Loculamenta

Digital Camera in the Archives

2010-02-26T09:15:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

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

The three things

Digital Oral History!

2009-09-28T16:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-25T10:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-11T12:18:00.000-07:00

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....

2009-08-28T14:23:00.001-07:00

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.

Image truncation, workflow "Check" steps and Adobe Suite

2009-04-01T11:12:00.000-07:00

Truncated images are corrupt image files. Occasionally, computers can still draw a thumbnail version of an image even if it is truncated. Adobe will discover the problem while processing making the extra labor involved behave like a "check" during processing workflow. I'm obsessed with creating "check" phases in normal workflow so I can eliminate a lengthy proofing period after completion which always occurs at or around deadline time.

The California Digital LIbrary, OAC, and digital image collections

2008-12-12T10:00:00.000-08:00

Having worked with the CDL, Berkeley, and the OAC producing catalogues for over 14000 images over the past 4 years, ...

Stop it with the Archivists Tool Kit already

2008-08-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

Seriously

http://www.archiviststoolkit.org/

I am literally wavering on the edge of simply accepting that this tool is going to become one of those hopeless dinosaurs that everyone uses because everyone uses it. It is still in my estimation, a tool that attempts to substitute xml coding skills (Such as those in EAD, MARCXML, METS, etc.), with an arcane skill in using an overly generalized software program. No help list is more rife with misunderstanding and confusion then the list serve in my mailbox for Archivist toolkit, yet this also may be a sign of how broadly accepted it is.

Is it easy to use? Initially, but is it easy to make do what YOU need it to do? No. You will need to know how to play with XML style sheets to make it output properly, and if you know that, then why would you need to input your finding aid into Archivist toolkit when you could have just marked it up from text form?

I have always warned the collection managers I have worked with against accepting that any software program will somehow do away with the need for expert operators, but AT seems to promise precisely that. What all managers forget, is that they are merely trading off one expertise for another. In this case, in what is and will be the primary markup language that provides actual and usable interoperability(XML), for expertise in a software program. (AT.) They are still going to require a database specialist to use AT, wheres the savings?

Heres my prediction. When AT provides a working digital object instance, I am going to be asked to use it again by some institution. Its an inevitable inertia. I'm being asked to use it now, and even the archivist I work with acknowledges that the work we are doing in AT will go largely ignored once these grants are done. But, as I am doing now, eve after they make the improvements everyone is demanding, it is still going to be easier to mark up a text output for those objects then it will be to input them into AT.

The lesson that should always stand, and always will, do not get married to software.

The Denver IMLS conference

2008-06-25T09:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.imls.gov/news/prisource/Jun08.shtm

Whether you like it or not, the IMLS thrived and will continue to expand and thrive due to the Laura Bush 21rst Century Librarian Program...

While I am and probably always will be one of those people at the conferences who thinks they already know everything there is to know about the new information age, the Denver conference provided an excellent review of where we are going with digital collaboration. One of the most popular or in my estimation forward looking, presentation in my opinion was during the "Gaining Intellectual Control Cataloging and Metadata: Some Simple Strategies." By Susan Chung who went on to examine the role of steve.museum in tagging and the role of the public and general users in creating metadata as a part of work that is invariably done during the process of collection processing so that cataloging becomes an automated process. Most of the proposed ideas were way outside the scope of ordinary library work, but at some point this consolidation of cataloging and "normal" archive and content auditing as one process will probably be accepted as obvious. It is only the way we continue to segregate our digital and electronic background structure from the physical processing that keeps us from doing it now. As usual we face a situation where the "legacy" library work is keeping us from moving properly into the modern electronic library world.

Chung went on to explain the ways that the public and our users can provide metadata. This is the holy grail of metadata creation in my opinion and something that runs head on into the wall of the legacy library.

the wunderkammer

2008-06-11T08:55:00.000-07:00

http://www.a-website.org/mnemosyne/arrange/pages/6wunder.html
"The cabinet of curiosities, or Wunderkammer, was designed to facilitate an encyclopaedic enterprise, the aim of which was the collection and preservation of the whole of knowledge. The earliest encyclopaedic practices were set within a classical framework whereby new observations and practical experiments were seen as the continuation of work initiated by the great ancient thinkers, such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder. Working within this framework, many early encyclopaedists turned to empirical activities in an effort to resolve the questions prompted by the close analysis of ancient texts, made increasingly accessible during the decades immediately following the invention of the printing press. Over time, however, these activities began to reveal new truths in conflict with the tenets of classical doctrine. As a result, they began to undermine the established authority of the ancients, thereby paving the way for new methods of 'scientific' investigation.

"In the museum of Mr. John Tradescant are the following things: first in the courtyard there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them. In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree, a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright colored birds from India, a number of things changed into stone, amongst others a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese, etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror when this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of rinocerode, a cup of an E. Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn, many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 lbs., Indian arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies- when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it, an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision, some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the King of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, a S. Francis in wax under glass, as also a S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon are graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones'."Georg Christoph Stirn 1638

from The Tradescant Collection