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Month: January 2008

Caring for Special Collections: Exploring the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf

Connecting to Collections BookshelfI subscribe to the RSS feed from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and so saw a press release encouraging institutions to apply for the free IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf.

The IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf is intended to provide small and medium-sized libraries and museums with essential resources needed to improve the condition of their collections. The Bookshelf includes books, DVDs, and other collections resources, as well as a Guide to Online Resources and a User’s Guide to all of the materials. It addresses such topics as the philosophy and ethics of collecting, collections management and planning, emergency preparedness, and culturally specific conservation issues.

The Heritage Preservation has created both a 48 page Bookshelf User’s Guide, with a page dedicated to each resources selected for the bookshelf, and a Guide to Online Resources to be used as a companion to the bookshelf. The Bookshelf User’s Guide has a brilliant section at the end giving you pointers to specific sections of the various Bookshelf resources to answer special questions – such as ‘Where can we find information on raising funds for collections care?’ and ‘How can I prioritize the needs of our collections?’.

What is interesting is that it took me a while to realize that each of the institutions that is awarded The Bookshelf will actually receive the books. My past experience with O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online made me assume that the books would be only accessed online. The Safari Books Online site requires a paid membership, but then provides access to an ever growing electronic reference library. The total number of resources is listed as currently over 5,000. One level of membership, Safari Library, provides unlimited access to all the resources (currently listed as $42.99 a month or $472.89 per year) while the less expensive membership level, Safari Bookshelf (currently listed as $22.99 a month or $252.99 a year), provides access to up to ten titles at a time.

Seeing those prices got me wondering, what will the receivers of this bookshelf be getting and what it’s total cost would be? I found my way to a list of the books and resources that will be included. Between the Internet and the 48 page guide to the Bookshelf I found the following information about each element of the Bookshelf. IMLS has broken the bookshelf down into three subsections as shown below:

Bookshelf: The Core Collection

Bookshelf: Nonliving Collections

Bookshelf: Living Collections

Grand Total

The maximum cost (with no membership discounts) to purchase all the components of The Bookshelf would be $951.87. Add in the cost of shipping and printing your own copies from the free downloads and we can probably talk about the monetary value of the Bookshelf being approximately $1000!

Online Acces

While researching all of this I came across a new option on Amazon.com – something they are calling Amazon Upgrade. For an additional fee above and beyond the price you pay for the physical book – you can have immediate and permanent online access to the content of that book. Take a look at the offering explained on the Amazon page for The National Trust Manual of Housekeeping: The Care of Collection in Historic Houses Open to the Public. I assume that they plan to increase the titles for which this is an option. If so, I can envision building an online reference shelf of one’s own – one title at a time. Rather than deciding that something like O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online has enough books to make it worth while for you – you will create your own custom online reference shelf.

The other half of the online access story is of course the number of resources that are posted online for free download (or as living HTML documents being updated over time). These are all the resources from the list above that can be downloaded for free:

What if all the resources that those who care for collections need were available via an online bookshelf? Now that would be an amazing resource for which many would be happy to pay an annual fee. Perhaps it could be provided as part of the membership fee for one or more of the appropriate professional organizations. An additional benefit to an online collection is the opportunity to receive automatic updates and new editions. I will also keep an eye on the Amazon Upgrade option to see how easy it is for someone to build their own online reference shelf – but I think a purposeful online collection designed for cultural heritage institutions would be even more compelling.

Getting the Bookshelf

A lot of organizations have already received the Bookshelf, but the press release that got me looking at all this mentioned that the next (final?) application period will be from March 1 through April 30, 2008. Recipients will be announced in July of 2008.

If you are considering applying you can find more details about the application process and review the questions you must answer online. But even for those that don’t qualify (federally operated and for-profit institutions are not eligible) – the Bookshelf User’s Guide, the Guide to Online Resources and those resources that may be downloaded for free provide a powerful combination of materials to support institutions and individuals as they care for collections of all shapes and sizes.

Note: All prices quoted in this post were valid as of January 27th, 2008. Image shown above from IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf page.

LOC + Flickr equals Crowdsourced Tagging

Flickr/LOC: Lily Smith between 1910 and 1915 (LC-B2- 2350-8)It is no surprise that the Library of Congress announcing the publication of images on Flickr is news both in mainstream news outlets and in the blogosphere. From librarian.net‘s short and cheery LoC goes 2.0! post to ArchivesNext‘s pondering Is Flickr “legitimate” for archives now that LOC is there?, I have seen a lot of discussion of LoC and Flickr in my RSS feeds.

What is it all about?

In case you have missed the details, the Library of Congress has published two photo collections on Flickr in a new subsection of the website called The Commons. The two collections are:

  • 1930s-40s in Color: 1615 photos taken by photographers working for the US government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) and covering “rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working between 1939 and 1944.”
  • News in the 1910s: 1500 photos taken by photographers who worked for the Bain News Service. Topics include “sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, and political activities, with a special emphasis on life in New York City.”

I enjoyed reading Flickr’s own blog post on the subject, Many hands make light work. It gave me a glimpse of their vision. For them, these two collections from the Library of Congress make up a pilot project – this is just the first step.

On their page for The Commons they first talk about their goals for the project:

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

On the homepage for the Library of Congress Flickr pilot I found this introduction:

The Library of Congress invites you to explore history visually by looking at interesting photos from our collections. Please add tags and comments, too! More words are needed to help more people find and use these pictures.

So, here we have a project between two large and well known organizations, with their goals carefully aligned. Let’s get more people looking at the amazing photos from the Library of Congress. Let’s also harness the curiosity and enthusiasm of those who want to be more involved and want to tag content. I love it!

Considering the Tags

So then I started looking at photos and the tags they have. I wish (being my database geek self) that I could see the groupings in which tags were added (ie, that one person added tags 3 through 10). They don’t seem to be displayed alphabetically – but rather in the order in which they were added to the photo.

I considered this photo from the 1930s-40s in Color collection:

LOC Woman Airplane Photo

The list below shows all the tags that were assigned to it, in the order in which the tags are displayed beside the photo above on Flickr (listed separated by commas to preserve space). The ‘Library of Congress’ tag has already been assigned to every photo in the collections upon upload, and therefore always appears first:

Library of Congress, Long Beach, california, 1942, october, WW2, USA, aircraft, douglas, Palmer, WWII, women, manufacturing, yellow, stripes, overalls, engine, Douglas Aircraft, engine installation, military aviation, World War II, women at work, historical photographs, slide film, 4×5, large format, LF, transparency, transparencies, world war 2, technology

In a world with no controlled vocabulary, there seems to be a theory at work of covering all your bases. Rather than noticing that someone had tagged this photo ‘WW2’, it was also later tagged with ‘WWII’, ‘World War II’ and ‘world war 2’. On another photo in the collection I know I saw the tag ‘wwii’. As long as there is no ‘offical’ version for this tag, I see the wisdom in tagging it with all of them – just to be sure.

The official description of the photo is: “Women are trained to do precise and vital engine installation detail in Douglas Aircraft Company plants, Long Beach, Calif. (1942 Oct)”. The metadata provided by the Library of Congress also includes information about the format of the film itself.

These are the subject headings assigned by the Library of Congress catalogers:

  • Douglas Aircraft Company

  • Airplane industry

  • Women–Employment

  • World War, 1939-1945

  • Assembly-line methods

  • United States–California–Long Beach

It is interesting to note that the main things that the independent taggers have captured that the professional catalogers haven’t are either non-topical aspects of the image (‘yellow’ and ‘overalls’) as well as broader more general ideas (‘military aviation’ and ‘technology’).

Does the tag ‘women at work’ tell you more than the LOC subject heading ‘Women–Employment’? Maybe, maybe not – but if you view all the images tagged ‘women at work’ across Flickr, now you can see these women from the 1940s at work beside photos such as three vendors and Bozo village life. Now this is something different. This is knitting threads from the ivory tower of libraries and archives into the communal tapestry that is Flickr. Not only might the addition of the ‘women at work’ tag make these images more accessible to the average person looking for Library of Congress photos – but it also puts these photos in the everyday path of many more people. It brings us firmly back to Flickr’s goal stated above of giving more people a “taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection”.

Copyright

Flickr has this to say on The Commons’ home page about copyright:

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

I am with ArchivesNext in hoping that this move by the Library of Congress will give archivists and librarians on the ground in other institutions a bit more ammunition with which to fight for posting their images on Flickr. Copyright is one of the issues that seems to give so many organizations pause – so it is interesting to see this new category having been created specifically for cultural institutions. I like that they link back to the Library of Congress’s official answer about what it means if the catalog record notes ‘No known restrictions on publication’. Flickr also explicitly mentions that “If the pilot works – or, when it works! – we’ll look to allow other interested cultural institutions the opportunity to extend the application of “no known restrictions” to their catalogues.” So clearly “no known copyright restrictions” has been created with cultural institutions in mind.

Final Thoughts

I am intrigued to see how this progresses. If nothing else is accomplished, more people will certainly see images from the Library of Congress collections than they would have had none of these photos been published on Flickr. Some will even surf back to the Library of Congress website to learn more about their photo collecitons. For the example photo I selected above, there were already subject headings assigned – but for most of the Bain News Service photos all that is available are bits of “unverified data provided by the Bain News Service on the negatives or caption cards”. Every tag that is added improves the chances that an interested party may find the photo they need.

I have posted before about the potential of crowdsourcing. I am in favor of it. Yes, all the tags won’t be perfect. Yes, there will be seven different ways of tagging for World War II. But when all is said and done, more people will find more photos. More eyes will see the treasures that once were only available to those who could get inside temperature and humidity controlled vaults. And more people will have the opportunity to learn a tiny bit more about why cultural institutions like the Library of Congress are great!

SAA2008 Here I Come! After the Revolution: Unleashing the Power of EAD

SAA2008 I got the word just before the holidays – the panel proposal of which I was a part has been accepted for SAA 2008 in San Francisco . The title of the panel is ‘After the Revolution: Unleashing the Power of EAD’ and the working title for my paper/presentation is ‘Visualizing Archival Collections: Leveraging the Power of EAD’.

My co-presenters are Max Evans (currently of the NHPRC, soon to be of the LDS Church Historical Department) and Elizabeth Yakel (of University of Michigan, School of Information). Jodi Allison-Bunnell from Northwest Digital Archives, Orbis Cascade Alliance is our panel Chair.

This is the description of our panel that we submitted with our proposal:

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) was created in 1995 to increase uniformity and interoperability of data about archival collections to facilitate discovery. It has yet to realize that goal: most online finding aids merely recreate paper documents. Speakers will demonstrate how the structured, standardized nature of EAD can form the basis of user-friendly interfaces and finding aids that can accommodate multiple perspectives and utilize graphical and visual interfaces–while faithfully recording and presenting the context, structure, and content of the collection. Panelists will also address the challenges of unleashing the power of EAD, including normalizing XML, the lack of standard values for cross-institutional aggregation of data, and different approaches to subject terms, with a discussion of the technological and practical issues that surround them. The session relates to the SAA strategic priorities of technology and public awareness and engages elemental questions of revolutionary and evolutionary change.

My portion of the panel will focus on my ArchivesZ information visualization project. I will be discussing both the power of this type of graphical interface to archival collections as well as addressing the roadblocks to their practical implementation. My plan is to continue the work I started last Spring over the course of this Spring and Summer – and show off a new version of ArchivesZ in San Francisco (as well as online here of course!).

Here are the descriptions of Max, Elizabeth and Jodi’s planned contributions (cribbed from our proposal submission):

  • Max Evans will explore the fundamental purposes of finding aids and explore what can be done to leverage EAD’s structure to render graphical, informative, and elegant finding aids online.
  • Elizabeth Yakel will discuss usability test findings and how these were incorporated into the EAD-based Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections to allow communities to engage with collections in new ways.
  • Jodi Allison-Bunnell brings a lively interest in user-centered presentations of finding aids that emerge from her work as manager of a five-state EAD consortium.

I am so pleased and excited. So – who is planning on going to San Fransisco in August? I hope to see you there.

Image Credit: Society of American Archivists, ARCHIVES 2008: Archival R/Evolution & Identities web page.