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Year: 2008

Spellbound Blog on Twitter

I little while back I created a Twitter account for Spellbound Blog. So far I have just been posting pointers back to my blog posts on it, but I do plan to start using it to share other tidbits (like a link to today’s Doonsbury that features fictional Library of Congress archivist Violet McPhee).

A question for those playing along at home – would you be more likely to follow Spellbound Blog on Twitter or add Spellbound Blog to your network on del.icio.us? Or happy to do both?

If you already have the Spellbound Blog RSS feed in your feed reader, perhaps links shouldn’t be mixed in with alerts about new blog posts? This would mean that del.icio.us would be a better place to put links. Are more folks in the archives community on Twitter or del.icio.us? Maybe I can inspire  ArchivesNext to post a poll about which of these services people are actually using?

ps. When did del.icio.us become delicious.com?

Vice President Ruled Part of Executive Branch: Cheney’s Records Must Be Preserved

CNN’s headline is Cheney must keep records, judge orders.  The very short version of all this is that the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued “Vice President Richard B. Cheney in his official capacity, the Executive Office of the President (“EOP”), the Office of the Vice President (“OVP”), the National Archives and Records
Administration (“NARA”), and Dr. Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States, in his official capacity” to force everyone involved to “preserve all vice presidential records, broadly defined to encompass all records relating to the vice president carrying out his constitutional, statutory or other official or ceremonial duties” (see the CREW site article: Court Orders Cheney to Preserve Records in CREW Lawsuit).

Turns out that a judge agrees with CREW and has ordered that:

Defendants shall preserve throughout the pendency of this litigation all documentary material, or any reasonably segregable portion thereof created or received by the Vice President, his staff, or a unit or individual of the Office of the Vice President whose function is to advise and assist the Vice President, in the course of conducting activities which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the Vice President, without regard to any limiting definitions that Defendants may believe are appropriate

I love that last bit – keep it all, even if you don’t think you should.  The court order finishes by saying that they should still give the records to NARA as long as NARA is going to treat them as covered by the Presidential Records Act (see NARA’s PRA page or Wikipedia’s PRA page – I will let you guess which is easier to read).

Is it bad of me to be excited that this is being treated as front page news? As of 9:30pm September 20th 2008, CNN is featuring the article in its ‘prime top left with a big photo’ spot and the New York Times has a link off the main page to their article: Cheney Is Ordered to Preserve Wide Set of Records. They say that there is no such thing as bad publicity. I would like to believe that front page news stories such as this one help improve understanding of archives in general (and NARA in particular).

NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant News: Visualizing Archival Collections

archivesz ng

As of August 22nd, 2008 it was official. There is even a blog post over on the NEH Office of Digital Humanities updates page to prove it. The University of Maryland was granted a Level I NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant to fund work on the ‘Visualizing Archival Collections’ project. The official one liner is that the project will support “The development of visualization tools for assessing information contained in electronic archival finding aids created with Encoded Archival Description (EAD)”. Why did I wait so long to announce this on the blog? I wanted to have something fun to announce at the end of my SAA presentation out in San Francisco!

The project director is Dr. Jennifer Golbeck. I also have the support of University of Maryland’s Jennie Levine, Dr. Bruce Ambacher, and Dr. Doug Oard. This amazing set collaborators should help me stay on the right track and make sure I keep the sometimes competing issues relating to archives, information retrieval and interface design in balance.

I will be collecting EAD encoded finding aids over the next few months. My goal is to gather a broad sample of English language finding aids from a wide range of institutions and work on the script that extracts this data into a database. Once we have the data extracted I get to look at what we have, do some data cleanup and start thinking about what sorts of visualizations might work with our real world data. During the spring term we will design and build a 2nd generation prototype of ArchivesZ.

Want your data to be part of this? If you would like to contribute EAD finding aids in XML format to the project, please send me the following information:

  1. Archives Name
  2. Archives Parent Institution (if applicable)
  3. Archives Location
  4. Contact at Archives for questions about the finding aids (name, email and phone number)
  5. Estimate of # of finding aids being offered
  6. Controlled Vocabulary or Thesaurus used for Subject values (as many as are used)
  7. Method of finding aid delivery (sending me a zip file? pointing me at a directory online? some other way?)
  8. Do I have your permission to post a discussion of the data issues I may find in your finding aids here on Spellbound Blog? (Please see the OSU Archives post as an example of they types of issues I discuss)

You can either put this into the form on my Contact Page or send email directly to jeanne AT spellboundblog dot com.

Thank you to everyone for their enthusiasm about the ArchivesZ project. It is very exciting to have the opportunity to take all these shiny ideas to the next level.

SAA2008: Yale, Family Papers & High School Students (Session 508)

The session’s official title was Family and Community Archives Project: Introducing High School Students to the Archives Profession. It focused on a pilot outreach program carried out by 21 archivists from Yale University at the Cooperative Arts and Humanities magnet high school in New Haven, CT. 117 high school juniors participated as part of their US History course. The pilot aimed to introduce them to what archivists do, work with them to find, understand and describe their family papers and also to present archives as a possible profession to students who might assume that it was only welcoming to Caucasians.

A number of their original plans were adjusted after they met with the high school administrators:

  • They would need to work with juniors rather than seniors because it is the juniors who take US History
  • The principal wanted them to work with all 5 classes of US History students, rather than a single class.
  • The program would run from March to May instead of January to June
  • When they realized that a number of students are in foster care, they needed to find other ways to include students who did not want (or could not) do family research. They chose to add the option of researching the history of community organizations.

Logistics

A total of twenty-one archivists from various departments at Yale University volunteered. They were divided up into five teams, one for each class with which they would be working during the course of the pilot. Starting in October they held weekly meetings to create the schedule and plans. A total of eight lesson plans were created. These took much more time than the archivists had expected. They also designed and printed a brochure to introduce the students to archives, archivists and basic archival terms. A wiki (Family Community Archives Project Wiki) was created to facilitate communication among the archivists and teachers. The wiki included bios of the archivists.

All classwork would be graded by the teachers without input from the archivists. This classwork included a journal component. It was decided that the journal (a 3-ring binder that the archivists provided) would remain in the class room. This choice was made based on teacher input – there was concern that if the journals were removed from the classroom that they would quickly be misplaced or forgotten.

Parents and guardians of participating students were alerted via a letter explaining the class project and encouraging them to help students as they worked on their family or community research.

A blog (Family and Community Archives Project Blog) was created that students, archivists and teachers could all use to communicate with each other. They met with the classes for 8 weeks. Every student got a certificate of participation and an ‘archivally themed goody box’ (think Oscars.. but less opulent). They asked students to complete an evaluation form – to ‘be honest… we are thick skinned’. They mounted an exhibit in the main Yale library featuring the student’s work. As is often the case with 16 year olds, the students pulled it together at the last minute and did a great job. They had an opening reception that included students, parents and the community.

Lessons Learned

They discussed both with the teachers and archivists to analyze what worked and what didn’t. What worked?

  • Students learned what archivists do – some said they might consider a career as an archivist and that they learned a lot.
  • The teachers enjoyed it – noticed some students were more engaged than they sometimes were (while some were not that interested).
  • Brought Yale into community and the community into Yale.
  • Collaboration across libraries and departments – archivists met each other and worked together.
  • The group creation of lesson plans.
  • The choice to assign several archivists per class. It permitted small groups and one-on-one work. Lesson plans were sometimes customized to suite the classroom/teacher/student special cases.
  • The blog: this communication worked for some.. but not all. Hard to know why some students were more comfortable with the blog than others. It was a good way to provide students with information about the archivists and the project.
  • The wiki: provided schedules, lesson plans, resources.. etc. It was very successful & usefull.

The most successful aspects?

  • The archives tour
  • Discussion of who uses archives and why which included audio/visual examples and archival material.
  • The exhibit was a high point of the project. They photographed the items they wanted to display and that worked well. Students were very proud of the exhibit.. 25% did not contribute.

What did not work?

  • Teacher support varied – success completely depended on the enthusaism and commitment of the teacher.
  • 8 weeks is too long for this sort of project
  • Class meeting times too long – 40 and 80 minute sessions
  • Needed more feedback earlier in the process from teachers on lesson plans – didn’t learn the reading level of the students until lesson plans were done… needed clearer definition of expectations for the exhibit.
  • Efficacy and support for homework – some people thought there should be no homework (other than project tasks) .. some thought it should be more structured.
  • Technology support for A/V lesson – school didn’t have equipment to support the A/V projection needs
  • Student privacy – they needed parent/guardian permissions to allow video & photos of students to be taken. There was a very late question about if they could use the students’ first and last in the exhibition. No media release forms were sent out in time to make a video about the session.
  • School activities schedule changed all the time – interfered
  • Early class time led to poor attendance (7 am!)
  • The archivists talked too much – they needed more hands on lessons. Students should have been able to bring in materials earlier in the process and have more time to work with them. More opportunity to connect to the student – the example being the LAST class session when the students brought materials in for scanning by the archivists. This gave a way to connect to the archivists and understand why their materials were important.

Teacher’s suggestions for improving the project

  • Run the project for 2 weeks in march – just after national testing is completed
  • Meet with each class 5 times in a row in one week.. with one class being the tour

This project fit in really well with Yale’s goals of reaching out to the local New Haven community.

Potential lessons for other archivists

  • planning phase:
    • define measures of success
    • define what you want students to learn & how – realistic objects for a 16 year old.. do not be too ambitious. Include perspectives of archivist parents. for some classes lecturing worked well.. some classes small groups worked really well
    • define resources needed ( they had 21 archivists who did work on Yale’s time) – Money = $3,000 spent on photo reproductions, handouts, mounting, gift boxes, lunch for teachers & archivists and final reception.
    • explore what is available on the Internet – look for lesson plans – good stuff out there that is often too ambitious, but good for adaptation
    • partner with the teacher – engage the teachers early on.. define what the students need to do by the end of the project. think about archivists who have never taught before.. figure out what you can do to help them
    • include a tour of a repository
    • provide teaching lessons for archivists who haven’t taught
    • plan for unengaged students and teachers – adapted their lessons.. hard situation..
    • avoid early morning classes
    • resolve privacy/confidentiality issue early
  • implementation:
    • be flexible – be prepared for changing activities schedules and other in class challenges
    • do an exhibit – create copies.. understand that these are precious materials
    • be visual in your teaching – video!
    • delving into family history can raise sensitive information – help 16 year olds figure out how to choose what to display in a public exhibit
    • introduce them to other jobs beyond archivist – at first only talked about archivists work… but next year will also talk about all the people who work in archives. Tie in their interests (this was an arts school.. include that perspective)
    • wrap up meetings with teachers and archivists essential

Diversity

One of the underlying goals of the pilot was to explore ways to increase diversity.

Cultural exchange: What did archivists learn from the students and teachers when working with the school? They learned about the student’s families and their community organizations. It bridged a generation gap – the archivists learned about what it meant to be a high school kid these days. Not all of it was positive – it left a lot of the archivists with concern for the state of education – issues with their writing skills.

Difficult to measure: How do we know it worked? No longitudinal study is being done to find out if they end up working in archives. We need to take a long view – but be impatient.

The impact on archives, defined broadly – no matter if they did not make any new archivists, they supported the archival endeavor – 110 students, teachers and their families now have a better understanding of archives and records.

Questions & Answers

Question: Who crafted the evaluation for the students?

Answer: One of the archivists created it and it was approved by the rest of the team.

Question: In the future would you find it more desirable to work with the teachers on evaluating the student projects for grading purposes? or is that not our business?

Answer: No, they would not want to be involved with grading. The teacher knows the students. That said – they do wish that the teachers had planned the final project earlier on. Next time the archivists would encourage/push for final project guidelines.

Question: How did you measure that your learning objectives were met other than the survey?

Answer: They didn’t do that formally – but anecdotally when the students were in other classes – they heard other teachers report that students continued to talk about the archives work outside of the history class. There was a ‘buzz’ among the students.

Question: How did you find the time to do this?

Answer: The leadership had to agree (at least informally) that the archivists can do this. Molly: They were very surprised by how much time it all took. It was a volunteer effort.. they met as a group 1x a week during their lunch hour.

Question: Why didn’t you consider doing an electronic journal?

Answer: There was a concern that not all students are tech savvy. For example – only a handful of kids engaged with the blog. They felt they couldn’t require it unless everyone had access and a sufficient comfort level with the tools.

Question: Where any archivists of color involved in the project ? If one of the goals of projects like this is to encourage individuals of color to consider a career as an archivist, it might be easier if they see people who look like them.. people out there documenting diverse communities.

Answer: Yes.. a few. There were suggestions that they could contact the roundtables of color/ethnicity – bring in visiting speakers to talk about how they came to work in archives. The materials are important too – materials they can relate with. It was emphasized again that this was a pilot and the had to spend a great deal of time creating their lesson plans from scratch. Now that they have the building blocks – they can improve other aspects.

Question: What about talking about preserving things like MySpace pages – maybe use myspace for the blogging

Answer: They didn’t want to do anything that might exclude people.

Question: Was the non-involved teacher aware of what archives do?

Answer: He didn’t come to the archives tour. He was totally tuned out. He felt he was very behind in the teaching schedule – both students and the teacher felt it was taking away from class time.

Question: Could they offer the 11 out of 117 who said they might want to be archivists internships?

Answer: Maybe – but since the rules of the school required that any student who left the campus was accompanied by an adult, it would be very challenging.

My Thoughts

I found this session very inspiring. I loved that it took the archives to the community and it the community into the archives. This is the sort of outreach project I hope has a chance of spreading to other schools. Interested in considering a project like this at your archives? Take a look at all the resources available on the wiki’s handouts and homework page and be on the lookout for a writeup of the pilot in the Nov/Dec issue of Archival Outlook.

SAA2008: Preservation and Experimentation with Analog/Digital Hybrid Literary Collections (Session 203)

floppy disks

The official title of Session 203 was Getting Our Hands Dirty (and Liking It): Case Studies in Archiving Digital Manuscripts. The session chair, Catherine Stollar Peters from the New York State Archives and Records Administration, opened the session with a high level discussion of the “Theoretical Foundations of Archiving Digital Manuscripts”. The focus of this panel was preserving hybrid collections of born digital and paper based literary records. The goal was to review new ways to apply archival techniques to digital records. The presenters were all archivists without IT backgrounds who are building on others work … and experimenting. She also mentioned that this also impacts researchers, historians, and journalists.For each of the presenters, I have listed below the top challenges and recommendations. If you attended the sessions, you can skip forward to my thoughts.

Norman Mailer’s Electronic Records

Challenges & Questions:

  • 3 laptops and nearly 400 disks of correspondence
  • While the letters might have been dictated or drafted by Mailer, all the typing, organization and revisions done on the computer were done by his assistant Judith McNally. This brings into question issues of who should be identified as the record creator. How do they represent the interaction between Mailer & McNally? Who is the creator? Co-Creators?
  • All the laptops and disks were held by Judith McNally. When she died all of her possessions were seized by county officials. All the disks from her apartment were eventually recovered over a year later – but it causes issues of provenance. There is no way to know who might have viewed/changed the records.

Revelations and Recommendations:

What is accessioning and processing when dealing with electronic records? What needs to be done?

  • gain custody
  • gather information about creator’s (or creators’) use of the electronic records. In March 2007 they interviewed Mailer to understand the process of how they worked together. They learned that the computers were entirely McNally’s domain.
  • number disks, computers (given letters), other digital media
  • create disk catalog – to reflect physical information of the disk. Include color of ink.. underlining..etc. At this point the disk has never been put into a computer. This captures visual & spacial information
  • gather this info from each disk: file types, directory structure & file names

The ideal for future collections of this type is archivist involvement earlier – the earlier the better.

Papers of Peter Ganick

  • Speaker: Melissa Watterworth
  • Featured Collection: Papers of Writer and Small Press Publisher Peter Ganick, Thomas J Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut

Challenges & Questions:

  • What are the primary sources of our modern world?
  • How do we acquire and preserve born digital records as trusted custodians?
  • How do we preserve participatory media – maybe we can learn from those who work on performance art?
  • How do we incrementally build our collections of electronic records? Should we be preserving the tools?
  • Timing of acquisition: How actively should we be pursuing personal archives? How can we build trust with creators and get them to understand the challenges?
  • Personal papers are very contextual – order matters. Does this hold true for born digital personal archives? What does the networking aspect of electronic records mean – how does it impact the idea of order?
  • First attempt to accession one of Peter Ganick’s laptops and the archivist found nothing she could identify as files.. she found fragments of text – hypertext work and lots of files that had questionable provenance (downloaded from a mailing list? his creations?). She had to sit down next to him and learn about how he worked.
  • He didn’t understand at first what her challenges were. He could get his head around the idea of metadata and issues of authenticity. He had trouble understanding what she was trying to collect.
  • How do we arrange and keep context in an online environment?
  • Biggest tech challenge: are we holding on for too long to ideas of original order and context?
  • Is there a greater challenge in collecting earlier in the cycle? What if the creator puts restrictions on groupings or chooses to withdraw them?
  • Do we want to create contracts with donors? Is that practical?

Revelations and Recommendations:

  • Collect materials that had high value as born digital works but were at a high risk of loss.
  • Build infrastructure to support preservation of born digital records.
  • Go back to the record creator to learn more about his creative process. They used to acquire records from Ganick every few years.. that wasn’t frequent enough. He was changing the tools he used and how he worked very quickly. She made sure to communicate that the past 30 years of policy wasn’t going to work anymore. It was going to have to evolve.
  • Created a ‘submission agreement’ about what kinds of records should be sent to the archive. He submitted them in groupings that made sense to him. She reviewed the records to make sure she understood what she was getting.
  • Considering using PDFa to capture snapshot of virtual texts.
  • Looked to model of ‘self archiving’ – common in the world of professors to do ongoing accruals.
  • What about ’embedded archivists’? There is a history of this in the performing arts and NGOs and it might be happening more and more.

George Whitmore Papers

Challenges & Questions:

  • How do you establish identity in a way that is complete and uncorrupted? How do you know it is authentic? How do you make an authentic copy? Are these requirements as unreasonable and unachievable?

Revelations and Recommendations:

  • Refresh and replicate files on a regular schedule.
  • They have had good success using Quick View Plus to enable access to many common file formats. On the downside, it doesn’t support everything and since it is proprietary software there are no long term guarantees.
  • In some cases they had to send CP/M files to a 3rd party to have them converted into WordStar and have the ascii normalized.
  • Varied acquisition notes.. and accession records.. loan form with the 3rd party who did the conversion that summarized the request.. they did NOT provide information about what software was used to convert from CP/M to DOS. This would be good information to capture in the future.
  • Proposed an expansion of the standards to include how electronic records were migrated in the <processinfo> processing notes.

Questions & Answers

Question: As part of a writers community, what do we tell people who want to know what they can DO about their records. They want technical information.. they want to know what to keep. Current writers are aware they are creating their legacy.

Answer: Michael: The single best resource is the interPARES 2 Creator Guidelines. The Beineke has adapted them to distrubute to authors. Melissa: Go back to your collection development policies and make sure to include functions you are trying to document (like process.. distribution networks). Also communities of practice (acid free bits) are talking about formats and guidelines like that Gabriela: People often want to address ‘value’. Right now we don’t know how to evaluate the value of electronic drafts – it is up to authors.

Question: Cal Lee: Not a question so much as an idea: the world of digital forensics and security and the ‘order of volatility’ dictate that everyone should always be making a full disk copy bit by bit before doing anything else.

Comment: Comment on digital forensic tools – there is lots of historical and editing history of documents in the software… also delete files are still there.

Question: Have you seen examples of materials that are coming into the archive where the digital materials are working drafts for a final paper version? This is in contrast to others are electronic experiments.

Answer: Yes, they do think about this. It can effect arrangement and how the records are described. The formats also impact how things are preserved.

Question: Access issues? Are you letting people link to them from the finding aids? How are the documents authenticity protected.

Answer: DSpace gives you a new version anytime you want it (the original bitstream) .. lots of cross linking supports people finding things from more than one path. In some cases documents (even electronic) can only be accessed from within the on site reading room.

Question: What is your relationship is like with your IT folks?

Answer: Gabriela: Our staff has been very helpful. We use ‘legacy’ machines to access our content. They build us computers. They are also not archivists, so there is a little divide about priorities and the kind of information that I am interested in.. but it has been a very productive conversation.

Question: (For Melissa) Why didn’t you accept Peter’s email (Melissa had said they refused a submission of email from Peter because it didn’t have research value)?

Answer: The emails that included personal medical emails were rejected. The agreement with Peter didn’t include an option to selectively accept (or weed) what was given.

Question: In terms of gathering information from the creators.. do you recommend a formal/recorded interview? Or a more informal arrangement in which you can contact them anytime on an ongoing basis?

Answer: Melissa: We do have more formal methods – ‘documentation study’ style approaches. We might do literature reviews.. Ultimately the submission agreement is the most formal document we have. Gabriela: It depends on what the author is open to.. formal documentation is best.. but if they aren’t willing to be recorded, then you take what you can get!

My Thoughts

I am very curious to see how best practices evolve in this arena. I wonder how stories written using something like Google Documents, which auto-saves and preserves all versions for future examination, will impact how scholars choose to evaluate the evolution of documents. There have already been interesting examinations of the evolution of collaborative documents. Consider this visual overview of the updates to the Wikipedia entry for Sarah Palin created by Dan Cohen and discussed in his blog post Sarah Palin, Crowdsourced. Another great example of this type of visual experience of a document being modified was linked to in the comments of that post: Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie. If you haven’t seen this before – take a few minutes to click through and watch the screencast which actually lets you watch as a Wikipedia page is modified over time.

While I can imagine that there will be many things to sort out if we try to start keeping these incredibly frequent snapshot save logs (disk space? quantity of versions? authenticity? author preferences to protect the unpolished versions of their work?) – I still think that being able to watch the creative process this way will still be valuable in some situations. I also believe that over time new tools will be created to automate the generation of document evolution visualization and movies (like the two I link to above) that make it easy for researchers to harness this sort of information.

Perhaps there will be ways for archivists to keep only certain parts of the auto-save versioning. I can imagine an author who does not want anyone to see early drafts of their writing (as is apparently also the case with architects and early drafts of their designs) – but who might be willing for the frequency of updates to be stored. This would let researchers at least understand the rhythm of the writing – if not the low level details of what was being changed.

I love the photo I found for the top of this post. I admit to still having stacks of 3 1/2 floppy disks. I have email from the early days of BITNET.  I have poems, unfinished stories, old resumes and SQL scripts. For the moment my disks live in a box on the shelf labeled ‘Old Media’. Lucky me – I at least still have a computer with a floppy drive that can read them!

Image Credit: oh messy disks by Blude via flickr.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2008, 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.

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.