Menu Close

Month: March 2008

SAA2008: PDFs of Conference Presentations

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

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

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

I do wonder what they mean when they say that the presentations will be “viewable by meeting attendees”. In my heart of hearts I hope they go a step further and let the speakers sign off on these presentations being shared with the world (or at least with all of SAA). I haven’t gone through every Session Page on the SAA 2007 Un-Official Wiki, but I believe that not very many presenters took the opportunity to provide links to soft copies of their presentations. I hope that SAA is more successful on this front.

No matter the choices made relating to immediate access – I see this as a big step forward in the commitment to using technology. I think one of the best ways to learn is through getting your hands dirty. Technology is listed as one of SAA’s strategic priorities. Every choice that SAA makes that encourages their membership to become more tech-savvy is a step towards supporting that priority.

Big Digital Step For SAA: American Archivist Online

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

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

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

What issues are online?

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

How is it structured?

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

Who can access it?

Officially, only members of SAA and individual or institutional subscribers to the journal can access all available issues. In reality, it appears most of the issues are available to everyone. Currently only the Fall/Winter issues of 2005, 2006 & 2007 restrict access to all the content. Even for these issues there is access to some of the articles – such as the Book Reviews section in both the 2005 and 2007 Fall/Winter issues.

The FAQ claims that non-subscribers must pay a fee to print an article – but I don’t see how they will enforce that. When viewing a PDF of an article from the most recent issue I was able to save it to my local desktop and print it without a problem. Not sure if that is a bug or how it will remain – or if maybe they are talking about official reprints that are sent through the mail?

Other features

  • Try the handy Article Category search links – like this one that shows all the Presidential Addresses.
  • Mark or save articles to your own private lists (if you are logged in)
  • Search the full text – either across the journal or within an individual issue.
  • Subscribe to the RSS feed (I spotted on the All Issues page). The feed includes the article abstract, category, author and source issue information. Be the first archivist on your block to know the instant the new issue is published online!

Final Thoughts

I think that everyone who heard President Adkins announce at SAA in Chicago that the American Archivist was going online was excited (well.. there was lots of clapping – that is for sure). That announcement was a strong indications to me of SAA’s commitment to improving their online offerings.

Finally seeing it available online is even better – action speaks louder than words.

Image Credit: SAA Logo from http://archivists.org/

ISSUU: Interesting Platform for Online Publishing

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

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

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

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

Issuu has a special Copyright FAQ, which in combination with Peter Hirtle‘s page on Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States, should support those trying to figure out if they can upload what they want to upload without getting into copyright related hot water.

So how is it different from a plain old PDF? Take a look at the embedded Issuu viewer below showing a 1908 copy of The Colonial Book of The Towle Manufacturing Company Silversmiths.

I don’t think this would ever be the way you would want to give online access to digitized records in general – but I do think that this could be a great way to highlight a particularly impressive set or volume of documents. If an archives featured one of these a month on their homepage – would people subscribe to their RSS feed just to see the new one? On the actual page on which I found the above document, Issuu makes it easy to subscribe to the RSS feed for the Issuu author ‘silverlibrary’.

I don’t know why Issuu has decided that I must create an account before I may view document author silverlibrary’s user profile. I would hope that there was an elegant way for visitors to see a group of Issuu documents created by the same author without having to create an account first (or ever).

Want to know what others think? Take a look at Finally, a Web-based PDF Viewer That Does Not Suck (Issuu) over on TechCrunch. One interesting tidbit I picked up from that review is that Issuu is based in Denmark. I wonder what impact that has on which copyright rules apply to the documents uploaded into Issuu.

Want to read more about their vision? Of course they have a press release in the form of an Issuu publication and I have embedded it below. I think my favorite line is that Issuu is intended to be ‘YouTube for Publications’.

I would love to see a highlighted section created for ‘cultural heritage materials’ (or something like that anyway). Take a look around Issuu and let me know what you think. Is this a viable tool for an archives or manuscript collection to use to highlight parts of their collection?