Session Title: Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation Speaker:Melissa Terras
Overview: Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.
Session Highlights
Areas of “Amateur” endeavor have a long history of launching collections, such as:
cabinet of curiosities
foundation of astronomical research
british flora and amateur botanists
weather observations
open source software movement
Being an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean being bad at what you do!
Within the realm of self-defined museums some common topics often emerge:
ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia)
comics
technology – especially old tech, there is a surprising trend of being fascinated by technology approximately 10 years older than the collector
personal and “embarrassing” collections
genealogy
For these self-defined museums the scope is self-defined – these are self-delineated collections. Virtual museums can document aspects of cultural heritage considered socially taboo or in some way too sensitive to collect. A great example of this is the Museum of Menstruation which claims to have been created 14 years ago and is currently trying to establish a public permenant display for the public.
Session Title: Digital Lives: How people create, manipulate and store their personal digital archives Speaker:Peter Williams, UCL
Digital lives is a joint project of UCL, British Library and University of Bristol
What? We need a better understanding of how people manage digital collections on their laptops, pdas and home computers. This is important due to the transition from paper-based personal collections to digital collections. The hope is to help people manage their digital archives before the content gets to the archives.
How? Talk to people with in-depth narrative interview. Ask people of their very first memories of information technology. When did they first use the computer? Do they have anything from that computer? How did they move the content from that computer? People enjoyed giving this narrative digital history of their lives.
Who? 25 interviewees – both established and emerging people whose works would or might be of interest to repositories of the future.
Findings?
They created a detailed flowchart of users’ reported process of document manipulation.
Common patterns in use of email showed that people used email across all these platforms and environments. Preserving email is not just a case of saving one account’s messages:
For my test I searched for an exact match on “Ticket with portrait of George Washington”. This returns one result – the one image in Flickr with the same name, from The Field Museum in Flickr Commons. If you click on the ‘More Filters’ link, you will see other ways to filter your results – including the option to restrict your results to only include images whose creators permit reuse.
Next I clicked in the ‘Creator allows reuse’ and my one result disappeared! Quite disappointing in my book.
Navigating the rapidly changing landscape of new technology is a major challenge for archivists. As quickly as new technologies come to market, people adopt them and use them to generate records. Businesses, non-profits and academic institutions constantly strive to find ways to be more efficient and to cut their budgets. New technology often offers the promise of cost reductions. In this age of constantly evolving software and technological innovation, how do archivists know when a new technology is important or established enough to take note of? When do the records generated by the latest and greatest technology matter enough to save?
Below I have include two diagrams that seek to illustrate the process of adopting new technology. I think they are both useful in aiding our thinking on this topic.
<physdesc label="Extent:" encodinganalog="300$a">
77 linear feet (approximately 44,000 items)
</physdesc>
Contrast this with one of the examples where the size of the collection was extracted properly by the current script:
<physdesc label="Extent:" encodinganalog="300$a">
<extent>8.4 linear feet</extent>
(14 boxes)
</physdesc>
Sometimes it feels like a game of Where’s Waldo. In this case we are simply missing the set of <extent> tags from the first example. Off I went to the EAD tag descriptions to find the guidelines for use of the <physdesc> tag, where I found this overview of the tag:
Amanda Ross, project archivist for the Forest History Society, sent me 57 EAD finding aids to include in the ArchivesZ project. These are the data challenges that the current data extraction script does not address:
Titles with embedded tags or punctuation. Generally the script drops anything after it hits either, so rather than a title like William E. Towell Papers, 1941 – 1988, my database ended up only with “William E Towell Papers,” based on this encoding: <titleproper>Inventory of the William E. Towell Papers, <date normal=”1941/1988″>1941 – 1988</date></titleproper>
The presence of a <lb/> character within the <extent> tag, used to force a line break, is preventing my script from extracting any size information at all (as found in the Inventory of the DeWitt Nelson Papers, 1940 – 1976)
There are still spaces available in a workshop I am giving May 6, 2009 at the University of Maryland’s iSchool. The workshop, titled Benefits of Blogging: Why you should start a blog today!, is free and open to anyone in the University of Maryland community.
This is the workshop description:
Blogging is an easy way to build your professional network, improve your writing and get your ideas out there. Information professionals need to understand how to take advantage of the promise of blogs, both to support their careers as well as a tool for institutions. This workshop will be led by an active blogger who has found great success in becoming part of a broader community via her blog. Learn about free tools, things to keep in mind and why you should start a blog today.
When: 5pm Wednesday May 6, 2009
Where: iSchool Student Lab, Hornbake South room 2108
Are you interested in this session, but not affiliated with the University of Maryland? Please let me know, either via my contact form or a comment below, and I will see what I can do about putting together another session off-campus.
These finding aids have helped me identify three types of ArchivesZ data challenges:
strange characters
broad composite subjects
determination of accurate collection size
Strange and mysterious characters!
These finding aids use a special character in the place of the standard Library of Congress double dash which normally appears between subsections of the subject heading.
An example subject from the Utah Government XML looks like this:
Women—Suffrage—Utah.
Viewing the same subject in a pure text editor (such as vi):
Women—Suffrage—Utah.
By the time it gets into my database and is pulled out via a query in MySQL Query Browser it looks like this:
Women—Suffrage—Utah.
Rather than just stripping out all instances of —, my plan is to replace them with the standard Library of Congress double dash. This will ensure that the existing code that breaks the subjects down to tags will still work.
Overall, it was a great experience. I wish I could have been in multiple rooms at the same time so I could have seen more posters and presentations. I also wished I had understood that I could have presented with either a poster or a power point deck. That was not entirely clear ahead of time. The downside of of my choice was being tied to my poster, but the upside is that I still have the poster that can be examined by readers like you. Obviously it all worked out in the end.
A big thanks to everyone in the Graduate Student Government who worked so hard to bring this event together.
Session Title: Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation
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results – including the option to restrict your results to only include images whose creators permit reuse.
The title says it all. 