I am a backer of this project, and you can be too. As of the original writing of this post, they are currently 47% funded twenty-eight days out from their deadline. For those of you not familiar with Kickstarter, people can post creative projects and provide rewards for their funders. The funding only goes through if they reach their goal within the time limit – otherwise nothing happens, a model they call ‘all-or-nothing funding’.

What will the money be spent on?

• 45% for PHP programmers who have been coding the custom web interface
• 35% for interface designers
• 10% for data acquisition & data clean up
• 10% for hosting bills

They aim for a five month time-line to move from their existing functional prototype to something viable to release to the public.

I am also intrigued by ways that the work on this project might be leveraged in the future to support similar text-mining projects that tie in location and date. How about doing the same thing with civil war letters? How about mining the lyrics from Broadway musical songs?

If this all sounds interesting, take a look at the video below and read more on the Hip-Hop Word Count Kickstarter home page. If half the people who follow my RSS feed pitch in $10, this project would be funded. Take a look and consider pitching in. If this project doesn’t speak to you – take a look around Kickstarter for something else you might want to support.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Creative Funding for Text-Mining and Visualization Project

I have spent lot of time thinking about how to generate thematic overviews of groups of archival collections. My information visualization project, ArchivesZ, aims to provide ways of understanding aggregated archival description data, both from a single institution or across institutional boundaries. Now I find myself wondering if text mining with a tool like MALLET might generate smart topic groupings more elegantly than fighting with the wide range of non-standardized collection subjects.

Topic Modeling with MALLET

To get a sense of what MALLET generates, see the excerpt below from Blevins’s post:

With some tinkering, MALLET generated a list of thirty topics comprised of twenty words each, which I then labeled with a descriptive title. Below is a quick sample of what the program “thinks” are some of the topics in the diary:

• MIDWIFERY: birth deld safe morn receivd calld left cleverly pm labour fine reward arivd infant expected recd shee born patient
• CHURCH: meeting attended afternoon reverend worship foren mr famely performd vers attend public supper st service lecture discoarst administred supt
• DEATH: day yesterday informd morn years death ye hear expired expird weak dead las past heard days drowned departed evinn
• GARDENING: gardin sett worked clear beens corn warm planted matters cucumbers gatherd potatoes plants ou sowd door squash wed seeds

He goes on to explain that “MALLET also allows us to track those topics across the text.” What if, instead of text mining a diary, we pumped the descriptions of every archival collection from a single institution into MALLET. Of course we would need a good list of stop words including such common terms as archives, history, sources and records. But I wonder how the topics MALLET suggests would compare to the official subjects associated with each collection? Could this give us a broad overview of the topics covered by a specific repository and give us a new way to build paths to the collections based on topic?

Auto-Classification Using Castanet

Text miner Aditi Muralidharan also posted recently on this theme in Castanet: automatically generating a browsing structure for a collection and explains:

Castanet automatically carves a sub-structure from the hierarchical concept dictionary, WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu), and matches items in the collection to one or many appropriate places within that hierarchy. Then, after some automated trimming and flattening, the result is a hierarchical browsing system.

I have heard of Castanet before via the Flamenco Search Interface Project. Apparently Muralidharan did a project using Castanet last summer to create a category system for Flickr Commons images based on the images’ tags which is then rendered using a Flamenco interface. I include a partial screen-shot below to give you a taste of what the navigation of images feels like a few levels down in the hierarchy. I love the classification of ‘Group Action’ then filtered by a sub-classification of ‘Commerce’. The first images shown are of ‘horse trading’ – with additional headings and images beneath them as well as additional filter options on the left.

What If?

What if we pulled all the English language archival descriptions from around the world as our original data set. If we used this data for topic modeling, our subjects clusters would be cross-institutional. Maybe we could map the local institution assigned subjects to the topic model generated topics for each collection and get a sort of automated crosswalk for finding related collections. If we used the local institution assigned subjects from the archival descriptions for Canasta style auto-classification, maybe we could generate a way to hierarchically browse collections topically.

Both MALLET and Flamenco are open source (I am not sure of the status of Castanet) and, as I discovered working on ArchivesZ, many institutions will share their archival description data for a good cause. So – is this a good cause? I need to tease these ideas out a bit more, but what do you all think of it at first blush? Feasible? Interesting? Worthwhile experiments?

Image Credits: MALLET logo from MALLET homepage. Images in screen shot from Flickr Commons with no known copyright.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Topic Modeling, Auto-Classification and Archival Description

I have spent much of the past year learning the details of Search Engine Optimization. Usually shortened to SEO, this simply refers to the use of techniques which improve the traffic sent to a website via organic search. Want your webpage to show up at the top of the list for a specific search in Google? You want to work on your SEO.

So when I look at new archives website, I can’t help but keep an eye open for how well the site is optimized for search engines.

I hope that UMBC will forgive me for nitpicking their new site. A lot of their choices are great for SEO,  but they also have room for improvement.

Things Done Well for SEO

• Home Page Title & Description: The site’s home page has a good meta description. This is the text displayed below the link on a search results page – as shown below:
• Unique Page Titles At Collection Level: Each photography collection homepage has a unique page title and a nice block of explanatory text. Google can only read words – so the more unique text on a page, the better the job Google can do in figuring out what your page is about. Example: Ardsley Park Album
• Good anchor text: (also known as link text) The words used in anchor text tells search engines information about the destination page. For example, the blue text below is anchor text.

Areas for SEO Improvement

• Unique Page Titles At Item Level: Individual images and documents all use a generic page title such as ‘UMBC | Digital Archive | Document Viewer’. Document Example: Accidental Death of an Anarchist Image Example: 10 year old Bootblack
• H1 Tags: In the HTML of each page, the dominant heading of the page should use the <h1> tag. This helps Google know the phrase you are targeting with this page. It is your 2nd best place to emphasize your content after the page title. In the case of the item pages, there seems to often be a headline type title at the top of the page – but it currently is not an demarcated with an <h1> tag.
• Think About Search Results and Indexing: Pages displaying results of internal searches on your site are not likely to be useful as indexed pages in Google. The thinking here is that they can dilute the focus on the item and collection level pages on your site if Google also has many search results pages in the index. If UMBC wanted their search pages to be indexed, then those pages’ URLs should be simplified and the search results pages need a page title that somehow includes the search criteria. There are two ways that I know of to disable this indexing – blocking via the site’s robots.txt file or via a robots meta tag in the header of the search results page. Both of these methods tell obliging search engines to not crawl certain parts of your site.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of other things that UMBC could do to support this new website. They could create an XML sitemap of all their pages and submit it to Google (maybe they already have). They might re-title some of their pages based on using a tool like Google Insight to see what variations of a phrase is searched on most frequently. My goal here was to give you a taste of the sorts of things that catch my eye. Also, SEO is still more of an art than a science – so you will sometimes notice that what one SEO expert recommends is the opposite of what the next expert would tell you.

In many cases changes, such as the Unique Page Title at the Item Level mentioned above, may not even be possible due to software or programmer resource limitations. The trick is to take advantage of every option that is available. There are also trade-offs to be made. UMBC’s site provides some very slick interfaces for viewing the details of a group of documents, such as theater programs and other materials related to a theatrical production. The imlementation elegantly handles the situation of multiple scanned images which relate to a coherent set of documents. Sometimes you can’t have both your innovative UI and perfect SEO. Then it gets down to what your goals are for your website. Are you trying to make a specific community of existing users happy by providing them with tools they can use? Or does your mission focus more on reaching out to a broader audience?

There is no silver bullet to search engine optimization. It just takes knowledge of the available tools and techniques combined with a willingness to keep learning and experimenting. Like the ‘Do-It-Yourself-Woman‘ pictured above in the Nationaal Archief‘s photo I found out on the Flickr Commons, you too can learn the basics and do-it-yourself. A great starting point is Google’s free SEO Guide. Also, please remember that the best time to plan your SEO strategy is before you have built your site in the first place!

I would love to do research on how much progress archives websites can make in their organic search traffic after SEO improvements. My thinking is to take a snapshot of a month of analytics (the statistics that tell you how many people are visiting your website) and then apply some SEO inspired changes. After a suitable delay (it takes some time for SEO to do its job) we consider another month of analytics to determine any change in organic traffic.

Do you want me to do a quick review of your archives website to see if there is room for SEO improvement? Please contact me or add a comment to this post. I feel like there is a conference presentation in all this if we can find a good set of websites to optimize.

Finally, thank you to unsuspecting UMBC – your new website really is beautiful.

Image credit: Doe-het-zelf vrouw /Do-it-yourself-woman from Nationaal Archief on Flickr Commons.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SEO Evaluation of an Archival Website: Looking at UMBC’s Digital Collections

For my test I searched for an exact match on “Ticket with portrait of George Washington”. This returns one result – the one image in Flickr with the same name, from The Field Museum in Flickr Commons. If you click on the ‘More Filters’ link, you will see other ways to filter your results – including the option to restrict your results to only include images whose creators permit reuse.

Next I clicked in the ‘Creator allows reuse’ and my one result disappeared! Quite disappointing in my book.

Google is also getting onto the ‘make it easy to search for reusable images’ bandwagon. Search Engine Land reported that Google Images Quietly Adds Creative Commons Filter. That post pointed me to Google  Operating System‘s search interface that lets you play with the options that Google has available. After a clicking through to some of the images returned by a Google Image Search for creative commons images of archives, the way the Google model appears to work is to look for creative commons badges or links on the page with the image. I even found Flickr creative commons images, but when I tried to find my Flickr Commons image of the ticket used above for my Yahoo image search experiment it wasn’t returned by Google either.

So if an archives (or museum or library) posts images on a page that indicates that the content is licensed under creative commons, it seems those images will then appear in Google’s image search as reusable. That is good news! Another way to get users to find your public domain images.

The question I am left is how to resolve the gap between Flickr Commons’ ‘no known copyright restrictions  rights statement and both Google and Yahoo’s definition of reusable content.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons

The Sunshine Week blog announced the release of a 2009 Survey Of State Government Information Online. The survey results explains:

Using a standardized worksheet surveyors rated each section on its usability, looking at factors such as whether the information was clearly linked, if full reports or only summaries were available, whether viewing and/or downloading was free, and whether the data were current. The categories for the survey were selected for generally serving the overall public good — the kind of information people need for their own health and well-being and that of the community.

See the worksheet for details on the categories selected for inclusion in the survey and the results for lots of interesting tidbits about exactly which states provide access (or not) to various public information online. A few very randomly selected highlights:

• Maryland: Nursing home information, mhcc.maryland.gov/consumerinfo/nhguide, got high marks for facilitating online search and for allowing users to “compare data in a variety of ways.”
• Iowa: The state auditor’s office reportedly offers online more than 5,000 full reports of all its audits dating back to 2001. The audits are easily accessible from tabs on the main Web page, www.auditor.iowa.gov.
• Colorado: Bridge inspection reports in Colorado are considered public, but they are not published online. Anyone who wants to see the reports is advised to file an FOI request.

All of this made me recall my blog post about the parallel goals of journalists and archivists when considering digital public records and databases. I wanted to celebrate Sunshine Week by looking for other online sources of government information. My first stop was the website of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA). They had a couple of great resources including:

• A 2007 status report on the state of State Records (and it looks like a new report should be out soon – their 2008 survey just closed at the end of January 2009)
• Directory of State Archives and Records Programs
• Details on their Local Government Project

A bit further afield we find GovernmentDocs.org advertised as a “community government document reviewer system”. On their about page we read:

With the GovernmentDocs.org system, citizen reviewers can engage in the government accountability process like never before. Registered users can review and comment on documents, adding their insights and expertise to the work of the national nonprofit organizations which are partnering on this project. This new information then becomes instantly searchable. The text of each document is searchable, as well, thanks to a powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality.

GovernmentDocs.org adds a powerful layer to government transparency and accountability by indexing documents in a user-friendly manner that is remarkably easy to share. Every page of every document has its own unique url, allowing you and other users to link to that page on blogs, send emails about the documents to friends, and expose the information to a wider audience.

Here is an example GovernmentDocs page taken from a request submitted by CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) regarding the Endangered Species Act. Each GovernmentDocs page has a unique URL, full text transcription of the page and supports comments and reviews. The possibility of building up a community around these records is very real. I am curious to see how many citizen reviewers and comments are associated with these documents a year from now.

Please help celebrate Sunshine Week by exploring all these amazing resources!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Sunshine Week 2009: Archives, Records and Other Online Government Information

I took a look around to see what I could see. I was intrigued by the fact that I couldn’t see a list of all the magazines in their collection. So I went after the information the hard way and kept reloading the Google Book Search home page until I didn’t see any new titles displayed in their highlighted magazine section. This is what I came up with, roughly grouped by general topic groupings.

Science and technology:

• The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: which started out as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago in December of 1945 through November of 1998
• CIO: The Magazine for Information Executives: back to Volume 1, Number 1 from Sept/Oct 1987
• Maximum PC: October 1998 through the present
• Popular Science: stretching back to an issue for March of 1872 when it was known as Popular Science Monthly through to February 2008
• Popular Mechanics: January 1905 through November 2005

Lifestyle and city themed:

• New York Magazine:  April 1968 through December 1997. Fascinating that some of the magazines still have the original mailing label on them (see this example from a July 1969 issue of New York )
• Cincinnati Magazine: January 1971 through December 2005, at which point it seems to switch to being an annual city guide titled Cincinnati USA
• Atlanta: January 2003 through August 2008 – and mis-titled ‘Atlants’
• Indianapolis Monthly: January 1995 to the present
• Cruise Travel: June 1979 through December 2007

African American:

• Ebony Jr!: May 1973 through October 1985
• Jet: November 1961 through October 2008
• Black Digest: Named ‘Negro Digest’ from November 1961 through April 1970, then Black Digest from May 1970 through April 1976.

Health, nutrition and organic:

• Women’s Health and Men’s Health: January 2006 through present. I found it very amusing to be able to scan the covers of all the issues so easily – true for all of these magazines of course, but funny to see cover after cover of almost identically clad men and women exercising.
• Prevention: January 2006 through the present
• Better Nutrition: January 1999 through December 2004
• Organic Gardening: November 2005 to the present
• Vegetarian Times: March1981 through November 2004

Sports and the outdoors:

• Baseball Digest: July 1945 through October 2007
• American Cowboy: May 1994 through August 2008
• Bicycling, Mountain Bike and Runner’s World: January 2006 through present

They of course promise more magazines on the way, so if you are reading this long after mid December 2008  I would assume there are more magazines and more issues available now. I hope that they make it easier to browse just magazines. Once they have a broader array of titles – how neat would it be to build a virtual news stand for a specific week in history? Shouldn’t be hard – they have all the metadata and cover images they need.

I love being able to read the magazine – advertising and all. They display the covers in batches by decade or 5 year period depending on the number of issues. I also like the Google map provided on each magazines ‘about’ page that shows ‘Places mentioned in this magazine’ and easily links you directly to the article that mentions the location marked on the map.

I think it is interesting that Google went with more of a PDF single scrolling model rather than an interface that mimics turning pages. In many issues (maybe all?) they have hot-linked the table of contents so that you can scroll down to that section instantly. You can also search within the magazine, though from my short experiments it seems that only the articles are text indexed and the advertisements are not.

Google’s current model for search is to return results for magazines mixed in with books in Google Book Search results – but they do let you limit your results to only magazines from their Advanced Search page within Google Book Search. See these results for a quick search on sunscreen in magazines.

Overall I mark this as a really nice step forward in access to old magazines. As with many visualizations, seeing the about page for any of these magazines made me ask myself new questions.  It will be interesting to see how many magazines sign on to be included and how the interface evolves.

To read more about Google’s foray into magazine digitization and search take a look at:

• Tech Crunch: Google Adds Print Magazines To Book Search 
• Official Google Blog: Search and Find Magazines on Google
• Venture Beat Digital Media: Google Book Search: now with magazines!
• Washington Post/AP: Google updates search index with old magazines

For a really nice analysis of the information that Google provides on the magazine pages see Search Engine Land’s Google Book Search Puts Magazines Online.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Google Tackles Magazine Archives

There really is something for everyone here. I picked this striking image of Martha Graham because I love modern dance, but there are also images of war, fashion, sports, landscapes, architecture and tons more. The images currently posted stretch from the 1750s through 2003 and include many that have never before been published.

It is also worth noting that not everything in this collection is a photograph. I found illustrated pages from books like the Queen Summer by Walter Crane. I also found illustrations like this one of the ancient temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Turkey.

From the text in Google’s blog post, it sounds as if Google is doing the digitizing – while LIFE Inc (or their parent company Time Inc) will profit from the sale of prints. The current posted photos represent 20% of all the photos. Ultimately the photo archive is expected to be about 10 million images and stretch to the present day.

TimeInc has partnered with QOOP to sell framed fine art photographs via links directly from each of the LIFE photo pages within Google. Take a look at the page dedicated to selling you a  framed art print of St. Moritz, Switzerland in 1947.

I had not heard of QOOP before, but they seem to have a number of options available for those who want to be their partner. QOOP also wanted me to join their ‘Social Commerce Revolution’. In order to join the revolution I had to create an account (it is free and easy it pointed out). To create my account I had to give them my email address, password and birth date. Not so bad. On the next screen they required that I enter my mailing address and phone number. I don’t really want to give them this information – but I am curious about this revolution I have been promised. And when I was done – a whole lot of nothing happened. I think that I am supposed to use QOOP to create and market products. Is it an affiliate program? Is it an artsier CafePress? Do I need to contribute my own images or can I use those of others? I am still not sure.

I do like their integration with the LIFE images, but I think that there is clearly more work to be done before they are going to foster a ‘Social Commerce Revolution’ anytime soon.

Time Inc’s press release includes the following details:

The LIFE Photo Archive featured on Google will be among the largest professional photography collections on the Web and one of the largest scanning projects ever undertaken. Millions of images have been scanned and made available on Google Image Search today with all 10 million images to be available in the coming months.

“For 70 years, LIFE has been about one thing, and that’s the power of photography to tell a story,” says Andy Blau, LIFE’s President. “LIFE will now reach a broader audience and engage them online with the incredible depth and breadth of the LIFE Photo Archive from serious world events, to Hollywood celebrities to whimsical photographs.” Time Inc. EVP, John Squires adds: “We’re delighted Google recognized the rich value of our photo archive and worked with us to bring it to millions of consumers. Consistent with the launch of the TIME Archive, PEOPLE Archive and the SI Vault, this initiative continues our efforts to build valuable new revenue opportunities from our rich heritage.”

All keywords are translated into 16 different languages. LIFE’s Photo Archive will be scanned and available on Google Image Search free for personal and research purposes. Copyright and ownership of all images will remain with Time Inc.

Google uses a special notation to support search across the LIFE collection – all you do is include source:life as one of your search terms within the Google Image search box. Each photo has a rich set of metadata including a description and the keywords mentioned in the press release above.

When you click on one of the keywords (which are actually called ‘Labels’ in the Google interface) it submits a search within the LIFE collection – but does NOT restrict that search to only the keywords. Rather, it seems to search across all the text associated with each image. For example – the label ‘Feathers’ on assorted images links to this URL: http://images.google.com/images?q=Feathers+source:life. This search returns many images, including one of Debutante Marilyn Lowe wearing a dress made from feathers which is not in fact assigned the label ‘Feathers’, but obviously does include the word feathers in the description.

For those accustomed to hotlinked tag-like terms only retrieving content that also is assigned that term (see all the images in the Flickr Commons tagged with ‘snow’), this might be a bit confusing. Also in contrast with the Flickr Commons, Google does not offer the opportunity for users to assign additional labels/keywords to the images. If you have signed on with a Google account, you can assign images within the LIFE collection a star rating. I don’t see how this is used right now, but I expect that over time they will leverage these ratings to sort the Google hosted image search results.

Since I spend a lot of time these days organizing controlled vocabularies, seeing the keywords assigned to these images makes me wish I could see Time Inc’s full and organized set of terms. My favorite spotted so far? Lines of People – as typified by this photograph of Models wearing checked outfits from 1958.

It will be interesting to see what other partnerships crop up in the next year to digitize other major collections. I am also very curious to know if people actually buy framed fine art prints at the current cost of $79.99 for an 8″x12″ inch print in a 13″x16″ frame. Who knows if Time Inc will be forthcoming with their degree of success on this front – but it will likely be an good test case for other major collections looking to recoup some of the cost of their digitization efforts and find a new revenue stream.

Image Credit: The copyright of both of the images shown above belong to Time Inc. Please click through to view details about each image, including the photographer’s name and the option to purchase your own print of the image.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

LIFE Photo Archive Digitized and Put Online by Google

I learned about this site on a tour of the Internet Archive while out in California for SAA 2008. It contains still and moving images from across NASA. For the first time these visual materials have been pulled together and methodically assigned appropriate metadata. This means that you can do really nice advanced searches and faceted browsing of search results. Before this effort, there was no standardized set of attributes describing these visual materials being created across NASA.

The NASA Images about page explains:

NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.

The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.

It goes on to explain that the Internet Archive receives no financial support from NASA and that NASA Images is currently funded through a grant from the Kahle-Austin Foundation. They are currently looking for new grants and sponsorships to fund upcoming projects.

Also, according to their published Terms and Conditions, they have made an effort to only include non-copyrighted images (though they don’t guarantee it). This is an amazing wealth of images and movies available for public use. The terms state that “You may use this NASA imagery for educational or informational purposes, including photo collections, textbooks, public exhibits and Internet Web pages (personal or otherwise). ”

I have embedded below footage of plumes of hot gas shooting across the surface of the sun. Check out this photo of the original 7 astronauts in their very shiny spacesuits from 1968. Happy Golden Anniversary NASA!

Image Credit:  NASA 50th Anniversary logo designed by Crabtree + Company. Read more about Crabtree + Company’s thoughts behind the creation of the logo.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Celebrating NASA’s 50th with NASA Images

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)

This sort of thing makes the most sense when you can see examples. The creator of Parallax has published a great little video tour, but I also wanted to show you some neat data sets that were very easy to discover and embed in my blog. Since so many people are thinking about the Olympics right now, I thought I would start by exploring the Olympic Games Collection from Freebase. Below I have two data sets. On the left you will see a list of Olympic Games – and on the right you will see a list of Olympic event venues. (NOTE: to those reading this through a feed reader – you will likely have to click through to view the lists)

Now lets take a real sidestep and pull up a list of sports teams who use a former Olympic facility as a venue. This is the sort of question that you could figure out on your own, but it would be a pain in the neck to do by hand. See the list on the left below which took just as long to create as it took me to spot that Team (venue) was on the list of ‘more connections’ when my list of Olympic Venues was being displayed. The frame on the right below displays the one Olympic Venue that Freebase knows to have won an award (in this case the Structural Special Award).

Of course the lists above are only as good as the data behind them, but you can see how interesting it could be to use Parallax to explore connected information. Now take this idea to the world of archives and libraries, OPACs and finding aids and imagine the sorts of questions you can start asking. Yes – it does depend on the data being connected, but that is happening more and more all the time. The promise of the semantic web is structured data everywhere we turn.

Go play with Parallax. Look at Venture Funded Companies and then look at all the Games Developed by those companies. Examine the list of  Bird Species and then see what schools have bird mascots… and THEN see a list of famous people who went to schools that have bird mascots.

Put in your own search from the Parallax homepage and play with the available connections.  Map and timeline views are also available – though they only work if your data includes location and temporal data, respectively. If you find a great sequence of data sets – please share them!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Freebase Parallax Search Interface: Exploring Olympic Games Facts