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Year: 2007

SAA2007: Preserving Born Digital Records of the Design Community (Session 106)

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The official title for SAA2007 Session 106 is Constructing Sustainability: Real-World Implementations of Preservation Standards for Born-Digital Design Documentation, but I think it might have been better served to include the word Architecture somewhere in it’s title. Sponsored by the Architectural Records Roundtable, this session considered issues related to preserving born digital records of “the design community”. The design community in question includes both architects and landscape designers.

Each panelist gave a 5 minute brief about the way in which they are working toward preserving these design community records – and the rest of the session was opened up to Q&A. David Read, the session chair, mentioned how they used a wiki to collect questions and ideas for the session, gave an introduction to each of the panelists and helped guide the Question and Answer portion of the session.

Who was on the panel?

What is being done?

Phil Bernstein kicked off the 5 minute summaries with a quick history of design technology. He explained how currently there is a shift in progress. Hundreds of years of paper drawings were followed by ten to fifteen years of electronic drawings. The latest development is use of Building Information Modelling (BIM). BIM relies on a database that generates ‘reports’ that are in fact ‘drawings’. These are sometimes referred to as Building Development Information Models. Digital printers can produce physical models directly from the stored BIM data with no need to step through generation of an actual drawing outside the computer.

Phil showed Yale School of Architecture design examples from the BIM world. These were fantastical organically shaped creations that looked more like strange undiscovered plants from under the sea than traditional buildings!

The good news is that the data in the BIM databases are all just text. The bad news is that the generated ‘design artifacts’ are based on the text data and can lead to digitally printed artifacts. There has been an explosion in the various means of representation. The architecture world is catching up to the to other industries (such as the auto industry) that have been doing this for 25+ years.

Current architects are application agnostic – they don’t care what they use to create their outputs. All the paths and platforms will only grow – what is driving the design process will be increasing in complexity. The building industry is making a fundamental shift from electronic drawing to the Building Information Modeling approach – but there is an unlimited environment for representation. He hoped to discuss the intersection between the archival/record keeping issues and the problems facing the architecture world.

Carissa Kowalski Dougherty’s overview covered the Digital Archive for Architecture (DAArch) project out of the Art Institute of Chicago . The project was based on the 2004 study Collecting, Archiving, and Exhibiting Digital Design Data. They considered how Architecture and Design firms are using software tools to produce and design – but examined these questions from a museum and curatorial perspective.

The recommendation is a two-tiered collection approach.

  • First tier: Native files – like autocad files – these are going to be preserved at the bit level – but there is no commitment to ensuring access to these files
  • Second tier : Output formats – only pdf and tif files
    PDF: line drawings, vector-based graphic files, text documents power points
    TIF: renderings, digital photographs

The second tier outputs are what they are committing to “functionally preserve”.

Carissa presented an example of what they accessioned from the Garofalo Architects‘ Manilow Residence (2001-2003) project. A lot of what they got were files that no-one (including the small architectural firm itself) could still open.. the software is gone. Another major challenge was poor naming conventions for the files themselves. The final project archive included over 200 native vector 2D files (.dxf, .dgn, .dwg), 145 pdfs.. and more.

From the UrbanLab they sought to preserve their Visitor Information Center Competition Entry from 2001. This was a project that was never built and therefore has little physical output. They mostly used autoCAD (2D), Maya (3D), FormZ (3D) and Adobe Illustrator (layout).

The DAArch Software highlights:

  • browser based
  • DSpace as back end
  • Dublin Core augmented with CDWA and custom metadata to support architecture data and digital materials
  • authority records
  • group and item level cataloging
  • will be available open source with BSD license via SourceForge (this was a requirement of the funder – that it be open source)

Final lessons and challenges from the DAArch project:

  • file naming and organization – the biggest challenges at the smaller firms – need outreach to these firms
  • metadata for digital objects – there is not a lot out there for 3D digital images
  • software and migration tools – can we/should we preserve the software dependent first tier files? or just the PDF/TIF outputs?
  • three-dimensional objects, BIM, animations, etc

Annemarie van Roessel discussed Columbia’s major Manhattanville project. Their goal is to make digital records last as long as steel and glass. The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library is feeling the pressure to be a leader, so how does Avery document this project? Manhattanville is a 30 year planning, design and build project targeted to be completed in 2030. It will cover 17 acres northwest of the main Columbia campus.

There are many building blocks to the digital design archives: autoCAD, project management records, collaborative environments (sharepoint – Microsoft), images, presentations, websites and movies (ie, more than just “scary CAD drawings”). They are planning staged preservation points. The Avery is committed to developing capacity for digital archiving by 2009. For their metadata they use at minimum the mandatory DACS elements mapped to Dublin Core elements.

Dennis Newman was the final panelist. He has clients who need to preserve/archive finished drawings – such as the documents being sent along to regulatory agencies for final approval. PDF/A-1 was based on ‘electronic paper’ – you loose lots of data when you ‘cut back’ to PDF-A. PDF-E is in it’s first draft/generation being submitted for version 1. PDF-A didn’t address 3D, complex metadata or moving images. PDF-E is based on Acrobat version 7. Adobe has thrown out PDF to the ISO community. Dennis believes that the final ‘as-built’ drawing is what should be the archived version.

He pointed out that Stage I responders need more information than the regulator commissions need. Since 9-11 the state requirements have changed about what need to be in the ‘record’.

As an IT professional he was asked “what can we do” and his answer is “how much do you want to spend?”. IT can do anything – but it takes time and money.

Questions and Answers

Keep in mind throughout this section that I was summarizing the questions and their answers as best I could. Please do not take any statements attributed to the session speakers as full and complete quotes. In cases where I missed too much of the question or answer I generally skipped including it in the list below. If you are anxious to know exactly what someone said, you would need to buy and listen to the conference recordings for this session.

QUESTION : Could a neutral exchange format such as International Alliance for Interoperability‘s (IAI) Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) be the foundation or a piece of the next step in preservation of born digital design documentation? Text + data model that could be read by different software (import/export of data). You can do this now with AutoCAD – you can dump into IFC.

Phil: Is a neutral exchange format the answer to the archiving problems? Software is changing so fast that there is no way that a standard could keep up with it. Also – even if all the data in the world could be put in XML – you still need something to ‘read and do something’ with the data. He put the business process diagram on screen from his talk and pointed out that all the different tools and their outputs exist within the CONTEXT of the business process itself.

Carissa (?): IFC is a recommendation of the Art Institute of Chicago

QUESTION: William Reilly from the FACADE project started to ask about the challenges inherent in the fact that the IFC standard only gives you the geometry. There was some back and forth about this idea with voices noting that IFC can capture more than that.. but not everything.

Kristine Fallon: The idea of doing a neutral format for complex information is a complicated thing. Going back probably 20 years, the people working on data exchange standards for engineering … the different software won’t perfectly talk to each other – but what they can do is exchange ‘model views’. The IFC data model is capable of a fairly comprehensive set of model views.

QUESTION : Who is going to keep it up in 20 years? Are the software producers going to keep it up?

Phil: Autodesk spent 5 million dollars in building the IFCs. If the archivists align their needs with the business needs then the business will pay for it and the archivists will get what they need.

Annemarie: The archivists don’t have the money and resources.. even at Columbia they don’t have the money to buy generation after generation of the software to read all the different file formats. Maybe the MIT approach of emulation is a better approach.

David : Will there ever be a day that I will have an emulator on his desktop? That makes me more curious about exporting pure text.. I can get my head around preservation of that.

Annemarie: The Mannhattenville project is the first step for Columbia in collecting digital data. Archivists need to reach out to organizations now to explain that they want to preserve what they are creating. I am being honest about the chaos coming down the track when we start getting the data from the 90s.

QUESTION (from the audience): The function of IFC is not for archiving.. it is for different software products to communicate with one another. How do you figure out what artifacts of the design process do you keep? How do you extract the ‘important’ parts to keep from what is ‘less’ important?

Phil : What about when there are physical digital models, analytical models and more.. how do you understand all of it?

Carissa: The architectural firms need to be able to get to all of this too. It isn’t just archivists who should be caring about access to all these models. There are legal ramifications and the possibility of renovations later… this needs to come out of the architecture profession.

QUESTION (I asked the following question): Are the problems in preserving the final products so challenging – are there any thoughts to trying to preserve the process. With paper there is an easier preservation of the evolution of design.

Annemarie: In the Manhattanville project one of the big challenges is the architect who does lots of self editing. In many cases they don’t want the word to see their interim choices during the design process.

Phil: Digital tools can encourage you to explore useless ideas. Keep in mind that the journal file for the Building Information Model keeps track of every change. It will tell you that on Tuesday at 4:10 pm someone moved this door 5 inches to the left.

Carissa : At the art institute, architect and archivists need to work together to figure out what is worth capturing.

David: Two different schools of thought. Archiving the final product or archiving the process. File formats are preserving the final product.

QUESTION : There is danger in keeping everything – the goal of archiving is to keep the best final version. The big hulking databases of the world open the door to keeping an overwhelming set of unimportant data.

Annemarie : the needs of all their different consumers are so broad. Perhaps the taking a snapshot should happen more often – thinner slices

Carissa : 2D snapshots are not going to capture the fullness of a 3D object. But it isn’t capturing as much as it might.

Phil : There could be an interactive digital simulation that generates 3D models.. there could be no ‘final’ product. Can we have an impact on how info is kept 4, 10, 30 years from now – for the future? In a world where you can borrow (or pay for) processing time… someone will keep all the versions of autocad.. you will pay for the 15 seconds of rendering time in AutoCAD 14 from some 3rd party.

Kristine Fallon: There is a real business purpose to sorting this out… the IAI work is very real world.. defining model views can help support business.. but they can also support the goals of archivists.

Kristine Fallon‘s Question : Was PDF-E designed to be an archival format?

Dennis: No.. it was designed to be a data interchange format. People who don’t want to give lots of proprietary data to another vendor – they still need to give them a bunch of data to work with them.. that is where PDF-E came out of.

My Thoughts

As seems to be the case with all born digital records, there are no easy answers. While events like 9-11 have had impacts on the types of final products that regulatory agencies and first responders need to evaluate and have easy access to, the speed of innovation and evolution in building design is stunning. It should come as no surprise that architects are more concerned with finding the best tools for their trade than they are with how to preserve the artifacts of their ultimate creations. They will change the tools they use when they find a better tool to manifest their vision.

The most promissing option seems to be having archivists get involved in discussions with the software developers, the architects, the builders and government early in the design process. The traditional model of archivists receiving the final products of business processes years after they were completed does not appear to be an answer on which we can depend. I suspect that proactive efforts to plan for preservation from the start will pay off – both for those trying to use the records 10 years from now and for those who want to preserve some subset of the records of the design community for future generations.

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.

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Reflections on SAA2007 and Ten Tips for an Optimal Conference Experience

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I want to start off by saying that I really enjoyed SAA 2007. I met amazing people. I went to sessions that made me think. I gave my first SAA conference presentation. I handed out dozens of cards for the unofficial SAA 2007 wiki and for this blog. I brainstormed ideas for sessions, workshops, books and articles. I have seeds for more projects than a single person could start (let alone finish) in a year.

I will be posting session summaries for a number of the sessions I attended over the course of the next week. I have also added a link to my presentation slides on the new Presentations page (note the optimistic use of plural in the page’s name).

My brain is still buzzing from the whirlwind that was SAA 2007 for me, but I have created a list of the top 10 basic conference attending tips that I (re)discovered during the conference and hope to remember for SAA 2008 (and any other conference I attend):

10: Eat more often. Eat real food. Hors d’oeuvres don’t count.

9: Going full throttle without any breaks for more than one day is impossible. At some point my brain won’t take in new information and all I want to do is sit and think about a session I went to yesterday.

8: You never know which sessions will be your favorites. It always happens that at least one session I wasn’t so sure about knocks my socks off — while another that I was so excited about drives me back out the door after 10 minutes.

7: Always bring an extra jacket.

6: Make new friends. Cultivate your inner extrovert. Be bold and introduce yourself. Never assume that everyone around you knows each other – do the kind thing and initiate introductions. This gets easier the more you practice. And don’t worry – everyone forgets names, that is part of the reason they give us those snazzy name tags and insist we wear them.

5: Bring twice as many business cards as you think you need.

4: Don’t have cards? Make them! I have used both VistaPrint and GotPrint. VistaPrint has a set of designs that they will print for free (with their logo on the back). Gotprint makes super lush, shiny cards on nice heavy stock. Both include online tools to create your card – but will also let you upload a PDF if you want to use Photoshop to do something more graphically inspired. If you ended up with either my Spellbound Blog card or the 2007 Wiki card in your stack of cards, you have a sample of what GotPrint can create.

3: Bring the big book they send you in the mail that describes all the sessions. The on site booklet only has the session titles – and often that isn’t enough information to make your choices.

2: Do the fun stuff! It is a good way to force your brain to take a break. It also gives you a chance to meet new people (see tip #6 above).

1: Be flexible. Plans change, opportunities for networking, brainstorming and being exposed to new ideas are around every corner. The choice to NOT attend a session you meant to go to almost always means it will be replace by something else – likely better than what you had planned to do anyway.

Now.. if I can just remember to look at this before I head out to SAA 2008!

Thank you again to everyone who made this conference open and welcoming. I enjoyed meeting so many fabulous new people and I hope to stay in touch with you all (and remember all your names).

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BlogDay2007: Five New Blogs for Your Consideration

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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!

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SAA2007: Opening Plenary Session Ponders Diversity

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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 .

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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.

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Preserving Virtual Worlds – TinyMUD to SecondLife

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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

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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?

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Phoenix DVD destined for Mars

Hubble's Sharpest View Of Mars

When the Phoenix Mars Mission launches (possible as early as this Friday August 3rd, 2007), it will have something unusual on board. The Planetary Society has created what they call the Phoenix DVD.

In late May of 2007 they proudly announced that their special DVD was ready for launch:

… the silica glass mini-DVD with a quarter million names on it (including all Planetary Society members) has been installed on the Phoenix spacecraft and is ready to go to Mars!

In addition to the names, the disc also contains Visions of Mars, a collection of literature and art about the Red Planet. The names and Visions of Mars were written to the silica mini-DVD by the company Plasmon OMS using a special technique. The resulting archival disk should last at least hundreds of years on the Martian surface, ready to be picked up by future explorers.

After the disc was written, a special label was applied to the disc to identify it for future explorers.

The page about Visions of Mars describes it as follows:

Visions of Mars is a message from our world to future human inhabitants of Mars. It will launch on its way to the Red Planet in the summer of 2007 aboard the spacecraft Phoenix. Along with personal messages from leading space visionaries of our time, Visions of Mars includes a priceless collection of Mars literature and art, and a list of hundreds of thousands of names of space enthusiasts from around the world. The entire collection will be encoded on a mini-DVD provided by The Planetary Society, which will be affixed to the spacecraft.

All this has been inscribed on a silica mini-DVD – and has the phrase “Attention Astronauts: Take This With You” in bright red letters on the front. I hate to be cynical (and those of you who read this blog know that it is not my nature to be so) but where will those ‘future human inhabitants of Mars’ find a DVD player to watch this DVD? I know I am not the first to doubt their plan – but I couldn’t resist. Given my suspicion of the whole affair I thought I would at least look into the company that created this very special disk.

Plasmon has an extensive website with all sorts of interesting tidbits. They explain their trademarked Ultra Density Optical (UDO) technology. They feature two PDFs – one called Archiving Defined and another labeled Plasmon Archive Solution. It looks very interesting. My VERY oversimplified summary is that they have combined a RAID approach with a very durable and secure WORM (Write Once, Read Many) flavor of DVD and packaged it into a solution for companies who need to ensure their data remains safe.

I have been meaning to learn more about the latest and greatest in hardware and material solutions aimed at digital preservation in the corporate world – and Boing Boing’s post Mars Library of books, DVDs, and database is now ready for launch just gave me a great excuse to start to scratch the surface.

I have also been following the blog StorageSwitched! for a while. It is written by the CEO of StorageSwitch LLC (“a technology provider for the fixed content data storage market with a multitude of gateway and utility products and services”). I have found it interesting to take a look at the business and technology side of preserving information. I plan more posts in this vein as I learn more about what is out there and how it is being used.

Photo Credit: David Crisp and the WFPC2 Science Team (Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology)

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Public.Resource.Org: Creative Financing and Public Domain Content

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Sunrise on Malibu Lake by Charles O'Rear (National Archives photo no. NWDNS-412-DA-15109) Public.resource.org is dedicated to using funds contributed by individuals to buy public domain content. This content is then released online in multiple locations such as the Internet Archive and Google Video for use by anyone. I love their tag line: Underwritten By The Feds! Overwritten By You!

I spotted this in boingboing’s post Liberated public domain government docs surfacing online and I was immediately intrigued. This isn’t really an archiving issue exactly – though you could decide that it takes more of a LOCKSS approach to preservation. I also wonder how this approach could be used to finance the digitization of other public domain materials.

The website explains on their About Us page that they have recently applied for non-profit status with the IRS, so soon the purchase price of these materials could become a tax deduction for those who file US Tax Returns. They feature materials from 54 different US Federal agencies – from the Fish and Wildlife Service to the IRS. There are materials on the Environment, Public Health, Flying and many more.

But that isn’t all they are tackling – back in May they issued a message to The Internet discussing their attitude toward (and frustration with) the Smithsonian Images website. It begins:

We write to you today on the subject of SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu, a government ecommerce site built on a repository of 6,288 images of national significance. The site is breathtaking in scope, with imagery ranging from the historic cyanotypes of Edward Muybridge to historic photos from aviation, natural history, and many other fields. If the Smithsonian Institution is our attic, these photos are our collective scrapbook.

However, the web site imposes draconian limits on the use of this imagery. The site includes a copyright notice that to the layman would certainly discourage any use of the imagery. While personal, non-commercial use is purportedly allowed, it requires a half-dozen clicks before the user is allowed to download a low-resolution, watermarked image. An image without the watermark and at sufficient resolution to be useful requires a hefty fee, manual approval by the Smithsonian staff, and the resulting invoice specifically prohibits any further use without permission.

The letter goes into great detail about why they disagree with how things are being done – take a look if you are curious. Also -they didn’t just create this letter – they also created a free to download book titled Public Domain Prospectus which they declare as a tool for those researching the public domain status of the 6,288 images included (in their low resolution watermarked versions).

I went hunting on the Smithsonian Images site to see for myself. I found a few things. While the prices for prints or digital files do seem expensive to my eyes – there is the following note included in the Product and Pricing Information:

Special Note on Pricing: Smithsonian Photographic Services, as an instrument of the Smithsonian Institution, is a non-profit entity. Fees associated with the delivery of images represent material fees only and go to support the broader mission to create, archive, and preserve images associated with the Institution and it’s holdings.

That page also includes some information about how the images may be used, but for the full story I headed over to the Copyright Policy. That is when I started to get confused. The copyright policy on that page talks about “Use of text, images and other content on this website…”. Does that mean these same rules apply to the images you purchase as well?

Let’s take a closer look at one of the pages about a specific image. Here is a nice one of Fireworks over National Monuments. I click on the tempting ‘Download Image’ button and now I see more about what the Public.Resource.Org folks are talking about. One more click and I finally find what appears to be the official Commercial Use of Smithsonian Images page which concludes with:

Commercial distribution, publication or exploitation of Smithsonian files is specifically prohibited. Anyone wishing to use any of these files or images for commercial use or publication must first request and receive prior permission by contacting [Smithsonian Institution Office of Imaging & Photographic Services]. Permission for such use is granted on a case-by-case basis. A usage fee may be involved depending on the type and nature of the proposed use.

There is a special policy for school, teacher and student use of the watermarked versions of the images for free (with the right citations of course).

If I understand the Public.Resource.Org’s issues, it isn’t predominately with the price of the high resolution digital versions or even the print versions of these photos (though they DO touch on it in their letter and I think I side with Smithsonian Images on that aspect – it does cost money and time to make all that available). Rather it is with the firmness that Smithsonian Images claims that you must request permission to use any of the images you purchase for anything beyond personal or educational use. I think I like what NARA has on their website concerning the publication of their still photos which begins with these two paragraphs:

Generally, photographic records copied and sold by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) may be published without special permission or additional fees. NARA does not grant exclusive or non-exclusive publication privileges. Copies of Federal records, as part of the public domain, are equally available to all.

A portion of the photographs among our holdings are or may be subject to copyright restrictions. The National Archives does not confirm the copyright status of photographs, but will provide any information filed with the photograph. It is important to note that all of the digital images that are available on our website are in the public domain.

I can see how it might seem safer (from a “don’t sue us” point of view) to force a search by hand for each and every image as users request to use them. At the same time I would like to think that the folks over at Smithsonian Images already know which images are in the public domain. Maybe I am oversimplifying this, but I want to believe that the details of copyright are part of the metadata that could be supplied along with the date, photographer’s name and description.

I prefer the National Archives’ approach of stating clearly that they do not confirm the copyright status of photographs. They put it in the hands of the entity who wants to use the materials – though that might be small comfort to the average citizen not well versed in copyright rules.

The Wikipedia page on Copyright status of work by the U.S. government includes sections about digital historical material as well as work produced by government contractors. Reading through this makes me realize how quickly the copyright status of images such as those provided by Smithsonian Images and NARA can get confusing.

I think what Public.Resource.Org is doing with their propagation of public domain materials to locations where the public can actually get at them easily is interesting. I want to check back in a year and see how much they have set loose – and what materials they are asking for help to liberate. As I mentioned above, I think there could be some interesting models of individuals donating money to finance the digitization and of public domain materials. Something like what Fundable does to take pledges toward a specific fund-raising goal – and then only turn those pledges into funds if the goal is reached.

As for their great frustration with Smithsonian Images? Well, I see Public.Resource.Org’s side. In this age of Flickr.com – people are growing used to watching for Creative Commons Licenses. With so much out there with liberal Creative Commons Licenses and in the Public Domain, why struggle with images that are copyright protected unless you really need to?

I would like to think that rights management is one of the first things that would get sorted out before a large image collection is put online – especially if the goal is to produce a revenue stream. That said – I would love to know the real story here. I can imagine that the rights on many of those images are not clear cut. But if the Smithsonian Image people know that some of them are in the public domain – then why would they go through all that extra trouble to force a rights search for every image? Why not distinguish the ones which require research from those that don’t? Couldn’t it only help support the work of the Smithsonian to have their images used by as many projects as possible? Anyone reading this have an answer for us from the inside?

About the image above: Given that I prefer images without watermarks (as provided by Smithsonian Images) and that I know that the images on NARA’s site are in the public domain I went hunting for something pretty – and found the image I feature above. To find it yourself do a search for [Sunrise on Malibu Lake] in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC). These are the details included with the image:

Sunrise on Malibu Lake in the Santa Monica mountains near Malibu, California, which is located on the northwestern edge of Los Angeles County. The mountains contain the last semi-wilderness in Los Angeles County. This area so far has escaped development pressure. Some 84 percent of the state’s residents live within 30 miles of the coast and this concentration has resulted in increasing land use pressure. Several commissions have been authorized by the legislature to restrict coastal development, 05/1975.

Item from Record Group 412: Records of the Environmental Protection Agency, 1944 – 2000. NARA NAIL Control Number: NWDNS-412-DA-15109. Photograph by Charles O’Rear.

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Happy Birthday Spellbound Blog

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One year ago, when I posted my Introduction post on July 19th of 2006, I had taken only 3 courses towards my MLS degree. I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to write about.. or how often. I wasn’t sure anyone would be interested in my posts. I was about a month away from standing in front of my poster at SAA passing out home-made cards with the name of this blog on them (and my blog URL scribbled on scraps of paper when I ran out of the cards). I posted summaries of many of the sessions I attended, but we never really reached critical mass with bloggers at the SAA 2006 conference in DC.

One year later and I have written 45,028 words in 72 posts (special thanks to the TD Word Count plugin for easy access to those stats). I have completed 7 out of the 12 courses required for my MLS. I am on a panel at the SAA conference in Chicago. I have shiny new cards to hand out to anyone who might want one. There already exists a page in the unofficial conference wiki waiting for people to sign up to cover various sessions at SAA 2007 in Chicago.

I have 145 subscribers to my RSS feed (thank you Feedburner). Most of those subscribers use either Bloglines or the Google Reader. I am proud that this blog is included in the ArchivesBlogs aggregator. According to Technorati, this blog has an Authority of 33 (which means that 33 blogs have linked to it in the past 6 months).

According to Google Analytics, I have had just over 5,000 unique visitors to my Spellbound Blog website. Those individuals have viewed a total of 13,900 pages (each with up to 10 posts on them). I have had visitors from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa (those are Google Analytics geographic breakdowns). 27% of the visitors to Spellbound Blog are recurring visitors. While almost 25% of my visitors arrive because they just typed my URL into their browser, 37% have been referred from other sites and 38% referred from search engines. A full 35% of my site traffic is the result of organic Google searches – but those site visits average a 75% bounce rate so it is possible that many of those visitors take a quick look around, realize they are in the wrong place and continue on their way.

In contrast with what Google Analytics tells me, Awstats reports that I have had over 9,000 unique visitors in 2007 alone – but that seems somehow to include requests for my RSS feed. It is interesting to note here that it is not easy to be sure what the various statistics really mean. This stats confusion made me think of this quote: “A man with one watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never quite sure.” (Lee Segall).

The most popular post due to organic searches is the post titled 129th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s Invention of the Phonograph. Google currently returns this post in the 2nd slot for searches of impact of thomas edison inventions and at the bottom of the first page for invention of the phonograph. I would like to imagine that the 330 or so middle or elementary school students who stumbled onto this post were intrigued by my ideas, but the average time on the page is only a bit over 2 minutes – so who knows how many of them are actually reading it.

It is hard to know who is really reading what I write. I always appreciate comments on my posts – it makes me more confident that folks are in fact reading. I also just like the feedback.

All I can be certain of is that I still enjoy the research and the writing. I haven’t run out of ideas. During this past semester (during which I was taking 2 courses and working full time) I actually found myself annoyed by all the duties that prevented me from posting more often. I had one of those moments in which I realized that writing for this blog had turned into a reward rather than any sort of ‘work’.

So three cheers for a great first blog year! I have lots of ideas for the year ahead. I hope I can meet some of you at SAA in Chicago. My talk, “Communicating Context: The Power of Digital Interfaces”, will be part of the panel titled Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World (Session 804: Saturday September 1 at 1pm).

Thank you to everyone who reads Spellbound Blog. Thank you for your comments. Thank you for keeping me in (and adding me to) your RSS feed readers. Without all of you I would just be talking to myself.

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