He then proposes 3 approaches to monetizing these efforts and leveraging the resulting digitized video:

1. Media-Centric Wikipedia - complete with an expectation that social media contributions would provide “scalable way for creating editorial metadata, such as descriptions and story summaries that would be costly to otherwise create”. This makes me think of Flickr Commons for video.
2. Education Site - akin to NBCU’s iCue site I mentioned in my post about NBC News Archive footage on Hulu. “Efforts like this provide educational/subscription opportunities as well as sponsorship/advertising opportunities—what advertiser doesn’t want to get in front of 13 - 18 year olds?”
3. News Site Extension - described as “bolting the news archive onto the existing site”. The major benefit of this is that “more content provides more SEO opportunity and, hence, larger audience reach.”

Baker concludes:

In a market where traditional media is struggling to create unique and compelling online experiences and business models, the archive represent a differentiator that can jump-start audience building and monetization initiatives. Not only is it an important representation of world history that must be saved for “preservation-sake”, the archive represents a large, untapped online opportunity.  Who will be first to realize its potential?

The ultimate goal of all three of these scenarios is to offset the extreme expense of digitization of thousands of hours of news footage. I think it is refreshing to see a perspective from outside the cultural heritage corner of the world that still sees video archives as rich resources worth preserving. I also like seeing ideas that are pitched in manner that should catch the attention of those making budgets and struggling with finding funding for large digitization efforts.

Image Credit: Flickr photo OSU Spring Game 2006 Media Lineup by Chris Metcalf

I found some useful tools along the way:

• Cocoalicious - a Mac only desktop tool for working with and exploring Delicious bookmarks
• Scripted Re-Mark - a web page that will generate a little javascript for you to use to bulk update your Delicious bookmarks. This means you can update up to 100 bookmarks at a time (the most you can show on a browser page at once in the Delicious interface). I used this to bulk update all my bookmarks from private to public after I was done with my review.
• Linkrolls - a standard Delicious service for displaying your most recent bookmarks on any page. This is how I am currently displaying my most recent bookmarks on my blog’s sidebar.

So what does this all mean to you? There are a lot of things you can do:

• Add the RSS feed of my bookmarks to your feedreader
• Create your own Delicious account to store (and share if you choose) your bookmarks
• Add SpellboundBlog’s Delicious account to your network on Delicious (requires you to have a Delicious account)
• Browse through thumbnail screenshots of my bookmarks on FavThumbs
• Explore my tags, perhaps only subscribing to the feeds of specific tags I use to follow new links of those types when I add them. Below you will see the top 100 tags I use most often, along with a notation of the number of bookmarks to which I have assigned each.

My bookmarks are a reflection of my interests. As you can see from the tags above (or by clicking through to my tag page if the tag cloud doesn’t appear in your reader), my bookmarks are just as likely to be about information visualization, Flex (an Adobe tool for developing Flash applications), data sources, thesauri and web tools as they are to be about archives, digitization and preservation.

I have a few more ideas that I will proceed with as my time and newly discovered tools allow. I want to add all the links I include in my posts to my Delicious account. What would be super amazing would be to find some tool that would mine my blog posts for links and then add them to Delicious with tags matching the categories assigned to the post. I want an easy to use dead link checker so I can run it every few months. I also need to find the perfect Delicious tool to let me easily post to both my personal and blog accounts without logging out and logging back in again. I use the Twitterfox Firefox Plugin to let me post to more than one Twitter account and would love something like that for Delicious.

I have been using Delicious for a bit longer than I have been writing this blog.  I love it. If you still manage all your bookmarks locally in your web browser - I highly recommend you give Delicious a try. It will even let you import all your existing bookmarks and assign your bookmark folder names as tags. If you don’t want to share your bookmarks with the world simply click the ‘Do Not Share’ checkbox when adding a bookmark and it will stay private. Did I mention the service is free?

For those of you who are already converts, do you know of other tools that can make the Delicious experience even tastier? Please post them in the comments! I will give you an official Spellbound Blog gold star if you have one that matches one of the tools I described on my ‘most wanted’ list above.

And what would a political video blog post be without a political video? If you don’t see the video below, you can click through to view the I Like Ike ad from 1954 I chose for your viewing pleasure.

This is a great example of finding new audiences for material from archives. In this case, I had to dig for a while to discover that these were from the NBC News Archives. The Hulu iCue network/studio home page doesn’t really tell me anything - but you can imagine using a page like this to supply more information if you wanted to stress the archival origin of a set of videos.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Archives Name
2. Archives Parent Institution (if applicable)
3. Archives Location
4. Contact at Archives for questions about the finding aids (name, email and phone number)
5. Estimate of # of finding aids being offered
6. Controlled Vocabulary or Thesaurus used for Subject values (as many as are used)
7. Method of finding aid delivery (sending me a zip file? pointing me at a directory online? some other way?)

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

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

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.