Even with the recent announcement that the Flickr Commons is not currently accepting new applications, there are clearly still applications being processed. NARA has been on Flickr since February of 2009 and loaded 49 sets of images. As announced in a recent press release, on the first of February 2010 Flickr flipped the switch and all the images in the The U.S. National Archives’ photostream was shifted over into the Commons.

The 49 sets are sorted into 4 collections:

• Historical Photographs and Documents (19 sets) – including NARA favorites like Rosie the Riveter and Nixon and Elvis and documents from regional archives across the country.
• DOCUMERICA Project by the Environmental Protection Agency (27 sets) – one set dedicated to top picks and the rest organized by photographer. Interestingly, NARA’s website has indexed the 15,000+ images from this project by subject and by location. I wonder how the picked which image from DOCUMERICA to port over to Flickr?
• Mathew Brady Civil War Photographs (2 sets) – currently 473 out of the 6,066 digitized Mathew Brady images are uploaded into the Commons. The images posted in the Commons are available in a much higher resolution than they are within ARC. A great example from this collection is the image of the Poplar Church (image shown to right) available as a 600 x 483 GIF on ARC and as a 3000 x 2416 JPG on Flickr. This image also has gotten a nice set of comments and tags.
• Development and Public Works (1 set) – the only set in this collection consists of images taken to support the Flathead Irrigation Project. “The Project was initiated to determine rights and distribute water originating on the Flathead Indian Agency in Montana to both tribal and non-tribal land.” These images seem to be the same resolution on both archives.gov and Flickr.

In honor of this transition, NARA posted a new set of 220 Ansel Adams photographs. One of the first comments on the set was “low-res scans? Pretty big letdown.” Fine question. As noted above, other images from NARA in the Commons much larger than the 600 x 522 that seems to be available for the Ansel Adams images. It would be great to have a clear explanation about available resolutions published along with each new set of images.

NARA has published this simple rights statement for all NARA images in the Commons:

All of the U.S. National Archives’ images that are part of The Flickr Commons are marked “no known copyright restrictions.” This means the U.S. National Archives is unaware of any copyright restrictions on the publication, distribution, or re-use of those particular photos. Their use restriction status in our online catalog is “unrestricted.” Therefore, no written permission is required to use them.

NARA has also posted an official Photo Comment and Posting Policy and a fairly extensive FAQ about the images they have post on Flickr. I do wish that there was a simpler way to request reprints of images from the Commons. Most of the NARA images have this standard sentence – but for someone not familiar with NARA and more accustom to one click ordering, the instructions seem very complex:

For information about ordering reproductions of photographs held by the Still Picture Unit, visit: www.archives.gov/research/order/still-pictures.html

I also wish that more of the images had location information assigned – only 113 of the images show up on the fun to explore map view. At first glance it looks as if this information is populated only for images taken near airports. There are many images that include a location based subject in the image description posted on Flickr, yet do not include geographic metadata that would permit the image to be shown on a map. The one image I did find that was not at an airport but did include geographic metadata is this image of the World Trade Center assigned to the NYC Financial District Flickr Location. While I could add a location related tag to NARA’s images, there does not appear any way for the general public to suggest location metadata.

One odd note about this and other World Trade Center images – the auto-generated tags have broken up the building name very oddly as shown in my screen clip on the left.

Another fun way way to explore the NARA Flickr images is to visit the ‘Archives’ page (slightly hilariously titled “U.S. National Archives’ Archives”). Here we can browse photos based on when they were uploaded to Flickr or when they were taken. Those images that include a specific date can be viewed on a calendar (such as these images from 1918) or in a list view (those same images from 1918 as a list), while those taken ‘circa’ a year can be viewed in a list with all other images from sometime that year (such as these images from circa 1824).

Beyond all the additional tags and content collected via comments on these images, I think that being able to find NARA images based on a map, calendar or tag is the real magic of the commons. The increased opportunities for access to these images cannot be overstated.

Take this image of a sunflower. If you visit this image on archives.gov, you can certainly find the image and view it – but good luck finding all the images of flowers as quickly as this Flickr tag page for NARA images of flowers can. Even looking at the special Documerica by Topic page doesn’t get me much closer to finding an image of a flower.

It will be fun to watch what else NARA chooses to upload to the Commons. I vote for more images that are assigned metadata such that they show up on the map and calendar. I will also put your mind at ease by telling you that the lovely ladies at the top of this post are their because their image is one of the most popular uploaded by NARA to date (based on it having been marked a favorite by 88 individuals). The only image I could find with more fans was the classic image of Nixon and Elvis with 250 fans at the time of this posting.

What is your favorite NARA Commons image? Please post a link in the comments and if I get enough I will set up a gallery of Spellbound Fan Favorites!

Image Credits: All images within this blog post are pulled from NARA’s images on the Flickr Commons. Please click on the images to see their specific details.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

National Archives Transitions to Flickr Commons Membership

Each Thursday over the past month I have created a Commons Picks of the Week gallery from the all the images added to the Commons in the prior 7 days.

Here are the galleries from the first month of my experiment. Let me know what you think.

• September 17, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• September 24, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• October 1, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• October 8, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week

Each week I had about 150 new images from which to select my 18 favorites. Since many institutions seem to load their images each week along some thematic lines, sometimes I felt like I had too many of one kind of image. Moving forward I may switch to bi-weekly or monthly to get a larger pool of images from which to pick.

I think there is a lot of room for making fun thematic galleries from images in the Commons. I tried my hand at this too and came up with Bathing Beauties of the Commons.  Of course the fact that all images across Flickr can co-exist in these galleries means that Commons images now have another way to be pulled into the public eye next to other ‘regular’ images.

I have a short wish list of enhancements I would love to see:

• slideshow option for display of the gallery within Flickr
• a way to embed a gallery on an external website as a slideshow
• some way to follow the new galleries created by an individual (RSS feed or subscription option)

If you try your hand creating a gallery of Commons images, please post a link as a comment to this post so we can all take a look.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Flickr Galleries: Fun with Flickr Commons

Duke University Rare Books, Manuscript & Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) : Lynn Eaton (Reference Archivist)

While I didn’t find my way into this session until the start of the next speaker’s presentation, Lynn was kind enough to share with me her personal printout of her presentation slides. The links below and any associated commentary are based solely on my own interpretation of the various screen-shots included.

• Duke Digital Collections
• RBMSCL Finding Aids
• AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials – this includes interviews with experts, a TV ads quiz and a wide range of TV ads available via iTunes U.
• Duke Yearlook – a set of Flickr collections displaying images from the Duke University Archives, each focused on a decade or theme related to Duke’s history.
• Duke University Libraries YouTube Channel: example Duke Exhibit: “A Century of Sex Appeals”
• Duke Digital Collections on DukeMobile iPhone application – This wasn’t included in the presentation’s slides – but I spotted it on the YouTube Channel. I downloaded the DukeMobile app onto my iTouch and had a great time exploring the Duke Digital Collections included in the images section of the app. I think it was

University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Digital Collections: Tom Sommer (University and Technical Services Archivist)

UNLV has experimented with new technologies as they appear. Tom made a point of saying that when they started seeing others provide a feature on their websites, UNLV would find a way to try it out. A great example of this is the addition of a tag cloud and google map to The Boomtown Years collection listed below.

• Howard Hughes Digital Collection – Images displayed in this online exhibition about Howard Hughes, such as this portrait of Howard Hughes, feature the opportunity both to rate and comment on the image. In addition, they provide an RSS feed for every possible metadata attribute (such as location, subject and media type)
• Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years – in addition to ratings and comments, this collection adds on display of recent comments, tagging and a google map which ties images to locations in southern Nevada.
• UNLV Special Collections Facebook Page – shares news and updates about projects – launched 2 months ago

Marist College Archives and Special Collections: John Ansley (Head, Archives and Special Collections)

Marist first launched their website in 2001 to raise awareness of their collections. They also used listserves and the on-campus newspaper. Utlimately their best tactic was working one-on-one with professors whose interests intersected with their collections. This led to contact with special interest groups. Working with the special interest groups led to new tag and metadata values for their collections.

• Hidden in Plain Sight – online exhibit about fore-edge painting. Includes videos as part of introduction since it is hard to understand through still images. The bibliography receives the most hits.
• Marist Environmental History Project – this ongoing project aims to document who has what information about environmental history. The site includes an extensive list of primary sources as well as a 24 minute oral history:  The Enduring Storm:  The Story of the Storm King Case and the People Who Launched the Modern Environmental Movement (mp3).
• Intercollegiate Rowing Association Poughkeepsie Regatta – timeline used to guide users to who won each race, PDFs of programs, and extensive bibliographies (including an index of 1000+ NYT articles about the regatta).
• Lowell Thomas Travelogues – a household name during the golden age of radio, Lowell Thomas created extensive multimedia travelogues of his travels around the world. He is credited with making T. E. Lawrence famous as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The site was launched as a teaser to the over 1000 linear feet of photos, audio, video & other records which will be available to researchers in October 2009. For a taste of what is coming, check out this Lowell Thomas travelogue video clip – my favorite quote from which is “…come with me on a magic carpet out to the land of history, mystery and romance.”

My Thoughts

The archivists at all three of these educational institutions have tried new things and worked hard to share their materials with people beyond the traditional range of a reading room. The promise of the web, and all the tools and techniques it supports, is still being uncovered. It will be up to innovative archivists to keep discovering ways to push the envelope and welcome new audiences from all the corners of the globe.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dukeyearlook/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, 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.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Archival Collections Online: Reaching Audiences Beyond The Edge of Campus (SAA09: Session 405)

Overview: Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.

Session Highlights

Areas of “Amateur” endeavor  have a long history of launching collections, such as:

• cabinet of curiosities
• foundation of astronomical research
• british flora and amateur botanists
• weather observations
• open source software movement

Being an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean being bad at what you do!

Within the realm of self-defined museums some common topics often emerge:

• ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia)
• comics
• technology – especially old tech, there is a surprising trend of being fascinated by technology approximately 10 years older than the collector
• personal and “embarrassing” collections
• genealogy

For these self-defined museums the scope is self-defined – these are self-delineated collections. Virtual museums can document aspects of cultural heritage considered socially taboo or in some way too sensitive to collect. A great example of this is the Museum of Menstruation which claims to have been created 14 years ago and is currently trying to establish a public permenant display for the public.

Platforms have evolved over the life of the web, starting with static html, then blogs and now Flickr images as a mode of presentation.

This is a list of successful amateur collections online:

• Today’s Inspiration – illustration from the 40′s and 50′s
• JonWilliamson.com – advertising 1940s-1960s
• Pulp Fiction Flickr Group – 882 members who provide basic metadata and often label stuff within the image – currently contains 3,385 items.
• Curio Cabinet Flickr Group – 1,206 members and 5,537 items

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a more traditional site created by a cultural heritage institution. It contains 100,000+ images copyright cleared for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK. VADS is a very detailed static source of images with metadata, but provides no interaction.

Amateurs do provide metadata, but it is intuitive metadata. It might not fit into rigid buckets of data, but that doesn’t meant that the metadata available isn’t useful.

What are the boundaries between amateur and professional? Work vs hobby?

Many of these amateur sites get much more traffic than most standard museum sites. More than 50% of museum digitized images are never visited.

Memory institutions are starting to put things into the wider online community:

• Smithsonian: photos in Smithsonian Flickr Commons
• Tate: The How We Are Now project invited the public to contribute photos to the How We Are Flickr Group. The images were streamed to screens within the How We Are: Photographing Britain exhibit and 40 photos were chosen to be included as the last set of photos in the physical exhibit.
• Victoria & Albert Museum: created a Flicrk group of photos taken at the V&A museum along with a long list of other V&A Flickr groups and streams
• Oxford University’s Great War Archive: contains 6,500 items contributed by the public and related to the First World War.
• Facebook and Twitter are being used more often for informing the community about their collections

Much of amateur research has been driven by advances in technology. A great example of this is the advent of affordable metal detectors led to dramatic changes in archaeology. The internet and Web 2.0 technology are arming a whole new generation of enthusists who can find one another and collaborate more easily than might ever have been dreamed of 20 years ago.

Next Steps & Conclusions

Future research will involve looking at the psychology of collection: archives vs collections. For now it is important to realize that institutions are not the only hosts of “worthwhile” digital objects. Pro-am (aka, pro-amateur) are doing better with using web 2.0 & getting more traffic.

What can memory institutions learn from this?

• interact with user communities
• use the ‘grand central stations’ of flickr, twitter, facebook
• usability of flickr is better than what most memory institutions build for themselves

My Thoughts

This session considers the ways cultural memory institution can take advantage of the web by looking at what the successful enthusiasts are achieving. This research-backed approach confirms what I would have expected. Libraries, museums and archives are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to putting their collections online. Sites run by non-professionals are doing an amazing job of drawing in new audiences, keeping people around and then initiating conversation within that audience.

The Flickr Commons is a big step forward, but it isn’t the only option. There are also varying opinions about how successful the crowdsourcing aspect of the Flickr Commons is for memory institutions. A lot of this goes back to to a core question “how do we know if we have succeeded?”. There is much to be said for setting out clear goals when launching online initiatives. Is your goal increased traffic to your site or crowdsourcing of metadata? A great example of an initiative whose goal is clearly collection of crowdsourced metadata is the German Federal Archives who chose to use the Wikimedia Commons for their photo metadata initiative.

If you are trying to extend your mission of providing access to materials to the public, then how do you measure success? Putting your materials in what Melissa called “grand central stations” (or what I have also heard termed “public crosswalks”) definitely increases the chances of serendipitous discovery by new individuals. That said, we can see from the successful blogs mentioned above that tackling a niche with enthusiasm and consistent posting can go a long way to building a following. JonWilliamson.com seems to have only launched back in November of 2008 with a post featuring a Scotch Tape Christmas ad from 1951. The author posted in May of 2009 that his images in Flickr had surpassed 100,000 views.

To conclude this post I leave you with a list of inspirational digitized collections online that were created by various cultural heritage institutions:

• Publishers’ Bindings Online – discussed in SAA2007′s Session: Publishers’ Bindings Online – Digitization, Collaboration, Standardization and Community Building, a multi-institutional project that includes galleries of topical images combined with an essay that gives the images context. Two of my favorites are:
  • From Domestic Goddesses to Suffragists: The Story of Women Told on Bookbindings, 1820-1920
  • Indians, the Frontier, and the West in American Bookbindings
• Calisphere – more than 150,000 digitized items organized for easy use by K-12 teachers. This is especially interesting in that it represents items already available in Online Archive of California, but organized in a way to make them easy to find and use with their target audience in mind.
• Yiddish Books Online – A project by the National Yiddish Book Center that uses the Internet Archive as a platform to host 11,000 digitized out-of-print Yiddish books. This project is a nice cross between a branded custom site and a grand-central station

Have a favorite online collection website? Please share it in the comments below.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, 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.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mms0131/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

DH2009: Digital Curiosities and Amateur Collections

Asian American Jazz Fusion

Dr. Anthony Brown, of Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra, explained why there was a Chinese hammered dulcimer sitting in the middle of the room. Brown was going to introduce us to Asian and American Jazz fusion. The curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection from 1992-1996, he discovered materials related to Ellington’s Far East Suite, originally composed to honor the people who welcomed Ellington during his state department tour (cut short by Kennedy’s assasination). Brown was able to trace Ellington’s itinerary through business records and then figure out the instruments that inspired the original in the Asian American Jazz Orchestra’s recording of Far East Suite. His next CD project was Monk’s Moods. The Asian American Jazz Orchestra is now celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of a CD titled Ten.

Yangqin Zhao plays the Chinese hammered dulcimer and is the formost performer on the instrument in the western hemisphere. The dulcimer travelled via the silk road from persia. The silk road was the original information highway. It was the way east and west were connected in the ancient eras.

Then a recording of Monk’s Moods on piano was played. Then Zhao performed the same piece on the Chinese hammered dulcimer. To achieve this, Brown and Zhao had to work together to translate the original arrangement. Excerpt from Gershwin’s rapsody in blue – recomposition – reorchestrated for his orchestra. A piece of music or a dance chart cannot come to life until you breath life into it. Enabling access to performing arts is different.

The second piece that Zhao played was Andantino from Rhapsody in Blue. Samples of both Andantino and Monk’s Moods are available on the Ten CD page. Zhao then thanked Anthony for teaching her Jazz.

Tango

The dance portion of the session was brought to us by Richard Powers of Stanford University Dance Division and his dance partner Joan Walden. Powers founded the Flying Cloud Academy of Vintage Dance. He has a design and creative process degree from Stanford where he is an expert in 19th and early 20th century social dance. Stanford has an extensive dance manuals collections and Powers is the director of Stanford’s 70 member vintage dance ensemble.

Stanford Dance department wanted Richard to make dance more visible on campus to help make sure that it didn’t get cut (partially or completely). Outreach is important – strengthen funding or let potential donors know about you. He recommends that you can bring back dance manuals from your archive. With movies like Mad Hot Ballroom and Shall We Dance? and TV shows like Dancing With The Stars, the American public is predisposed right now to be interested in dancing. Most of the dances in dance manuals were meant for teaching regular people to dance so they could dance with their friends. They were part of a self improvement movement.

Think of unique way to encourage others to use archival records. Powers encourages everyone to NOT hand it off to others. Being a non-dancer gives you a better chance for colloboration. The more we know, the harder it is to get into a true collaboration. But if it is new for you you are more open minded and more open to true collaboration.

There are other resources beyond dance manuals: dance magazines, etiquette books, anti-dance manuals (which sometimes describe the illicit dances that the proper dance manuals won’t mention), novels that give background, journals/diaries/letters, iconography – lithographs, photos, drawings, etchings, sculptures .. to help get the visual idea.. costuming. Dance cards and ball programs give lots of information – when, who.. what music.. maybe where. This also gives you a chance to see which dances were popular (vs the manuals which are promoting dances). Motion pictures from the times. So – how can we weave all of this together?

For more information about how to reconstruct dances, read Powers’ Guidelines for Dance Research and Reconstruction.

We then got a crash course in Tango history. I took notes as fast as I could, but I know I missed a lot along the way. Here are the bits I managed to get down – but don’t trust me to be an authority:

• 100 years ago in Buenes Ares or Paris – you could find the argentinian tango. 1908 – just arrived in paris.. in the outskirts from Buenes Ares. But that version would seem simple. And then they danced!
• 1st Myth of the Tango: It was born in the brothels. His informed opinion is that it was created by the poor, but that doesn’t mean they were pimps & prostitutes. Most tango scholars today believe it was created by the honest poor in the bario.
• 2nd Myth of the Tango: The Tango was imported to Paris (1908-1912) and tamed by the French who found it too passionate and make it more appropriate for the ballroom. Lots of documentation from many sources that prove that the French ADDED more passion.. and that the dance was carried to Paris by young aristocrats.
• Tango was presented in response to the dance called the Apache – exchanged influence from 1912-1914 in Paris.
• A Buenes Arnes dance manual from 1914 (dated by the illustrations) called El Tango Argentino includes detailed illustrations and foot diagrams. Going back to the source shows us the meaning behind the names and rules about steps. Most drama and stalking was added 15 years later.
• The true roots of Tango are unknown.
• The main trunk of Tango is the version known in Paris 100 years ago.. social Tango today is still the same. Three branches of
• Tango are: 1) stage performance (more dramatic), 2) ballroom competition and 3) Beunes Ares – every 10 years or so it changes dramatically.

Then they got everyone up and out on the dance floor. We went from learning history and thinking about how to one might decipher dance manuals to actually learning to Tango!

My Thoughts

If you are wondering why I am posting this over four months after the conference – you can blame Beaver Archivist’s post about Dancing Archivists. It immediately made me recall the largest gathering of dancing archivists I had personally witnessed. The session itself was really great. It was so far from people sitting in silent rows staring at powerpoint slides (not that there is anything wrong with that) that you might have thought you had wandered into the wrong conference.

It was the takeaway that was especially appealing to me. I really like the idea of finding new ways to bring performance based archives back to life – of finding new ways to reach out to people and make the records sing and dance again. Hearing music reinterpreted and reinvented is of course fundamentally different from seeing sheet music in a glass case. What if every archives that had performance art related records found a way to have two live, participatory events each year? I can only imagine the new audience who might be drawn in to learn about what is hidden in the archives — they might just come back because it is fun. My fingers are crossed that I can get my 2nd Tango lesson in Austin, TX in August 2009.

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.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA2008: Chinese Hammered Dulcimer + Tango = Archivists as Creative Collaborators

Title: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online

Abstract: As more archival materials move online, archivists must become adept at participating in and managing online communities. This session will discuss real world experiences of this involvement, including putting images into the Flickr Commons and links to archival materials in Wikipedia, as well as guidelines on cultural norms within online communities. We will also discuss choosing between building new communities from scratch vs joining a broader, existing community (such as the Flickr Commons).

I will be serving as session chair and moderator for our group of fabulous panelists (finances and travel plans permitting):

• Deborah Wythe: talking about Flickr Commons and other Brooklyn Museum web/community projects (or whatever the latest and greatest projects are afoot at the Brooklyn Museum by the time we hit August 2009)
• Ann Lally: talking about Wikipedia and blogs (co-author of: Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections)
• Mark Matienzo: talking about NYPL web/community projects
• Seb Chan: talking about Powerhouse Museum, Flickr Commons and (maybe) blogs

The intention is for this session to begin with very brief presentations showing off the current projects at our panelists’ institutions and follow that up with lots of time for discussion and answering of questions.

We see our target audience as archivists who want to hear about real world experiences of working within existing online communities (such as Wikipedia or Flickr) and building new communities dedicated to cultural heritage materials. The session will target individuals with less experience with Web 2.0 and social media implementations, but the lessons learned should also be of interest to those already in the implementation stages of their own projects.

I will put out a call for questions as we get closer to the conference so that our group can get an idea of what people are interested in learning about specifically, so start making notes now. Hope to see you in Austin!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities

In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of Poverty, I want to point people to examples of ways in which poverty is documented in archives, manuscript collections and elsewhere.

The most obvious types of records that document poverty are:

• Photographs: Calisphere’s themed collections for the period 1929-1939: The Great Depression include images of the Dust Bowl Migration as well as general photos documenting Hard Times. The Library of Congress When They Were Young photo retrospective of childhood has a number of striking images.
• Music: Such as what can be found in the Library of Congress American Folklife Center.
• Newspapers: Which can include everything from human interest stories to classified ads – increasingly available online from sources including Google News Archive Search and the fee based NewspapeArchive.com.
• Census Records: The Census website has a special section dedicated to  US Census Bureau poverty statistics, including a page of links to other sites dedicated to poverty research and statistics.

There are also organizations dedicated to research on poverty – such as the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research and National Poverty Center. The archival records from groups such as these could show ways that organizations have addressed poverty over time, as well as the history of poverty itself.

Archives do their best job with records produced in the process of carrying out tasks related to business or personal life, and many of those who are living in the greatest poverty aren’t generating (or saving) their own records. Is being documented by photographers, news articles and the Census Bureau the same thing as telling your own story through an oral history or having your photographs, personal papers or other life documents archived? One of the most fascinating things about primary source materials in general, and archival records in specific, is the first hand view that it can lend the researcher. That sense of stepping into their shoes – of having a chance to retrace their steps.

There are certainly institutions whose records cast light on the lives of those in poverty such as homeless shelters, social service agencies and health clinics – but I would put forth that we are rarely capturing the first person voices of those living in poverty. I am realistic. I know that those dealing with the basic issues of food, shelter and personal safety are likely not thinking about where to record their oral history or how to get their personal papers into an archive or manuscript collection. That doesn’t mean that I don’t wish there wasn’t a better way. These are people who deserve to be represented with their own voice to the people of the future.

I am enamored of the idea of recording people’s own stories as is being done in each of the following examples:

• StoryCorps which has arranged for all their interviews to be preserved by the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center
• Memory Archive which, as of October 2008, has 5 stories listed on the Poverty category page
• The Oxford Project covered in the CNN article Photo project gives voice to ‘backbone of America’

I want to end my post with an inspirational project. Photographer Camilo José Vergara has been photographing the built environment in poor, minority communities across the United States since 1977.  He has re-photographed the same locations many times over the years. This permits him to create time lapse series of images that show how a space has changed over time. He has published a number of books (the most recent of which is American Ruins) as well as having created an interactive website.

The Invincible Cities website documents Harlem, NY, Camden, NJ and Richmond, CA. After selecting one of these three locations you are greeted by a map, timeline and photographs. You can walk through time at individual locations and watch storefronts change, buildings get demolished and fashions shift. The interface lets you select images by location, theme and year. My description can’t do it any justice – just go explore for yourself: Invincible Cities. The site explains that his next goal is to create a ‘Visual Encyclopedia of the American Ghetto’ (VE for short) that covers all of the United States.

In the March 2008 PopPhoto.com article Camilo Jose Vergara: 30 Years Documenting the American Ghetto, we find the following interesting quotes from the photographer:

“Once photography at its best and most prestigious became art and the rewards went to photographer artists, the field became uninterested and unable to significantly contribute to the creation of a historical record, that is to the making of an inventory of our world and to illustrate how it changes,” asserts Vergara, adding that the Internet is an ideal way to bypass traditional museums. “You can realize a larger world that can support a different kind of photography.”

The Internet is especially well-suited to housing a multi-layered history of the ghettos’ evolution. Advances in technology allow the designers to arrange images in complex ways: links take the viewer to a page that gives census data; click on a color-coded street map on the left side of the screen to pinpoint exact addresses of panoramic views, artifacts, architectural details, building interiors or street-level views. “These kinds of things were unimaginable when I started the project,” he says.

Can we expect projects like this  to give individuals of the future a real taste of what life was like for the poor in US cities or around the world? Should part of our efforts at diversity of representation in the historical record specifically address preservation of the records and manuscripts of those living in poverty? Lots to think about! I hope this post has introduced you to new resources and projects. Please share any I missed in the comments below.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty in the Archival Record and Beyond

A search in the Flickr Commons yielded this lovely Library of Congress image of women praying on the Brooklyn Bridge (likely participating in the ritual of Tashlikh).

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Collections & Archives has photos about Rosh Hashanah – including this optimistic card depicting a couple from the Fuerth displaced persons camp flying to Tel Aviv.

Yad Vashem has pulled together selections relating to Rosh Hashanah in an online collection called Marking the New Year.

I also found an assortment of treasures on the Internet Archive:

• A Jewish calendar for sixty-four years from 1838 “detailing the new moons, festivals, and fasts, with the sections of the law as read in the synagogues every Sabbath during the year; also the days on which the hour for commencing Sabbath is altered; together awith the corresponding Christian dates”
• The hymn shown in the image below is from The Jewish year; a collection of devotional poems for Sabbaths and holidays throughout the year (p 137-139),  published in 1898.
• Dated twelve years later is The limits of assimilation : a sermon preached at the Bayswater Synagogue on Rosh-hashana (New Year), October 4th, 5671-1910.

These examples only scratch the surface of the archives and collections that include Jewish records. If this has peaked your interest, here are a few other websites to explore:

• Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives
• American Jewish Committee Archives  (which includes the fabulous little cartoon video celebrating diversity in the 1950s called ‘Here’s Looking at You‘ if I could have figured out how I would have embedded it here – but fair warning – the video/audio starts immediately upon landing)
• The National Jewish Archive of Broadcasting
• Scottish Jewish Archives Centre
• Bloom Southwest Jewish Archives

Know of others I missed – please add them in the comments below!

These sites are from suggestions in the comments:

• Jewish Women’s Archive
• Center for Jewish History

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Jewish New Year 5769: Images and Words from the Past

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.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

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

The official title of Session 102 was We’re Not the Destination, We’re the Journey: Revealing Archival Collections at the Web’s Surface. If you attended this session or don’t want to read through the details, you can skip to the end and just read my thoughts on this session.

California Digital Library

The first presentation was by Lena Zentall of the California Digital Library (CDL). I believe it was titled something like “Untitled <snappy name here>”. CDL is increasing visibility of primary sources by targeting primary sources to specific audiences. Lena described how they view the URL as a line to reel in new audiences. She started with an overview of how archival content traditionally makes its way online.

Start with a box -> described by finding aids -> digital copies of finding aids put on line and cherry picked individual items are digitized to be featured online.

Two Audiences, Two Sites

CDL has taken a new approach. They have two sites for two very different audiences:

• Online Archive of California (OAC): presents both finding aids and digitized primary sources and targets archivists, historians & researchers
• Calisphere – only takes primary sources (for now) and targets k-12 teachers, lifelong learners, and undergraduates

Collections can have home in several places. For example, the items about the Chinese in California can be found in:

• OAC: Guide to the Chinese in California Virtual Collection
• Calisphere: As a subset of the California Cultures: Asian Americans collection, including the Chinese Exclusion Act
• Library of Congress American Memory: The Chinese in California, 1850-1925

Calisphere has created themed collections to highlight superstar digital objects. They pull images out of the finding aids and rearrange them for the target audience. These images are hand picked and associated with an essay. They pick striking objects with good metadata. This is what their audience wants – the teachers asked for it. Another example themed collection is the Goldrush Murder & Mayhem collection which includes this photo of the “old time San Francisco pickpocket” Jennie Hastings.

Hidden Gems: Untitled and No Metadata

The next part of the presentation discussed what happens to items that are untitled and associated with no metadata. Lena showed us the results when you searched the OAC images for for untitled. I found 12,315 items when I did this search. They really only live in the context of the finding aid. Of course the challenge is that people use words to find images. These hidden gems can be helped by inheriting the metadata of their parent container (such as collection level information) when there is nothing else.

3 Approaches

1. Digitize and release content to the web: low effort (after infrastructure is set up), very high return on investment. Over 40% of Calisphere traffic generated by google searches… but when users follow the link from google then they find the rich context.
2. Align with other aggregators: – low/medium effort, medium return. Calipshere content is also being pulled into aggregators. They can also pull back new data that is added by 3rd party partners – such as reading level added on a teacher site. These are three examples of Murder and Mayhem content in three different partner sites:
   • CLRN: Murder and Mayhem – (California Learning Resources Network)
   • EdZone: Murder & Mayhem
   • OER: Murder and Mayhem (Open Educational Resources) lets users add tags and search by keywords
3. Cherry-picking the best items: high effort, promising returns – but it is also harder to measure the returns

Finding New Audiences and New Volunteers

The next step is to reach beyond standard cultural and education venues and move into different ares of the internet. For example, the CDL added links to Wikipedia. The perception of those involved with this effort was that it was a very convoluted process with lots of mysterious rules. They were unsure if the links would remain in place. It sometimes seemed like a lot of work when the links might just be removed. They added 33 links and found 53 links made by others not affiliated with the CDL. On the plus side, links like this puts the digital objects in a very specific context. Traffic initiated from these Wikipedia entries is almost certainly individuals seeking detailed information in the specific topic they are researching.

The next frontier involves blogs. CDL digital items are now featured in blogs, but soon CDL will be creating a blog for Calisphere to tell the story behind individual pictures. The final stop for this talk was an inspirational blog: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century. This blog was presented as a way to achieve the fame that primary sources dream about.

Library of Congress

The second presentation, by Helena Zinkham from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs division, was titled “The New Friends for Old Photos – putting pictures in your path with the Flickr commons and Web 2.0″. This talk focused on the pilot project of putting Library of Congress photos on Flickr in the new Flickr Commons.

People who want photos don’t think of libraries or archives. They go to museums and stock photo agencies. Helena wants to help people realize that archives are a great source of images.

There has been increasing progress with hidden collections. Lots of digitization and work with metadata has been done to help items make their way online. But this begs the question of whether we are just creating new hidden collections in corners of the Internet that the average person will never come in contact with. Collections like ArchiveGrid, DLF Aquifer, and OAC. The descriptions need to get out of the catalogs – most people find content on the web.. we need to put the images on the web in the path of the users.

The Flickr commons satisfied Helena’s desire to pull people in from Flickr back to discover the catalog world of archives. Flickr can be considered a virtual reading room and platform for a virtual volunteer corp. Helena showed the example of the image Weavers at Work. The comments on this photo included:

• information that photo is of blind women weaving rugs
• the photographer’s great grandchild identified the photographer as Percy Byron
• the start of a discussion about what the cabinet or instrument might be shown to the far right of the photo

These commenters are new friends worth making!

Pros of Web 2.0

• make collection available
• gain information about collections – participatory description
• increase the visibility of specific photos
• win support for cultural heritage organizations

Risks of Web 2.0

• disrespect for collections (smart aleck chat)
• loss of meaning
• reduce revenue from photo sales
• excludes undigitized collections
• higher costs (more money and time)
• less chance for us to have fun as history detectives – other people are doing ‘our’ work

read powerhouse museums’ 3 month report about their experience. … Helena will post info about the nuts and bolts on the SAA site, but she also directed the audience to Powerhouse Museum’s Commons on Flickr First 3 Months Report.

Flickr Basics

Helena asked the session attendees who was familiar with flicker? Most of the room raised their hands. Who has accounts? Still good number. Who is adding archival content? A sprinkling of hands were raised.

Helena then explores Flickr basics and showed off the following neat search examples:

• A search for germany schaefer in Google finds Flickr photos (as well as Flickr photo comments). The LOC Germany Schaefer photo was returned 4th on my list when I did the search when writing up this post.
• A search for houston house search within Flickr co-mingles old and current photos

Logistics and Statistics

The LOC liked Flickr and felt it was a good fit because photographs are the main focus of the site. They did need one big change. Because LOC is not the owner or photographer (unlike most photo contributors), they needed a way to express that clearly. Flickr responded by creating The Commons. They also created a new rights statement of ‘no known copyright restrictions’ for members of The Commons to use. This is different from public domain. Flickr also appears (based on my hunt through the links) to permit each institutions in The Commons to link to their own explanation about what they mean by ‘no known copyright restrictions’. LOC deep links to a specific section of their Copyright and Other Restrictions page for Prints & Photographs. George Eastman House has a special George Eastman House & The Commons on Flickr page about copyright, as does the Brooklyn Museum.

Statistics from the first 6 moths on Flickr:

• 3,500 LOC photos posted
• 8 million views
• 30,000 favorites for 80% of the photos
• 14,000 Flickr members made LOC a contact
• 5,000 comments (3,300 people)
• 12,500 unique tags (59,000 total)
• 500 catalog records updated – Helena indicated that this could be considered a new kind of backlog, “but a backlog you can come to like”
• 20% increased traffic to p&p online catalog

There are 30,000 more photos from Bain News Service on the way, but they are only adding fifty photos a week. This number was recommended by Flickr as the largest they would want to push at any one time. This goes back to the tolerance of people who have Flickr in their friend photo stream. Fifty photos is about as many as people want to get at any one time. More than that and you increase the likelihood that people would remove you from their stream instead of be overwhelmed. They would have no chance to really look at more than that.

Contributors to The Commons can choose which features to enable. For example, the Portrait of Hine as small child standing by drum shows how george eastman house chooses to send people back to their institution for prints.

How much does it cost?

• a Flickr pro account costs $24.95 a year
• digitization costs
• time: daily moderation on the account – LOC checks every day for uncivil discourse which takes about 10 minutes
• 15-20 hours a week to pull data from comments to update metadata

Flickr Comments

One of the greatest parts of this presentation was the examination of ways in which flicker users contributed through comments. Here are some examples:

• Auto Polo: – comment includes link to an auto polo thread on the Jalopy Journal’s message board which includes newspaper images and an extended discussion.
• Sylvia Sweets Tea Room – includes a very extensive history of the business added by the daughter of the original proprietor
• Negro boy near Cincinnati, Ohio – the comments include a deep conversation about the title of the photo and the context of this title at the time it was taken (1942 or 1943).
• Jones Barn where dynamite was found – Flickr members found the context and news article to go with this photo
• Al Palzer – this photo’s original title was Al Palser – but the misspelling was pointed out in the comments. The comments also include a response from the LOC noting that the boxer’s name would be updated in the original catalog record.

Other Promotion Approaches

The Library of Congress has now started linking out from the LOC catalog entries to the Flickr image so that it is easy for users to discover any conversations associated with the Flickr version. Powerhouse museum has a Photo of the Day blog to highlight images from their collection. The Brooklyn Museum encourages people to upload photos of things happening in Brooklyn. Then and now photos can be taken – in this case see factory buildings in Lowell, Massachusetts in December 1940/January 1941 and then again in January of 2008.

The key to 2.0 is frequent, new content and interaction from archival staff. Helena is open to new ideas about how to use Flickr and closed with saying that Web 2.0 is right in our path.

Questions and Answers

Question: What is their view of the accuracy/inaccuracy user generated tags and comments?

Answer: Study done in the past comparing accuracy of official cataloging to comments – even if people make mistakes, but others will correct them.. LOC has a ‘hands off’ policy to not delete/change stuff unless it is defamatory or spam. Only 3 instances of this so far. LOC is citing the source as ‘Flickr commons’ and also include commenters’ sources – which are actually a lot more varied than you might expect (like the Jalopy Journal).

Question: Are you worried about an increase demand in staff time as you add more photos?

Answer: Yes.. there will be an increase in demand.. but the Flickr comments are there and since LOC is adding links back out to those records they are available for researchers even if they are not added to the original catalog record. Maybe they need more staff? depends on goals. Could work with expert teams and look for ‘formal trusted’ volunteers. A great example was the baseball history association who took photos and contributed expert information in a spreadsheet (if I heard correctly they gave LOC a spreadsheet identifying team, game, date and opponent for more than 3000 photos).

Question: Isn’t the link from the LOC catalog record to Flickr enough? Why update the LOC catalog records at all?

Answer: They are really only updating when it is a mistake (like Palser’s name mistake). Flickr also provides APIs and LOC pulls all the comments and tags into external database so that LOC can choose how to use the information over time.

Question: What are your thoughts and concerns about the longevity of Flickr as a platform?

Answer: What grows fast can die fast. Their perspective: Flickr is a copy.. and LOC has an extract of all the tags and comments – nothing lost if it disappears.

Question: Calipshere: how do they work with teachers to learn their needs and their satisfaction with the work that is done?

Answer: They hired Berkeley experts to talk to teachers about what they wanted. They used interviews and created personas to capture the audience needs. Targeting the K-12 audience was aimed at being a success by being clear about their audience. Teachers used to print out images, but now they do more with powerpoint and iPods plugged into TV in the classroom. The teachers say they are happy with the theme collections and they want more. They have an advisory board with teachers.. they use surveys and watch the bboards.

Question: Is there a crossover between Calishpere and OAC users?

Answer: They almost didn’t cross link to the finding aids from within Calisphere.. but they decided the information was so important. Reason for the upcoming blog – want to tell the story behind the photos.

Question: Do they have anlytics/evidence of pulling people back to their sites?

Answer: Yes.. they can see increases in usage from everything they have done.

Question: When you download the comments – are they dated so you can only look at the new ones? How hard was it to change the title in your catalog?

Answer: Everything is time/date stamped when you pull info out of Flickr. Quick and easy to update.. 10 minutes per picture to do the updates.. Flickr members are doing a great job with citations.

Question: Do you have advice about how to get historical society folks who are concerned about loosing the admission fee for people coming in to do research on board with these web 2.0 approaches?

Answer: You show them alternative revenue streams. In the museum world .. they realized that they weren’t making money from reproductions and a change is in process to let people use images for publishing.. all about improving the brand recognition. Helena: I would love ideas from people using Flickr.. and to hear from people who are dealing with multiple audiences.

Question: Have you had complaints? Any specifically from copyright holders?

Answer: Yes.. they have had complaints.. one “Why haven’t you cleaned up the photos?” LOC position is to provide the version they have.. and it is up to others to cleanup and do what they like with the photos. They also point out that instead of perfecting photos, they are spending money on providing access to more photos.

Question: Expectations of service. Are people expecting that if they ask a question about a photo that they will get an answer from a LOC representative?

Answer: Do you have to respond to everyone who asked to be a contact? No.. perhaps different expectations for institutions. They currently add a comment when they are updating the original catalog records. Might acknoledge big contributors (more than 10 photos) at the end of the pilot via a direct e-mail to individuals.

Question: Have people complained about rights – that is my grandmother.. don’t put it on the web?

Answer: No. They do have a policy in place. Most people are ‘pleased as punch’ to learn that their family heritage is alive and well. OAC: They haven’t had anyone ask to take the content down. In the case that people provide feedback for updates – since OAC is an aggregation of items from so many institutions – they have to pass corrections info along to original keeper of the metadata and leave it in their hands to do updates.

Question: Is there a fear that interest will decrease as more photos are added to the commons?

Answer: Bloggers in the web were in love with the idea that the photos would go into Flickr. There was a big peak at the start – but views and comments are still steady (but smaller) . The more additions.. more communities that will be touched. The Powerhouse Museum experienced a tripling of their traffic after posting images in the Flickr Commons.

Question: Have people come into the reading room because of the Flickr pilot?

Answer: Maybe? We don’t know. Lena said she did!

Question: Are we teaching the teachers how to teach with photos?

Answer: Calisphere has provided links to info about using primary sources and analysis tools.. resources for teachers. (Follow-up: Are they clicking those links? Good question!)

Question: Are you contacting the people who post negative comments?

Answer: Yes.. and most of them were more spam.

My Thoughts

Culture of Online Communities

There are a few different ideas I wanted to share related to the material from this presentation. First, I noticed that the online culture of both Flickr and Wikipedia were called out as having a clear impact. They are in fact two very different communities. In the case of the LOC and Flickr we heard that part of what seemed to keep the comments constructive and friendly was that Flickr’s users strive to keep a ‘play nice’ atmosphere in place. In contrast, we heard that Wikipedia was perceived as confusing and unpredictable when the CDL staff was updating pages to add links back to their primary sources. They never felt certain that the links they were working so hard to add wouldn’t be removed the next day.

These are just two examples of ways in which the archival community is beginning to bump into various online communities. We need to really understand the cultural rules for each of the communities in which we want to participate. Another excellent example of this was the revelation that LOC should only upload 50 new images a week into Flickr because of the way in which users view new images uploaded by their friends. It would be unfortunate for LOC to loose many of its Flickr friends because it overwhelmed their Flickr feeds with 1,000 images.

Personas: Targeting Real People

I was also very pleased to hear Lena discuss the creation of personas to define and target the audiences they want to serve. If you want to listen to a great presentation on personas – give a listen to the IA Summit 2008 presentation Data driven design research personas (2nd podcast down on the page) while going though the presentation slides up on slideshare. I promise it is a very accessible talk (ie, low on jargon and tech – high on real life examples) and very worth your time. It was one of the best sessions I saw at that conference.

Finding Images Without Words

While today it is generally true that people must use words to find images – someday people will be able to use images to find images. An example of this work in progress is an experimental service named retrievr. You can already use this tool to search for Flickr images either by uploading an image or by creating a sketch you want to match. Another interesting image search interface is found over on Xcavator.net. You pick a photo as your starting point – and then you can even trace a subsection of the image to be used for subsequent image matching. We are not there yet – but we will be someday. I can only image the number of Untitled images that will finally be found!

Vigilance

Your reward for reading this far is discovering my rationale for using the image I included at the top of this post. I think that many people are worried that we must be like the San Jose Vigilance Committee of 1906 – on our guard to stop people from stealing images from cultural heritage institutions when they are posted online. I would argue that the two projects described in this session show the benefits of a more open attitude. The Internet isn’t the wild west anymore. We should stop treating it that way. We don’t need Vigilance Committees online – we need ambassadors, interpreters and brave pioneers like Lena, Helena and the amazing teams of people who made the projects they described come to life.

Image credit: History San Jose Research Library via Calisphere.

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.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA2008: Revealing Archival Collections at the Web’s Surface (Session 102)