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Caring for Special Collections: Exploring the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf

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Connecting to Collections BookshelfI subscribe to the RSS feed from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and so saw a press release encouraging institutions to apply for the free IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf.

The IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf is intended to provide small and medium-sized libraries and museums with essential resources needed to improve the condition of their collections. The Bookshelf includes books, DVDs, and other collections resources, as well as a Guide to Online Resources and a User’s Guide to all of the materials. It addresses such topics as the philosophy and ethics of collecting, collections management and planning, emergency preparedness, and culturally specific conservation issues.

The Heritage Preservation has created both a 48 page Bookshelf User’s Guide, with a page dedicated to each resources selected for the bookshelf, and a Guide to Online Resources to be used as a companion to the bookshelf. The Bookshelf User’s Guide has a brilliant section at the end giving you pointers to specific sections of the various Bookshelf resources to answer special questions – such as ‘Where can we find information on raising funds for collections care?’ and ‘How can I prioritize the needs of our collections?’.

What is interesting is that it took me a while to realize that each of the institutions that is awarded The Bookshelf will actually receive the books. My past experience with O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online made me assume that the books would be only accessed online. The Safari Books Online site requires a paid membership, but then provides access to an ever growing electronic reference library. The total number of resources is listed as currently over 5,000. One level of membership, Safari Library, provides unlimited access to all the resources (currently listed as $42.99 a month or $472.89 per year) while the less expensive membership level, Safari Bookshelf (currently listed as $22.99 a month or $252.99 a year), provides access to up to ten titles at a time.

Seeing those prices got me wondering, what will the receivers of this bookshelf be getting and what it’s total cost would be? I found my way to a list of the books and resources that will be included. Between the Internet and the 48 page guide to the Bookshelf I found the following information about each element of the Bookshelf. IMLS has broken the bookshelf down into three subsections as shown below:

Bookshelf: The Core Collection

Bookshelf: Nonliving Collections

Bookshelf: Living Collections

Grand Total

The maximum cost (with no membership discounts) to purchase all the components of The Bookshelf would be $951.87. Add in the cost of shipping and printing your own copies from the free downloads and we can probably talk about the monetary value of the Bookshelf being approximately $1000!

Online Acces

While researching all of this I came across a new option on Amazon.com – something they are calling Amazon Upgrade. For an additional fee above and beyond the price you pay for the physical book – you can have immediate and permanent online access to the content of that book. Take a look at the offering explained on the Amazon page for The National Trust Manual of Housekeeping: The Care of Collection in Historic Houses Open to the Public. I assume that they plan to increase the titles for which this is an option. If so, I can envision building an online reference shelf of one’s own – one title at a time. Rather than deciding that something like O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online has enough books to make it worth while for you – you will create your own custom online reference shelf.

The other half of the online access story is of course the number of resources that are posted online for free download (or as living HTML documents being updated over time). These are all the resources from the list above that can be downloaded for free:

What if all the resources that those who care for collections need were available via an online bookshelf? Now that would be an amazing resource for which many would be happy to pay an annual fee. Perhaps it could be provided as part of the membership fee for one or more of the appropriate professional organizations. An additional benefit to an online collection is the opportunity to receive automatic updates and new editions. I will also keep an eye on the Amazon Upgrade option to see how easy it is for someone to build their own online reference shelf – but I think a purposeful online collection designed for cultural heritage institutions would be even more compelling.

Getting the Bookshelf

A lot of organizations have already received the Bookshelf, but the press release that got me looking at all this mentioned that the next (final?) application period will be from March 1 through April 30, 2008. Recipients will be announced in July of 2008.

If you are considering applying you can find more details about the application process and review the questions you must answer online. But even for those that don’t qualify (federally operated and for-profit institutions are not eligible) – the Bookshelf User’s Guide, the Guide to Online Resources and those resources that may be downloaded for free provide a powerful combination of materials to support institutions and individuals as they care for collections of all shapes and sizes.

Note: All prices quoted in this post were valid as of January 27th, 2008. Image shown above from IMLS Connecting to Collections Bookshelf page.

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LOC + Flickr equals Crowdsourced Tagging

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Flickr/LOC: Lily Smith between 1910 and 1915 (LC-B2- 2350-8)It is no surprise that the Library of Congress announcing the publication of images on Flickr is news both in mainstream news outlets and in the blogosphere. From librarian.net‘s short and cheery LoC goes 2.0! post to ArchivesNext‘s pondering Is Flickr “legitimate” for archives now that LOC is there?, I have seen a lot of discussion of LoC and Flickr in my RSS feeds.

What is it all about?

In case you have missed the details, the Library of Congress has published two photo collections on Flickr in a new subsection of the website called The Commons. The two collections are:

  • 1930s-40s in Color: 1615 photos taken by photographers working for the US government’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Office of War Information (OWI) and covering “rural areas and farm labor, as well as aspects of World War II mobilization, including factories, railroads, aviation training, and women working between 1939 and 1944.”
  • News in the 1910s: 1500 photos taken by photographers who worked for the Bain News Service. Topics include “sports events, theater, celebrities, crime, strikes, disasters, and political activities, with a special emphasis on life in New York City.”

I enjoyed reading Flickr’s own blog post on the subject, Many hands make light work. It gave me a glimpse of their vision. For them, these two collections from the Library of Congress make up a pilot project – this is just the first step.

On their page for The Commons they first talk about their goals for the project:

Back in June of 2007, we began our first collaboration with a civic institution to facilitate giving people a voice in describing the content of a publicly-held photography collection.

The key goals of this pilot project are to firstly give you a taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection, and secondly to show how your input of a tag or two can make the collection even richer.

On the homepage for the Library of Congress Flickr pilot I found this introduction:

The Library of Congress invites you to explore history visually by looking at interesting photos from our collections. Please add tags and comments, too! More words are needed to help more people find and use these pictures.

So, here we have a project between two large and well known organizations, with their goals carefully aligned. Let’s get more people looking at the amazing photos from the Library of Congress. Let’s also harness the curiosity and enthusiasm of those who want to be more involved and want to tag content. I love it!

Considering the Tags

So then I started looking at photos and the tags they have. I wish (being my database geek self) that I could see the groupings in which tags were added (ie, that one person added tags 3 through 10). They don’t seem to be displayed alphabetically – but rather in the order in which they were added to the photo.

I considered this photo from the 1930s-40s in Color collection:

LOC Woman Airplane Photo

The list below shows all the tags that were assigned to it, in the order in which the tags are displayed beside the photo above on Flickr (listed separated by commas to preserve space). The ‘Library of Congress’ tag has already been assigned to every photo in the collections upon upload, and therefore always appears first:

Library of Congress, Long Beach, california, 1942, october, WW2, USA, aircraft, douglas, Palmer, WWII, women, manufacturing, yellow, stripes, overalls, engine, Douglas Aircraft, engine installation, military aviation, World War II, women at work, historical photographs, slide film, 4×5, large format, LF, transparency, transparencies, world war 2, technology

In a world with no controlled vocabulary, there seems to be a theory at work of covering all your bases. Rather than noticing that someone had tagged this photo ‘WW2’, it was also later tagged with ‘WWII’, ‘World War II’ and ‘world war 2’. On another photo in the collection I know I saw the tag ‘wwii’. As long as there is no ‘offical’ version for this tag, I see the wisdom in tagging it with all of them – just to be sure.

The official description of the photo is: “Women are trained to do precise and vital engine installation detail in Douglas Aircraft Company plants, Long Beach, Calif. (1942 Oct)”. The metadata provided by the Library of Congress also includes information about the format of the film itself.

These are the subject headings assigned by the Library of Congress catalogers:

  • Douglas Aircraft Company

  • Airplane industry

  • Women–Employment

  • World War, 1939-1945

  • Assembly-line methods

  • United States–California–Long Beach

It is interesting to note that the main things that the independent taggers have captured that the professional catalogers haven’t are either non-topical aspects of the image (‘yellow’ and ‘overalls’) as well as broader more general ideas (‘military aviation’ and ‘technology’).

Does the tag ‘women at work’ tell you more than the LOC subject heading ‘Women–Employment’? Maybe, maybe not – but if you view all the images tagged ‘women at work’ across Flickr, now you can see these women from the 1940s at work beside photos such as three vendors and Bozo village life. Now this is something different. This is knitting threads from the ivory tower of libraries and archives into the communal tapestry that is Flickr. Not only might the addition of the ‘women at work’ tag make these images more accessible to the average person looking for Library of Congress photos – but it also puts these photos in the everyday path of many more people. It brings us firmly back to Flickr’s goal stated above of giving more people a “taste of the hidden treasures in the huge Library of Congress collection”.

Copyright

Flickr has this to say on The Commons’ home page about copyright:

These beautiful, historic pictures from the Library represent materials for which the Library is not the intellectual property owner. Flickr is working with the Library of Congress to provide an appropriate statement for these materials. It’s called “no known copyright restrictions.”

Hopefully, this pilot can be used as a model that other cultural institutions would pick up, to share and redistribute the myriad collections held by cultural heritage institutions all over the world.

I am with ArchivesNext in hoping that this move by the Library of Congress will give archivists and librarians on the ground in other institutions a bit more ammunition with which to fight for posting their images on Flickr. Copyright is one of the issues that seems to give so many organizations pause – so it is interesting to see this new category having been created specifically for cultural institutions. I like that they link back to the Library of Congress’s official answer about what it means if the catalog record notes ‘No known restrictions on publication’. Flickr also explicitly mentions that “If the pilot works – or, when it works! – we’ll look to allow other interested cultural institutions the opportunity to extend the application of “no known restrictions” to their catalogues.” So clearly “no known copyright restrictions” has been created with cultural institutions in mind.

Final Thoughts

I am intrigued to see how this progresses. If nothing else is accomplished, more people will certainly see images from the Library of Congress collections than they would have had none of these photos been published on Flickr. Some will even surf back to the Library of Congress website to learn more about their photo collecitons. For the example photo I selected above, there were already subject headings assigned – but for most of the Bain News Service photos all that is available are bits of “unverified data provided by the Bain News Service on the negatives or caption cards”. Every tag that is added improves the chances that an interested party may find the photo they need.

I have posted before about the potential of crowdsourcing. I am in favor of it. Yes, all the tags won’t be perfect. Yes, there will be seven different ways of tagging for World War II. But when all is said and done, more people will find more photos. More eyes will see the treasures that once were only available to those who could get inside temperature and humidity controlled vaults. And more people will have the opportunity to learn a tiny bit more about why cultural institutions like the Library of Congress are great!

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MIT’s SIMILE Project: Innovations in Metadata Interaction and Analysis

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MIT SIMILE projectWell-formed Data’s post on Exhibit led me to explore what was available from MIT‘s Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project. I took a little time to examine some of the SIMILE project tools with an eye to how they could impact interaction with archival records and metadata, as well as how they might support the work of archivists. All the tools appear to be available via an open source BSD license.

Babel

Babel converts files from one format to another. I did a test to see if it would convert one of the Library of Congress EAD Finding Aids from XML to some other format – but it gave me an error (‘unqualified attribute ‘repositoryencoding’ not allowed’). I love the idea that I could just point this at an EAD finding aid and get something useful out the other side – but apparently that is a bit on the wishful thinking side – at least for the moment.

Exhibit 2.0

Exhibit 2.0 is described on the Exhibit homepage as follows:

Exhibit is a three-tier web application framework written in Javascript, which you can include like you would include Google Maps. If you just want to show a few hundred records of data on maps, timelines, scatter plots, interactive tables, etc., why bother learning SQL, ASP, PHP, CGI, or whatever when you can just use Exhibit? To use Exhibit, you write: a simple data file, and an HTML file in which you specify how the data should be shown. Data + Presentation. That’s all there is to publishing, as it should be.

Sounds fabulous, doesn’t it? I wish I had a week to play with this tool. They have a whole slew of examples, but I think the two I list below do a fine job of showing what you can create (not to mention being fairly thematic for those of you paying attention to the US Presidential Primaries news coverage):

Gadget

Gadget is an XML inspector designed to create useful summaries of vast pools of XML data. I didn’t download and play with this one – but it sounds like something that might be very interesting to pump a big pile of EAD XML format finding aids into to see what could be discovered from an aggregate point of view.

Longwell & RDFizers

Longwell is a faceted browser for RDF formatted data, while RDFizers is actually a directory of tools which convert other data formats into the RDF format. It doesn’t exist now, but if there was an RDFizer that went from EAD to RDF then Longwell would become more interesting to archivists.

That said, they already do have both a MARC/MODS RDFizer and an OAI-PMH RDFizer. I suspect that many archivists could put their hands on archival data in one of these two formats – which makes experimenting with Longwell more plausible in the near term.

Final Thoughts

There are lots other tools that are part of the SIMILE project (screen scrapers and timeplotters and more), but the ones listed above most ignited my imagination. Surely there are geek archivists even now rolling up their sleeves to figuring out how to leverage free open source tools like these, both to improve access to records and increase understanding of what we have and how well it is (or isn’t) documented.

I hope to find time to play with each of these over the next few months – but I would love to know if anyone else out there has already tried any of these tools. Have suggestions for likely datasets? Have knowledge of existing archive related applications using these tools? Please post your comments below or drop me a line via my contact form!

Image Credit: The Simile Project logo displayed above is from MIT’s Simile Project website.

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SAA2008 Here I Come! After the Revolution: Unleashing the Power of EAD

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SAA2008 I got the word just before the holidays – the panel proposal of which I was a part has been accepted for SAA 2008 in San Francisco . The title of the panel is ‘After the Revolution: Unleashing the Power of EAD’ and the working title for my paper/presentation is ‘Visualizing Archival Collections: Leveraging the Power of EAD’.

My co-presenters are Max Evans (currently of the NHPRC, soon to be of the LDS Church Historical Department) and Elizabeth Yakel (of University of Michigan, School of Information). Jodi Allison-Bunnell from Northwest Digital Archives, Orbis Cascade Alliance is our panel Chair.

This is the description of our panel that we submitted with our proposal:

Encoded Archival Description (EAD) was created in 1995 to increase uniformity and interoperability of data about archival collections to facilitate discovery. It has yet to realize that goal: most online finding aids merely recreate paper documents. Speakers will demonstrate how the structured, standardized nature of EAD can form the basis of user-friendly interfaces and finding aids that can accommodate multiple perspectives and utilize graphical and visual interfaces–while faithfully recording and presenting the context, structure, and content of the collection. Panelists will also address the challenges of unleashing the power of EAD, including normalizing XML, the lack of standard values for cross-institutional aggregation of data, and different approaches to subject terms, with a discussion of the technological and practical issues that surround them. The session relates to the SAA strategic priorities of technology and public awareness and engages elemental questions of revolutionary and evolutionary change.

My portion of the panel will focus on my ArchivesZ information visualization project. I will be discussing both the power of this type of graphical interface to archival collections as well as addressing the roadblocks to their practical implementation. My plan is to continue the work I started last Spring over the course of this Spring and Summer – and show off a new version of ArchivesZ in San Francisco (as well as online here of course!).

Here are the descriptions of Max, Elizabeth and Jodi’s planned contributions (cribbed from our proposal submission):

  • Max Evans will explore the fundamental purposes of finding aids and explore what can be done to leverage EAD’s structure to render graphical, informative, and elegant finding aids online.
  • Elizabeth Yakel will discuss usability test findings and how these were incorporated into the EAD-based Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections to allow communities to engage with collections in new ways.
  • Jodi Allison-Bunnell brings a lively interest in user-centered presentations of finding aids that emerge from her work as manager of a five-state EAD consortium.

I am so pleased and excited. So – who is planning on going to San Fransisco in August? I hope to see you there.

Image Credit: Society of American Archivists, ARCHIVES 2008: Archival R/Evolution & Identities web page.

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Digital Preservation via Emulation – Dioscuri and the Prevention of Digital Black Holes

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dioscuri.JPGAvailable Online posted about the open source emulator project Dioscuri back in late September. In the course of researching Thoughts on Digital Preservation, Validation and Community I learned a bit about the Microsoft Virtual PC software. Virtual PC permits users to run multiple operating systems on the same physical computer and can therefore facilitate access to old software that won’t run on your current operating system. That emulator approach pales in comparison with what the folks over at Dioscuri are planning and building.

On the Digital Preservation page of the Dioscuri website I found this paragraph on their goals:

To prevent a digital black hole, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), National Library of the Netherlands, and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project to research and develop a solution. Both institutions have a large amount of traditional documents and are very familiar with preservation over the long term. However, the amount of digital material (publications, archival records, etc.) is increasing with a rapid pace. To manage them is already a challenge. But as cultural heritage organisations, more has to be done to keep those documents safe for hundreds of years at least.

They are nothing if not ambitious… they go on to state:

Although many people recognise the importance of having a digital preservation strategy based on emulation, it has never been taken into practice. Of course, many emulators already exist and showed the usefulness and advantages it offer. But none of them have been designed to be digital preservation proof. For this reason the National Library and Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands started a joint project on emulation.

The aim of the emulation project is to develop a new preservation strategy based on emulation.

Dioscuri is part of Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access via NETworked Services) – run by the Planets consortium and coordinated by the British Library. The Dioscuri team has created an open source emulator that can be ported to any hardware that can run a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Individual hardware components are implemented via separate modules. These modules should make it possible to mimic many different hardware configurations without creating separate programs for every possible combination.

You can get a taste of the big thinking that is going into this work by reviewing the program overview and slide presentations from the first Emulation Expert Meeting (EEM) on digital preservation that took place on October 20th, 2006.

In the presentation given by Geoffrey Brown from Indiana University titled Virtualizing the CIC Floppy Disk Project: An Experiment in Preservation Using Emulation I found the following simple answer to the question ‘Why not just migrate?’:

  • Loss of information — e.g. word edits

  • Loss of fidelity — e.g. WordPerfect to Word isn’t very good

  • Loss of authenticity — users of migrated document need access to original to verify authenticity

  • Not always possible — closed proprietary formats

  • Not always feasible — costs may be too high

  • Emulation may necessary to enable migration

After reading through Emulation at the German National Library, presented by Tobias Steinke, I found my way to the kopal website. With their great tagline ‘Data into the future’, they state their goal is “…to develop a technological and organizational solution to ensure the long-term availability of electronic publications.” The real gem for me on that site is what they call the kopal demonstrator. This is a well thought out Flash application that explains the kopal project’s ‘procedures for archiving and accessing materials’ within the OAIS Reference Model framework. But it is more than that – if you are looking for a great way to get your (or someone else’s) head around digital archiving, software and related processes – definitely take a look. They even include a full Glossary.

I liked what I saw in Defining a preservation policy for a multimedia and software heritage collection, a pragmatic attempt from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a presentation by Grégory Miura, but felt like I was missing some of the guts by just looking at the slides. I was pleased to discover what appears to be a related paper on the same topic presented at IFLA 2006 in Seoul titled: Pushing the boundaries of traditional heritage policy: Maintaining long-term access to multimedia content by introducing emulation and contextualization instead of accepting inevitable loss . Hurrah for NOT ‘accepting inevitable loss’.

Vincent Joguin’s presentation, Emulating emulators for long-term digital objects preservation: the need for a universal machine, discussed a virtual machine project named Olonys. If I understood the slides correctly, the idea behind Olonys is to create a “portable and efficient virtual processor”. This would provide an environment in which to run programs such as emulators, but isolate the programs running within it from the disparities between the original hardware and the actual current hardware. Another benefit to this approach is that only the virtual processor need be ported to new platforms rather than each individual program or emulator.

Hilde van Wijngaarden presented an Introduction to Planets at EEM. I also found another introductory level presentation that was given by Jeffrey van der Hoeven at wePreserve in September of 2007 titled Dioscuri: emulation for digital preservation.

The wePreserve site is a gold mine for presentations on these topics. They bill themselves as “the window on the synergistic activities of DigitalPreservationEurope (DPE), Cultural, Artistic and Scientific knowledge for Preservation, Access and Retrieval (CASPAR), and Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services (PLANETS).” If you have time and curiosity on the subject of digital preservation, take a glance down their home page and click through to view some of the presentations.

On the site of The International Journal of Digital Curation there is a nice ten page paper that explains the most recent results of the Dioscuri project. Emulation for Digital Preservation in Practice: The Results was published in December 2007. I like being able to see slides from presentations (as linked to above), but without the notes or audio to go with them I am often left staring at really nice diagrams wondering what the author’s main point was. The paper is thorough and provides lots of great links to other reading, background and related projects.

There is a lot to dig into here. It is enough to make me wish I had a month (maybe a year?) to spend just following up on this topic alone. I found my struggle to interpret many of the Power Point slide decks that have no notes or audio very ironic. Here I was hunting for information about the preservation of born digital records and I kept finding that the records of the research provided didn’t give me the full picture. With no context beyond the text and images on the slides themselves, I was left to my own interpretation of their intended message. While I know that these presentations are not meant to be the official records of this research, I think that the effort obviously put into collecting and posting them makes it clear that others are as anxious as I to see this information.

The best digital preservation model in the world will only preserve what we choose to save. I know the famous claim on the web is that ‘content is king’ – but I would hazard to suggest that in the cultural heritage community ‘context is king’.

What does this have to do with Dioscuri and emulators? Just that as we solve the technical problems related to preservation and access, I believe that we will circle back around to realize that digital records need the same careful attention to appraisal, selection and preservation of context as ‘traditional’ records. I would like to believe that the huge hurdles we now face on the technical and process side of things will fade over time due to the immense efforts of dedicated and brilliant individuals. The next big hurdle is the same old hurdle – making sure the records we fight to preserve have enough context that they will mean anything to those in the future. We could end up with just as severe a ‘digital black hole’ due to poorly selected or poorly documented records as we could due to records that are trapped in a format we can no longer access. We need both sides of the coin to succeed in digital preservation.

Did I mention the part about ‘Hurray for open source emulator projects with ambitious goals for digital preservation’? Right. I just wanted to be clear about that.

Image Credit: The image included at the top of this post was taken from a screen shot of Dioscuri itself, the original version of which may be seen here.

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Will Crashed Hard Drives Ever Equal Unlabeled Cardboard Boxes?

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Photo of Crashed Hard Drive - wonderferret on FlickrHow many of us have an old hard drive hanging around? I am talking about the one you were told was unfixable. The one that has 3 bad sectors. The one they replaced and handed to you in one of those distinctive anti-static bags. You know the ones I mean – the steely grey translucent plastic ones that look like they should contain space food.

I have more than one ‘dead’ hard drive. I can’t quite bring myself to throw them out – but I have no immediate plans to try and reclaim their files.

I know that there are services and techniques for pulling data off otherwise inaccessible hard drives. You hear about it in court cases and see it on TV shows. A quick Google search on hard drive rescue turns up businesses like Disk Data Recovery

Do archivists already make it a policy to hunt not just for computers, but for discarded and broken hard drives lurking in filing cabinets and desk drawers? Compare this to a carton of documents that needed special treatment to permit access to the records they contained and yet are appraised as valuable. If the treatment required were within budgetary and time constraints – it would be performed. Mold, bugs, rusty staples, photos that are stuck together… archivists generally know where to get the answers they need to tackle these sorts of problems. I suspect that a hard drive advertised or discovered to be broken would be treated more like an empty box than a moldy box.

For now I would stack this challenge near the bottom of the list below archiving digital records that we can access easily but that run on old hardware or software, but I can imagine a time when standard hard drive rescue techniques will need to be a tool for the average archivist.

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Using WWI Draft Registration Cards for Research: NARA Records Provide Crucial Data

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NARA: World War I photograph, 1918 (ARC Identifier: 285374)

In the HealthDay article Having Lots of Kids Helps Dads Live to 100, a recent study was described that examined what increased the chances of a man living past 100.

A young, trim farmer with four or more children: According to a new study, that’s the ideal profile for American men hoping to reach 100 years of age. The research, based largely on data from World War I draft cards, suggests that keeping off excess weight in youth, farming and fathering a large number of offspring all help men live past a century.

The article mentions that this research was “spurred by the fact that a treasure trove of information about 20th-century American males has now been put online”. The study was based out of the University of Chicago’s Center on Aging. The paper, New Findings on Human Longevity Predictors, includes the following reference:

Banks, R. (2000). World War I Civilian Draft Registrations. [database on-line]. Provo, UT, Ancestry.com.

With an account on Ancestry.com, you too could examine the online database of World War I Draft Registration Cards. This Ancestry.com page notes the source of the original data as:

United States, Selective Service System. World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, 1917-1918. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration. M1509, 4,582 rolls

NARA’s page for the World War I Selective Service System Draft Registration Cards, M1509 includes similar background information to what can be found on the Ancestry.com page, but of course – no access to the actual records.

It is frustrating to a study based on archival records that is making the news, but that does not make it clear to the reader that archival records were the source for the research. As I discussed at length in my post Epidemiological Research and Archival Records: Source of Records Used for Research Fails to Make the News, I feel that it is very important to take every opportunity to help the general public understand how archival records are supporting research that impacts our understanding of the world around us. I appreciate that partnering with 3rd parties to get government records digitized is often the only option – but I want people to be clear about why those records still exist in the first place.

Photo Credit: US. National Archives, World War I Photographs, 1918. Army photographs. Battle of St. Mihiel-American Engineers returning from the front; tank going over the top; group photo of the 129th Machine gun Battalion, 35th Division before leaving for the front; views of headquarters of the 89th Division next to destroyed bridge; Company E, 314th Engineers, 89th Division, and making rolling barbed wire entanglements. NAIL Control Number: NRE-75-HAS(PHO)-65

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The MemoryArchive Affiliate Program: A Wiki Engine for Collecting Memoirs

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MemoryArchive LogoA Beautiful WWW posted A Review of MemoryArchive.org. MemoryArchive, founded by historian Marshall Poe, is a new MediaWiki based website aimed at collecting first person accounts that they term ‘memoirs’. In sharp contrast with the communal authorship approach of most wikis, MemoryArchive locks down edits of each entry after a format review.

What sorts of memoirs are they looking for? In their FAQ they say they want “pretty much anything you remember that someone else might conceivably find interesting, now or in 500 years”.

I spent some time exploring. I read a very moving memorial titled Death by Aids The Goodbye Party, 1992, by Jay Blotcher (ed note: Jay emailed me with the correct title for this memoir). I wandered through some 9/11 memories. Eventually something dawned on me. Maybe it is the fact that I am spending most of my days lately thinking deep thoughts about metadata and classification — or maybe my archives course work is to blame — whatever the reason, I realized that I wanted more information about the storytellers. Right now it appears that each memoir includes Who, What, When and Where data – to whatever degree the contributors choose to furnish such information. Categories are also available and seem to be frequently employed.

But I want to know more about the individuals who are telling the stories. I appreciate that some posts will be made more powerful through anonymity, but for those cases that an individual is willing to share additional biographic information it would be great to have an easy place for that information to be captured.

I think the most interesting aspect of the Memory Archive to the archives community is the Memory Archive Affiliate Program. The theory behind this program is to support the collection and archiving of personal histories online. It is described as being of interest to the following types of organizations:

  • historical societies (urban, state, or national)
  • institutions interested in recording their own history (a club, society, or military unit)
  • educational institutions teaching history (high school or college)
  • public history projects (oral history gathering, or document collection)

This is a powerful idea. Any time you can accumulate a critical mass of of a single type of information on the web (in this case, memoirs) you have the chance of becoming a destination. There is also the added benefit of enabling smaller organizations to launch an online memoir collection initiatives without needing to worry about the technology, costs and people-power that would usually be required.

There does needs to be an easy way for the Memory Archive Affiliates to download these born digital memoirs for offline use and preservation purposes. This could be accomplished by an ‘export’ or ‘format for printing’ button on each memoir page, or perhaps some form of bulk download for all memoirs collected for a single affiliate’s project. I will say that the default print format isn’t bad. It seems to already do some special reformatting (such as displaying URL links in their entirety). I still also would want more metadata, though perhaps the definition of attributes to be collected could be customized per project.

I am curious to see the overall quality of the memoirs a year from now. I suspect that memoirs collected is association with a topically focused program may be more compelling than the average ‘man-on-the-net’ first person narratives. That isn’t to say that there is no value in the memories of someone who feels compelled to share their story – but a collection created around a theme would have the additional power of that common thread. The affiliate program memoirs would also be more likely to come with some contextual background explaining the source and origin of the solicited accounts. I am a fan the existing thematic memory sites, such as The April 16 Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. I love that the Omeka software used to create these two example sites is open source and free. Unfortunately, I don’t think the average small historical society or public history project is likely to have the resources to build and support a site like this even with free software. I think that a program like the Memory Archive Affiliate Program (or something like it) could bridge the gap for these smaller organizations and make the creation of online memoir collection projects a reality.

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SAA2007: Content Aggregation, Shareable Metadata and Access (Session 607)

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Photo taken by Andrea Mercado: Card Catalog, Digital CatalogFocusing on the challenges of sharing metadata to support content aggregation and access, SAA2007 Session 607’s official title was The Dynamics in the Aggregate: Shareable Metadata and Next-Generation Access Systems. Bill Landis, the Head of Arrangement, Description, & Metadata Coordinator at Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives division, began the session by stressing that while it is hard to predict the future it seems obvious that there will be an increase in the aggregation of content. Google is one type of aggregator. Many institutions are using the standards of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) to both publish and to harvest data. This session considered shareable metadata and how it can support or hinder content aggregation and access. A pointer was give to the Best Practices for OAI Data Provider Implementations and Shareable Metadata joint initiative of the Digital Library Federation and the National Science Digital Library.

Introduction to Shareable Metadata and Interoperability

The first speaker, Sarah Shreeves, started the panel off with her presentation titled The Dynamics of Sharing: Introduction to Shareable Metadata and Interoperability (follow the link to view the full set of slides). Sarah is not an archivist, but she has extensive experience with metadata aggregation.

She began with the assumption that “we” (libraries/archives/museums/cultural organizations) cannot afford to think about our collections only in the context of our local community. There is no way to know where your metadata is going to end up – either grouped with other things or pulled out of your collection into single atomized items.

Why share content? It benefits our users, supports one-stop searching, brings together distributed collections and supports mashups . Sharing helps us and increases our exposure. We have to do this – we cannot assume that our users will come in through the front door. Lorcan Dempsey uses the phrase In The Flow to mean how to get your content “out” into the world where users will find it.

Keys to Shareability or Interoperability:

  • You need the technical side (Z39.50, OAI PMH, RSS …etc)
  • Organization commitment of resources (people, training, time, priority)
  • Standards.. lots and lots of standards

There are two main ways to share metadata. The first is known as federated search. In this model a user searches from a single central location. That query is sent to distributed database and the answers are sent back for the central query source to assemble the results. Z39.50 and Search/Retrieval via URL ( SRU) are examples of technology used to perform federated searches.

The second way of sharing metadata is known as the metadata aggregation model. In this scenario, metadata is pulled from many places into a single location. This is what search engines, union catalogs, OAI PMH, RSS and Atom do. It provides an opportunity to massage and normalize the data. Once users find what they are looking for – they are often redirected to the original source of the item.

A major challenge of the metadata aggregation model is “the ability to perform a search over diverse sets of metadata records and obtain meaningful results” Priscilla Caplan (in Metadata Fundamentals for All Librarians). This is hard because we are not used to what metadata looks like outside our local context. Sarah then showed lots of different examples so the audience could see how different the metadata is.

Metadata is not monolithic. It can be a view projected from a single information object. It is possible to create multiple views appropriate for different uses. Each view will affect the granularity of description, choice of vocabularies, and choice of formats.

You can customize the format of your metadata depending on the context of how the metadata will be consumed. This might sound scary, hard and overwhelming – but Sarah is confident that we can do this in smart ways. She believes that we should be able to lobby for the features we need to support different views.

Sarah’s list of attributes of ‘shareable metadata’:

  • is quality metadata
  • promotes search interoperability
  • is human understandable outside of its local context
  • must be useful outside its local context – an aggregator can actually build services based on the data in the records provided – example was geographic data that can be used to put the items on a map
  • preferably is machine processable – Subject clustering – machine created – but still needs lots of human intervention to make it work
  • provides enough contextual information – the Theodore Roosevelt collection didn’t have a Roosevelt subject term because the title of the collection was assumed to be enough. She also mentioned a map that didn’t include the fact that it was a map in it’s metadata
  • is consistent across a collection – ie, same date field, same controlled vocabulary.. this is within a single collection
  • is coherent
  • is true to its content but also its audience – different views for different perspectives
  • conforms to standards – descriptive, technical, etc

There are some safe assumptions you can make. Users often get to your data through shared records – not through your front door. Users either don’t know about your collection or won’t remember. Shared records can lead users to local environments where the full context is available. Users are often entering through deep links that may bypass the introductory information that provides the larger context for a collection.

Implementing Shareable Metadata Practices

Jenn Riley, of the Inquiring Librarian Blog, gave the 2nd presentation: Implementing Shareable Metadata Practices in a Diverse University Environment. Jenn has a grand vision of what we are trying to achieve with all these efforts to share metadata. We needs lots of different ways to discover the data.. lots of environments.

We need machine-readable descriptive metadata, definitions of properties of shareable metadata in various communities (this is the focus of this session), and protocols and systems that use them for sharing that make it automatic. We also need online delivery of content too, but that is a big challenge and out of scope for this session.

Archives and digital libraries face different challenges in implementing standard practices related to shareable metadata. Archives are unique, making the notion of a single workflow model not possible. They are not a ‘homogeneous body’. Archives need to figure out how to support the expanding view of the mission to meet the needs of online users and make more services available. They need to find resources to provide appropriate description as well as technical implementation – and need time and money and skills in order to do this. On the other hand, digital library practice assumes content is digitized– that there will be ‘stuff’ at the end. Metadata-only workflows are not common. Digital libraries usually assume item-level description, but this is often not the case, and concepts of provenance and original order are largely foreign.

Communities need to agree on key definitions to bridge the gulf between digital libraries and archives. Digital libraries need to understand that Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is not a metadata format, EAD is a markup language.

The good news is that aggregations are not out to replace archives specific discovery systems. We don’t have to give up the local robust environment, we can and need to do both.

Key shareable metadata principles for archives:

  • Context: need enough context so the user can figure out if the record is useful for them. At the same time – too much repeated info can cause issues too.
  • Content: what is the appropriate granularity for shared records from archives — this choice needs to be done per usage and per audience.

Possible strategies include the creation of collection-level records only, creation of an aggregator that understands multi-level descriptions, the design of multi-level descriptions carefully for future item/file-level view, linking to digital objects from the lowest level of description in the finding aid and description at the item level.

Jenn then discussed the experiences at Indiana University’s Digital Library Program :

  • They have a new EAD finding aid website
  • the new system is more faithful to encoding with less ‘helpful’ fixed presentation
  • mutual learning process about archival descriptive practices
  • many decisions made about when encoding should be changed when systems should be changed
  • results of this process: RE-ENGINEERING! New template, report card, better previewing capability — new template for EAD that supports new data we didn’t have before… report card built on schema-tron and encoder can preview how their encoding is really working and preview what the final product finding aid will look like
  • some EAD files link to digital objects
  • soon there will be item-level OAI records (Dublin Core and MODS) for digitized items linked from finding aids
  • central Digital Library repository that allows EAD as the *master* metadata format
  • new workflow that permits links from any level of a multi-level description in EAD

The more you put stuff online – the more you attract the sort of attention that gets you more money to put more stuff online. Jenn suggests lobbying of software vendors for a better support of EAD.. don’t settle for Dublin core. We need to discuss with our user communities about the need for an archives-specific aggregators and consider the multi-level description.

Libraries and archives are learning from one another. The item centric view can be too narrow – but it can help with re-engineering. More structure in finding aids can be a good thing. Archives can show libraries why expertise in descriptive practice is still necessary — maybe those who are running out of things to catalog on the library side can spend some time describing over on the archives side?

Archival Frameworks for Shareable Metadata

Kelcy Shepherd, Digital Interfaces Librarian at the University of Massachusetts Amherst , gave the final presentation of the session: “Archival Standards and Tools: A Framework for Shareable Metadata”.

The first framework Kelcy addressed was Describing Archives: A Content Standard (DACS). What about DACS is applicable to sharing metadata? It is compatible for use with controlled vocabularies. It can make sure that our access points will work well with access points from other metadata communities. Since DACS is output agnostic, you can create the data and then use that data to generate different views or formats. A single set of DACS based data can produce printed finding aids, EAD finding aids, MARC 21 or MODS records.

In order to produce each of these different views from a single original format, you must a crosswalk. A crosswalk maps individual elements from one data format to corresponding elements of another. Unfortunately, crosswalks come with their own challenges:

  • granularity
  • missing elements
  • single element on one side that would need to be split into multiple elements on the other side

You need expertise in both standards addressed by a each crosswalk in order to do this well.

Next Kelcy discussed Encoded Archival Description (EAD). EAD is a data structure standard, machine readable format for encoding archival descriptions. It allows archivists to share the data across institutions. If you want to re-purpose a finding aids metadata, the data needs to be in a machine readable format. EAD gives you this. You can convert an EAD encoded finding aid into a Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) document using an XSLT stylesheet and a crosswalk. The stylesheet may take a lot of work (especially for use across many finding aids), but there is a big payoff. Once the work is done a single stylesheet can be used across many many finding aids.

The Archivists’ Toolkit was cited as an example of a tool that can let you output multiple formats from a single set of data. It can produce EAD, MARC, MODS and Dublin Core records.

Tools can support efforts – but it all comes back to quality archival description. The best tool in the world will never make bad content into good content. If data is inconsistent – you have to manually go back and clean it up. I particularly liked Kelcy’s point about ensuring that your data doesn’t need the screen labels you to make sense. If you don’t consider this, when you export that data into a new format or view the data can loose it’s meaning.

Her concluding point was that if you don’t have the tech skills or support, work on your content.. use DACS… get your data in order and it will pay off later.

Questions and Answers

Question: How does this work when you are trying to share your metadata with communities that use different controlled vocabularies – thinking about the single EAD that generates MODS and MARC .etc etc…

Answer: Aggregators often they don’t use subject headings. This is nearly impossible to do in OAI – people use lots of different controlled vocabularies.. and sometimes no controlled vocabulary at all. There are experiments being done with subject clustering. Algorithms are used to cluster like things together – but it still requires human intervention to make sure the clusters make sense.

On the other hand – if you are using a standard vocabulary, there is work being done to map from one standard to another. An example of this is the OCLC Metadata switch project .

Question : What about social taggging?

Jenn : We are in no position to turn down metadata.

Sarah: DSpace has a concept of community. There is a way to let a community organically build their own controlled vocabulary as they go – new contributions are provided choices of terms that have been used before.

Bill talked about the article about Michaelson where they gave the same finding aids to 40 archivists to use LCSH for picking subject headings. The result was 0 consistency! Every single archivist picked different subject headings.

Jordan: PennTags is an example of an effort to combine social tagging with traditional classification. It shows tagging not as competition but as another way to get user generated descriptive information. It is an example of a way to ‘get into the flow’.

Sarah: Google will now use OAI PMH as a site map for indexing, but it throws away the metadata.

Jenn: Dlib – representing digital collections on wikipedia article.

Bill: PennTags is acting as an aggregation system to pull siloed information together.

Question: In some cases EAD data is flattened down for all items so that each item has all the context data and only one field is different on each? Is this an indication that the mapping have been better?

Answer: It is a problem – can be a problem…ultimately it is all about use and audience.

My Thoughts

I came away from this session with my head whirling with ideas. I was so pleased to hear people talk about concrete examples. We need more examples of challenges and real world benefits to further efforts to aggregate, publish and share archival content and it’s metadata. None of this is easy, but each project will give us new lessons and add to the growing set of best practices.

I truly believe that the sooner we tackle these thorny problems, the sooner we will start seeing the impact in improved access to archival records. The sooner we deal with it, the less we will be adding data that will have to be fixed later.

For anyone who has been following my blog – you will already know about my ArchivesZ project from last spring. One of the big struggles we had was figuring out how to make the subject term metadata ‘useful’ for aggregation and visualization. Another example of the challenges and benefits to shareable metadata is the SAA presentation about Publisher’s Bindings Online .

I had one last sentence in my notes from this session – an idea for a Facebook application that would let you feature your favorite archival image or record. This would be an amazing example of getting archival records ‘in the flow’ and showing up in surprising new places where no-one is ‘looking’ for records. Hey – maybe I should prod the Footnote people with this idea. It might be right up their alley!

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, 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.

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SAA2007: Archives and E-Commerce, Three Case Studies (Session 404)

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George Washington US DollarDiane Kaplan, of Yale University Library’s Manuscripts and Archives unit, started off Session 404 (officially titled Exploring the Headwaters of the Revenue Stream) by thanking everyone for showing up for the last session of the day. This was a one hour session that examined ways to generate new funds through e-commerce . Three different e-commerce case studies were presented, followed by a short question and answer period.

University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center

Mark Shelstad‘s presentation, “Show Me the Money: Or: How Do We Pay for This?”, detailed the approach taken by the University of Wyoming‘s American Heritage Center (AHC) to find alternate revenue streams. After completing a digitization project in the fall of 2004, the AHC had to figure out how to continue their project after their original grant money ran out.

Since they didn’t have a lot of in-house resources, they chose Zazzle.com for their effort to profit from their existing high resolution images. They can earn up to 17% from the sales through a combination of affiliate sales and profits from the sale of products featuring American Heritage Center images.

They had a lot of good reasons for choosing Zazzle.com. Zazzle.com already had an existing ‘special collections’ area, meaning that their images would have a better chance of being found by those interested in their offerings (for example – take a look at the Library of Congress Vintage Photos store). Zazzle.com also did not require an exclusive license to the images. The American Heritage Center Zazzle on-line store opened in 2005.

Currently they are making about $30 a month in royalties from 200 images. Mark pointed out that everyone needs to keep in mind that the major photo provider, Corbis, has yet to turn a profit in online photo sales. He also mentioned a website called Cogteeth.com that lets you click on any image and use those images on t-shirts, mugs.. etc.

Near the end of his talk, Mark shared an amazing idea to create a non-profit that would be a joint organization for featuring and selling products using archival images. I love it! It is easy to see that many archives are small and don’t have the infrastructure to create and run their own e-commerce websites. At the same time, general sites that let anyone set up a store to sell items with custom images on them threaten to loose the special nature of historical images in the shuffle. Even the special collections section of Zazzle lumps the American Heritage Center and the Library of Congress collections with Disney and Star Wars. I would love to see this idea grow!

Minnesota Historical Society

Kathryn Otto of the Minnesota Historical Society (MHS) spoke next. She first gave an overview of traditional services provided by MHS for a fee, such as photocopies, reader-printer copies, microfilm sales, media sales, inter-library loan fees, classes and photograph sales. MHS also earned income via standard use fees and research services.

The first e-commerce initiative at MHS was the sale of Minnesota State Death Certificates from 1904 – 2001. Made available via the Minnesota Death Certificate Index they provide the same data as Ancestry.com, but the MHS index provides a better search interface. They have had users tell them that they couldn’t find something on Ancestry.com – but that they were able to find what they needed on the MHS site.

To their existing Visual Resources Database, MHS also added a buy button for most images. Extra steps were added into the standard buy process to deal with the addition of a use fee depending on how the purchaser claims the image will ultimately be used. One approach that did not work for them was to offer expensively printed pre-selected images. The historical society sells classes online and can handle member vs non-member rates. TheVeterans Graves Registration Index is a tiny database that was created by reusing the interface used for the death certificates.

The Birth Certificate Index provides “single, non-certified copies of individual birth certificates reproduced from the originals” via the website.. while “[o]fficial, certified copies of these birth certificates are available through the Minnesota Department of Health.” The MHS site provides much faster and easier service than the Department of Health as can be seen from this page detailing how to order a non-certified copy of a birth record from the DOH – which requires printing, filling out and either faxing or snail mailing a form.

Features to keep in mind as you branch into in e-commerce:

  • Statistics – Consider the types of statistics you want. Their system just gave them info about orders – not how much they made.
  • Sales tax – Figure out how is it handled
  • Postage/Handling fees – Look at the details! The MHS Library-Archives was stuck with the Museum Store’s postage rates because the e-commerce system could not handle different fees for different types of objects.
  • Can’t afford credit card fees? Consider PayPal.
  • Advertise what you are selling on your own website.

Godfrey Memorial Library, Middletown, CT

The final panelist was Richard Black, Director of the Godfrey Memorial Library in Middletown, Connecticut. The Godfrey is a small, non-profit, genealogical research library with approximately 120,000 genealogical items. They currently have 5 full time staff and 60 volunteers.

Services they provide:

About 3 years ago they had exhausted all of their endowment money and faced the strong possibility of closing the doors. They were down to one full time librarian and a few volunteers and were dependent mostly on donations and some minor income from other sources/services.

They had only a few options open to them:

  • find more money from other sources
  • merge with another library
  • close the doors
  • sell some of the content
  • others??

The first approach to raise funds was to create a subscription website. The Godfrey acquired Heritage Quest census records and added other databases as resources allowed. Subscriptions were sold for $35 a year. The board thought they might be lucky to get 100 subscriptions.. but they actually got approximately 14,000!

Now the portal provides access to sites for which a premium has been paid (so that subscribers don’t have to pay), sites that are available free on the Internet (but made easier to find) and sites unique to Godfrey, including digitized material in the library and other material that has been made available to them. They just added 95,000 Jewish grave-sites – brought to them by a local rabbi. Another recent addition was a set of transcriptions of a grave-site made as an Eagle Scout project. They also negotiated to have their books digitized for them for free. The company performing the digitization will pay a royalty to Godfrey as the books are used.

The costs to acquire data for the portal includes $60,000 a year for access to premium sites, the cost to digitize and transcribe unique content (there are opportunities to partner and reduce costs) and the cost to acquire patrons. The efforts of the Godfrey staff and volunteers is ‘free’ – but costs time.

The Godfrey subsequently lost access to the Heritage Quest material. This was like taking the anchor store out of the corner of a mall. It forced them to diversify their revenue streams and watch for new opportunities.

Current revenue source distribution:

  • online portal 45%
  • annual appeal 10%
  • patron requests 5%
  • contract services 35% (OCLC analytical cataloging that they do)
  • misc 5%

The endowment funds have been restored and the Godfrey’s staff is now growing again.

Questions

Question: Did you meet resistance in your institutions?
Answer: No.. Minnesota said they had such success that the 2 questions they here now are A) What do we put online next? B) How long can they protect their income from the rest of the institution?

Question: (From someone from a NJ archives) Is there a way to do e-commerce with government records and not have the money ‘stolen’ from them?
Answer: Minnesota – The department of health was happy for death and birth certificates business to go away? They do worry about the future when they might try to make a marriage index – because that territory is already ‘owned’ by a group that wants to keep that income.

Question: When you charge for use fees – are there people who don’t pay them?
Answer: Minnesota: Probably – no way to really know.
Mark (American Heritage Center): Our images are public domain – they can do what they like with them.

Question: Do you brand your images?
Answer: Mark: Yes.. a logo and URL goes with the images.

My Thoughts

I was particularly impressed by how much information was conveyed in the course of the 1 hour session. My personal highlights were:

  • As I mentioned above, I want Mark’s idea for a non-profit to sell co-located products based on archival images to gain support and momentum.
  • I was pleased by the point that the MHS makes money from their Minnesota Death Certificate Index partly due to their improved and powerful search interface. The data is available elsewhere – but they made it easier to find information, so they will become the destination of choice for that information.
  • The Godfrey’s story is inspirational. In an age when we hear more and more often about archives and libraries being forced to cut back services due to funding shortfalls, it is great to hear about a small archives that pulled themselves back from the brink of disaster by brave experimentation.

These three case studies gave a great glimpse of some of the ways that archives can get on the e-commerce bandwagon. There is no magic here – just the willingness to dig in, figure out what can be done and try it. That said – there is definitely lots of room to learn from others successes and mistakes. The more real world success and failure stories archives share with the archival community about how to ‘do’ e-commerce, the easier it will be for each subsequent project to be a success.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2007, 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.

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