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Month: August 2008

SAA2008: Hitting the ground running

I am gearing up for my first day at the SAA annual meeting here in San Francisco. I am still not totally sure what I am going to attend today – each slot has at least 3 interesting looking sessions. For those of you not familiar with how I blog at conferences, I will NOT be live blogging. Live blogging (as I define it) is sitting in a session and recording my notes and thoughts during the session and posting it as fast as possible. Instead I will be taking notes during the sessions – and then turning them into posts on each session at a later time. Sometimes I manage to do this while I am still at the conference. Sometimes this happens over the course of the week or two after the conference. This lets me add links, draw connections between the sessions and get a bit more perspective. I don’t promise to blog every session I attend, but if the past two years are any indication I should manage better than half.

In a side note – if you are staying at the conference hotel and have paid the fee to access Internet from within your hotel room ($15 a day!), you can then call down to the front desk and get a magic code to use in order to get wireless wherever it is available within the hotel.

I hope to meet as many of you as I can this year. The one guaranteed place to find me is during my session on Saturday morning at 9:30 am: Session 602: After the Revolution: Unleashing the Power of EAD. If you read my blog, feel free to come and introduce yourself. It is nice to know who is out there!

After The Games Are Over: Olympic Archival Records

What does an archivist ponder after she turns off the Olympics? What happens to all the records of the Olympics after the closing ceremonies? Who decides what to keep? Not knowing any Olympic Archivists personally, I took to the web to see what I could find.

Olympics.org uses the tag line “Official Website of the Olympic Movement” and include information about The International Olympic Committee’s Historical Archives. The even have an Olympic Medals Database with all the results from all the games.

The most detailed list of Olympics archives that I could find is the Olympic Studies International Directory listing of Archives & Olympic Heritage sites. It is from this page that I found my way to records from the Sydney Olympic Park Authority.

The Olympic Television Archive Bureau (OTAB) website explains that this UK based company “has over 30,000 hours of the most sensational sports footage ever seen, uniquely available in one library”  and aims to provide “prompt fulfilment of your Olympic footage requirements”.

Then I thought to dig into the Internet Archive. What a great treasure trove for all sorts of interesting Olympic bits!

First I found a Universal Newsreel from the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo (embedded below).

I also found a 2002 Computer Chronicles episode Computer Technology and the Olympics which explores the “high-tech innovations that ran the 2002 Winter Olympic Games” (embedded below).

Other fun finds included a digitized copy of a book titled The Olympic games, Stockholm, 1912 and the oldest snapshot of the Beijing 2008 website (from December of 2006). Seeing the 2008 Summer Games pages in the archive made me curious. I found the old site of the official Athens summer games from 2004 which kindly states: “The site is no longer available, please visit http://www.olympic.org or http://en.beijing2008.com/”. The Internet Archive has a bit more than that on the athens2004.com archive page – though some clicking through definitely made it clear that not all of the site was crawled. Lucky for us we can still see the Athens 2004 Olympics E-Cards you could send!

Then I turned to explore NARA‘s assorted web resources. I found a few photos on the Digital Vaults website (search on the keyword Olympics).  A search in the Archival Research Catalog (ARC) generates a long list – including footage of the US National Rifle Team in the 1960 Olympics in Italy.

My favorite items from NARA’s collections are in the Access to Archival Databases (AAD). First I found this telegram from the American Embassy in Ottawa to the Secretary of State in Washington DC (Document ID # 1975OTTAWA02204) sent in June 1975:

 1. EMBASSY APPRECIATES DEPARTMENT’S EFFORTS TO ASSIST CONGEN IN CARING FOR VIPS WHO CERTAINLY WILL ARRIVE FOR 1976 OLYMPIC GAMES WITHOUT TICKETS OR LODGING. HAS DEPARTMENT EXPLORED POSSIBILITY OF OBTAINING 4,000 TICKETS ON CONSIGNMENT BASIS FROM MONTGOMERY WARD, WITH UNDERSTANDING THAT, AS TICKETS ARE SOLD, PROCEEDS WILL BE REMITTED? PERHAPS SUCH AN ARRANGEMENT COULD BE WORKED OUT WITH FURTHER UNDERSTANDING THAT UNSOLD TICKETS BE RETURNED TO MONTGOMERY WARD AT SOME SPECIFIED DATE PRIOR TO BEGINNING OF EVENTS.

2. EMBASSY WILL FURNISH AMOUNT REQUIRED TO RESERVE SIX DOUBLE ROOMS FOR PERIOD OF GAMES. AT PRESENT HOTEL OWNERS AND OLYMPIC OFFICIALS ARE IN DISAGREEMENT AS TO AMOUNTS THAT MAY BE CHARGED FOR ROOMS DURING OLYMPIC PERIOD. NEGOTIATIONS ARE CURRENTLY BEING CARRIED OUT AND AS SOON AS ROOM RATES HAVE BEEN ESTABLISHED, QUEEN ELIZABETH HOTEL MANAGER WILL ADVISE US OF THEIR REQUIREMENTS TO RESERVE THE SIX DOUBLE ROOMS.

Immediately beneath that one, I found this telegram from October 1975 (Document Number 1975STATE258427):

SUBJECT:INVITATION TO PRESIDENT FORD AND SECRETARY
KISSINGER TO ATTEND OLYMPIC GAMES IN AUSTRIA,
FEBRUARY 4-15, 1976

THE EMBASSY IS REQUESTED TO INFORM THE GOA THAT MUCH TO THE PRESIDENT’S AND THE SECRETARY’S REGRET, THE DEMANDS ON THEIR SCHEDULES DURING THAT PERIOD WILL NOT MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR THEM TO ATTEND THE WINTER GAMES. KISSINGER

There are definitely a lot of moving parts to Olympic Archival Records. So many nations participate.  New host countries with the option to handle records however they see fit. I explored this whole question two years ago and came up against the fact that control over the archival records produced by each Olympics was really in the hands of the hosting committee and their country. A quick glance down the list of Archives & Olympic Heritage sites I mentioned above gives you an idea of all the different corners of the world in which one can find Olympic Archival Records in both government and independent repositories. Given that clearly not all Olympic Games are represented in that list, it makes me wonder what we will see on this front from China now that the closing ceremony is complete.

I also suspect that with each Olympic Games we increase the complexity of the electronic records being generated. Would it be worthwhile to create an online collection for each games – as has been done for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank or The September 11 Digital Archive, but extend it to include access to Olympic electronic records data sets? The shear quantity of information is likely overwhelming – but I suspect there is a lot of interesting information that people would love to examine.

Update: For those of you (like me) who wondered what Montgomery Ward had to do with Olympic Tickets – take a look at Tickets For The ’76 Olympics Go On Sale Shortly At Montgomery Ward over in the Sports Illustrated online SI Vault. Sports Illustrated’s Vault is definitely another interesting source of information about the Olympic Games. If my post above has made you nostalgic for Olympics gone by – definitely take a look at the current Summer Games feature on their front page. I couldn’t figure out a permanent link to this feature, but if I ever do I will update this post later.

Geek Archivist and Other T-Shirts

I have a new favorite procrastination technique – putting together graphics and opening CafePress shops! These are ideas I have had for ages (and more are in the works). I suspect they will be great tools for starting interesting conversations with both colleagues, friends and the general public. Please take a look the ones below and see what you think. I should be wearing my GEEK ARCHIVIST t-shirt at SAA if you want to see one in person. I have also created an Archivist Fun T-shirts page for you to use to find all the current designs as I add them.

geek archivist logo

Born Digital Logo

Born Analog Logo

Forgive the poor graphic quality on the thumbnails above – the resizing image magic of WordPress is not all it could be. The images used in the the actual products were created using the specifications set out by the CafePress folks and therefore should be totally clear on the t-shirts, bags, mouse pads and other fun stuff I found to slap them on. Let me know if there is a product you wish I was offering that I haven’t included yet (mugs? aprons? their list of offerings is amazing).

Hope they make you smile as much as they are making me smile.

SAA Wiki 2008: Create an account and add your voice!

SAA 2008 WikiAs of this writing, seventy-three individuals have created accounts on the UnOfficial Wiki of the 2008 SAA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Where are the rest of you? For all of you wondering why to create an account, here are some reasons to join the wiki fun:

Not presenting?  There are still plenty of ways you can use the wiki to improve your conference experience.

Not going to the conference? Look through the Introductions page and take the opportunity to reconnect with your colleagues. The annual meeting gives everyone a chance to focus on the latest thoughts and activities in the archives community – no matter where you are. See a session you wish you could attend? Add a note to that session’s page – let the presenters and those who might blog the session know about your interest.

Have questions or need help? Drop me a message via my contact page and I will lend a hand. Remember – wikis are very sturdy, you won’t break it!

Online Interactive U.S. Copyright Slider

Digital Copyright Slider

Remember when I posted about the Copyright Slider: Quick Easy Access to Copyright Laws and Guidelines? This was my last line in that post:

My next question is how hard would it be to make a slick flash version of this that could live online and be updated as copyright rules change?

Well, thanks to Digitization 101’s A digital version of the Copyright Slider post I discovered that exactly what I wished for now exists. Go take the Digital Copyright Slider for a spin.

The interface is clear and simple – they did a great job of taking advantage of the interactive medium to do things they couldn’t do on the paper slider. If it won’t disturb your neighbors, turn up the volume to hear the satisfying click each time you move the slider to a new scenario. Make sure you click on some of the *s to see more detailed information. Take note of the advice regarding more complicated scenarios as well as the links directly to documents detailing specific copyright laws.

I love that it has been licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The creators have included their contact information along with the idea that other institutions could host custom copies of the slider with their own copyright research contacts. The only downside I see to this is that if there are changes to US copyright law, it will take time for updates to a central copy of the slider to propagate to local customized copies.

The final question is how fast they can update the slider in the event of changes to copyright law – but we will have to wait on changes to the US copyright landscape before we can find that out!

Image Credit: Image above is taken directly from a screen shot of the Digital Copyright Slider.