are anxious to know exactly what someone said, you would need to buy and listen to the conference recordings for this session.

QUESTION : Could a neutral exchange format such as International Alliance for Interoperability‘s (IAI) Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) be the foundation or a piece of the next step in preservation of born digital design documentation? Text + data model that could be read by different software (import/export of data). You can do this now with AutoCAD – you can dump into IFC.

Phil: Is a neutral exchange format the answer to the archiving problems? Software is changing so fast that there is no way that a standard could keep up with it. Also – even if all the data in the world could be put in XML – you still need something to ‘read and do something’ with the data. He put the business process diagram on screen from his talk and pointed out that all the different tools and their outputs exist within the CONTEXT of the business process itself.

Carissa (?): IFC is a recommendation of the Art Institute of Chicago

QUESTION: William Reilly from the FACADE project started to ask about the challenges inherent in the fact that the IFC standard only gives you the geometry. There was some back and forth about this idea with voices noting that IFC can capture more than that.. but not everything.

Kristine Fallon: The idea of doing a neutral format for complex information is a complicated thing. Going back probably 20 years, the people working on data exchange standards for engineering … the different software won’t perfectly talk to each other – but what they can do is exchange ‘model views’. The IFC data model is capable of a fairly comprehensive set of model views.

QUESTION : Who is going to keep it up in 20 years? Are the software producers going to keep it up?

Phil: Autodesk spent 5 million dollars in building the IFCs. If the archivists align their needs with the business needs then the business will pay for it and the archivists will get what they need.

Annemarie: The archivists don’t have the money and resources.. even at Columbia they don’t have the money to buy generation after generation of the software to read all the different file formats. Maybe the MIT approach of emulation is a better approach.

David : Will there ever be a day that I will have an emulator on his desktop? That makes me more curious about exporting pure text.. I can get my head around preservation of that.

Annemarie: The Mannhattenville project is the first step for Columbia in collecting digital data. Archivists need to reach out to organizations now to explain that they want to preserve what they are creating. I am being honest about the chaos coming down the track when we start getting the data from the 90s.

QUESTION (from the audience): The function of IFC is not for archiving.. it is for different software products to communicate with one another. How do you figure out what artifacts of the design process do you keep? How do you extract the ‘important’ parts to keep from what is ‘less’ important?

Phil : What about when there are physical digital models, analytical models and more.. how do you understand all of it?

Carissa: The architectural firms need to be able to get to all of this too. It isn’t just archivists who should be caring about access to all these models. There are legal ramifications and the possibility of renovations later… this needs to come out of the architecture profession.

QUESTION (I asked the following question): Are the problems in preserving the final products so challenging – are there any thoughts to trying to preserve the process. With paper there is an easier preservation of the evolution of design.

Annemarie: In the Manhattanville project one of the big challenges is the architect who does lots of self editing. In many cases they don’t want the word to see their interim choices during the design process.

Phil: Digital tools can encourage you to explore useless ideas. Keep in mind that the journal file for the Building Information Model keeps track of every change. It will tell you that on Tuesday at 4:10 pm someone moved this door 5 inches to the left.

Carissa : At the art institute, architect and archivists need to work together to figure out what is worth capturing.

David: Two different schools of thought. Archiving the final product or archiving the process. File formats are preserving the final product.

QUESTION : There is danger in keeping everything – the goal of archiving is to keep the best final version. The big hulking databases of the world open the door to keeping an overwhelming set of unimportant data.

Annemarie : the needs of all their different consumers are so broad. Perhaps the taking a snapshot should happen more often – thinner slices

Carissa : 2D snapshots are not going to capture the fullness of a 3D object. But it isn’t capturing as much as it might.

Phil : There could be an interactive digital simulation that generates 3D models.. there could be no ‘final’ product. Can we have an impact on how info is kept 4, 10, 30 years from now – for the future? In a world where you can borrow (or pay for) processing time… someone will keep all the versions of autocad.. you will pay for the 15 seconds of rendering time in AutoCAD 14 from some 3rd party.

Kristine Fallon: There is a real business purpose to sorting this out… the IAI work is very real world.. defining model views can help support business.. but they can also support the goals of archivists.

Kristine Fallon‘s Question : Was PDF-E designed to be an archival format?

Dennis: No.. it was designed to be a data interchange format. People who don’t want to give lots of proprietary data to another vendor – they still need to give them a bunch of data to work with them.. that is where PDF-E came out of.

My Thoughts

As seems to be the case with all born digital records, there are no easy answers. While events like 9-11 have had impacts on the types of final products that regulatory agencies and first responders need to evaluate and have easy access to, the speed of innovation and evolution in building design is stunning. It should come as no surprise that architects are more concerned with finding the best tools for their trade than they are with how to preserve the artifacts of their ultimate creations. They will change the tools they use when they find a better tool to manifest their vision.

The most promissing option seems to be having archivists get involved in discussions with the software developers, the architects, the builders and government early in the design process. The traditional model of archivists receiving the final products of business processes years after they were completed does not appear to be an answer on which we can depend. I suspect that proactive efforts to plan for preservation from the start will pay off – both for those trying to use the records 10 years from now and for those who want to preserve some subset of the records of the design community for future generations.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, 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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Reflections on SAA2007 and Ten Tips for an Optimal Conference Experience

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I want to start off by saying that I really enjoyed SAA 2007. I met amazing people. I went to sessions that made me think. I gave my first SAA conference presentation. I handed out dozens of cards for the unofficial SAA 2007 wiki and for this blog. I brainstormed ideas for sessions, workshops, books and articles. I have seeds for more projects than a single person could start (let alone finish) in a year.

I will be posting session summaries for a number of the sessions I attended over the course of the next week. I have also added a link to my presentation slides on the new Presentations page (note the optimistic use of plural in the page’s name).

My brain is still buzzing from the whirlwind that was SAA 2007 for me, but I have created a list of the top 10 basic conference attending tips that I (re)discovered during the conference and hope to remember for SAA 2008 (and any other conference I attend):

10: Eat more often. Eat real food. Hors d’oeuvres don’t count.

9: Going full throttle without any breaks for more than one day is impossible. At some point my brain won’t take in new information and all I want to do is sit and think about a session I went to yesterday.

8: You never know which sessions will be your favorites. It always happens that at least one session I wasn’t so sure about knocks my socks off — while another that I was so excited about drives me back out the door after 10 minutes.

7: Always bring an extra jacket.

6: Make new friends. Cultivate your inner extrovert. Be bold and introduce yourself. Never assume that everyone around you knows each other – do the kind thing and initiate introductions. This gets easier the more you practice. And don’t worry – everyone forgets names, that is part of the reason they give us those snazzy name tags and insist we wear them.

5: Bring twice as many business cards as you think you need.

4: Don’t have cards? Make them! I have used both VistaPrint and GotPrint. VistaPrint has a set of designs that they will print for free (with their logo on the back). Gotprint makes super lush, shiny cards on nice heavy stock. Both include online tools to create your card – but will also let you upload a PDF if you want to use Photoshop to do something more graphically inspired. If you ended up with either my Spellbound Blog card or the 2007 Wiki card in your stack of cards, you have a sample of what GotPrint can create.

3: Bring the big book they send you in the mail that describes all the sessions. The on site booklet only has the session titles – and often that isn’t enough information to make your choices.

2: Do the fun stuff! It is a good way to force your brain to take a break. It also gives you a chance to meet new people (see tip #6 above).

1: Be flexible. Plans change, opportunities for networking, brainstorming and being exposed to new ideas are around every corner. The choice to NOT attend a session you meant to go to almost always means it will be replace by something else – likely better than what you had planned to do anyway.

Now.. if I can just remember to look at this before I head out to SAA 2008!

Thank you again to everyone who made this conference open and welcoming. I enjoyed meeting so many fabulous new people and I hope to stay in touch with you all (and remember all your names).

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SAA2007: Opening Plenary Session Ponders Diversity

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In his introduction, Bruce Bruemmer began with a disarming “Thank you disembodied voice” – and merrily rolled along through a short, cheery and heartfelt introduction for SAA president Elizabeth W. Adkins. He saved time (and likely vocal stress) by prerecording a YouTube video enumerating Adkins’s accomplishments . He led rounds of applause for Adkins’s father, aunt, uncle and husband. Bruemmer claims her only fault is that she is too serious. That she did not perceive the inherent humor of Velveeta and Miracle Whip concerned him.

He finally found the chink in her armor when he broke down laughing at the apparently often repeated J. L. Kraft quote “What we do, we do do” – and at this she finally admitted that it was ‘a little funny’.

Elizabeth Adkins’s Plenary Speech

Adkins began her talk by leading the hall in applauding the program committee, the host committee, the sponsors, past presidents, international visitors, and council members – each in turn.

She then made an exciting announcement – American Archivist is being made available online! If you are onsite at the conference, there will be a peek at the beta version on display on Friday in the Embassy Room. Issues from 2000 forward will be available online and they are still working on the digitization of all back issues. SAA will still print the journal. Access to the digital version will be available via a link off the SAA homepage. All but the 6 most recent issues will be available freely to anyone. More work will need to be done to improve visibility through indexing services and complete the digitization of back issues.

After this, she launched into her main speech “Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action”. I will do my best to include as many points as I managed to fully  captured in my notes. If this topic interests you – I encourage you to watch for publication of the full original. Please forgive me any misquotes, omissions and oversights. I have also included a few additional details on points that were in the presentation.

Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action

Adkins first contemplated diversity of the presidents of SAA by considering how long had it had been since a corporate archivist had been SAA president. The answer was William Overman in 1957 – and Overman is the only other corporate archivist to ever be selected as president. Adkins is also one of only 16 women to have been SAA President.

What does SAA Mean by Diversity? Why do we care? Adkins reviewed the 2004 census of the profession known as A*CENSUS . With its 5,620 responses it was much more extensive than the surveys done in 1956 and 1982.

Gender Imbalance

From A First Look at A*CENSUS Results (published in August of 2004):

The archival profession has experienced a significant shift in gender in the last half century. The A*CENSUS survey indicates that the ratio of women to men is now approximately 2:1. This is almost a mirror image of the gender distribution reported in Ernst Posner’s 1956 survey of SAA members, in which 67% were men and 33% were women.

Adkins stated that the current gender imbalance is an issue for two reasons:

  • we need men’s perspective and input
  • since women are still generally paid less than men – having a gender imbalance is likely driving down salaries

Library and Museums are seeing this same gender imbalance while the gender imbalance is flipped in the IT industry.

Race and Ethnic Diversity

According to A*CENSUS 2004 only 7% of the SAA membership is non-white while the general US populate is 25% non-white (with an even greater number of non-whites in kindergarten classes today).

Why should we care?
* “It’s the right thing to do”
* Completeness of the documentary record
* It’s good business business
* Competition with other professions and career paths

Dr. Harold T. Pinkett (1914-2001) was the first African American at NARA – named an SAA fellow in 1962, editor of American Archivist 1968-1971 and council member from 1971-1972.

SAA first diversity efforts launched in 1970s

From 1936-1972, women in SAA made up only 28-33% of SAA members. The 1970s brought lots of progress for women’s representation and activity in SAA.

Work on Racial and Ethnic diversity started in 1978…more work supported 1981-1987, some efforts supported – other efforts (such as desire for a fellowship to support study) were not.

The Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable (AACR) founded in 1987, took on this name in 1994 (?). The Harold T. Pinkett Award was established in 1993 “to encourage minority students to consider careers in the archival profession and promote minority participation in SAA”.

In 1997 SAA created a Diversity Task Force and a final report was submitted in 1999. SAA Council accepted final report and moved forward in an ad hoc matter. In 2002 members of the task force were frustrated by lack of progress and passed a resolution asking for info on progress. The crux of the answer was “not a lot”.

In May 2003 the SAA council created a ‘diversity committee’… council is now actually talking about diversity and actually putting things in motion.

Focus on Students

There has a been a huge growth of Student Chapters. The concept was approved by the SAA council in 1993. There has been a growth from 3 chapters to nearly 30. Currently 20% of all members, more than 10% of attendees at this meeting, are students. Adkins hopes the students will help bringing more diversity into SAA and asked for a round of applause for the students attending the meeting.

Where are we now?

In 2005, SAA launched a new strategic planning effort and Diversity was identified one of the three highest priorities (with Technology and Public Awareness being the other 2).

What is the state of diversity today? Lots of talk – but how much actual action?

What is done?

  • position statement
  • census completed
  • monitoring progress
  • education for non-archivists who serve under represented groups
  • experimentation with the idea ofDiversity Fair

Next actions?

  • outreach on college and university campuses
  • provide other “entry points” into the archival profession
  • Archival education

The Task Force recommendations included improvement of the SAA website, providing financial aid for minorities and under represented communities, and working on SAA’s new member development.

Adkins presented an interesting idea of reaching out to kids age 10-15 such that we might influence their future career choices. She also suggested that SAA emulate the ALA model of the Spectrum Scholarship. Established in 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship program granted over 60 $5,000 scholarships this year alone. While SAA does not have the money to support a scholarship at this level – Adkins announced that a new SAA Minority Scholarship has been approved by the SAA council (this leading to the first spontaneous applause of the speech). She also made a big point of pointing to the Midwest Archives Conference’s Archie Motely Memorial Scholarship for Minority Students and saying that they should get credit as leaders in the area of minority scholarships.

“Diversity starts with a commitment to inclusion”

Addressing diversity concerns is hard work, but diversity will improve SAA in ways we can’t grasp now. She compared future progress to past efforts that now seem obvious (provision of childcare, the membership committee..etc).

Adkins concluded that that we need to build on a foundation of inclusion. A ‘welcoming respectful attitude’ will help us move forward. But we need to move forward with not just words – but with also with actions.

The hall gave her a standing ovation. Confronted with this, Adkins remarked that she had made it through so far but now she was getting all verklempt .

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Final Count Down to SAA2007

The final count down to the annual conference of the Society of American Archivists, this year convening in Chicago, is well under way. Many of you might already be confirming your flights and packing your bags. I won’t be on site until Wednesday night – but thought I would try and catch as many of you as I could before you head away from your regular blog reading rhythms.

Are you attending?

Over 115 registered users (37 of them have introduced themselves) have been adding tons of content to the UnOffical Conference Wiki. If you haven’t visited recently (or at all) take a quick browse through all the great info that has been added.

If you are interested in trying your hand at posting session summaries – I say go for it! You don’t need to have a blog to do this. The wiki is open for anyone’s contributions. If you have any questions about how to post about a session on the wiki, feel free to contact me and I will do whatever I can to help.

Are you a presenter?

Take a look at the page for your session on the wiki and consider what you might add to tell attendees more about what you will talk about. Upload your handouts (and let me know if you have problems with this). Add links to related information or supporting websites, before or after your talk.

Are you in charge of a group meeting?

Consider adding detailed agendas (and thanks to all of you who already have!) to your page linked off the Group Meetings page. If you welcome those who are not members of your round table or section, add a friendly ‘everyone welcome’ note.

Watching from afar?

If you are not attending, please consider participating from wherever you are. If there is a session you would kill to have attended – then go to the Session Coverage page (or the session specific page for the session in question) and put a note next asking for someone to post a summary. This might also encourage presenters to add more of their materials to the wiki after the fact.

At the Conference

I hope to meet as many of you on-site as I can. I will be presenting as part of Session 804 Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World, Saturday at 1pm. I also plan to attend the Blogger Get-Together if I possibly can (once they decide when and where it will be). I will do my best to update both the Session Coverage page and my user page on the wiki with the sessions I plan to attend. If last year is any indication of how I will blog – I will take notes while offline and then post session summaries (with additional thoughts) after the fact. I discovered that I do not enjoy posting stream of consciousness style, on-the-spot posts. All my posts for the conference will be classified as SAA2007. I will also link to them from the session pages on the wiki. Finally, my posts (and everyone else’s if they are tagged SAA2007) should be available if you go to the Technorati page for SAA2007. Want to reach me? Use my contact form or post a comment here.

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Unofficial SAA2007 Chicago Conference Wiki Now Online

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wiki_green2_logo.gifIt is alive! Take a look at the fabulous new SAA2007 Unofficial Conference Wiki. The wiki exists due to the vision and dedicated effort of Cal Lee, Lori Eakin, Kate Theimer and others. You can read more about who contributed energy and resources to bring the wiki to life on the Acknowledgments page.

Are you willing to write about presentations? Direct your attention please to the Session Coverage page. As you plan your schedule for the conference, consider letting others know which panels and round tables you plan to cover. The ultimate goal would be to make sure that at least person has committed to coverage of every session. You don’t need to have a blog to cover a session – you can add your session recap as a page in the wiki. We will make sure it is easy to do when we get that far.

Are you presenting or running a roundtable? Then please consider adding to the basic information in the wiki about your session. You can add links, references, supporting documentation and background information — anything you think might be useful to those considering your session (or unable to attend because of conflicts).

Do you know Chicago? Help us add to the pages listed under the Logistics heading.

Need something to improve your conference experience? There are pages for ride sharing, looking for roommates, and special info for first time conference attendees.

Never contributed to a wiki before? There is a special page for you with tips and another waiting for you to post questions (and remember – the only stupid question is one you never ask).

So what are you waiting for? Cruise on over and take a tour, add what you can and spread the word.

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Ideas for SAA2007: Web Awards, Wikis and Blogs

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Online since late March of this year, the new ArchivesNext blog is wasting no time in generating great ideas. First of all – I love the idea of awards for the best archives websites. How about ‘Best Archives Blog’, ‘Best Online Exhibit’ and ‘Best Archives Website’? It seems like barely a week goes by on the Archives and Archivists’ listserv between each announcement of a new archives website or online exhibition. I think an entire blog could be created just showing off the best of archives websites. I would love to see those making the greatest online contributions to the profession honored at the annual conference.

Another great ArchivesNext idea is a wiki for SAA2007 in Chicago. I was amazed at the conference last summer to see the table where you could buy audio recordings of the presentations. I live so much in the tech/geek world that I had assumed that of course SAA would have someone recording the sessions so they could be posted online. I assumed that there would be a handy place for presenters to upload their handouts and slides. A wiki would be a great way to support this sort of knowledge sharing. People come from all over the world for just a few days together at conferences like this. Many more can’t make the trip. I think it would go a long way to build more of an online archival community to have something beyond a listserv that let groups of like minded individuals build a collection of resources surrounding the topics discussed at the conference.

What about blogging the conference? Last year Foldering.com suggested we all use SAA2006 to tag our conference blog posts. Technorati shows 25 posts with that tag (and yes, a lot of those posts are mine). One major stumbling block was a lack of wireless in the hotel where the convention was held. Another was a combination of lack of interest and lack of coordination. Too few people were mobilized in time to plan coverage of the panels.

We could leverage a conference wiki to coordinate more effectively than we did last year. Simple signup sheets could help us ensure coverage of the panels and roundtables. I think it would be interesting to see if those who cannot attend the conference might express preferences about which talks should definitely be covered. If there are wiki pages for each panel and roundtable, those pages could eventually include links to the blog posts of bloggers covering those talks.

Blogging last August at SAA2006 was interesting for me. I had never attempted to blog at a conference (Spellboundblog was less than 1 month old last August). I took 37 pages of notes on my laptop. Yes, there was a lot of white space – but it was still 37 pages long. I found that I couldn’t bring myself to post in the informal ‘stream of consciousness style that I have often seen in ‘live blogging’ posts. I wanted to include links. I wanted to include my thoughts about each speaker I listened to. I wanted to draw connections among all the different panels I attended. I wanted someone who hadn’t been there to be able to really understand the ideas presented from reading my posts. That took time. I ended up with 10 posts about specific panels and round tables and another 2 about general conference ideas and impressions. Then I gave up. I got to the point where I felt burdened by the pages I had not transcribed. I had gotten far enough away from the conference that I didn’t always understand my own notes. I had new things I wanted to talk about, so I set aside my notes and moved on.

I hope we get more folks interested in blogging the conference this year. Feel free to email me directly at jeanne AT spellboundblog.com if you would like to be kept in the loop for any blogging coordination (though I will certainly post whatever final plan we come up with here).

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SAA 2007 Session Proposal Submitted

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Abby submitted the completed panel proposal for our “Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World” panel for SAA 2007. We recruited both a 3rd person to join our panel (Jean-François Blanchette) and a panel chair (L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin). We also earned an endorsement from the EAD Roundtable. Now all we can do is try not to think about it.

Thanks to everyone for your encouragement and support.

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SAA 2007 Session Proposal: Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World

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Abby Adams, Assistant Access and Outreach Archivist of the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, University of Georgia, and I are putting together a proposal for a session at SAA 2007 in Chicago. She and I found each other via my poster at SAA 2006: Communicating Context in Online Collections. We have been pondering many of the same questions related to the effective communication of context and original order in online digitized collections.

Our proposal is for a traditional 3 presentation panel with the title “Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World”. All we need now is a 3rd presenter, the endorsement of an SAA section or roundtable and (of course) the approval of the session selection committee. (And some plane tickets!)

This is the current version of our description for the proposal (mostly composed by Abby) :

Now that digitization projects have become more common in archival repositories, user and archivists alike have uncovered problems when it comes to understanding the context of online materials. However, there are various ways to provide more contextual information, thus enhancing the use of digital archives. But, archivists must confront the obstacles surrounding this task by developing best practices and incorporating new software into their digitization projects. In order to simplify the problem, we should return to our traditional archival principles and draw connections to collection arrangement and description in a digital environment. Join three archivists to explore how to improve on “analog” techniques in the communication of context. When done right, the digitization of a collection will not only retain all the same opportunities for communicating context that we are familiar with, it may revolutionize the way that archivists and users interact and understand our records.

The short take on what we want to cover in our session’s presentations is:

  • What should archivists be doing to not loose context and original order information in the transition from analog records to digitized records?
  • What can digitization give us the ability to do that we couldn’t do in the analog world?
  • What tools and standards are out there today to help archivists do both of the above? What information should archivists be capturing to permit them to take advantage of the opportunities to communicate context and original order that these tools and standards offer?

Abby’s part of the session, titled “Where’s the Context? Enhancing Access to Digital Archives”, will examine the need for preserving context and original order when digitizing archival materials – focusing on how it enhances online use and access to archives. How can new systems retain the existing ability to communicate context and original order when moving from “analog” to “digital”?

My portion, “Communicating Context: The Power of Digital Interfaces”, will discuss what archivists can do in the digital world they cannot do (or at least not easily) with analog records to communicate context and original order. I will focus on various innovative methods to do this including the use of GIS, hot-linking for ease of navigation, the ability to ‘collect’ digital surrogates for examination and more. I plan to include a combination of exciting new interfaces doing great things alongside new ideas of what could be done. Keep your fingers crossed for us that there is internet access in the session rooms in Chicago.

We have a vision of a third speaker whose talk would consider what the leading standards and software tools are permitting people to do today. How can archivists leverage the existing and evolving standards (EAD, EAC, TEI and other DTD s) to capture and communicate context and original order in the digital world? In addition, it would provide a high level review of common software packages (Archon , Archivists’ Toolkit, ContentDM , and others) and how they address original order and context. Finally we have a notion of a checklist of what to capture when digitizing to take advantage of what these tools and standards can provide for you.

Are you our mystery 3rd panelist that we are having so much trouble finding? Your first tip is that you have already mapped out 5 powerpoint slides in your head and started scribbling a rough draft of the “Archivists’ Digitization Checklist for Preserving Context” on a scrap of paper near your computer.

Maybe you know someone who would be a great person to pitch this to? Or you have advice for us concerning who to pass our proposal along to in the great hunt for that elusive session endorsement?

The deadline looms large (October 9)! Please contact us either via email (jeanne AT spellboundblog DOT com and adamsabi AT uga DOT edu) or in the comments of this post.

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