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October is American Archives Month

SAA American Archives MonthWith barely more than a week to go, I am finally getting my act together to mention American Archives Month. To check if there are activities somewhere near you, go to the very thorough Council of State Archivists listing of activities for American Archives Month 2007. If you love looking at posters take a look at their awsome Archives Week/Month Poster Gallery.

The Society of American Archivists came out with a great array of resources in support of the celebration this year. I especially like the How To Know If Something Is Newsworthy and Tips for Media Interviews fliers – but if you download only one document to look through – make it the American Archives Month Public Relations Kit. They get to the heart of one of my favorite sentiments – keep archival records in front of the eyes of the everyday person. I don’t mean that in a sensational way… I don’t want archives in the news for screwing up (even if they do say that any publicity is good publicity). I want every news story that could have the support of archival records to use them and acknowledge them. I want every middle school kid who lives in a town with an archives to know that it exists and to have some idea why they should care. I want every teacher who has an archives with an enthusiastic archivist in it near them to KNOW about that enthusiastic archivist and use the available resources to make their lessons richer.

American Archives Month is a great vehicle for reaching out and pulling people in the doors. It could also be used as an opportunity for archives to try new programs and judge their popularity before rolling out sessions to be held throughout the year.

Finally – another way to get a sense of what is happening locally is to keep an eye on at what other blogs are posting about American Archives Month 2007.

Blog Action Day: A Look At Earth Day as Archived Online

In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of discussing the environment, I decided to see what records the Internet had available about the history of Earth Day.

I started by simply Googling Earth Day. In a new browser window I opened the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. These were to be my two main avenues for unearthing the way that Earth Day was represented on the internet over the years.

Wikipedia’s first version of an Earth Day page was created on December 16th, 2002. This is the current Earth Day page as of the creation of this post – last updated about a week ago.

The current home page for the Earthday Network appears identical to the most recent version stored in the Wayback Machine, dated June 29, 2007 – until you notice that the featured headline on the link to http://www.earthdaynetwork.tv is different.

The site that claims to be ‘The Official Site of International Earth Day’ is EarthSite.org. The oldest version from the Wayback Machine is from December of 1996. This version shows a web visitor counter perpetually set to 1,671. Earth day ten years ago was scheduled for March 20th, 1997. If you scroll down a bit on the What’s New page you can read the 1997 State of the World Message By John McConnell (attributed as the founder of Earth Day).

The U.S. Government portal for Earth Day was first archived in the Internet Archive on April 6, 2003. The site, EarthDay.gov, hasn’t changed much in the past 4 years. The EPA has an Earth Day page of it’s own, that was first archived in early 1999. No clear way to know if that actually means that the EPA’s Earth Day page is older or if it was just found earlier by the Internet Archives ambitious web crawlers.

Envirolink.org, with the tagline “The Online Environmental Community”, was first archived back in 1996. You can see on the Wayback Machine page for Environlink.org, has a fairly full ten years worth of web page archiving.

Next I wanted to explore what the world of government records might produce on the subject. A quick stop over at Footnote.com to search for “Earth Day” didn’t yield a terribly promising list of results (no surprise there – most of their records date to before the time period we are looking for). Next I tried searching in Archival Research Catalog (ARC) over on the U.S. National Archives website. I got 15 hits – all fairly interesting looking… but none of them linked to digitized content. A search in Access to Archival Databases (AAD) system found 2 hits – one to some sort of contract between the EPA and a Fairfax Virginia company named EARTH DAY XXV from 1995 and the other a State Department telegram including this passage:

THIS NATION IS COMMITTED TO STRIVING FOR AN ENVIRONMENT THAT NOT ONLY SUSTAINS LIFE, BUT ALSO ENRICHES THE LIVES OF PEOPLE EVERYWHERE – – HARMONIZING THE WORKS OF MAN AND NATURE. THIS COMMITMENT HAS RECENTLY BEEN REINFORCED BY MY PROCLAMATION, PURSUANT TO A JOINT RESOLUTION OF THE CONGRESS, DESIGNATING MARCH 21, 1975 AS EARTH DAY, AND ASKING THAT SPECIAL ATTENTION BE GIVEN TO EDUCATIONAL EFFORTS DIRECTED TOWARD PROTECTING AND ENHANCING OUR LIFE-GIVING ENVIRONMENT.

I also thought to check the Government Printing Office’s (GPO) website for the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Currently it only permits searching back through 1991 online – but my search for “Earth Day” did bring back 50 speeches, proclamations and other writings by the various presidents.

Frustrated by the total scattering of documents without any big picture, I headed back to Google – this time to search the Google News Archive for articles including “Earth Day” published before 1990. The timeline display showed me articles mostly from TIME, the Washington Post and the New York Times – some of which claimed I would need to pay in order to read.

Back again to do one more regular Google search – this time for earth day archive. This yielded an assortment of hits – and just above the fold I found my favorite snapshot of Earth Day history. The TIME Earth Day Archive Collection is a selection of the best covers, quotes and articles about Earth Day – from February 2, 1970 to the present. This is the gold mine for getting perspective on Earth Day as it has been perceived and celebrated in the United States. The covers are brilliant! If I had started this post early enough, I would have requested permission to include some here.

With the passionate title Fighting to Save the Earth from Man, the first article in the TIME Earth Day Collection begins by quoting then President Nixon’s first State of the Union Address:

The great question of the seventies is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?

Fast forward to the recent awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore and I have to image that the answer to that question of if we were ready to make peace with nature asked so long ago was ‘Not Yet’.

Overall, this was an interesting experiment. The hunt for ‘old’ (such as it is in the fast moving world of the Internet) data about a topic online is a strange and frustrating experience. Even with the Wayback Machine, I often found myself with only part of the picture. Often the pages I tried to view were missing images or other key elements. Sometimes I found a link to something tantalizing, only to realize that the target page was not archived (or is so broken as to be of no use). The search through government records and old newspaper stories did produce some interesting results – but again seemed to fail to produce any sense of the big picture of Earth Day over the years.

The TIME Collection about Earth Day was assembled by humans and arranged nicely for examination by those interested in the subject. It is properly named a ‘collection’ (in the archival sense) because it is not the pure output of activities surrounding Earth Day, but rather a selected snapshot of related articles and images that share a common topic. That said, it is my fervent hope that websites such as these appear more and more. I suspect that the lure of attracting more readers to their websites with existing content will only encourage more content creators with a long history to join in the fun. If other do it as well as TIME has seemed to in this case, it will be a win/win situation for everyone.

Nurturing Fearlessness in the Face of Computers

Photo by Grant HutchinsonI have spent a fair amount of time thinking about what makes me different from those around me who proclaim themselves “not techie”. It isn’t that I know more about specific programs. I think it is that I am not afraid.

My friends and family always ask me to find them information online (or the best price for a new camera or the best airfare for their next trip) – and I really don’t think that I know better places to look online before I start. I think that I just don’t give up after the first two tries don’t work!

We talked about some of these ideas in the ‘Archives and Web 2.0 Technologies’ discussion at SAA2007 in Chicago. How do you get folks more comfortable with new technology? How to nurture fearlessness?

Dorthea Salo’s recent post, Training-wheels culture, got me thinking about this again.

She says:

Librarians are a timorous breed, fearful of ignorance and failure. We believe knowledge is power, which taken to an unhealthy extreme can mean that we do not do anything until we think we understand everything. We do not learn by doing, because learning by doing invariably means failure. So a librarian just won’t sit down with AACR2, Connexions, and the AUTOCAT mailing-list archive and work out how to catalogue a novel item. Nor she won’t sit down at the computer and beat software with rocks until it works.

She’ll sit passively, hands in lap, and ask for training, feeling guilty the whole time for displaying ignorance.

I know I do have more experience with some things. Yes, I have spent years designing databases and years building software, but that doesn’t mean that I know how to use a database with which I have never had contact before. The difference between myself and many others is that I am not afraid to just try. I back up often and I give myself permission to make mistakes. There is nothing I can do (short of wielding a hammer) that will break my computer like the one in the image I included above.

So how do we get more archivists and librarians (those in school and those already on the job) comfortable with trying things when they sit down in front of a computer? I have a few ideas.

Full Immersion

This approach would be akin to learning a new language by full immersion, and perhaps it might work well for the same reasons. What if a person was put in front of a computer with 3 programs they don’t know how to use, but have always wished they could get ‘trained’ on? And what if that computer had a handy button for the instructor to instantly reset the student back to a clean slate at any time? I really think a day (or even an afternoon) with the opportunity to play and know that you can’t break anything permanently could be very empowering.

There are self defense training courses that put a ‘mock attacker’ in a big padded suit and coach the student in how to attack them. Because of the big suit they can hit and kick and go full force but know that they won’t really hurt this person. At the same time they teach their body what hitting that hard would feel like. They teach their body how to react to defend itself when they need it. It may seem extreme, but I think that some people need a safe environment to try anything. Go ahead, see what happens if you try! Yeah – it won’t work sometimes.. but other times it will.

The class could start with a lesson in hunting for computer software “how to” answers online. Add some knowledgeable floaters to the room to prevent total frustration from taking its toll (but with strict instructions to avoid too much hand holding) and we might have something.

Scavenger Hunt

People know what a scavenger hunt is – so what if we harnessed that understanding and made them look for stuff online. What if they HAD to use some Web 2.0 style sites to find (and bookmark? and screen capture?) items on their list? Purple Duck by Kristen RutherfordThis sort of idea could be implemented remotely with new hunts launching on a specific date and time and with a firm deadline so people are urged to stick with it long enough to start feeling comfortable.

I think one of the saddest thing about the whole ‘Web 2.0’ label is that it scares people away. A scavenger hunt that happened to push you into the brier patch hunting for a creative commons licensed photo of a purple duck could having you using those tools before you remembered they were supposed to be threatening.

How Did You Do That?

I have noticed a pattern among those who don’t feel at home on a computer. They will often find one way to do something and then do it that way every time – forever. While I can understand the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, I also cringe when I see someone take 10 keystrokes to do something that could take 2.

Now, take those same folks and make them watch me do something an easier way – either on their computer or at least with programs they are familiar with on my own. Things I don’t even think twice about can be a revelation. “How did you do that?” is something I frequently hear when I work in front of someone who takes pains to stay within their comfort zone when they use their own computer.

There are a number of different ways this could be implemented in the real world. I imagine a group of tech savvy volunteers willing to be a mentor to someone who works nearby. They could get together once a week for even just an hour – the idea being that the mentor drives and does WHAT the mentee asks to be done, but does it using shortcuts or hunts for the BEST way to do that activity through trial and error.

Film At Eleven

Screencasts are easy to make these days – so what if a different set of mentors were willing to make top five shortcut videos on a per task basis? I can imagine one on ‘top five shortcuts when surfing the web’ and another for ‘top five shortcuts to use on your Windows desktop’. There are certainly plenty of videos that come back on YouTube when I search on windows tips, but it would be more appealing if the videos were made using examples from the point of view of ‘our’ audience – libraries and archives. People can get their heads around new ideas more easily if the context in which they are learning is familiar.

The “Break Me” Challenge

I have a running joke with some of my friends (and many of those around me who write software) that given enough time, I can find a bug in any software I use. I expect this. I know (I was a developer, remember?) that all software has bugs. I know that the only thing a software company who makes something you need has to do is make their software less buggy than the other guy.

What if more people felt a new software tool was a challenge? I must admit, I do feel that way. For me, hunting for obvious bugs is like finding the edges of the world before I start exploring. What are the limits on what I can do here? I want to lift all the rocks and see where the bugs are wiggling so that when I actually must depend on the tool to do something for me I will know where not to step.

Could we create a workshop where people are taught this way of approaching software? I am not talking about teaching people to be pessimistic, rather to make them realize that even when they find a bug it won’t be the end of the world. Trying new things when you first start out rewards you with the knowledge of what your tool can really do. What do most people who buy a new kitchen gadget do when they get home? Find something to cook that requires the gadget. There is no guarantee that it won’t end up in the bottom of your drawer a month later – but at least people are willing to experiment with (and read the instructions for) cooking tools!

Core Education

What all of this was part of an MLS student’s training? I know that there is a basic Information Technology course that is required in the MLS program at my school. I will admit that I didn’t take it (I took an Information Visualization course in the Computer Science department instead) – but I suspect that trying to break software and learn computer shortcuts wasn’t part of the training. No matter who teaches it, the syllabi for the core class always includes a sentence like ‘Become familiar with common information management tools’ in the list of their goals. I think there are a lot of assumptions about what people already know when they get to graduate school. I think we need to acknowledge that every graduate student is not equally comfortable with computers (even those young students right out of college). School is about learning – this should be the easiest place to spread these skills.

Inspiration

Andrea Mercado (of LibraryTechtonics fame) has blogged about both her Geek Out Don’t Freak Out classes and NetGuides program at Reading Public Library. The Geek Out classes are geared toward patrons who have some technology they don’t really know how to use – the digital camera with 50 settings when they only use 2.. or the PDA that they don’t actually know how to sync. The NetGuides are described on the RPL site as “students trained at the library to provide patrons with one-on-one technology answers and personalized instruction”. The topics they cover include basic computing, basic Internet, MP3 players and more (check out all the topics).

Both these examples are real world implementations for the ‘How Did You Do That?’ category above. It is so great to see examples of what can exist. I bet in some institutions there are staff members who need this support as much as their patrons.

Five Weeks to a Social Library was described as “the first free, grassroots, completely online course devoted to teaching librarians about social software and how to use it in their libraries.” I read blog posts from some of the librarians who went through this program (out of the 40 total who took it the first time around) – and they seemed to enjoy their experiences.

Learning 2.0 is an “online self-discovery program that encourages the exploration of web 2.0 tools and new technologies, specifically 23 Things“. I loved seeing that the original creators gave out prizes to their local staff at PLCMC who completed all 23 things (USB MP3 players). From the list on the right side of that Learning 2.0 page, it seems like the idea has spread to other libraries. The PLCMC folks also have created Learning 2.1 – complete with the fabulous tag line “Mashing up 21st century skills with lifelong learning”. They state that the site was created to support on-going learning beyond what was done with Learning 2.0.

Would You Volunteer? Would You Attend?

So.. lots of ideas. There are clearly a number of great programs already out there. Any folks out there want to chat about if they think my ideas would be helpful? Or doable? Or too intimidating? Or overly optimistic?

How can we build on the success of existing programs? Tell me encouraging tales of programs like NetGuides. Point me to other initiatives like Five Weeks and Learning 2.1. Is any of this making it into onto the radar of archivists?

Reflections on SAA2007 and Ten Tips for an Optimal Conference Experience

I want to start off by saying that I really enjoyed SAA 2007. I met amazing people. I went to sessions that made me think. I gave my first SAA conference presentation. I handed out dozens of cards for the unofficial SAA 2007 wiki and for this blog. I brainstormed ideas for sessions, workshops, books and articles. I have seeds for more projects than a single person could start (let alone finish) in a year.

I will be posting session summaries for a number of the sessions I attended over the course of the next week. I have also added a link to my presentation slides on the new Presentations page (note the optimistic use of plural in the page’s name).

My brain is still buzzing from the whirlwind that was SAA 2007 for me, but I have created a list of the top 10 basic conference attending tips that I (re)discovered during the conference and hope to remember for SAA 2008 (and any other conference I attend):

10: Eat more often. Eat real food. Hors d’oeuvres don’t count.

9: Going full throttle without any breaks for more than one day is impossible. At some point my brain won’t take in new information and all I want to do is sit and think about a session I went to yesterday.

8: You never know which sessions will be your favorites. It always happens that at least one session I wasn’t so sure about knocks my socks off — while another that I was so excited about drives me back out the door after 10 minutes.

7: Always bring an extra jacket.

6: Make new friends. Cultivate your inner extrovert. Be bold and introduce yourself. Never assume that everyone around you knows each other – do the kind thing and initiate introductions. This gets easier the more you practice. And don’t worry – everyone forgets names, that is part of the reason they give us those snazzy name tags and insist we wear them.

5: Bring twice as many business cards as you think you need.

4: Don’t have cards? Make them! I have used both VistaPrint and GotPrint. VistaPrint has a set of designs that they will print for free (with their logo on the back). Gotprint makes super lush, shiny cards on nice heavy stock. Both include online tools to create your card – but will also let you upload a PDF if you want to use Photoshop to do something more graphically inspired. If you ended up with either my Spellbound Blog card or the 2007 Wiki card in your stack of cards, you have a sample of what GotPrint can create.

3: Bring the big book they send you in the mail that describes all the sessions. The on site booklet only has the session titles – and often that isn’t enough information to make your choices.

2: Do the fun stuff! It is a good way to force your brain to take a break. It also gives you a chance to meet new people (see tip #6 above).

1: Be flexible. Plans change, opportunities for networking, brainstorming and being exposed to new ideas are around every corner. The choice to NOT attend a session you meant to go to almost always means it will be replace by something else – likely better than what you had planned to do anyway.

Now.. if I can just remember to look at this before I head out to SAA 2008!

Thank you again to everyone who made this conference open and welcoming. I enjoyed meeting so many fabulous new people and I hope to stay in touch with you all (and remember all your names).

BlogDay2007: Five New Blogs for Your Consideration

Blog Day 2007 I am taking a moment out of the flurry that is SAA2007 to list five blogs I enjoy to celebrate BlogDay2007:

ResearchBuzz posts about internet research. It touches on databases, search engines and all sorts of ways to find information online. I believe that reaching out to the online research community is a huge opportunity for archives. ResearchBuzz is one way I stay connected with what that world is thinking about.

Available Online is about digitization (or rather digitisation as it is spelled in the UK). It is a creation of Alastair Dunning, the Programme Manager for the JISC Digitisation Programme.

A Beautiful WWW focuses on a neat cross section of information visualization, research, web programming and data mining.

Mashable is a popular blog on Web 2.0 and social networks. This one is very high volume, but if you have been feeling out of the loop on all the latest Web 2.0 developments – this is a great blog to add to your RSS reader and skim through for items of interest.

StorageSwitched! is the blog of the CEO of StorageSwitch. I like this blog because it gives me a view into the hardware world of storing data on disk – but also ponders everything from using your empty disk drives space to pondering preservation efforts.

To see other lists of fabulous blogs, take a look at all the BlogDay2007 posts on Technorati.

I hope you enjoy discovering some new blogs today.. and now back to our regularly scheduled SAA 2007 programming!

SAA2007: Opening Plenary Session Ponders Diversity

In his introduction, Bruce Bruemmer began with a disarming “Thank you disembodied voice” – and merrily rolled along through a short, cheery and heartfelt introduction for SAA president Elizabeth W. Adkins. He saved time (and likely vocal stress) by prerecording a YouTube video enumerating Adkins’s accomplishments . He led rounds of applause for Adkins’s father, aunt, uncle and husband. Bruemmer claims her only fault is that she is too serious. That she did not perceive the inherent humor of Velveeta and Miracle Whip concerned him.

He finally found the chink in her armor when he broke down laughing at the apparently often repeated J. L. Kraft quote “What we do, we do do” – and at this she finally admitted that it was ‘a little funny’.

Elizabeth Adkins’s Plenary Speech

Adkins began her talk by leading the hall in applauding the program committee, the host committee, the sponsors, past presidents, international visitors, and council members – each in turn.

She then made an exciting announcement – American Archivist is being made available online! If you are onsite at the conference, there will be a peek at the beta version on display on Friday in the Embassy Room. Issues from 2000 forward will be available online and they are still working on the digitization of all back issues. SAA will still print the journal. Access to the digital version will be available via a link off the SAA homepage. All but the 6 most recent issues will be available freely to anyone. More work will need to be done to improve visibility through indexing services and complete the digitization of back issues.

After this, she launched into her main speech “Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action”. I will do my best to include as many points as I managed to fully  captured in my notes. If this topic interests you – I encourage you to watch for publication of the full original. Please forgive me any misquotes, omissions and oversights. I have also included a few additional details on points that were in the presentation.

Our Journey Toward Diversity – And a Call to (More) Action

Adkins first contemplated diversity of the presidents of SAA by considering how long had it had been since a corporate archivist had been SAA president. The answer was William Overman in 1957 – and Overman is the only other corporate archivist to ever be selected as president. Adkins is also one of only 16 women to have been SAA President.

What does SAA Mean by Diversity? Why do we care? Adkins reviewed the 2004 census of the profession known as A*CENSUS . With its 5,620 responses it was much more extensive than the surveys done in 1956 and 1982.

Gender Imbalance

From A First Look at A*CENSUS Results (published in August of 2004):

The archival profession has experienced a significant shift in gender in the last half century. The A*CENSUS survey indicates that the ratio of women to men is now approximately 2:1. This is almost a mirror image of the gender distribution reported in Ernst Posner’s 1956 survey of SAA members, in which 67% were men and 33% were women.

Adkins stated that the current gender imbalance is an issue for two reasons:

  • we need men’s perspective and input
  • since women are still generally paid less than men – having a gender imbalance is likely driving down salaries

Library and Museums are seeing this same gender imbalance while the gender imbalance is flipped in the IT industry.

Race and Ethnic Diversity

According to A*CENSUS 2004 only 7% of the SAA membership is non-white while the general US populate is 25% non-white (with an even greater number of non-whites in kindergarten classes today).

Why should we care?
* “It’s the right thing to do”
* Completeness of the documentary record
* It’s good business business
* Competition with other professions and career paths

Dr. Harold T. Pinkett (1914-2001) was the first African American at NARA – named an SAA fellow in 1962, editor of American Archivist 1968-1971 and council member from 1971-1972.

SAA first diversity efforts launched in 1970s

From 1936-1972, women in SAA made up only 28-33% of SAA members. The 1970s brought lots of progress for women’s representation and activity in SAA.

Work on Racial and Ethnic diversity started in 1978…more work supported 1981-1987, some efforts supported – other efforts (such as desire for a fellowship to support study) were not.

The Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable (AACR) founded in 1987, took on this name in 1994 (?). The Harold T. Pinkett Award was established in 1993 “to encourage minority students to consider careers in the archival profession and promote minority participation in SAA”.

In 1997 SAA created a Diversity Task Force and a final report was submitted in 1999. SAA Council accepted final report and moved forward in an ad hoc matter. In 2002 members of the task force were frustrated by lack of progress and passed a resolution asking for info on progress. The crux of the answer was “not a lot”.

In May 2003 the SAA council created a ‘diversity committee’… council is now actually talking about diversity and actually putting things in motion.

Focus on Students

There has a been a huge growth of Student Chapters. The concept was approved by the SAA council in 1993. There has been a growth from 3 chapters to nearly 30. Currently 20% of all members, more than 10% of attendees at this meeting, are students. Adkins hopes the students will help bringing more diversity into SAA and asked for a round of applause for the students attending the meeting.

Where are we now?

In 2005, SAA launched a new strategic planning effort and Diversity was identified one of the three highest priorities (with Technology and Public Awareness being the other 2).

What is the state of diversity today? Lots of talk – but how much actual action?

What is done?

  • position statement
  • census completed
  • monitoring progress
  • education for non-archivists who serve under represented groups
  • experimentation with the idea ofDiversity Fair

Next actions?

  • outreach on college and university campuses
  • provide other “entry points” into the archival profession
  • Archival education

The Task Force recommendations included improvement of the SAA website, providing financial aid for minorities and under represented communities, and working on SAA’s new member development.

Adkins presented an interesting idea of reaching out to kids age 10-15 such that we might influence their future career choices. She also suggested that SAA emulate the ALA model of the Spectrum Scholarship. Established in 1997, the Spectrum Scholarship program granted over 60 $5,000 scholarships this year alone. While SAA does not have the money to support a scholarship at this level – Adkins announced that a new SAA Minority Scholarship has been approved by the SAA council (this leading to the first spontaneous applause of the speech). She also made a big point of pointing to the Midwest Archives Conference’s Archie Motely Memorial Scholarship for Minority Students and saying that they should get credit as leaders in the area of minority scholarships.

“Diversity starts with a commitment to inclusion”

Addressing diversity concerns is hard work, but diversity will improve SAA in ways we can’t grasp now. She compared future progress to past efforts that now seem obvious (provision of childcare, the membership committee..etc).

Adkins concluded that that we need to build on a foundation of inclusion. A ‘welcoming respectful attitude’ will help us move forward. But we need to move forward with not just words – but with also with actions.

The hall gave her a standing ovation. Confronted with this, Adkins remarked that she had made it through so far but now she was getting all verklempt .

Final Count Down to SAA2007

The final count down to the annual conference of the Society of American Archivists, this year convening in Chicago, is well under way. Many of you might already be confirming your flights and packing your bags. I won’t be on site until Wednesday night – but thought I would try and catch as many of you as I could before you head away from your regular blog reading rhythms.

Are you attending?

Over 115 registered users (37 of them have introduced themselves) have been adding tons of content to the UnOffical Conference Wiki. If you haven’t visited recently (or at all) take a quick browse through all the great info that has been added.

If you are interested in trying your hand at posting session summaries – I say go for it! You don’t need to have a blog to do this. The wiki is open for anyone’s contributions. If you have any questions about how to post about a session on the wiki, feel free to contact me and I will do whatever I can to help.

Are you a presenter?

Take a look at the page for your session on the wiki and consider what you might add to tell attendees more about what you will talk about. Upload your handouts (and let me know if you have problems with this). Add links to related information or supporting websites, before or after your talk.

Are you in charge of a group meeting?

Consider adding detailed agendas (and thanks to all of you who already have!) to your page linked off the Group Meetings page. If you welcome those who are not members of your round table or section, add a friendly ‘everyone welcome’ note.

Watching from afar?

If you are not attending, please consider participating from wherever you are. If there is a session you would kill to have attended – then go to the Session Coverage page (or the session specific page for the session in question) and put a note next asking for someone to post a summary. This might also encourage presenters to add more of their materials to the wiki after the fact.

At the Conference

I hope to meet as many of you on-site as I can. I will be presenting as part of Session 804 Preserving Context and Original Order in a Digital World, Saturday at 1pm. I also plan to attend the Blogger Get-Together if I possibly can (once they decide when and where it will be). I will do my best to update both the Session Coverage page and my user page on the wiki with the sessions I plan to attend. If last year is any indication of how I will blog – I will take notes while offline and then post session summaries (with additional thoughts) after the fact. I discovered that I do not enjoy posting stream of consciousness style, on-the-spot posts. All my posts for the conference will be classified as SAA2007. I will also link to them from the session pages on the wiki. Finally, my posts (and everyone else’s if they are tagged SAA2007) should be available if you go to the Technorati page for SAA2007. Want to reach me? Use my contact form or post a comment here.

Preserving Virtual Worlds – TinyMUD to SecondLife

A recent press release from the Library of Congress, Digital Preservation Program Makes Awards to Preserve American Creative Works, describes the newly funded project aimed at the preservation of ‘virtual worlds’:

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting a series of archiving case studies for early video games, electronic literature and Second Life, an interactive multiplayer game. Second Life content participants include Life to the Second Power, Democracy Island and the International Spaceflight Museum. Partners: University of Maryland, Stanford University, Rochester Institute of Technology and Linden Lab.

This has gotten a fair amount of coverage from the gaming and humanities sides of the world, but I learned about it via Professor Matthew Kirschenbaum‘s blog post Just Funded: Preserving Virtual Worlds.

The How They Got Game 2 post Library of Congress announces grants for preservation of digital games gives a more in depth summary of the Preserving Virtual Worlds project goals:

The main goal of the project is to help develop generalizable mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction, and to begin to test these mechanism through the archiving of selected test cases. Key deliverables include the development of metadata schema and wrapper recommendations, and the long-term curation of archived cases.

I take this all a bit more personally than most might. I was a frequent denizen of an online virtual world known as TinyMUD (now usually referred to as TinyMUD Classic). TinyMUD was a text based, online, multi-player game that existed for seven months beginning in August of 1989. In practice it was sort of a cross between a chat room and a text based adventure. The players could build new parts of the MUD as they went – in many ways it was an early example of crowdsourcing. There was a passionate core of players who were constantly building new areas for others to explore and experience – not unlike what is currently the case in SecondLife. These types of text based games still exist – see MudMagic for listings.

Apparently August 20, 2007 will be TinyMUD’s 18th Annual Brigadoon Day. It will be celebrated by putting TinyMUD classic online for access. The page includes careful notes about finding and using a MUD Client to access TinyMUD. The existence of an ongoing MUD community of users has kept software like this alive and available almost 20 years later.

With projects like Preserving Virtual Worlds getting grants and gaining momentum it seems more plausible with each passing day that 18 years from now, parts of 2007’s SecondLife will still be available for people to experience. I am thankful to know that a copy of the TinyMUD world I helped build is still out there. I am even more thankful to know that the technology still exists to permit users to access it even if it is only once a year.

Update: 20th Anniversary of TinyMud Brigadoon day is set for Thursday, August 20, 2009