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Month: August 2007

BlogDay2007: Five New Blogs for Your Consideration

Blog Day 2007 I am taking a moment out of the flurry that is SAA2007 to list five blogs I enjoy to celebrate BlogDay2007:

ResearchBuzz posts about internet research. It touches on databases, search engines and all sorts of ways to find information online. I believe that reaching out to the online research community is a huge opportunity for archives. ResearchBuzz is one way I stay connected with what that world is thinking about.

Available Online is about digitization (or rather digitisation as it is spelled in the UK). It is a creation of Alastair Dunning, the Programme Manager for the JISC Digitisation Programme.

A Beautiful WWW focuses on a neat cross section of information visualization, research, web programming and data mining.

Mashable is a popular blog on Web 2.0 and social networks. This one is very high volume, but if you have been feeling out of the loop on all the latest Web 2.0 developments – this is a great blog to add to your RSS reader and skim through for items of interest.

StorageSwitched! is the blog of the CEO of StorageSwitch. I like this blog because it gives me a view into the hardware world of storing data on disk – but also ponders everything from using your empty disk drives space to pondering preservation efforts.

To see other lists of fabulous blogs, take a look at all the BlogDay2007 posts on Technorati.

I hope you enjoy discovering some new blogs today.. and now back to our regularly scheduled SAA 2007 programming!

SAA2007: Opening Plenary Session Ponders Diversity

In his introduction, Bruce Bruemmer began with a disarming “Thank you disembodied voice” – and merrily rolled along through a short, cheery and heartfelt introduction for SAA president Elizabeth W. Adkins. He saved time (and likely vocal stress) by prerecording a YouTube video enumerating Adkins’s accomplishments . He led rounds of applause for Adkins’s father, aunt, uncle and husband. Bruemmer claims her only fault is that she is too serious. That she did not perceive the inherent humor of Velveeta and Miracle Whip concerned him.

He finally found the chink in her armor when he broke down laughing at the apparently often repeated J. L. Kraft quote “What we do, we do do” – and at this she finally admitted that it was ‘a little funny’.

Elizabeth Adkins’s Plenary Speech

Adkins began her talk by leading the hall in applauding the program committee, the host committee, the sponsors, past presidents, international visitors, and council members – each in turn.

She then made an exciting announcement – American Archivist is being made available online! If you are onsite at the conference, there will be a peek at the beta version on display on Friday in the Embassy Room. Issues from 2000 forward will be available online and they are still working on the digitization of all back issues. SAA will still print the journal. Access to the digital version will be available via a link off the SAA homepage. All but the 6 most recent issues will be available freely to anyone. More work will need to be done to improve visibility through indexing services and complete the digitization of back issues.

After this, she launched into her main speech “Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action”. I will do my best to include as many points as I managed to fully  captured in my notes. If this topic interests you – I encourage you to watch for publication of the full original. Please forgive me any misquotes, omissions and oversights. I have also included a few additional details on points that were in the presentation.

Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action

Adkins first contemplated diversity of the presidents of SAA by considering how long had it had been since a corporate archivist had been SAA president. The answer was William Overman in 1957 – and Overman is the only other corporate archivist to ever be selected as president. Adkins is also one of only 16 women to have been SAA President.

What does SAA Mean by Diversity? Why do we care? Adkins reviewed the 2004 census of the profession known as A*CENSUS . With its 5,620 responses it was much more extensive than the surveys done in 1956 and 1982.

Gender Imbalance

From A First Look at A*CENSUS Results (published in August of 2004):

The archival profession has experienced a significant shift in gender in the last half century. The A*CENSUS survey indicates that the ratio of women to men is now approximately 2:1. This is almost a mirror image of the gender distribution reported in Ernst Posner’s 1956 survey of SAA members, in which 67% were men and 33% were women.

Adkins stated that the current gender imbalance is an issue for two reasons:

  • we need men’s perspective and input
  • since women are still generally paid less than men – having a gender imbalance is likely driving down salaries

Library and Museums are seeing this same gender imbalance while the gender imbalance is flipped in the IT industry.

Race and Ethnic Diversity

According to A*CENSUS 2004 only 7% of the SAA membership is non-white while the general US populate is 25% non-white (with an even greater number of non-whites in kindergarten classes today).

Why should we care?
* “It’s the right thing to do”
* Completeness of the documentary record
* It’s good business business
* Competition with other professions and career paths

Dr. Harold T. Pinkett (1914-2001) was the first African American at NARA – named an SAA fellow in 1962, editor of American Archivist 1968-1971 and council member from 1971-1972.

SAA first diversity efforts launched in 1970s

From 1936-1972, women in SAA made up only 28-33% of SAA members. The 1970s brought lots of progress for women’s representation and activity in SAA.

Work on Racial and Ethnic diversity started in 1978…more work supported 1981-1987, some efforts supported – other efforts (such as desire for a fellowship to support study) were not.

The Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable (AACR) founded in 1987, took on this name in 1994 (?). The Harold T. Pinkett Award was established in 1993 “to encourage minority students to consider careers in the archival profession and promote minority participation in SAA”.

In 1997 SAA created a Diversity Task Force and a final report was submitted in 1999. SAA Council accepted final report and moved forward in an ad hoc matter. In 2002 members of the task force were frustrated by lack of progress and passed a resolution asking for info on progress. The crux of the answer was “not a lot”.

In May 2003 the SAA council created a ‘diversity committee’… council is now actually talking about diversity and actually putting things in motion.

Focus on Students

There has a been a huge growth of Student Chapters. The concept was approved by the SAA council in 1993. There has been a growth from 3 chapters to nearly 30. Currently 20% of all members, more than 10% of attendees at this meeting, are students. Adkins hopes the students will help bringing more diversity into SAA and asked for a round of applause for the students attending the meeting.

Where are we now?

In 2005, SAA launched a new strategic planning effort and Diversity was identified one of the three highest priorities (with Technology and Public Awareness being the other 2).

What is the state of diversity today? Lots of talk – but how much actual action?

What is done?

  • position statement
  • census completed
  • monitoring progress
  • education for non-archivists who serve under represented groups
  • experimentation with the idea ofDiversity Fair

Next actions?

  • outreach on college and university campuses
  • provide other “entry points” into the archival profession
  • Archival education

The Task Force recommendations included improvement of the SAA website, providing financial aid for minorities and under represented communities, and working on SAA’s new member development.

Adkins presented an interesting idea of reaching out to kids age 10-15 such that we might influence their future career choices. She also suggested that SAA emulate the ALA model of the Spectrum Scholarship. Established in 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship program granted over 60 $5,000 scholarships this year alone. While SAA does not have the money to support a scholarship at this level – Adkins announced that a new SAA Minority Scholarship has been approved by the SAA council (this leading to the first spontaneous applause of the speech). She also made a big point of pointing to the Midwest Archives Conference’s Archie Motely Memorial Scholarship for Minority Students and saying that they should get credit as leaders in the area of minority scholarships.

“Diversity starts with a commitment to inclusion”

Addressing diversity concerns is hard work, but diversity will improve SAA in ways we can’t grasp now. She compared future progress to past efforts that now seem obvious (provision of childcare, the membership committee..etc).

Adkins concluded that that we need to build on a foundation of inclusion. A ‘welcoming respectful attitude’ will help us move forward. But we need to move forward with not just words – but with also with actions.

The hall gave her a standing ovation. Confronted with this, Adkins remarked that she had made it through so far but now she was getting all verklempt .

Final Count Down to SAA2007

The final count down to the annual conference of the Society of American Archivists, this year convening in Chicago, is well under way. Many of you might already be confirming your flights and packing your bags. I won’t be on site until Wednesday night – but thought I would try and catch as many of you as I could before you head away from your regular blog reading rhythms.

Are you attending?

Over 115 registered users (37 of them have introduced themselves) have been adding tons of content to the UnOffical Conference Wiki. If you haven’t visited recently (or at all) take a quick browse through all the great info that has been added.

If you are interested in trying your hand at posting session summaries – I say go for it! You don’t need to have a blog to do this. The wiki is open for anyone’s contributions. If you have any questions about how to post about a session on the wiki, feel free to contact me and I will do whatever I can to help.

Are you a presenter?

Take a look at the page for your session on the wiki and consider what you might add to tell attendees more about what you will talk about. Upload your handouts (and let me know if you have problems with this). Add links to related information or supporting websites, before or after your talk.

Are you in charge of a group meeting?

Consider adding detailed agendas (and thanks to all of you who already have!) to your page linked off the Group Meetings page. If you welcome those who are not members of your round table or section, add a friendly ‘everyone welcome’ note.

Watching from afar?

If you are not attending, please consider participating from wherever you are. If there is a session you would kill to have attended – then go to the Session Coverage page (or the session specific page for the session in question) and put a note next asking for someone to post a summary. This might also encourage presenters to add more of their materials to the wiki after the fact.

At the Conference

I hope to meet as many of you on-site as I can. I will be presenting as part of Session 804 Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World, Saturday at 1pm. I also plan to attend the Blogger Get-Together if I possibly can (once they decide when and where it will be). I will do my best to update both the Session Coverage page and my user page on the wiki with the sessions I plan to attend. If last year is any indication of how I will blog – I will take notes while offline and then post session summaries (with additional thoughts) after the fact. I discovered that I do not enjoy posting stream of consciousness style, on-the-spot posts. All my posts for the conference will be classified as SAA2007. I will also link to them from the session pages on the wiki. Finally, my posts (and everyone else’s if they are tagged SAA2007) should be available if you go to the Technorati page for SAA2007. Want to reach me? Use my contact form or post a comment here.

Preserving Virtual Worlds – TinyMUD to SecondLife

A recent press release from the Library of Congress, Digital Preservation Program Makes Awards to Preserve American Creative Works, describes the newly funded project aimed at the preservation of ‘virtual worlds’:

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. Partners: University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab.

This has gotten a fair amount of coverage from the gaming and humanities sides of the world, but I learned about it via Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum‘s blog post Just Funded: Preserving Virtual Worlds.

The How They Got Game 2 post Library of Congress announces grants for preservation of digital games gives a more in depth summary of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project goals:

The main goal of the project is to help develop generalizable mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction, and to begin to test these mechanism through the archiving of selected test cases. Key deliverables include the development of metadata schema and wrapper recommendations, and the long-term curation of archived cases.

I take this all a bit more personally than most might. I was a frequent denizen of an online virtual world known as TinyMUD (now usually referred to as TinyMUD Classic). TinyMUD was a text based, online, multi-player game that existed for seven months beginning in August of 1989. In practice it was sort of a cross between a chat room and a text based adventure. The players could build new parts of the MUD as they went – in many ways it was an early example of crowdsourcing. There was a passionate core of players who were constantly building new areas for others to explore and experience – not unlike what is currently the case in SecondLife. These types of text based games still exist – see MudMagic for listings.

Apparently August 20, 2007 will be TinyMUD’s 18th Annual Brigadoon Day. It will be celebrated by putting TinyMUD classic online for access. The page includes careful notes about finding and using a MUD Client to access TinyMUD. The existence of an ongoing MUD community of users has kept software like this alive and available almost 20 years later.

With projects like Preserving Virtual Worlds getting grants and gaining momentum it seems more plausible with each passing day that 18 years from now, parts of 2007’s SecondLife will still be available for people to experience. I am thankful to know that a copy of the TinyMUD world I helped build is still out there. I am even more thankful to know that the technology still exists to permit users to access it even if it is only once a year.

Update: 20th Anniversary of TinyMud Brigadoon day is set for Thursday, August 20, 2009

Controversial Photos, Archvists’ Choices and Journalism

New York Times Magazine Cover: January 1995The New York Times Magazine published The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal in January of 1995. Still available online, it is a fascinating tale that took reporter Ron Rosenbaum on a wild hunt through multiple archives in a quest for long lost photographs. I spotted a link to the article in a post on Boing Boing – and once I started reading it I couldn’t stop.

The story includes thorough coverage of the research (and the footwork and the paperwork) it took to find the final resting place of some very controversial photographs. Taken as part of the orientation process of new students at Ivy League and Seven Sisters school campuses predominately during the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s, these photos were theoretically taken to screen for students who needed remedial posture classes. William Herbert Sheldon was a driving force behind many of the photos. Best known for assigning people into three categories of body types in the 1940s, Sheldon based his categories of endomorphic, mesomorphic, and ectomorphic on measurements done using the student photographs. Rosenbaum’s quest was to find the real story behind the photos and to discover if any of the photos survived the purging fires at that occurred at many of the schools involved.

His first stop was Harvard’s archives:

Harley P. Holden, curator of Harvard’s archives, said that from the 1880’s to the 1940’s the university had its own posture-photo program in which some 3,500 pictures of its students were taken. Most were destroyed 15 or 20 years ago “for privacy scruples,” Holden said. Nonetheless, quite a few Harvard nudes can be found illustrating Sheldon’s book on body types, the Atlas of Men. Radcliffe took posture photos from 1931 to 1961; the curator there said that most of them had been destroyed (although some might be missing) and that none were taken by Sheldon.

A major turning point in Sheldon’s project came in 1950. He went to the University of Washington to further his plans to make an Altas of Women. The families of a few photographed females students at the university questioned the real purpose of the photographs. The resulting upheaval culminated in the destruction of many photographs. A Time article dated September 25, 1950, Revolt at Washington, documents the events in Washington and notes that over 800 photos were burned.

Rosenbaum’s article goes on mention that thousands of photos were subsequently burned at Harvard, Vassar and Yale in the 60’s and 70’s – but he continued to hunt for the ones that some believed had escaped into Sheldon’s private archives. A chain of contacts led Rosenbaum to Sheldon’s former associate Roland D. Elderkin. An elderly gentleman of 84 at the time of the story’s publication, Elderkin spent years assisting Sheldon. He took many of the photographs. And after being turned down by many archives, he found Sheldon’s records, photos and negatives a home in the National Anthropological Archives.

In 1987, the curators of the National Anthropological Archives acquired the remains of Sheldon’s life work, which were gathering dust in “dead storage” in a Goodwill warehouse in Boston. While there were solid archival reasons for making the acquisition, the curators are clearly aware that they harbor some potentially explosive material in their storage rooms. And they did not make it easy for me to gain access.

On my first visit, I was informed by a good-natured but wary supervisor that the restrictive grant of Sheldon’s materials by his estate would permit me to review only the written materials in the Sheldon archives. The actual photographs, he said, were off-limits. To see them, I would have to petition the chief of archivists. Determined to pursue the matter to the bitter end, I began the process of applying for permission.

In their online guide to collections I found the entry for SHELDON, WILLIAM HERBERT (1898-1977), Papers. It notes that the collection is 150 linear feet. It also includes a line that reads “RESTRICTION: The photographic material is not available for research.”

While Rosenbaum’s hunt was for the photographs, some of his most interesting discoveries came from the papers themselves. During his three month wait for permission to view the photos, he reviewed boxes of letters and notes. See Rosenbaum’s article for details – but it was Sheldon’s own words in those papers that revealed he held racist views and that he seemed more concerned with his research than with the psychological impact of his research on the girls whose photos he arranged to take.

When finally Rosenbaum was given the opportunity to review some 20,000 negatives of the photos (no photos and no names) we read:

A curator trundled in a library cart from the storage facility. Teetering on top of the cart were stacks of big, gray cardboard boxes. The curator handed me a pair of the white cotton gloves that researchers must use to handle archival material.

I love it – gray cardboard boxes and white cotton gloves. He even mentions the finding aids and gives examples of how the groups of photos are described. I also appreciate the earlier acknowledgment of the “solid archival reasons for making the acquisition”.

Rosenbaum looked through a lot of the negatives, mostly to verify that what the finding aids claimed were present were in fact in those gray boxes. He was struck by the contrast between the expressions on the mens’ and womens’ faces.

For the most part, the men looked diffident, oblivious. That’s not surprising considering that men of that era were accustomed to undressing for draft physicals and athletic-squad weigh-ins. But the faces of the women were another story. I was surprised at how many looked deeply unhappy, as if pained at being subjected to this procedure. On the faces of quite a few I saw what looked like grimaces, reflecting pronounced discomfort, perhaps even anger. I was not much more comfortable myself sitting there in the midst of stacks of boxes of such images. There I was at the end of my quest. I’d tracked down the fabled photographs, but the lessons of the posture-photo ritual were elusive.

He found the missing photos – but no easy answers. This is a great combination of a compelling story and a realistic representation of archives and archivists. The records don’t always hold the answers to the question you thought you were asking – but sometimes they hold secrets you hadn’t expected.

So many elements tie back to the choices made by individual archivists – sometimes made in the heat of the moment or under great community pressure. I think this story is a particularly poignant example of the downstream effects of these sorts of hard choices. It isn’t often that we can see cause and effect this clearly.

What would you have done? Would you have burned the photos or stored them away? Would you have stepped forward to take Sheldon’s records? If something like this happened today – what do you think the future of these photos might be?