I couldn’t let MayDay 2008 pass without pointing everyone to the amazing annotated list of MayDay resources that the Society of American Archivists (SAA) has made available.

Does your institution have a disaster plan?
If not, the list of resources include a detailed set of Free Disaster Plan Templates. Today is the perfect day to download one and start planning.

A full disaster plan too overwhelming? SAA also provides a tidy list of easy MayDay activity ideas including:

Create or Update Your Contact Lists
One of the most important elements of disaster response is knowing how to contact critical people – emergency responders, staff, and vendors. Make sure your staff members have an up-to-date list that includes as much contact information as possible: work and home phone numbers (including direct lines at work), mobile phone numbers, work and home email addresses, and any other relevant addresses. Staff at many institutions hit by hurricanes in 2005 discovered that they couldn’t use work email or phone numbers because work systems were completely out of commission; those who had an alternative phone number or email address often could connect.

• SAA2006: Joint Annual Meeting of NAGARA, COSA, and SAA
  
• Unofficial SAA2007 Chicago Conference Wiki Now Online
  
• SAA2007: Archives and E-Commerce, Three Case Studies (Session 404)
  
• SAA 2007 Session Proposal: Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World
  

Dan Cohen posted yesterday about what he calls The Pirate Problem. Basically the Pirate Problem can be summed up as “there are ways of acting and thinking that we can’t understand or anticipate.” Why is that a ‘Pirate Problem’? Because a pirate pub opened near his home and rather than folding shortly thereafter due to lack of interest from the ‘very serious professionals’ who populate DC suburbs - the pub was a rousing success due to the pirate aficionados who came out of the woodwork to sing sea shanties and drink grog. This surprising turn of events highlighted for him the fact that there are many ways of acting and thinking (some people even know all the words to sea shanties without needing sheet music).

Dan recently delivered the keynote speech at a workshop at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The workshop brought together dozens of historians to talk about how the 16 million archival documents of the Southern Historical Collection (SHC) should be put online. He devoted his keynote “to prodding the attendees into recognizing that the future of archives and research might not be like the past” and goes on in his post to explain:

• Considering Historians, Archivists and Born Digital Records
  
• OBR: Optical Braille Recognition
  
• SAA 2007 Session Proposal: Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World
  
• Footnote.com and US National Archives records
  

I figured it couldn’t hurt to let folks know I am in Miami for the IA Summit. Anyone else from this corner of the world headed this way? If so, either drop a comment here or ping me over in IA Summit’s CrowdVine.

• The Archives and Archivists Listserv: hoping for a stay of execution
  
• Will Crashed Hard Drives Ever Equal Unlabeled Cardboard Boxes?
  
• Archival Context and Description - Taking It to the Next Level
  
• 129th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s Invention of the Phonograph
  

Thanks to Digitization 101’s post I learned about the Copyright Slider. A creation of the ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) - you can find more official information over on ALA’s Washington Office blog (Let the OITP Copyright Slider Answer Your Questions!) and order one of your own for only a bit more than $5 (less if you order in bulk).

The Copyright Slider lets you answer questions such as (quoting the post linked to above):

• Is a work in the public domain?
• Do you need permission to use it?
• When does copyright expire?

Here is their example of how it might be used:

A library in rural Pennsylvania is digitizing its local historical collection on the copper mining industry in the region. One of the collection texts, Memoirs of a Copper Miner, was published in 1953 and is still protected by copyright. Or is it? Align the black arrow on the slide-chart to materials published between 1923 and 1963 and discover that works originally published in the U.S. between 1923 and 1977 without a copyright symbol are in the public domain! Memoirs of a Copper Miner was published in 1953 and does not have a copyright symbol. Let the digitizing begin!

• DMCA Exemption Added That Supports Archivists
  
• Copyright Law: Archives, Digital Materials and Section 108
  
• ISSUU: Interesting Platform for Online Publishing
  
• Public.Resource.Org: Creative Financing and Public Domain Content
  

I found another reason recently to be excited about the progress of SAA’s online presence. Buried in the ARCHIVES 2008: Archival R/Evolution & Identities Checklist for Presenters is first tidbits of a plan to provide access to PDF versions of conference presentations on the SAA website.

Send an Electronic Copy of Your Presentation to SAA. The conference organizers would like to offer meeting attendees the opportunity to view presentations after the conference on the SAA 2008 Annual Meeting website (www.archivists.org). If you’ll supply a copy of your presentation, we’ll convert it to a PDF and post it. Please note that by sending SAA a copy of your presentation in electronic format, you grant permission for your presentation to be viewed by all SAA 2008 Annual Meeting attendees.

I am so pleased! I have always wanted access to the presentations - both for those sessions I attend and those I cannot. I have often been that person hovering at the edge of the stage after a panel, waiting to request a soft copy of the presentation.

• Overall Conference Impressions
  
• SAA2006: Joint Annual Meeting of NAGARA, COSA, and SAA
  
• Reflections on SAA2007 and Ten Tips for an Optimal Conference Experience
  
• Unofficial SAA2007 Chicago Conference Wiki Now Online
  

The Society of American Archivists has officially launched American Archivist Online (also available via the Members Only page once you login to archvists.org).

Here are a few key points that caught my eye from the FAQ :

• Content is available as PDF files with embedded searchable text (one file per article or section of the journal)
• It is hosted by MetaPress
• The online version will be produced in parallel with the print version

What issues are online?

Fall/Winter 2000 (Volume 63 - Number 2) through the most recent issue - Fall/Winter 2007. The FAQ reports that additional back issues will be digitized over time.

How is it structured?

Each journal article is a separate PDF file. Talk about a boon to graduate students and archives professors everywhere! Even the front matter is there separated out - perfect for printing and attaching to your article printouts for future reference. Of course, if you are feeling green (and better at reading on screen than I am) you can bookmark them or save them locally for future reference.

Who can access it?

• SAA2008: PDFs of Conference Presentations
  
• Overall Conference Impressions
  
• SAA2006: Joint Annual Meeting of NAGARA, COSA, and SAA
  
• Reflections on SAA2007 and Ten Tips for an Optimal Conference Experience
  

Issuu, with the tag line ‘Read the world. Publish the world.’ and pronounced ‘issue’, gives anyone the ability to upload a PDF document and publish it as an online magazine. I am intrigued by the possibilities of using this service to publish digitized archival records - especially those that would lend themselves to a ‘book’ style presentation (thinking here of a ledger or equivalent).

I am not sure I totally understand the implications of the Issuu Terms of service… especially this part:

By distributing or disseminating Uploader Submissions through the Issuu Service, you hereby grant to Issuu a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, assignable, fully paid-up, royalty-free, license to host, transfer, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and otherwise exploit your Uploader Submissions, in any media forms or formats, and through any media channels, now known or hereafter devised, including without limitation, RSS feeds, embeddable functionality, and syndication arrangements in order to distribute, promote or advertise your Uploader Submissions through the Issuu Service.

If I am following that properly, all the rights you are granting to the Issuu Service are only for the purposes of their distribution of your uploaded PDF.

• My New Daydream: A Hosting Service for Digitized Collections
  
• DMCA Exemption Added That Supports Archivists
  
• RSS and Mainstream News Outlets
  
• Footnote.com and US National Archives records
  

From May 31st through June 2nd of 2006, The National Archives, the Arizona State Library and Archives, and the Society of American Archivists hosted a colloquium to consider the question “What are the practical, technical skills that all library and records professionals must have to work with e-books, electronic records, and other digital materials?”. The website for the New Skills for a Digital Era colloquium already includes links to the eleven case studies considered over the course of the three days of discussion as well as a list of additional suggested readings. As mentioned over on The Ten Thousand Year Blog, the pre-print of the proceedings has been available since August, 2007.

As announced in SAA’s online newsletter, the Official Proceedings of the New Skills for a Digital Era Colloquium, edited by Richard Pearce-Moses and Susan E. Davis, is now available for free download. Published under Creative Commons Attribution, this document is 143 pages long and includes all the original case studies. I have a lot of reading to do!

The meat of the proceedings consists of a 32 page ‘Knowledge and Skills Inventory’ and a page and a half of reflections - both co-authored by Richard Pearce-Moses and Susan E. Davis. The Keynote Address by Margaret Hedstrom titled ‘Are We Ready for New Skills Yet?’ is also included.

• Chapters and Loose Papers: A Newsletter for Students of Archival Science
  
• Blog Action Day: A Look At Earth Day as Archived Online
  
• Question from the Archives of American Art and EAD talk (session 305)
  
• Considering Historians, Archivists and Born Digital Records
  

This week both Dan Cohen’s blog and ArchivesNext posted about the new Archives Wiki sponsored by the American Historical Association (AHA). The AHA blog summarizes the goals of this wiki as:

…we hope that by harnessing this (relatively) new technology for collaboration on the web, we can draw on the collective interests of thousands of researchers and archivists to develop a rich resource for anyone venturing into new archives for the first time.

The AHA post goes on to express the hope that the wiki “will provide a deeper level of information than the rather general information on most archival web sites”. Setting aside the question of if this wiki will reach critical mass with regard to contributions, the idea of collecting lots of information about archives and their collections got me thinking again about Freebase.com.

My earlier post, Metadata World Building: Freebase.com and OpenLibrary.org, considers the potential of using Freebase to build a set of structured data about archival institutions. I believe in the spirit behind the Archives Wiki, but I wish that the rich set of information that is going to be captured was being stuck into multiple attributes rather than free-form wiki text. I know that they have contributor guidelines , but that isn’t enough for me.

• Metadata World Building: Freebase.com and OpenLibrary.org
  
• WorldCat Identities: Visualizing Library Catalog Data
  
• Visualizing Archival Collections
  
• Redacting Data - A T-Shirt and Other Thoughts
  

Volume 2, Issue 1 of the student publication Chapters and Loose Papers is now online. Quoting the publication’s About Page: “Chapters and Loose Papers is the official SAA newsletter for students of Archival Science.”

Congratulations to the full editorial board listed in the current issue: Walter Butler (UCLA), Maureen Callahan, and Andrea Medina-Smith (Simmons College). It is a nice mix of reports from student SAA chapters, book reviews and short essays on a variety of topics. The essays included cover archives in the news, special projects and technology topics. On a personal note, I was pleased to see abbreviated versions of two of my blog posts officially ‘in print’.

For those of you who are students, Chapters and Loose Papers is looking for submissions for Volume 2, Issue 2. The deadline is March 1, 2008 and you can e-mail your writing directly to walterb333@aol.com. The official theme for this issue is Community Service. Submissions are welcome from Student SAA Chapters as well as individuals.

Topics of interest listed for this issue are:

• Student Chapter Happenings
• Student Projects:
  • Papers
  • Research Pursuits
  • Community Involvement
• Internship Experiences
• Technology

• Big Digital Step For SAA: American Archivist Online
  
• The Archives and Archivists Listserv: hoping for a stay of execution
  
• Book Review: Digital Preservation
  
• SAA2007: Opening Plenary Session Ponders Diversity