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NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant News: Visualizing Archival Collections

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archivesz ng

As of August 22nd, 2008 it was official. There is even a blog post over on the NEH Office of Digital Humanities updates page to prove it. The University of Maryland was granted a Level I NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant to fund work on the ‘Visualizing Archival Collections’ project. The official one liner is that the project will support “The development of visualization tools for assessing information contained in electronic archival finding aids created with Encoded Archival Description (EAD)”. Why did I wait so long to announce this on the blog? I wanted to have something fun to announce at the end of my SAA presentation out in San Francisco!

The project director is Dr. Jennifer Golbeck. I also have the support of University of Maryland’s Jennie Levine, Dr. Bruce Ambacher, and Dr. Doug Oard. This amazing set collaborators should help me stay on the right track and make sure I keep the sometimes competing issues relating to archives, information retrieval and interface design in balance.

I will be collecting EAD encoded finding aids over the next few months. My goal is to gather a broad sample of English language finding aids from a wide range of institutions and work on the script that extracts this data into a database. Once we have the data extracted I get to look at what we have, do some data cleanup and start thinking about what sorts of visualizations might work with our real world data. During the spring term we will design and build a 2nd generation prototype of ArchivesZ.

Want your data to be part of this? If you would like to contribute EAD finding aids in XML format to the project, please send me the following information:

  1. Archives Name
  2. Archives Parent Institution (if applicable)
  3. Archives Location
  4. Contact at Archives for questions about the finding aids (name, email and phone number)
  5. Estimate of # of finding aids being offered
  6. Controlled Vocabulary or Thesaurus used for Subject values (as many as are used)
  7. Method of finding aid delivery (sending me a zip file? pointing me at a directory online? some other way?)
  8. Do I have your permission to post a discussion of the data issues I may find in your finding aids here on Spellbound Blog? (Please see the OSU Archives post as an example of they types of issues I discuss)

You can either put this into the form on my Contact Page or send email directly to jeanne AT spellboundblog dot com.

Thank you to everyone for their enthusiasm about the ArchivesZ project. It is very exciting to have the opportunity to take all these shiny ideas to the next level.

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SAA2008: Yale, Family Papers & High School Students (Session 508)

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The session’s official title was Family and Community Archives Project: Introducing High School Students to the Archives Profession. It focused on a pilot outreach program carried out by 21 archivists from Yale University at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities magnet high school in New Haven, CT. 117 high school juniors participated as part of their US History course. The pilot aimed to introduce them to what archivists do, work with them to find, understand and describe their family papers and also to present archives as a possible profession to students who might assume that it was only welcoming to Caucasians.

A number of their original plans were adjusted after they met with the high school administrators:

  • They would need to work with juniors rather than seniors because it is the juniors who take US History
  • The principal wanted them to work with all 5 classes of US History students, rather than a single class.
  • The program would run from March to May instead of January to June
  • When they realized that a number of students are in foster care, they needed to find other ways to include students who did not want (or could not) do family research. They chose to add the option of researching the history of community organizations.

Logistics

A total of twenty-one archivists from various departments at Yale University volunteered. They were divided up into five teams, one for each class with which they would be working during the course of the pilot. Starting in October they held weekly meetings to create the schedule and plans. A total of eight lesson plans were created. These took much more time than the archivists had expected. They also designed and printed a brochure to introduce the students to archives, archivists and basic archival terms. A wiki (Family Community Archives Project Wiki) was created to facilitate communication among the archivists and teachers. The wiki included bios of the archivists.

All classwork would be graded by the teachers without input from the archivists. This classwork included a journal component. It was decided that the journal (a 3-ring binder that the archivists provided) would remain in the class room. This choice was made based on teacher input – there was concern that if the journals were removed from the classroom that they would quickly be misplaced or forgotten.

Parents and guardians of participating students were alerted via a letter explaining the class project and encouraging them to help students as they worked on their family or community research.

A blog (Family and Community Archives Project Blog) was created that students, archivists and teachers could all use to communicate with each other. They met with the classes for 8 weeks. Every student got a certificate of participation and an ‘archivally themed goody box’ (think Oscars.. but less opulent). They asked students to complete an evaluation form – to ‘be honest… we are thick skinned’. They mounted an exhibit in the main Yale library featuring the student’s work. As is often the case with 16 year olds, the students pulled it together at the last minute and did a great job. They had an opening reception that included students, parents and the community.

Lessons Learned

They discussed both with the teachers and archivists to analyze what worked and what didn’t. What worked?

  • Students learned what archivists do – some said they might consider a career as an archivist and that they learned a lot.
  • The teachers enjoyed it – noticed some students were more engaged than they sometimes were (while some were not that interested).
  • Brought Yale into community and the community into Yale.
  • Collaboration across libraries and departments – archivists met each other and worked together.
  • The group creation of lesson plans.
  • The choice to assign several archivists per class. It permitted small groups and one-on-one work. Lesson plans were sometimes customized to suite the classroom/teacher/student special cases.
  • The blog: this communication worked for some.. but not all. Hard to know why some students were more comfortable with the blog than others. It was a good way to provide students with information about the archivists and the project.
  • The wiki: provided schedules, lesson plans, resources.. etc. It was very successful & usefull.

The most successful aspects?

  • The archives tour
  • Discussion of who uses archives and why which included audio/visual examples and archival material.
  • The exhibit was a high point of the project. They photographed the items they wanted to display and that worked well. Students were very proud of the exhibit.. 25% did not contribute.

What did not work?

  • Teacher support varied – success completely depended on the enthusaism and commitment of the teacher.
  • 8 weeks is too long for this sort of project
  • Class meeting times too long – 40 and 80 minute sessions
  • Needed more feedback earlier in the process from teachers on lesson plans – didn’t learn the reading level of the students until lesson plans were done… needed clearer definition of expectations for the exhibit.
  • Efficacy and support for homework – some people thought there should be no homework (other than project tasks) .. some thought it should be more structured.
  • Technology support for A/V lesson – school didn’t have equipment to support the A/V projection needs
  • Student privacy – they needed parent/guardian permissions to allow video & photos of students to be taken. There was a very late question about if they could use the students’ first and last in the exhibition. No media release forms were sent out in time to make a video about the session.
  • School activities schedule changed all the time – interfered
  • Early class time led to poor attendance (7 am!)
  • The archivists talked too much – they needed more hands on lessons. Students should have been able to bring in materials earlier in the process and have more time to work with them. More opportunity to connect to the student – the example being the LAST class session when the students brought materials in for scanning by the archivists. This gave a way to connect to the archivists and understand why their materials were important.

Teacher’s suggestions for improving the project

  • Run the project for 2 weeks in march – just after national testing is completed
  • Meet with each class 5 times in a row in one week.. with one class being the tour

This project fit in really well with Yale’s goals of reaching out to the local New Haven community.

Potential lessons for other archivists

  • planning phase:
    • define measures of success
    • define what you want students to learn & how – realistic objects for a 16 year old.. do not be too ambitious. Include perspectives of archivist parents. for some classes lecturing worked well.. some classes small groups worked really well
    • define resources needed ( they had 21 archivists who did work on Yale’s time) – Money = $3,000 spent on photo reproductions, handouts, mounting, gift boxes, lunch for teachers & archivists and final reception.
    • explore what is available on the Internet – look for lesson plans – good stuff out there that is often too ambitious, but good for adaptation
    • partner with the teacher – engage the teachers early on.. define what the students need to do by the end of the project. think about archivists who have never taught before.. figure out what you can do to help them
    • include a tour of a repository
    • provide teaching lessons for archivists who haven’t taught
    • plan for unengaged students and teachers – adapted their lessons.. hard situation..
    • avoid early morning classes
    • resolve privacy/confidentiality issue early
  • implementation:
    • be flexible – be prepared for changing activities schedules and other in class challenges
    • do an exhibit – create copies.. understand that these are precious materials
    • be visual in your teaching – video!
    • delving into family history can raise sensitive information – help 16 year olds figure out how to choose what to display in a public exhibit
    • introduce them to other jobs beyond archivist – at first only talked about archivists work… but next year will also talk about all the people who work in archives. Tie in their interests (this was an arts school.. include that perspective)
    • wrap up meetings with teachers and archivists essential

Diversity

One of the underlying goals of the pilot was to explore ways to increase diversity.

Cultural exchange: What did archivists learn from the students and teachers when working with the school? They learned about the student’s families and their community organizations. It bridged a generation gap – the archivists learned about what it meant to be a high school kid these days. Not all of it was positive – it left a lot of the archivists with concern for the state of education – issues with their writing skills.

Difficult to measure: How do we know it worked? No longitudinal study is being done to find out if they end up working in archives. We need to take a long view – but be impatient.

The impact on archives, defined broadly – no matter if they did not make any new archivists, they supported the archival endeavor – 110 students, teachers and their families now have a better understanding of archives and records.

Questions & Answers

Question: Who crafted the evaluation for the students?

Answer: One of the archivists created it and it was approved by the rest of the team.

Question: In the future would you find it more desirable to work with the teachers on evaluating the student projects for grading purposes? or is that not our business?

Answer: No, they would not want to be involved with grading. The teacher knows the students. That said – they do wish that the teachers had planned the final project earlier on. Next time the archivists would encourage/push for final project guidelines.

Question: How did you measure that your learning objectives were met other than the survey?

Answer: They didn’t do that formally – but anecdotally when the students were in other classes – they heard other teachers report that students continued to talk about the archives work outside of the history class. There was a ‘buzz’ among the students.

Question: How did you find the time to do this?

Answer: The leadership had to agree (at least informally) that the archivists can do this. Molly: They were very surprised by how much time it all took. It was a volunteer effort.. they met as a group 1x a week during their lunch hour.

Question: Why didn’t you consider doing an electronic journal?

Answer: There was a concern that not all students are tech savvy. For example – only a handful of kids engaged with the blog. They felt they couldn’t require it unless everyone had access and a sufficient comfort level with the tools.

Question: Where any archivists of color involved in the project ? If one of the goals of projects like this is to encourage individuals of color to consider a career as an archivist, it might be easier if they see people who look like them.. people out there documenting diverse communities.

Answer: Yes.. a few. There were suggestions that they could contact the roundtables of color/ethnicity – bring in visiting speakers to talk about how they came to work in archives. The materials are important too – materials they can relate with. It was emphasized again that this was a pilot and the had to spend a great deal of time creating their lesson plans from scratch. Now that they have the building blocks – they can improve other aspects.

Question: What about talking about preserving things like MySpace pages – maybe use myspace for the blogging

Answer: They didn’t want to do anything that might exclude people.

Question: Was the non-involved teacher aware of what archives do?

Answer: He didn’t come to the archives tour. He was totally tuned out. He felt he was very behind in the teaching schedule – both students and the teacher felt it was taking away from class time.

Question: Could they offer the 11 out of 117 who said they might want to be archivists internships?

Answer: Maybe – but since the rules of the school required that any student who left the campus was accompanied by an adult, it would be very challenging.

My Thoughts

I found this session very inspiring. I loved that it took the archives to the community and it the community into the archives. This is the sort of outreach project I hope has a chance of spreading to other schools. Interested in considering a project like this at your archives? Take a look at all the resources available on the wiki’s handouts and homework page and be on the lookout for a writeup of the pilot in the Nov/Dec issue of Archival Outlook.

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

floppy disks

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

Norman Mailer’s Electronic Records

Challenges & Questions:

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

Revelations and Recommendations:

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

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

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

Papers of Peter Ganick

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

Challenges & Questions:

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

Revelations and Recommendations:

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

George Whitmore Papers

Challenges & Questions:

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

Revelations and Recommendations:

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

Questions & Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Thoughts

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: oh messy disks by Blude via flickr.

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

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SAA2008: Revealing Archival Collections at the Web’s Surface (Session 102)

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Calisphere: Vigilance Committee Warning, April 1906

The official title of Session 102 was We’re Not the Destination, We’re the Journey: Revealing Archival Collections at the Web’s Surface. If you attended this session or don’t want to read through the details, you can skip to the end and just read my thoughts on this session.

California Digital Library

The first presentation was by Lena Zentall of the California Digital Library (CDL). I believe it was titled something like “Untitled <snappy name here>”. CDL is increasing visibility of primary sources by targeting primary sources to specific audiences. Lena described how they view the URL as a line to reel in new audiences. She started with an overview of how archival content traditionally makes its way online.

Start with a box -> described by finding aids -> digital copies of finding aids put on line and cherry picked individual items are digitized to be featured online.

Two Audiences, Two Sites

CDL has taken a new approach. They have two sites for two very different audiences:

  • Online Archive of California (OAC): presents both finding aids and digitized primary sources and targets archivists, historians & researchers
  • Calisphere – only takes primary sources (for now) and targets k-12 teachers, lifelong learners, and undergraduates

Collections can have home in several places. For example, the items about the Chinese in California can be found in:

Calisphere has created themed collections to highlight superstar digital objects. They pull images out of the finding aids and rearrange them for the target audience. These images are hand picked and associated with an essay. They pick striking objects with good metadata. This is what their audience wants – the teachers asked for it. Another example themed collection is the Goldrush Murder & Mayhem collection which includes this photo of the “old time San Francisco pickpocket” Jennie Hastings.

Hidden Gems: Untitled and No Metadata

The next part of the presentation discussed what happens to items that are untitled and associated with no metadata. Lena showed us the results when you searched the OAC images for for untitled. I found 12,315 items when I did this search. They really only live in the context of the finding aid. Of course the challenge is that people use words to find images. These hidden gems can be helped by inheriting the metadata of their parent container (such as collection level information) when there is nothing else.

3 Approaches

  1. Digitize and release content to the web: low effort (after infrastructure is set up), very high return on investment. Over 40% of Calisphere traffic generated by google searches… but when users follow the link from google then they find the rich context.
  2. Align with other aggregators: – low/medium effort, medium return. Calipshere content is also being pulled into aggregators. They can also pull back new data that is added by 3rd party partners – such as reading level added on a teacher site. These are three examples of Murder and Mayhem content in three different partner sites:
  3. Cherry-picking the best items: high effort, promising returns – but it is also harder to measure the returns

Finding New Audiences and New Volunteers

The next step is to reach beyond standard cultural and education venues and move into different ares of the internet. For example, the CDL added links to Wikipedia. The perception of those involved with this effort was that it was a very convoluted process with lots of mysterious rules. They were unsure if the links would remain in place. It sometimes seemed like a lot of work when the links might just be removed. They added 33 links and found 53 links made by others not affiliated with the CDL. On the plus side, links like this puts the digital objects in a very specific context. Traffic initiated from these Wikipedia entries is almost certainly individuals seeking detailed information in the specific topic they are researching.

The next frontier involves blogs. CDL digital items are now featured in blogs, but soon CDL will be creating a blog for Calisphere to tell the story behind individual pictures. The final stop for this talk was an inspirational blog: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century. This blog was presented as a way to achieve the fame that primary sources dream about.

Library of Congress

The second presentation, by Helena Zinkham from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division, was titled “The New Friends for Old Photos – putting pictures in your path with the Flickr commons and Web 2.0”. This talk focused on the pilot project of putting Library of Congress photos on Flickr in the new Flickr Commons.

People who want photos don’t think of libraries or archives. They go to museums and stock photo agencies. Helena wants to help people realize that archives are a great source of images.

There has been increasing progress with hidden collections. Lots of digitization and work with metadata has been done to help items make their way online. But this begs the question of whether we are just creating new hidden collections in corners of the Internet that the average person will never come in contact with. Collections like ArchiveGrid, DLF Aquifer, and OAC. The descriptions need to get out of the catalogs – most people find content on the web.. we need to put the images on the web in the path of the users.

The Flickr commons satisfied Helena’s desire to pull people in from Flickr back to discover the catalog world of archives. Flickr can be considered a virtual reading room and platform for a virtual volunteer corp. Helena showed the example of the image Weavers at Work. The comments on this photo included:

  • information that photo is of blind women weaving rugs
  • the photographer’s great grandchild identified the photographer as Percy Byron
  • the start of a discussion about what the cabinet or instrument might be shown to the far right of the photo

These commenters are new friends worth making!

Pros of Web 2.0

  • make collection available
  • gain information about collections – participatory description
  • increase the visibility of specific photos
  • win support for cultural heritage organizations

Risks of Web 2.0

  • disrespect for collections (smart aleck chat)
  • loss of meaning
  • reduce revenue from photo sales
  • excludes undigitized collections
  • higher costs (more money and time)
  • less chance for us to have fun as history detectives – other people are doing ‘our’ work

read powerhouse museums’ 3 month report about their experience. … Helena will post info about the nuts and bolts on the SAA site, but she also directed the audience to Powerhouse Museum’s Commons on Flickr First 3 Months Report.

Flickr Basics

Helena asked the session attendees who was familiar with flicker? Most of the room raised their hands. Who has accounts? Still good number. Who is adding archival content? A sprinkling of hands were raised.

Helena then explores Flickr basics and showed off the following neat search examples:

Logistics and Statistics

The LOC liked Flickr and felt it was a good fit because photographs are the main focus of the site. They did need one big change. Because LOC is not the owner or photographer (unlike most photo contributors), they needed a way to express that clearly. Flickr responded by creating The Commons. They also created a new rights statement of ‘no known copyright restrictions’ for members of The Commons to use. This is different from public domain. Flickr also appears (based on my hunt through the links) to permit each institutions in The Commons to link to their own explanation about what they mean by ‘no known copyright restrictions’. LOC deep links to a specific section of their Copyright and Other Restrictions page for Prints & Photographs. George Eastman House has a special George Eastman House & The Commons on Flickr page about copyright, as does the Brooklyn Museum.

Statistics from the first 6 moths on Flickr:

  • 3,500 LOC photos posted
  • 8 million views
  • 30,000 favorites for 80% of the photos
  • 14,000 Flickr members made LOC a contact
  • 5,000 comments (3,300 people)
  • 12,500 unique tags (59,000 total)
  • 500 catalog records updated – Helena indicated that this could be considered a new kind of backlog, “but a backlog you can come to like”
  • 20% increased traffic to p&p online catalog

There are 30,000 more photos from Bain News Service on the way, but they are only adding fifty photos a week. This number was recommended by Flickr as the largest they would want to push at any one time. This goes back to the tolerance of people who have Flickr in their friend photo stream. Fifty photos is about as many as people want to get at any one time. More than that and you increase the likelihood that people would remove you from their stream instead of be overwhelmed. They would have no chance to really look at more than that.

Contributors to The Commons can choose which features to enable. For example, the Portrait of Hine as small child standing by drum shows how george eastman house chooses to send people back to their institution for prints.

How much does it cost?

  • a Flickr pro account costs $24.95 a year
  • digitization costs
  • time: daily moderation on the account – LOC checks every day for uncivil discourse which takes about 10 minutes
  • 15-20 hours a week to pull data from comments to update metadata

Flickr Comments

One of the greatest parts of this presentation was the examination of ways in which flicker users contributed through comments. Here are some examples:

  • Auto Polo: – comment includes link to an auto polo thread on the Jalopy Journal’s message board which includes newspaper images and an extended discussion.
  • Sylvia Sweets Tea Room – includes a very extensive history of the business added by the daughter of the original proprietor
  • Negro boy near Cincinnati, Ohio – the comments include a deep conversation about the title of the photo and the context of this title at the time it was taken (1942 or 1943).
  • Jones Barn where dynamite was found – Flickr members found the context and news article to go with this photo
  • Al Palzer – this photo’s original title was Al Palser – but the misspelling was pointed out in the comments. The comments also include a response from the LOC noting that the boxer’s name would be updated in the original catalog record.

Other Promotion Approaches

The Library of Congress has now started linking out from the LOC catalog entries to the Flickr image so that it is easy for users to discover any conversations associated with the Flickr version. Powerhouse museum has a Photo of the Day blog to highlight images from their collection. The Brooklyn Museum encourages people to upload photos of things happening in Brooklyn. Then and now photos can be taken – in this case see factory buildings in Lowell, Massachusetts in December 1940/January 1941 and then again in January of 2008.

The key to 2.0 is frequent, new content and interaction from archival staff. Helena is open to new ideas about how to use Flickr and closed with saying that Web 2.0 is right in our path.

Questions and Answers

Question: What is their view of the accuracy/inaccuracy user generated tags and comments?

Answer: Study done in the past comparing accuracy of official cataloging to comments – even if people make mistakes, but others will correct them.. LOC has a ‘hands off’ policy to not delete/change stuff unless it is defamatory or spam. Only 3 instances of this so far. LOC is citing the source as ‘Flickr commons’ and also include commenters’ sources – which are actually a lot more varied than you might expect (like the Jalopy Journal).

Question: Are you worried about an increase demand in staff time as you add more photos?

Answer: Yes.. there will be an increase in demand.. but the Flickr comments are there and since LOC is adding links back out to those records they are available for researchers even if they are not added to the original catalog record. Maybe they need more staff? depends on goals. Could work with expert teams and look for ‘formal trusted’ volunteers. A great example was the baseball history association who took photos and contributed expert information in a spreadsheet (if I heard correctly they gave LOC a spreadsheet identifying team, game, date and opponent for more than 3000 photos).

Question: Isn’t the link from the LOC catalog record to Flickr enough? Why update the LOC catalog records at all?

Answer: They are really only updating when it is a mistake (like Palser’s name mistake). Flickr also provides APIs and LOC pulls all the comments and tags into external database so that LOC can choose how to use the information over time.

Question: What are your thoughts and concerns about the longevity of Flickr as a platform?

Answer: What grows fast can die fast. Their perspective: Flickr is a copy.. and LOC has an extract of all the tags and comments – nothing lost if it disappears.

Question: Calipshere: how do they work with teachers to learn their needs and their satisfaction with the work that is done?

Answer: They hired Berkeley experts to talk to teachers about what they wanted. They used interviews and created personas to capture the audience needs. Targeting the K-12 audience was aimed at being a success by being clear about their audience. Teachers used to print out images, but now they do more with powerpoint and iPods plugged into TV in the classroom. The teachers say they are happy with the theme collections and they want more. They have an advisory board with teachers.. they use surveys and watch the bboards.

Question: Is there a crossover between Calishpere and OAC users?

Answer: They almost didn’t cross link to the finding aids from within Calisphere.. but they decided the information was so important. Reason for the upcoming blog – want to tell the story behind the photos.

Question: Do they have anlytics/evidence of pulling people back to their sites?

Answer: Yes.. they can see increases in usage from everything they have done.

Question: When you download the comments – are they dated so you can only look at the new ones? How hard was it to change the title in your catalog?

Answer: Everything is time/date stamped when you pull info out of Flickr. Quick and easy to update.. 10 minutes per picture to do the updates.. Flickr members are doing a great job with citations.

Question: Do you have advice about how to get historical society folks who are concerned about loosing the admission fee for people coming in to do research on board with these web 2.0 approaches?

Answer: You show them alternative revenue streams. In the museum world .. they realized that they weren’t making money from reproductions and a change is in process to let people use images for publishing.. all about improving the brand recognition. Helena: I would love ideas from people using Flickr.. and to hear from people who are dealing with multiple audiences.

Question: Have you had complaints? Any specifically from copyright holders?

Answer: Yes.. they have had complaints.. one “Why haven’t you cleaned up the photos?” LOC position is to provide the version they have.. and it is up to others to cleanup and do what they like with the photos. They also point out that instead of perfecting photos, they are spending money on providing access to more photos.

Question: Expectations of service. Are people expecting that if they ask a question about a photo that they will get an answer from a LOC representative?

Answer: Do you have to respond to everyone who asked to be a contact? No.. perhaps different expectations for institutions. They currently add a comment when they are updating the original catalog records. Might acknoledge big contributors (more than 10 photos) at the end of the pilot via a direct e-mail to individuals.

Question: Have people complained about rights – that is my grandmother.. don’t put it on the web?

Answer: No. They do have a policy in place. Most people are ‘pleased as punch’ to learn that their family heritage is alive and well. OAC: They haven’t had anyone ask to take the content down. In the case that people provide feedback for updates – since OAC is an aggregation of items from so many institutions – they have to pass corrections info along to original keeper of the metadata and leave it in their hands to do updates.

Question: Is there a fear that interest will decrease as more photos are added to the commons?

Answer: Bloggers in the web were in love with the idea that the photos would go into Flickr. There was a big peak at the start – but views and comments are still steady (but smaller) . The more additions.. more communities that will be touched. The Powerhouse Museum experienced a tripling of their traffic after posting images in the Flickr Commons.

Question: Have people come into the reading room because of the Flickr pilot?

Answer: Maybe? We don’t know. Lena said she did!

Question: Are we teaching the teachers how to teach with photos?

Answer: Calisphere has provided links to info about using primary sources and analysis tools.. resources for teachers. (Follow-up: Are they clicking those links? Good question!)

Question: Are you contacting the people who post negative comments?

Answer: Yes.. and most of them were more spam.

My Thoughts

Culture of Online Communities

There are a few different ideas I wanted to share related to the material from this presentation. First, I noticed that the online culture of both Flickr and Wikipedia were called out as having a clear impact. They are in fact two very different communities. In the case of the LOC and Flickr we heard that part of what seemed to keep the comments constructive and friendly was that Flickr’s users strive to keep a ‘play nice’ atmosphere in place. In contrast, we heard that Wikipedia was perceived as confusing and unpredictable when the CDL staff was updating pages to add links back to their primary sources. They never felt certain that the links they were working so hard to add wouldn’t be removed the next day.

These are just two examples of ways in which the archival community is beginning to bump into various online communities. We need to really understand the cultural rules for each of the communities in which we want to participate. Another excellent example of this was the revelation that LOC should only upload 50 new images a week into Flickr because of the way in which users view new images uploaded by their friends. It would be unfortunate for LOC to loose many of its Flickr friends because it overwhelmed their Flickr feeds with 1,000 images.

Personas: Targeting Real People

I was also very pleased to hear Lena discuss the creation of personas to define and target the audiences they want to serve. If you want to listen to a great presentation on personas – give a listen to the IA Summit 2008 presentation Data driven design research personas (2nd podcast down on the page) while going though the presentation slides up on slideshare. I promise it is a very accessible talk (ie, low on jargon and tech – high on real life examples) and very worth your time. It was one of the best sessions I saw at that conference.

Finding Images Without Words

While today it is generally true that people must use words to find images – someday people will be able to use images to find images. An example of this work in progress is an experimental service named retrievr. You can already use this tool to search for Flickr images either by uploading an image or by creating a sketch you want to match. Another interesting image search interface is found over on Xcavator.net. You pick a photo as your starting point – and then you can even trace a subsection of the image to be used for subsequent image matching. We are not there yet – but we will be someday. I can only image the number of Untitled images that will finally be found!

Vigilance

Your reward for reading this far is discovering my rationale for using the image I included at the top of this post. I think that many people are worried that we must be like the San Jose Vigilance Committee of 1906 – on our guard to stop people from stealing images from cultural heritage institutions when they are posted online. I would argue that the two projects described in this session show the benefits of a more open attitude. The Internet isn’t the wild west anymore. We should stop treating it that way. We don’t need Vigilance Committees online – we need ambassadors, interpreters and brave pioneers like Lena, Helena and the amazing teams of people who made the projects they described come to life.

Image credit: History San Jose Research Library via Calisphere.

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

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SAA2008: Hitting the ground running

I am gearing up for my first day at the SAA annual meeting here in San Francisco. I am still not totally sure what I am going to attend today – each slot has at least 3 interesting looking sessions. For those of you not familiar with how I blog at conferences, I will NOT be live blogging. Live blogging (as I define it) is sitting in a session and recording my notes and thoughts during the session and posting it as fast as possible. Instead I will be taking notes during the sessions – and then turning them into posts on each session at a later time. Sometimes I manage to do this while I am still at the conference. Sometimes this happens over the course of the week or two after the conference. This lets me add links, draw connections between the sessions and get a bit more perspective. I don’t promise to blog every session I attend, but if the past two years are any indication I should manage better than half.

In a side note – if you are staying at the conference hotel and have paid the fee to access Internet from within your hotel room ($15 a day!), you can then call down to the front desk and get a magic code to use in order to get wireless wherever it is available within the hotel.

I hope to meet as many of you as I can this year. The one guaranteed place to find me is during my session on Saturday morning at 9:30 am: Session 602: After the Revolution: Unleashing the Power of EAD. If you read my blog, feel free to come and introduce yourself. It is nice to know who is out there!

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After The Games Are Over: Olympic Archival Records

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Geek Archivist and Other T-Shirts

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I have a new favorite procrastination technique – putting together graphics and opening CafePress shops! These are ideas I have had for ages (and more are in the works). I suspect they will be great tools for starting interesting conversations with both colleagues, friends and the general public. Please take a look the ones below and see what you think. I should be wearing my GEEK ARCHIVIST t-shirt at SAA if you want to see one in person. I have also created an Archivist Fun T-shirts page for you to use to find all the current designs as I add them.

geek archivist logo

Born Digital Logo

Born Analog Logo

Forgive the poor graphic quality on the thumbnails above – the resizing image magic of WordPress is not all it could be. The images used in the the actual products were created using the specifications set out by the CafePress folks and therefore should be totally clear on the t-shirts, bags, mouse pads and other fun stuff I found to slap them on. Let me know if there is a product you wish I was offering that I haven’t included yet (mugs? aprons? their list of offerings is amazing).

Hope they make you smile as much as they are making me smile.

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Freebase Parallax Search Interface: Exploring Olympic Games Facts

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Well-formed data posted about a new Freebase project named Parallax. This new search interface takes faceted browsing another step – in this case making it easy to jump sideways from one dataset to another related dataset. Parallax still includes filters on the left side – but the twist comes from the opportunity to select what are called ‘Connections’ from the list in the upper right hand corner of the search results page.

This sort of thing makes the most sense when you can see examples. The creator of Parallax has published a great little video tour, but I also wanted to show you some neat data sets that were very easy to discover and embed in my blog. Since so many people are thinking about the Olympics right now, I thought I would start by exploring the Olympic Games Collection from Freebase. Below I have two data sets. On the left you will see a list of Olympic Games – and on the right you will see a list of Olympic event venues. (NOTE: to those reading this through a feed reader – you will likely have to click through to view the lists)

Now lets take a real sidestep and pull up a list of sports teams who use a former Olympic facility as a venue. This is the sort of question that you could figure out on your own, but it would be a pain in the neck to do by hand. See the list on the left below which took just as long to create as it took me to spot that Team (venue) was on the list of ‘more connections’ when my list of Olympic Venues was being displayed. The frame on the right below displays the one Olympic Venue that Freebase knows to have won an award (in this case the Structural Special Award).

Of course the lists above are only as good as the data behind them, but you can see how interesting it could be to use Parallax to explore connected information. Now take this idea to the world of archives and libraries, OPACs and finding aids and imagine the sorts of questions you can start asking. Yes – it does depend on the data being connected, but that is happening more and more all the time. The promise of the semantic web is structured data everywhere we turn.

Go play with Parallax. Look at Venture Funded Companies and then look at all the Games Developed by those companies. Examine the list of  Bird Species and then see what schools have bird mascots… and THEN see a list of famous people who went to schools that have bird mascots.

Put in your own search from the Parallax homepage and play with the available connections.  Map and timeline views are also available – though they only work if your data includes location and temporal data, respectively. If you find a great sequence of data sets – please share them!

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SAA Wiki 2008: Create an account and add your voice!

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SAA 2008 WikiAs of this writing, seventy-three individuals have created accounts on the UnOfficial Wiki of the 2008 SAA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Where are the rest of you? For all of you wondering why to create an account, here are some reasons to join the wiki fun:

Not presenting?  There are still plenty of ways you can use the wiki to improve your conference experience.

Not going to the conference? Look through the Introductions page and take the opportunity to reconnect with your colleagues. The annual meeting gives everyone a chance to focus on the latest thoughts and activities in the archives community – no matter where you are. See a session you wish you could attend? Add a note to that session’s page – let the presenters and those who might blog the session know about your interest.

Have questions or need help? Drop me a message via my contact page and I will lend a hand. Remember – wikis are very sturdy, you won’t break it!

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Online Interactive U.S. Copyright Slider

Digital Copyright Slider

Remember when I posted about the Copyright Slider: Quick Easy Access to Copyright Laws and Guidelines? This was my last line in that post:

My next question is how hard would it be to make a slick flash version of this that could live online and be updated as copyright rules change?

Well, thanks to Digitization 101’s A digital version of the Copyright Slider post I discovered that exactly what I wished for now exists. Go take the Digital Copyright Slider for a spin.

The interface is clear and simple – they did a great job of taking advantage of the interactive medium to do things they couldn’t do on the paper slider. If it won’t disturb your neighbors, turn up the volume to hear the satisfying click each time you move the slider to a new scenario. Make sure you click on some of the *s to see more detailed information. Take note of the advice regarding more complicated scenarios as well as the links directly to documents detailing specific copyright laws.

I love that it has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The creators have included their contact information along with the idea that other institutions could host custom copies of the slider with their own copyright research contacts. The only downside I see to this is that if there are changes to US copyright law, it will take time for updates to a central copy of the slider to propagate to local customized copies.

The final question is how fast they can update the slider in the event of changes to copyright law – but we will have to wait on changes to the US copyright landscape before we can find that out!

Image Credit: Image above is taken directly from a screen shot of the Digital Copyright Slider.

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