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Year: 2007

Digital Preservation via Emulation – Dioscuri and the Prevention of Digital Black Holes

dioscuri.JPGAvailable Online posted about the open source emulator project Dioscuri back in late September. In the course of researching Thoughts on Digital Preservation, Validation and Community I learned a bit about the Microsoft Virtual PC software. Virtual PC permits users to run multiple operating systems on the same physical computer and can therefore facilitate access to old software that won’t run on your current operating system. That emulator approach pales in comparison with what the folks over at Dioscuri are planning and building.

On the Digital Preservation page of the Dioscuri website I found this paragraph on their goals:

To prevent a digital black hole, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands, and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project to research and develop a solution. Both institutions have a large amount of traditional documents and are very familiar with preservation over the long term. However, the amount of digital material (publications, archival records, etc.) is increasing with a rapid pace. To manage them is already a challenge. But as cultural heritage organisations, more has to be done to keep those documents safe for hundreds of years at least.

They are nothing if not ambitious… they go on to state:

Although many people recognise the importance of having a digital preservation strategy based on emulation, it has never been taken into practice. Of course, many emulators already exist and showed the usefulness and advantages it offer. But none of them have been designed to be digital preservation proof. For this reason the National Library and Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project on emulation.

The aim of the emulation project is to develop a new preservation strategy based on emulation.

Dioscuri is part of Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access via NETworked Services) – run by the Planets consortium and coordinated by the British Library. The Dioscuri team has created an open source emulator that can be ported to any hardware that can run a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Individual hardware components are implemented via separate modules. These modules should make it possible to mimic many different hardware configurations without creating separate programs for every possible combination.

You can get a taste of the big thinking that is going into this work by reviewing the program overview and slide presentations from the first Emulation Expert Meeting (EEM) on digital preservation that took place on October 20th, 2006.

In the presentation given by Geoffrey Brown from Indiana University titled Virtualizing the CIC Floppy Disk Project: An Experiment in Preservation Using Emulation I found the following simple answer to the question ‘Why not just migrate?’:

  • Loss of information — e.g. word edits

  • Loss of fidelity — e.g. WordPerfect to Word isn’t very good

  • Loss of authenticity — users of migrated document need access to original to verify authenticity

  • Not always possible — closed proprietary formats

  • Not always feasible — costs may be too high

  • Emulation may necessary to enable migration

After reading through Emulation at the German National Library, presented by Tobias Steinke, I found my way to the kopal website. With their great tagline ‘Data into the future’, they state their goal is “…to develop a technological and organizational solution to ensure the long-term availability of electronic publications.” The real gem for me on that site is what they call the kopal demonstrator. This is a well thought out Flash application that explains the kopal project’s ‘procedures for archiving and accessing materials’ within the OAIS Reference Model framework. But it is more than that – if you are looking for a great way to get your (or someone else’s) head around digital archiving, software and related processes – definitely take a look. They even include a full Glossary.

I liked what I saw in Defining a preservation policy for a multimedia and software heritage collection, a pragmatic attempt from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a presentation by Grégory Miura, but felt like I was missing some of the guts by just looking at the slides. I was pleased to discover what appears to be a related paper on the same topic presented at IFLA 2006 in Seoul titled: Pushing the boundaries of traditional heritage policy: Maintaining long-term access to multimedia content by introducing emulation and contextualization instead of accepting inevitable loss . Hurrah for NOT ‘accepting inevitable loss’.

Vincent Joguin’s presentation, Emulating emulators for long-term digital objects preservation: the need for a universal machine, discussed a virtual machine project named Olonys. If I understood the slides correctly, the idea behind Olonys is to create a “portable and efficient virtual processor”. This would provide an environment in which to run programs such as emulators, but isolate the programs running within it from the disparities between the original hardware and the actual current hardware. Another benefit to this approach is that only the virtual processor need be ported to new platforms rather than each individual program or emulator.

Hilde van Wijngaarden presented an Introduction to Planets at EEM. I also found another introductory level presentation that was given by Jeffrey van der Hoeven at wePreserve in September of 2007 titled Dioscuri: emulation for digital preservation.

The wePreserve site is a gold mine for presentations on these topics. They bill themselves as “the window on the synergistic activities of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR), and Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services (PLANETS).” If you have time and curiosity on the subject of digital preservation, take a glance down their home page and click through to view some of the presentations.

On the site of The International Journal of Digital Curation there is a nice ten page paper that explains the most recent results of the Dioscuri project. Emulation for Digital Preservation in Practice: The Results was published in December 2007. I like being able to see slides from presentations (as linked to above), but without the notes or audio to go with them I am often left staring at really nice diagrams wondering what the author’s main point was. The paper is thorough and provides lots of great links to other reading, background and related projects.

There is a lot to dig into here. It is enough to make me wish I had a month (maybe a year?) to spend just following up on this topic alone. I found my struggle to interpret many of the Power Point slide decks that have no notes or audio very ironic. Here I was hunting for information about the preservation of born digital records and I kept finding that the records of the research provided didn’t give me the full picture. With no context beyond the text and images on the slides themselves, I was left to my own interpretation of their intended message. While I know that these presentations are not meant to be the official records of this research, I think that the effort obviously put into collecting and posting them makes it clear that others are as anxious as I to see this information.

The best digital preservation model in the world will only preserve what we choose to save. I know the famous claim on the web is that ‘content is king’ – but I would hazard to suggest that in the cultural heritage community ‘context is king’.

What does this have to do with Dioscuri and emulators? Just that as we solve the technical problems related to preservation and access, I believe that we will circle back around to realize that digital records need the same careful attention to appraisal, selection and preservation of context as ‘traditional’ records. I would like to believe that the huge hurdles we now face on the technical and process side of things will fade over time due to the immense efforts of dedicated and brilliant individuals. The next big hurdle is the same old hurdle – making sure the records we fight to preserve have enough context that they will mean anything to those in the future. We could end up with just as severe a ‘digital black hole’ due to poorly selected or poorly documented records as we could due to records that are trapped in a format we can no longer access. We need both sides of the coin to succeed in digital preservation.

Did I mention the part about ‘Hurray for open source emulator projects with ambitious goals for digital preservation’? Right. I just wanted to be clear about that.

Image Credit: The image included at the top of this post was taken from a screen shot of Dioscuri itself, the original version of which may be seen here.

Will Crashed Hard Drives Ever Equal Unlabeled Cardboard Boxes?

Photo of Crashed Hard Drive - wonderferret on FlickrHow many of us have an old hard drive hanging around? I am talking about the one you were told was unfixable. The one that has 3 bad sectors. The one they replaced and handed to you in one of those distinctive anti-static bags. You know the ones I mean – the steely grey translucent plastic ones that look like they should contain space food.

I have more than one ‘dead’ hard drive. I can’t quite bring myself to throw them out – but I have no immediate plans to try and reclaim their files.

I know that there are services and techniques for pulling data off otherwise inaccessible hard drives. You hear about it in court cases and see it on TV shows. A quick Google search on hard drive rescue turns up businesses like Disk Data Recovery

Do archivists already make it a policy to hunt not just for computers, but for discarded and broken hard drives lurking in filing cabinets and desk drawers? Compare this to a carton of documents that needed special treatment to permit access to the records they contained and yet are appraised as valuable. If the treatment required were within budgetary and time constraints – it would be performed. Mold, bugs, rusty staples, photos that are stuck together… archivists generally know where to get the answers they need to tackle these sorts of problems. I suspect that a hard drive advertised or discovered to be broken would be treated more like an empty box than a moldy box.

For now I would stack this challenge near the bottom of the list below archiving digital records that we can access easily but that run on old hardware or software, but I can imagine a time when standard hard drive rescue techniques will need to be a tool for the average archivist.

Using WWI Draft Registration Cards for Research: NARA Records Provide Crucial Data

NARA:   	 World War I photograph, 1918 (ARC Identifier: 285374)

In the HealthDay article Having Lots of Kids Helps Dads Live to 100, a recent study was described that examined what increased the chances of a man living past 100.

A young, trim farmer with four or more children: According to a new study, that’s the ideal profile for American men hoping to reach 100 years of age. The research, based largely on data from World War I draft cards, suggests that keeping off excess weight in youth, farming and fathering a large number of offspring all help men live past a century.

The article mentions that this research was “spurred by the fact that a treasure trove of information about 20th-century American males has now been put online”. The study was based out of the University of Chicago’s Center on Aging. The paper, New Findings on Human Longevity Predictors, includes the following reference:

Banks, R. (2000). World War I Civilian Draft Registrations. [database on-line]. Provo, UT, Ancestry.com.

With an account on Ancestry.com, you too could examine the online database of World War I Draft Registration Cards. This Ancestry.com page notes the source of the original data as:

United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls

NARA’s page for the World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, M1509 includes similar background information to what can be found on the Ancestry.com page, but of course – no access to the actual records.

It is frustrating to a study based on archival records that is making the news, but that does not make it clear to the reader that archival records were the source for the research. As I discussed at length in my post Epidemiological Research and Archival Records: Source of Records Used for Research Fails to Make the News, I feel that it is very important to take every opportunity to help the general public understand how archival records are supporting research that impacts our understanding of the world around us. I appreciate that partnering with 3rd parties to get government records digitized is often the only option – but I want people to be clear about why those records still exist in the first place.

Photo Credit: US. National Archives, World War I Photographs, 1918. Army photographs. Battle of St. Mihiel-American Engineers returning from the front; tank going over the top; group photo of the 129th Machine gun Battalion, 35th Division before leaving for the front; views of headquarters of the 89th Division next to destroyed bridge; Company E, 314th Engineers, 89th Division, and making rolling barbed wire entanglements. NAIL Control Number: NRE-75-HAS(PHO)-65

SAA2007: Archives and E-Commerce, Three Case Studies (Session 404)

George Washington US DollarDiane Kaplan, of Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives unit, started off Session 404 (officially titled Exploring the Headwaters of the Revenue Stream) by thanking everyone for showing up for the last session of the day. This was a one hour session that examined ways to generate new funds through e-commerce . Three different e-commerce case studies were presented, followed by a short question and answer period.

University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center

Mark Shelstad‘s presentation, “Show Me the Money: Or: How Do We Pay for This?”, detailed the approach taken by the University of Wyoming‘s American Heritage Center (AHC) to find alternate revenue streams. After completing a digitization project in the fall of 2004, the AHC had to figure out how to continue their project after their original grant money ran out.

Since they didn’t have a lot of in-house resources, they chose Zazzle.com for their effort to profit from their existing high resolution images. They can earn up to 17% from the sales through a combination of affiliate sales and profits from the sale of products featuring American Heritage Center images.

They had a lot of good reasons for choosing Zazzle.com. Zazzle.com already had an existing ‘special collections’ area, meaning that their images would have a better chance of being found by those interested in their offerings (for example – take a look at the Library of Congress Vintage Photos store). Zazzle.com also did not require an exclusive license to the images. The American Heritage Center Zazzle on-line store opened in 2005.

Currently they are making about $30 a month in royalties from 200 images. Mark pointed out that everyone needs to keep in mind that the major photo provider, Corbis, has yet to turn a profit in online photo sales. He also mentioned a website called Cogteeth.com that lets you click on any image and use those images on t-shirts, mugs.. etc.

Near the end of his talk, Mark shared an amazing idea to create a non-profit that would be a joint organization for featuring and selling products using archival images. I love it! It is easy to see that many archives are small and don’t have the infrastructure to create and run their own e-commerce websites. At the same time, general sites that let anyone set up a store to sell items with custom images on them threaten to loose the special nature of historical images in the shuffle. Even the special collections section of Zazzle lumps the American Heritage Center and the Library of Congress collections with Disney and Star Wars. I would love to see this idea grow!

Minnesota Historical Society

Kathryn Otto of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) spoke next. She first gave an overview of traditional services provided by MHS for a fee, such as photocopies, reader-printer copies, microfilm sales, media sales, inter-library loan fees, classes and photograph sales. MHS also earned income via standard use fees and research services.

The first e-commerce initiative at MHS was the sale of Minnesota State Death Certificates from 1904 – 2001. Made available via the Minnesota Death Certificate Index they provide the same data as Ancestry.com, but the MHS index provides a better search interface. They have had users tell them that they couldn’t find something on Ancestry.com – but that they were able to find what they needed on the MHS site.

To their existing Visual Resources Database, MHS also added a buy button for most images. Extra steps were added into the standard buy process to deal with the addition of a use fee depending on how the purchaser claims the image will ultimately be used. One approach that did not work for them was to offer expensively printed pre-selected images. The historical society sells classes online and can handle member vs non-member rates. TheVeterans Graves Registration Index is a tiny database that was created by reusing the interface used for the death certificates.

The Birth Certificate Index provides “single, non-certified copies of individual birth certificates reproduced from the originals” via the website.. while “[o]fficial, certified copies of these birth certificates are available through the Minnesota Department of Health.” The MHS site provides much faster and easier service than the Department of Health as can be seen from this page detailing how to order a non-certified copy of a birth record from the DOH – which requires printing, filling out and either faxing or snail mailing a form.

Features to keep in mind as you branch into in e-commerce:

  • Statistics – Consider the types of statistics you want. Their system just gave them info about orders – not how much they made.
  • Sales tax – Figure out how is it handled
  • Postage/Handling fees – Look at the details! The MHS Library-Archives was stuck with the Museum Store’s postage rates because the e-commerce system could not handle different fees for different types of objects.
  • Can’t afford credit card fees? Consider PayPal.
  • Advertise what you are selling on your own website.

Godfrey Memorial Library, Middletown, CT

The final panelist was Richard Black, Director of the Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut. The Godfrey is a small, non-profit, genealogical research library with approximately 120,000 genealogical items. They currently have 5 full time staff and 60 volunteers.

Services they provide:

About 3 years ago they had exhausted all of their endowment money and faced the strong possibility of closing the doors. They were down to one full time librarian and a few volunteers and were dependent mostly on donations and some minor income from other sources/services.

They had only a few options open to them:

  • find more money from other sources
  • merge with another library
  • close the doors
  • sell some of the content
  • others??

The first approach to raise funds was to create a subscription website. The Godfrey acquired Heritage Quest census records and added other databases as resources allowed. Subscriptions were sold for $35 a year. The board thought they might be lucky to get 100 subscriptions.. but they actually got approximately 14,000!

Now the portal provides access to sites for which a premium has been paid (so that subscribers don’t have to pay), sites that are available free on the Internet (but made easier to find) and sites unique to Godfrey, including digitized material in the library and other material that has been made available to them. They just added 95,000 Jewish grave-sites – brought to them by a local rabbi. Another recent addition was a set of transcriptions of a grave-site made as an Eagle Scout project. They also negotiated to have their books digitized for them for free. The company performing the digitization will pay a royalty to Godfrey as the books are used.

The costs to acquire data for the portal includes $60,000 a year for access to premium sites, the cost to digitize and transcribe unique content (there are opportunities to partner and reduce costs) and the cost to acquire patrons. The efforts of the Godfrey staff and volunteers is ‘free’ – but costs time.

The Godfrey subsequently lost access to the Heritage Quest material. This was like taking the anchor store out of the corner of a mall. It forced them to diversify their revenue streams and watch for new opportunities.

Current revenue source distribution:

  • online portal 45%
  • annual appeal 10%
  • patron requests 5%
  • contract services 35% (OCLC analytical cataloging that they do)
  • misc 5%

The endowment funds have been restored and the Godfrey’s staff is now growing again.

Questions

Question: Did you meet resistance in your institutions?
Answer: No.. Minnesota said they had such success that the 2 questions they here now are A) What do we put online next? B) How long can they protect their income from the rest of the institution?

Question: (From someone from a NJ archives) Is there a way to do e-commerce with government records and not have the money ‘stolen’ from them?
Answer: Minnesota – The department of health was happy for death and birth certificates business to go away? They do worry about the future when they might try to make a marriage index – because that territory is already ‘owned’ by a group that wants to keep that income.

Question: When you charge for use fees – are there people who don’t pay them?
Answer: Minnesota: Probably – no way to really know.
Mark (American Heritage Center): Our images are public domain – they can do what they like with them.

Question: Do you brand your images?
Answer: Mark: Yes.. a logo and URL goes with the images.

My Thoughts

I was particularly impressed by how much information was conveyed in the course of the 1 hour session. My personal highlights were:

  • As I mentioned above, I want Mark’s idea for a non-profit to sell co-located products based on archival images to gain support and momentum.
  • I was pleased by the point that the MHS makes money from their Minnesota Death Certificate Index partly due to their improved and powerful search interface. The data is available elsewhere – but they made it easier to find information, so they will become the destination of choice for that information.
  • The Godfrey’s story is inspirational. In an age when we hear more and more often about archives and libraries being forced to cut back services due to funding shortfalls, it is great to hear about a small archives that pulled themselves back from the brink of disaster by brave experimentation.

These three case studies gave a great glimpse of some of the ways that archives can get on the e-commerce bandwagon. There is no magic here – just the willingness to dig in, figure out what can be done and try it. That said – there is definitely lots of room to learn from others successes and mistakes. The more real world success and failure stories archives share with the archival community about how to ‘do’ e-commerce, the easier it will be for each subsequent project to be a success.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

October is American Archives Month

SAA American Archives MonthWith barely more than a week to go, I am finally getting my act together to mention American Archives Month. To check if there are activities somewhere near you, go to the very thorough Council of State Archivists listing of activities for American Archives Month 2007. If you love looking at posters take a look at their awsome Archives Week/Month Poster Gallery.

The Society of American Archivists came out with a great array of resources in support of the celebration this year. I especially like the How To Know If Something Is Newsworthy and Tips for Media Interviews fliers – but if you download only one document to look through – make it the American Archives Month Public Relations Kit. They get to the heart of one of my favorite sentiments – keep archival records in front of the eyes of the everyday person. I don’t mean that in a sensational way… I don’t want archives in the news for screwing up (even if they do say that any publicity is good publicity). I want every news story that could have the support of archival records to use them and acknowledge them. I want every middle school kid who lives in a town with an archives to know that it exists and to have some idea why they should care. I want every teacher who has an archives with an enthusiastic archivist in it near them to KNOW about that enthusiastic archivist and use the available resources to make their lessons richer.

American Archives Month is a great vehicle for reaching out and pulling people in the doors. It could also be used as an opportunity for archives to try new programs and judge their popularity before rolling out sessions to be held throughout the year.

Finally – another way to get a sense of what is happening locally is to keep an eye on at what other blogs are posting about American Archives Month 2007.

Blog Action Day: A Look At Earth Day as Archived Online

In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of discussing the environment, I decided to see what records the Internet had available about the history of Earth Day.

I started by simply Googling Earth Day. In a new browser window I opened the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. These were to be my two main avenues for unearthing the way that Earth Day was represented on the internet over the years.

Wikipedia’s first version of an Earth Day page was created on December 16th, 2002. This is the current Earth Day page as of the creation of this post – last updated about a week ago.

The current home page for the Earthday Network appears identical to the most recent version stored in the Wayback Machine, dated June 29, 2007 – until you notice that the featured headline on the link to http://www.earthdaynetwork.tv is different.

The site that claims to be ‘The Official Site of International Earth Day’ is EarthSite.org. The oldest version from the Wayback Machine is from December of 1996. This version shows a web visitor counter perpetually set to 1,671. Earth day ten years ago was scheduled for March 20th, 1997. If you scroll down a bit on the What’s New page you can read the 1997 State of the World Message By John McConnell (attributed as the founder of Earth Day).

The U.S. Government portal for Earth Day was first archived in the Internet Archive on April 6, 2003. The site, EarthDay.gov, hasn’t changed much in the past 4 years. The EPA has an Earth Day page of it’s own, that was first archived in early 1999. No clear way to know if that actually means that the EPA’s Earth Day page is older or if it was just found earlier by the Internet Archives ambitious web crawlers.

Envirolink.org, with the tagline “The Online Environmental Community”, was first archived back in 1996. You can see on the Wayback Machine page for Environlink.org, has a fairly full ten years worth of web page archiving.

Next I wanted to explore what the world of government records might produce on the subject. A quick stop over at Footnote.com to search for “Earth Day” didn’t yield a terribly promising list of results (no surprise there – most of their records date to before the time period we are looking for). Next I tried searching in Archival Research Catalog (ARC) over on the U.S. National Archives website. I got 15 hits – all fairly interesting looking… but none of them linked to digitized content. A search in Access to Archival Databases (AAD) system found 2 hits – one to some sort of contract between the EPA and a Fairfax Virginia company named EARTH DAY XXV from 1995 and the other a State Department telegram including this passage:

THIS NATION IS COMMITTED TO STRIVING FOR AN ENVIRONMENT THAT NOT ONLY SUSTAINS LIFE, BUT ALSO ENRICHES THE LIVES OF PEOPLE EVERYWHERE – – HARMONIZING THE WORKS OF MAN AND NATURE. THIS COMMITMENT HAS RECENTLY BEEN REINFORCED BY MY PROCLAMATION, PURSUANT TO A JOINT RESOLUTION OF THE CONGRESS, DESIGNATING MARCH 21, 1975 AS EARTH DAY, AND ASKING THAT SPECIAL ATTENTION BE GIVEN TO EDUCATIONAL EFFORTS DIRECTED TOWARD PROTECTING AND ENHANCING OUR LIFE-GIVING ENVIRONMENT.

I also thought to check the Government Printing Office’s (GPO) website for the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Currently it only permits searching back through 1991 online – but my search for “Earth Day” did bring back 50 speeches, proclamations and other writings by the various presidents.

Frustrated by the total scattering of documents without any big picture, I headed back to Google – this time to search the Google News Archive for articles including “Earth Day” published before 1990. The timeline display showed me articles mostly from TIME, the Washington Post and the New York Times – some of which claimed I would need to pay in order to read.

Back again to do one more regular Google search – this time for earth day archive. This yielded an assortment of hits – and just above the fold I found my favorite snapshot of Earth Day history. The TIME Earth Day Archive Collection is a selection of the best covers, quotes and articles about Earth Day – from February 2, 1970 to the present. This is the gold mine for getting perspective on Earth Day as it has been perceived and celebrated in the United States. The covers are brilliant! If I had started this post early enough, I would have requested permission to include some here.

With the passionate title Fighting to Save the Earth from Man, the first article in the TIME Earth Day Collection begins by quoting then President Nixon’s first State of the Union Address:

The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

Fast forward to the recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore and I have to image that the answer to that question of if we were ready to make peace with nature asked so long ago was ‘Not Yet’.

Overall, this was an interesting experiment. The hunt for ‘old’ (such as it is in the fast moving world of the Internet) data about a topic online is a strange and frustrating experience. Even with the Wayback Machine, I often found myself with only part of the picture. Often the pages I tried to view were missing images or other key elements. Sometimes I found a link to something tantalizing, only to realize that the target page was not archived (or is so broken as to be of no use). The search through government records and old newspaper stories did produce some interesting results – but again seemed to fail to produce any sense of the big picture of Earth Day over the years.

The TIME Collection about Earth Day was assembled by humans and arranged nicely for examination by those interested in the subject. It is properly named a ‘collection’ (in the archival sense) because it is not the pure output of activities surrounding Earth Day, but rather a selected snapshot of related articles and images that share a common topic. That said, it is my fervent hope that websites such as these appear more and more. I suspect that the lure of attracting more readers to their websites with existing content will only encourage more content creators with a long history to join in the fun. If other do it as well as TIME has seemed to in this case, it will be a win/win situation for everyone.

Nurturing Fearlessness in the Face of Computers

Photo by Grant HutchinsonI have spent a fair amount of time thinking about what makes me different from those around me who proclaim themselves “not techie”. It isn’t that I know more about specific programs. I think it is that I am not afraid.

My friends and family always ask me to find them information online (or the best price for a new camera or the best airfare for their next trip) – and I really don’t think that I know better places to look online before I start. I think that I just don’t give up after the first two tries don’t work!

We talked about some of these ideas in the ‘Archives and Web 2.0 Technologies’ discussion at SAA2007 in Chicago. How do you get folks more comfortable with new technology? How to nurture fearlessness?

Dorthea Salo’s recent post, Training-wheels culture, got me thinking about this again.

She says:

Librarians are a timorous breed, fearful of ignorance and failure. We believe knowledge is power, which taken to an unhealthy extreme can mean that we do not do anything until we think we understand everything. We do not learn by doing, because learning by doing invariably means failure. So a librarian just won’t sit down with AACR2, Connexions, and the AUTOCAT mailing-list archive and work out how to catalogue a novel item. Nor she won’t sit down at the computer and beat software with rocks until it works.

She’ll sit passively, hands in lap, and ask for training, feeling guilty the whole time for displaying ignorance.

I know I do have more experience with some things. Yes, I have spent years designing databases and years building software, but that doesn’t mean that I know how to use a database with which I have never had contact before. The difference between myself and many others is that I am not afraid to just try. I back up often and I give myself permission to make mistakes. There is nothing I can do (short of wielding a hammer) that will break my computer like the one in the image I included above.

So how do we get more archivists and librarians (those in school and those already on the job) comfortable with trying things when they sit down in front of a computer? I have a few ideas.

Full Immersion

This approach would be akin to learning a new language by full immersion, and perhaps it might work well for the same reasons. What if a person was put in front of a computer with 3 programs they don’t know how to use, but have always wished they could get ‘trained’ on? And what if that computer had a handy button for the instructor to instantly reset the student back to a clean slate at any time? I really think a day (or even an afternoon) with the opportunity to play and know that you can’t break anything permanently could be very empowering.

There are self defense training courses that put a ‘mock attacker’ in a big padded suit and coach the student in how to attack them. Because of the big suit they can hit and kick and go full force but know that they won’t really hurt this person. At the same time they teach their body what hitting that hard would feel like. They teach their body how to react to defend itself when they need it. It may seem extreme, but I think that some people need a safe environment to try anything. Go ahead, see what happens if you try! Yeah – it won’t work sometimes.. but other times it will.

The class could start with a lesson in hunting for computer software “how to” answers online. Add some knowledgeable floaters to the room to prevent total frustration from taking its toll (but with strict instructions to avoid too much hand holding) and we might have something.

Scavenger Hunt

People know what a scavenger hunt is – so what if we harnessed that understanding and made them look for stuff online. What if they HAD to use some Web 2.0 style sites to find (and bookmark? and screen capture?) items on their list? Purple Duck by Kristen RutherfordThis sort of idea could be implemented remotely with new hunts launching on a specific date and time and with a firm deadline so people are urged to stick with it long enough to start feeling comfortable.

I think one of the saddest thing about the whole ‘Web 2.0’ label is that it scares people away. A scavenger hunt that happened to push you into the brier patch hunting for a creative commons licensed photo of a purple duck could having you using those tools before you remembered they were supposed to be threatening.

How Did You Do That?

I have noticed a pattern among those who don’t feel at home on a computer. They will often find one way to do something and then do it that way every time – forever. While I can understand the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, I also cringe when I see someone take 10 keystrokes to do something that could take 2.

Now, take those same folks and make them watch me do something an easier way – either on their computer or at least with programs they are familiar with on my own. Things I don’t even think twice about can be a revelation. “How did you do that?” is something I frequently hear when I work in front of someone who takes pains to stay within their comfort zone when they use their own computer.

There are a number of different ways this could be implemented in the real world. I imagine a group of tech savvy volunteers willing to be a mentor to someone who works nearby. They could get together once a week for even just an hour – the idea being that the mentor drives and does WHAT the mentee asks to be done, but does it using shortcuts or hunts for the BEST way to do that activity through trial and error.

Film At Eleven

Screencasts are easy to make these days – so what if a different set of mentors were willing to make top five shortcut videos on a per task basis? I can imagine one on ‘top five shortcuts when surfing the web’ and another for ‘top five shortcuts to use on your Windows desktop’. There are certainly plenty of videos that come back on YouTube when I search on windows tips, but it would be more appealing if the videos were made using examples from the point of view of ‘our’ audience – libraries and archives. People can get their heads around new ideas more easily if the context in which they are learning is familiar.

The “Break Me” Challenge

I have a running joke with some of my friends (and many of those around me who write software) that given enough time, I can find a bug in any software I use. I expect this. I know (I was a developer, remember?) that all software has bugs. I know that the only thing a software company who makes something you need has to do is make their software less buggy than the other guy.

What if more people felt a new software tool was a challenge? I must admit, I do feel that way. For me, hunting for obvious bugs is like finding the edges of the world before I start exploring. What are the limits on what I can do here? I want to lift all the rocks and see where the bugs are wiggling so that when I actually must depend on the tool to do something for me I will know where not to step.

Could we create a workshop where people are taught this way of approaching software? I am not talking about teaching people to be pessimistic, rather to make them realize that even when they find a bug it won’t be the end of the world. Trying new things when you first start out rewards you with the knowledge of what your tool can really do. What do most people who buy a new kitchen gadget do when they get home? Find something to cook that requires the gadget. There is no guarantee that it won’t end up in the bottom of your drawer a month later – but at least people are willing to experiment with (and read the instructions for) cooking tools!

Core Education

What all of this was part of an MLS student’s training? I know that there is a basic Information Technology course that is required in the MLS program at my school. I will admit that I didn’t take it (I took an Information Visualization course in the Computer Science department instead) – but I suspect that trying to break software and learn computer shortcuts wasn’t part of the training. No matter who teaches it, the syllabi for the core class always includes a sentence like ‘Become familiar with common information management tools’ in the list of their goals. I think there are a lot of assumptions about what people already know when they get to graduate school. I think we need to acknowledge that every graduate student is not equally comfortable with computers (even those young students right out of college). School is about learning – this should be the easiest place to spread these skills.

Inspiration

Andrea Mercado (of LibraryTechtonics fame) has blogged about both her Geek Out Don’t Freak Out classes and NetGuides program at Reading Public Library. The Geek Out classes are geared toward patrons who have some technology they don’t really know how to use – the digital camera with 50 settings when they only use 2.. or the PDA that they don’t actually know how to sync. The NetGuides are described on the RPL site as “students trained at the library to provide patrons with one-on-one technology answers and personalized instruction”. The topics they cover include basic computing, basic Internet, MP3 players and more (check out all the topics).

Both these examples are real world implementations for the ‘How Did You Do That?’ category above. It is so great to see examples of what can exist. I bet in some institutions there are staff members who need this support as much as their patrons.

Five Weeks to a Social Library was described as “the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries.” I read blog posts from some of the librarians who went through this program (out of the 40 total who took it the first time around) – and they seemed to enjoy their experiences.

Learning 2.0 is an “online self-discovery program that encourages the exploration of web 2.0 tools and new technologies, specifically 23 Things“. I loved seeing that the original creators gave out prizes to their local staff at PLCMC who completed all 23 things (USB MP3 players). From the list on the right side of that Learning 2.0 page, it seems like the idea has spread to other libraries. The PLCMC folks also have created Learning 2.1 – complete with the fabulous tag line “Mashing up 21st century skills with lifelong learning”. They state that the site was created to support on-going learning beyond what was done with Learning 2.0.

Would You Volunteer? Would You Attend?

So.. lots of ideas. There are clearly a number of great programs already out there. Any folks out there want to chat about if they think my ideas would be helpful? Or doable? Or too intimidating? Or overly optimistic?

How can we build on the success of existing programs? Tell me encouraging tales of programs like NetGuides. Point me to other initiatives like Five Weeks and Learning 2.1. Is any of this making it into onto the radar of archivists?