Digital Camera in the Archives

This piece is incredibly timely as I have Nicholas Olsberg in the Architecture and Design Collection preparing an exhibition using quick snaps of drawings. In our case I really think a simple copy stand with a slightly better camera would be a much better proposal but at least the images are being made web accessible at some level.

http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/2010/02/24/capture-and-release-digital-cameras-in-the-reading-room/

Three Things I Didn't Learn in Archives School

This is a great entry and something all new archivists should read.

The three things

Digital Oral History!

I am not sure I am yet ready to commit to a Michigan Winter but this project sounds like something I have wanted to do for years now.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6698825.html (Bottom of page.)

Michigan State University, MATRIX, Center for Humane Arts, Letters, and Social Sciences Online, was awarded $319,284 (match: $333,063) for "Oral History in the Digital Age."

Michigan State University, through the MATRIX Center and the Michigan State University Museum, will partner with the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center, the American Folklore Society, and the Oral History Association to recommend standards and best practices for digital oral history.

UC Santa Cruz and the Dead Heads

Cross blogging with "The Wilder Side of Archives."

I think you may be dead on in your concerns Michelle, and theres also the question of managing what may be one of the "wildest" user communities that ever existed!

Resource Shelf StoryCreating a Virtual Terrapin Station: Blending Traditional & Socially Constructed Archives for Research, Teaching

The University of California, Santa Cruz Campus will digitize materials from its Grateful Dead Archive and make them available in a unique and cutting-edge Web site, the Virtual Terrapin Station. The Virtual Terrapin Station will provide access to Grateful Dead Archive materials and tools to facilitate public contributions to the archive. This project will enable the university to convert a significant part of a traditional archive to digital form and make it available online while simultaneously experimenting with the impact of fostering, creating, and curating a large, socially constructed archive. The project will develop a click-through permissions form for content contributors and will extend the reach of the Grateful Dead Archive to the academic research community. It will also implement and contribute to the development of the IMLS-funded exhibition tool, Omeka

Details are sketchy so far on how this project will roll out, but what we do know is UC Santa Cruz was awarded $615,175 (match: $795,549) in an effort that appears to include a social component.

Socially interactive collections are the holy grail of Web 2.0 digital archives. We all dream that we will be able to go online, and our users will naturally form a self sustaining user group which will then generate additional interest, fill in gaps in our accessions, make us generally famous in the academic world, and (we hope), generate new donor leads. The constant of creating these interactive collections however, is that they require more resources to moderate over time then a library or museum can usually afford, and there is no guarantee that a user population will latch on to the collection and make it bloom.

Many of these concerns are erased in the Santa Cruz Grateful Dead archive. The Grateful dead user community is as eager and active online as it was when the dead were still touring. The Internet Archives vast collection of audio files http://www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead has no shortage of user input, and the reviews are as prolific as they are factually accurate and informative. A collaboration or crossover into that storehouse should provide an additional flow of informed users that in turn, will supplement what the press releases are calling a "Socially constructed" archive, in a structure that looks like it will function like a wiki. The immediate question I have is, how much of their resources is Santa Cruz willing to hand over to policing these content contributors? It seems to me that the context of the Grateful Dead archive demands a hands off policy. How much control over user input will there be and what I wonder are the policies concerning moderating user input? In a community where a vast number of outside hobbyist users will have a stunning (and occasionally controversial) historical and cultural memory of the collection, how will users react to stringent rules by academics?

UC SANTA CRUZ PRESS RELEASE

Grateful Dead donates archives to UC Santa Cruz.

Susan Chun Cultural Heritage Consultant

In reviewing portions of the Denver IMLS Conference today I was struck again by Susan's words as something I have thought and said a hundred times to what seemed to be deaf ears.

Gaining Intellectual Control

25:10:

"Your decision about which standards to apply should and will be your own. Institutions should, in adopting data and content standards, should embrace these standards because doing so will enhance their ability to manage store or find data either in house or online. They should reject standards that make their cataloging processes too costly or too time consuming..."

she goes on to define several different facets of data standards that are explored and applied for best practices, and then makes this point,

"you may want to keep in mind that the same philosophies and methods that are used to create standards to support interoperability between institutions and communities, can also be used effectively within your institution, to support interoperability between multiple collection types or departments. You can choose to apply standards locally but not adhere to external standards and vice versa."

I am sure this went right over the heads of many of the participants but listen to what she is saying. A national standard is only as good as the paper its written on unless that standard makes your collection(s) WORK. During my work here in the Architecture and Design Collection as part of an IMLS grant to digitize the Irving J. Gill collection and the Kem weber collection, I am adhering to the standards of the SAA in processing architecture collections. Yet, I can see that this institution would benefit dramatically in many ways, from an expansion and modification of those standards, a modification that would highlight the collections contents according to its exhibition worthy content, and divide and sort it by thematic datatypes. This is a museum, relying on its permanent collection to provide background and content for the gallery year in and year out, and all of its finding tools should support that constant. Unfortunately, the external standards seem to be dictating the pragmatic cataloging of the institution and there is a serious and inflexible barrier to modifying those standards. There must be a way to impress on institution managers when and where to break out of the box. I just need to find it.

It can not be overstated: modification of externally accepted standards does not predicate a rejection of those standards!

NARA digs out of digital avalanche

http://fcw.com/articles/2009/09/14/nara-era-dig-out-of-digital-records-avalanche.aspx

A key tool in the National Archives and Records Administration’s strategy for tackling its digital challenges is the Electronic Records Archives (ERA). NARA officials say their $550 million development effort will result in archives in which electronic documents are available perpetually despite on-going changes in hardware and software. Here are the milestones for their plan....

http://techpresident.com/blog-entry/who-needs-presidential-libraries-when-youve-got-web

The article goes on to detail the extent of the new library and winds its way around the titles premise. Of course anyone who has ever worked in an archive knows that the brick and mortar portion of the library exists primarily as the controlled preservation center and "Corporate headquarters" of any collection. While much of our work can be done remotely there will always be a need for physical control. This article misses the opportunity to convey just how much more global the library experience is becoming. We can no longer consider each library outlet a primary servant of its local user population. We have to examine our users in terms of our unique content. Unique content has a global draw and thus over time will actually be used more then locally accessible material. Whether this shifts our resource allocation and our emphasis is on on our users from the local to the global is still hotly debated of course but opinions are and will continue to shift.