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Year: 2008

SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities

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SAA 2009: Sustainable Archives AUSTIN 09It is official – the panel I proposed for SAA 2009 (aka, Sustainable Archives: AUSTIN 2009) was accepted!

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):

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!

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Google Tackles Magazine Archives

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Google Book Search: Popular Mechanics Jan 1905 Cover ImageAs has been reported around the web today, Google is now digitizing and adding magazines to Google Book Search. This follows on the tails of the recent Google Life Photo archive announcement.

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:

Lifestyle and city themed:

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:

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:

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.

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Susa 2.0: Max Evans’ Finding Aid Prototype

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Susa Young GatesAs part of his portion of our SAA 2008 panel in San Francisco, Max Evans demonstrated his prototype for a new way to view an EAD finding aid. You can download his presentation from the SAA’s site: Finding Aids for the 21st Century: The Next Evolution.

Max’s prototype of Susa 2.0 is now online! He asked that I make sure you know it works best (showing all the intended mouse over text for links) with Internet Explorer version 6.0. The prototype presents the finding aid of the Susa Young Gates Papers from the Utah State Historical Society. His design tackles the major issues that plague large finding aids normally displayed in traditional single page layouts. Anyone who has looked at a large finding aid online has had the experience of being scrolled down somewhere in the middle and realizing they have no idea what they are looking at. What folder is this item in? What box is this folder in? Am I reading through a list of letters from 1950 or are these the ones from 1970?

Context is hard to communicate when you are dealing with long lists of folders that stretch longer than the length of the screen. Max’s design uses a three column approach to provide context from left to right. His design also gives users a way to look at the full list of either items or folders, independent of their originating containers – each list then sortable in three different ways: ‘as arranged’, alphabetically or by date. I love this page which shows how a scanned document might be displayed within the proper context of the collection – in this case, page 2 of document 1 of the General Correspondence from 1886-1909. All of these ideas get at the heart of giving researchers more control over how to tackle the records in a collection while making sure that they don’t loose the tools that ordered documents in a folder would provide them in the research room.

His prototype takes a step beyond just changing how the finding aid itself is presented – but also considers how the work flow of a researcher can be improved while also simplifying the record request processes. The prototype gives the patron the option to request the scanning of specific folders or items. They can also add records to their ‘research cart’ to either request the proper boxes be retrieved or to store the records in a personal research area within the archives website – both possibilities sound useful to me.

Max’s prototype is such a great example of rethinking how people are expected to work with archival records within the confines of the information we already have available in finding aids as they exist today. I highly recommend you give Susa 2.0 a look. It is a testament to Max’s incredible patience that he was able to create this prototype using over 200 separate HTML files – but it also sets the bar high for what we could be doing with our interface design!

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A Blogging Landmark – 100,000 Words and Counting

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Odometer by Melissa Doroquez via Flickr

This afternoon I realized that I had passed a new landmark here on Spellbound Blog – I have published over 100,000 words! 100,208 words in 137 posts to be exact (thank you TD Word Count plugin).

Since I managed to miss my 2 year blogiversary back in July, this seems like a fine time to thank you all for sticking with me and giving me such great feedback over the past 2+ years. Since my Happy Birthday post in July of 2007, Google Analytics tells me that I have had 14,901 unique visitors to my blog from 139 different countries and territories and Feedburner tells me that I have over 400 subscribers to my RSS feed.

So, thank you everyone for giving my posts some of your precious time. Now, onward to 200,000 words!

Image Credit: 100,000 Miles by Melissa Doroquez via Flickr.

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LIFE Photo Archive Digitized and Put Online by Google

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Martha GrahamIn news that would make any fan of old photographs drool, the Official Google Blog has announced that the LIFE Photo Archive is now available on Google Image Search.  The LIFE Photo Archive’s home page is neatly organized to encourage you to browse for images by decade, famous people and topics.

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: St. Moritz, Switzerland, February 1947TimeInc 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.

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Video News Archives: Digitization as Good Business

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Flickr: OSU Spring Game 2006 Media Lineup by Chris MetcalfMy work now includes more SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work and so I have added SEO focused blogs to my RSS feedreader. Today I spotted Search Engine Land‘s post Business Opportunities For Video News Archives. Stephen Baker calculates that 35 years worth of archive footage equals 51,100 hours of content per station. With approximately 20 stations per broadcast group he estimates a cost of $30 million per group to digitize each broadcast group’s archive of news footage. See the original article for more details on his calculations.

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

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SpellboundBlog Bookmarks now on Delicious

After reviewing the results of the ArchivesNext poll that Kate was so kind to organize, I created a Delicious account for Spellboundblog. Then I got to the hard part – sorting through my previously private list of bookmarks and separating personal bookmarks from ‘on topic’ bookmarks to share with the Spellbound Blog community (such as there is one). I had never really sat down and re-examined my tagging strategy. It was a very interesting experience. I cleaned up my tags (like combining the ‘photo’ and ‘photos’ tags into a single photos tag) and deleted some dead links I found by accident.

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.

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Political Campaign Ads from the NBC News Archives Find New Audience on Hulu.com

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Thinking about politics, but waxing nostalgic for the good old days of movie stars and snappy jingles? Surf over to Hulu.com’s new gallery of Historic Campaign Ads. These are from iCue, which bills itself as “A fun, innovative learning environment built around the video from the NBC News Archives“.

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.

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

Blog Action Day - Poverty long

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:

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:

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.

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Jewish New Year 5769: Images and Words from the Past

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Flickr LOC: Praying on the Brooklyn BridgeThe Jewish year of 5769 began at sunset of September 29th, 2008. The Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) is a very reflective holiday, one in which individuals are encouraged to consider their own actions from the past year. It made me wonder what materials are available online to let us glimpse the celebration of Rosh Hashanahs long past.

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:

Rosh Hashanah Poem (1898)

 

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:

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

These sites are from suggestions in the comments:

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