The California Digital LIbrary, OAC, and digital image collections

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

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

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

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