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

Sunshine Week Sunshine Week 2009 is a national initiative spearheaded by journalists to “open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) chose to mark Sunshine Week this year by announcing the release their new tool for searching EFF’s FOIA documents. Learn more about EFF’s efforts to make open government a reality in this EFF call to action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ArchivesZ Data Challenges: Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center

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The Syracuse UniversitySyracuse University Special Collections Research Center has also been so kind as to provide the XML source files for their finding aids for use in the ArchivesZ project. I loaded 572 finding aids and no errors were generated during the parsing of the XML files.

My scripts extracted 6632 unique ‘tags’ from the subjects assigned to the finding aids. As part of the data parsing and loading of data for use in the visualizations, the script divides up compound subjects into tags. For example, in the subjects we find assigned to Syracuse University finding aids we find these values (number shown is number of finding aids to which that subject is assigned):

  • Art — American — 20th century (1)
  • Art — Cartoonists (68)
  • Art — Cartoonists. (3)
  • Art — Exhibitions. (1)
  • Art — Illustrators (36)
  • Art — Illustrators. (1)
  • Art — Painters (77)
  • Art — Philosophy. (1)
  • Art — Sculpture (33)

As well as subjects, where the components are separated by commas such as these (number listed indicates total finding aids assigned that subject):

  • Art, American (33)
  • Art, American. (46)
  • Art, American, 20th century (28)
  • Art, American, 20th century. (31)
  • Art, Cuban, 20th century (1)
  • Art, Modern (1)
  • Art, French, 20th century. (1)

The goal is to capture the core ideas – to capture the overlap in subject matter among diverse collections. All of the collections with any of these subjects are about Art. With the current script, the tag Art is associated with 179 collections from Syracuse University. You can see from this tiny subset of subjects that other themes would be revealed when these subjects were decomposed more completely – and this just scratches the surface.

Out of the 6676 subjects, 5658 subjects are assigned to single collections. Out of the 6632 tags the current script extracted from those subjects, 5594 tags are assigned to single collections. Not much improvement with the current state of the script.

While currently the script does a good job with the Library of Congress double dash separation pattern, the Syracuse University data has shown me a number of other standard patterns that need to be handled which can be seen in the small sampling of art related subjects shown above. The easy one is removing periods and stripping spaces from the end of subject values. The harder change will be to implement smart separation of subjects into tags based on commas. This would need the code to only break up <subject> values while leaving <persname> and <corpname> alone. I will also need to examine <geogname> values from across various institutions to decide if it is better to break them up or leave them be.

Other than these subject issues, there are a few other script modification that I will need to make based on scenarios the data in the Syracuse finding aids have shown me:

  • Syracuse University uses an entity to populate the repository values – the current script does not handle this at all.
  • Ensure that single item collections are assigned a size of .25 linear feet
  • Linear ft must be added as another recognized abbreviation for linear feet

All these issues are being added to my master ‘to do’ list for updating the EAD parsing script. Onward to the next data set.

Want to share your institution’s EAD finding aids in XML format with the ArchivesZ project? Please drop me a line via my contact form.

Image Credit: Syracuse University image above from Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center home page.

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ArchivesZ Data Challenges: Oregon State University Archives

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OSU ArchivesThe Oregon State University Archives has generously contributed 356 of their finding aids in EAD format for use in the development of version 2 of ArchivesZ. This is my first post in a what will likely be a series of looks behind the scenes at the challenges facing a project like ArchivesZ on the data level.

Version one of ArchivesZ only used finding aids from the University of Maryland and the Library of Congress. This was definitely a case of the path of least resistance. I attend the University of Maryland and the Library of Congress has a very convenient page providing links to all their Finding Aids source XML files. A very key aspect of creating version 2 of ArchivesZ is making sure that the scripts that pull data from EAD XML files is robust enough to handle the encoding practices of a very diverse range of institutions.

Please keep in mind that OSU is likely to bear the brunt of many basic data issues that I would have unearthed with whatever data sets I tried first!

There are 3 crucial data elements on which the visualizations of ArchivesZ depend: subject, inclusive dates, and collection size. Each element presents unique challenges. The script parsing issues I am uncovering with the OSU finding aids are currently worst for collection size. In order to make pretty charts which let people compare the quantity of materials in each collection (or record group  – please forgive that I use the term ‘collection’ to mean any set of records for which a finding aid has been created), we need to be able to assign a single number to represent the size of each collection. Based on the values used in the LOC and UMD finding aids, we chose to go with linear of feet as our standard unit of measurement. So the trick is to translate whatever archivists choose to put into the <physdesc> element of their finding aid into some number of linear feet.

These are the size conversion rules we implemented for version 1 of ArchivesZ:

  • 1 microfilm reel = 1 linear foot
  • Collections represented only by a number of items will be represented as .25 linear feet
  • If size only specified in number of boxes, then 1 box = .5 linear feet
  • When the size is given in some different types of units, they are prioritized in the following order: linear feet > boxes > microfilm reels > items

This works reasonably well when the physical description values are simple – it starts to fall apart when what is entered is more complicated. Here are some examples of the physical descriptions in the OSU finding aids:

Guide to the Phi Kappa Phi-OSU Chapter Records: The display in the ‘pretty’ version of the finding aid  online shows this: 5.5 cubic feet (9 boxes, including 2 oversize boxes) (3 microfilm reels)

The version in the XML file is this:

<physdesc>
  <extent>5.5 cubic feet</extent>
  <extent>9 boxes, including 2 oversize boxes</extent>
  <extent>3 microfilm reels</extent>
</physdesc>

With the current algorithm, this finding aid would be marked as being 3 linear feet in size. At a bare minimum, I must add ‘cubic feet’ as another unit to be converted. More difficult to discern is if I should have a value of  5.5 linear feet (assuming 1 cubic foot = 1 linear foot for the purposes of these comparisons) or a value of 8.5 linear feet (5.5 + 3 linear feet for the 3 microfilm reels). There is never going to be a perfect answer here, but clearly my logic needs to be more sophisticated than it is now.

Harvey L. McAlister Collection: The display in the pretty version of this finding aid online is this: 1 cubic foot, including 26 photographs (4 boxes, including 2 oversize boxes, and 1 map folder)

The version in the XML file is this:

<physdesc>
  <extent encodinganalog="300$a">1 cubic foot, including 26 photographs</extent>
  <extent encodinganalog="300$a">4 boxes, including 2 oversize boxes, and 1 map folder</extent>
</physdesc>

With the current algorithm, this finding aid would be marked as being 1 linear foot in size. From looking at these two examples, it would seem that this would be fine and in fact – for the purposes of calculating a comparable size – only looking at the first <extent> value might be the way to go – at least for OSU finding aids.

There are some other simpler issues relating to standardization in the way that certain values are entered. For example, after ingesting 173 finding aids from OSU (the number I got through before my script flat out choked on a size designation), I ended up with five different repositories added to my REPOSITORIES table. I had expected only one. Each of these was entered as repository name — and I have included the length of each value to show how extra spaces are causing part of the problem:

  • Oregon State University                Libraries – length 36
  • Oregon State University    – length 23
  • Oregon State UniversityLibraries    – length 32
  • Oregon State University             Libraries  – length 36
  • Oregon State University Libraries    – length 33

Some of these I can handle by adding smarter trimming of trailing spaces – but in this case it is clear that typos and inconsistency are also a challenge. I checked and each of these different <corpname> values, within the <repository> element is used by at least 10 finding aids. Perhaps they have been inherited over time from a template?

I have considered creating a repository definition file that could be used when loading finding aids from one repository at a time. This would remove dependence on perfect replication of these sorts of values while still supplying the data needed to let people limit their searches by a named repository.

The last issue is the most minor. There are many /n and /t characters throughout the XML documents. These I plan to simply strip out as the script parses the XML file.

A big thank you to Elizabeth Nielsen, Senior Staff Archivist at OSU Archives. Her response to my query about OSU’s comfort with my taking apart their finding aids in public on my blog was “Bring it on – we’re tough!”.

It is fascinating to dig into new finding aids and see how the parsing script handles what it finds. I plan to test the existing script on XML from more sources to see all the things that must be fixed. Then I get to wrap my head around code that someone else wrote (another member of the original ArchivesZ team wrote the version 1 ruby script). For those of you who are not programmers, you can skim through my Book Review of Dreaming in Code to get a handle on why this can be harder than it sounds like it should be.

Want to share your institution’s EAD finding aids in XML format with the ArchivesZ project? Please drop me a line via my contact form.

Image Credit: OSU Archives image above from the OSU Archives Home Page.

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Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies

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Centropa. org features video photo montages that combine Jewish family photographs with oral history. I found my way to Centropa from the Time.com article Old Nazi News Makes Headlines in Germany which includes Kristallnacht in Words and Photographs from Centropa, but Centropa’s mission reaches beyond recalling the Holocaust. Centropa bills itself as “an interactive database of Jewish memory”.

The first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, we are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before.

Their fleet of 140 individuals conducted extensive oral interviews and digitized thousands of old family photos. They are quite intent on clarifying that they do not create videos during their sessions with their interviewees. Instead, they record audio of their multi-hour sessions, transcribe these sessions and combine them with the digitized family photos to create their movies.

The juicy center of their website is found in the Centropa Movies which are alternately billed as a “library of rescued memories” and a “digital bridge back to a world destroyed”.  Their movies are also available via iTunes and on the CentropaOffice YouTube Channel. The movie I have included below tells the story of Judit Kinszki and focuses on her father Imre Kinszki, a budding photographer from Budapest, Hungary. From this movie’s Centropa Movie page you can also navigate to Judit Kinszki’s biography , the full family photo album and a study guide for this movie.

The amount of detail provided with each posted interview is really incredible. Biographies, detailed notes on each photo, the study guide, a family tree and a currently grayed out but promising link to “Discuss Movie”. This site has clearly given great thought to how to support teachers and has followed that vision through in the form of tons of supporting materials. Centropa has chosen the path of quality over quantity with the 17 movies currently posted.

Upon further reflection, I realize now that the movies are an outgrowth of the database of photographs and biographies. The detail was not added to support the videos – but rather the videos are the next step of evolution beyond the photos and interview transcripts.

In addition to the movies they offer a Recipe Archive, downloadable eBook versions of some of their interviews as well as Centropa Student, aimed at high schools in Europe, North America, and Israel. For those of you working on your own oral history projects, there is the Centropa Oral History Tool Kit, available in 5 languages. The Centropa Glossaries are less glossary and more a detailed list of people, social groups, events and terms that can be searched by country, type or keyword. Finally, don’t miss the ‘Narrated Stories and Introductions’ featured on the right sidebar on the Centropa Movies page, such as Maps, Central Europe and History or the Introduction to Centropa for US Students.

Reading Centropa’s claim that they are the first to combine the use of family photos and oral histories made me recall the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Project Jukebox. This project launched back in 1988 and aims to ” integrate oral history recordings with associated photographs, maps, and text.” The original was written using Hypercard!

They have a map showing all the communities in Alaska currently included as part of the project. A good example of an individual photo with accompanying narration is Harry Cook in his Garden from the Kiana Village History Project. No – it isn’t as elegantly assembled as the Centropa Movies, but the intention is much the same. They use old photos as a catalyst for helping individuals being interviewed and then combine the audio and images to improve end users’ understanding of the context of individual photos.

I have signed up with Centropa to be notified when they launch the promised ‘Add Your Family Photos’ feature. Until then I will keep scanning my own family’s photos, such as the one below featuring my grandfather (back row on the right), and working my way through all the Centropa Movies and their supporting materials.

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German Federal Archives, Crowdsourcing & the Wikimedia Commons

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Wikimedia Commons: Children with Ice Cream 1949, Berlin (Commons:Bundesarchiv)

I spotted the New York Times article  Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain Vivid New Lives via Dan Cohen’s Twitter Feed. The article is a nice treatment of the difference between the Library of Congress‘s 50 photo a week contributions to the Flickr Commons and the German Federal Archives‘ contribution of 100,000 images to the Wikimedia Commons (described as ” the virtual archive for material used in Wikipedia articles”).

I took a look at the details of this project – starting with the homepage of the Commons: Bundesarchiv on the Wikimedia Commons. This passage explains one of the goals of the Budesarchiv Gallery:

Very old photographs have become public domain, and events and persons of today can be photographed by Wikipedians with their digital cameras. But for the time between there is a huge gap in Wikipedia articles. The donation of Federal Archive is important to close that gap, and it is to hope that it can serve as a model to other institutions in Germany or elsewhere.

Also, each individual photo includes this disclaimer:

For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Factual corrections and alternative descriptions are encouraged separately from the original description.

There is a special category to call out instances of these types of descriptions – BArch images with biased descriptions. In my exploration, I discovered only a very few with these original image captions translated to English. One example is the photo of a single room home for a family of eleven.

In contrast to the Library of Congress addition of 50 photos a week, the German Federal Archive plans to add “a few thousand images a month”. The Commons:Bundesarchiv To Do list is also interesting reading. The To Do page includes tasks both in German and English (though the wiki discussion page is all in German). I love having the opportunity to read about issues confronting those working on this sort of project. For example – there is a discussion about how to determine if an image should remain Uncategorized. What if only 1 person out of three is tagged? Does it still ‘deserve’ to remain marked as ‘uncategorized’?

New categories created for use in this project need to use a special template so that they show up properly within the sub-categories of the Category:Images  from the German Federal Archive page. For example – the page which sorts images by country has 64 sub-categories at the time of this post. A new country added using this template approach would immediately show up on the  images by country sub-category page.

I will say that the learning curve for classifying images within the Wikimedia Commons in general, and the Budesarchiv project in specific, is much higher than tagging images in the Flickr Commons. There is a handy CommonSense tool (available via the ‘find categories’ tab on any image) that will suggest categories based on keywords, but even that is a bit overwhelming for a beginner.

As an example, let’s look at the image I chose for this post of two boys finishing their ice cream in 1949. Here are the categories currently assigned:

Let’s take a look at what the wiki text looks like to set these categories. First there is the special template for the project which specifies the year and location.  I believe that these are attributes uploaded with the original photograph. This gives us the first two categories in our list (emphasis added mine):

{{BArch-License|
|signature=Bild 183 1984-0202-506
|batch=Bild 183
|year=1949
|month=
|location=Berlin
|PD=
}}

Then we get to the standard Wikimedia Commons categories. These are the categories most akin to tags in Flickr. These are the categories which will promote discovery of these images alongside images from other sources from across the Wikimedia Commons:

[[Category:History of Germany]]
[[Category:Ice cream]]
[[Category:Black and white photographs of children]]
[[Category:Black and white photographs of Germany]]
[[Category:Standing males]]
[[Category:Photographs by Brenner]]

These categories were clearly hand added by someone, since the original caption reads (by my rough translation) At the beach: “Is it already gone?”. I suppose I could go in and add [[Category:Beaches]], but I am honestly not sure if there is enough beach in the photo to warrant such a classification.

I am very curious to see comparison stats of the assignment of categories/tags to images in both the Flickr & Wikimedia Commons a year from now. How will we measure success? How will we grade the accuracy of metadata assigned by the public? Which images will get more public views and usage – those added to the Flickr Commons or those added to the Wikimedia Commons?

For now, I am happy to set aside all these thorny questions. I am just so pleased to see a new and ambitious experiment in crowdsourcing image metadata.

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SAA2008: Chinese Hammered Dulcimer + Tango = Archivists as Creative Collaborators

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Library of Virginia: St. Peters Service Club dance, Richmond HotelThe official title of this session was Getting to the Heart of Performance: Archivists as Creative Collaborators. It was a lovely change of pace. Upon entering this session, we discovered someone tuning a Chinese hammered dulcimer in the middle of a social dance floor. Our hosts were Scott Schwartz of the Sousa Archives and Center for American Music, University of Illinios, Urbana-Champaign and Andrew M. Wentink of Middlebury College Special Collections & Archives. The goals of the session? To teach us about Asian American Jazz fusion and Tango.

Asian American Jazz Fusion

Dr. Anthony Brown, of Anthony Brown’s Asian American Orchestra, explained why there was a Chinese hammered dulcimer sitting in the middle of the room. Brown was going to introduce us to Asian and American Jazz fusion. The curator of the Smithsonian’s Duke Ellington Collection from 1992-1996, he discovered materials related to Ellington’s Far East Suite, originally composed to honor the people who welcomed Ellington during his state department tour (cut short by Kennedy’s assasination). Brown was able to trace Ellington’s itinerary through business records and then figure out the instruments that inspired the original in the Asian American Jazz Orchestra’s recording of Far East Suite. His next CD project was Monk’s Moods. The Asian American Jazz Orchestra is now celebrating its 10th anniversary with the release of a CD titled Ten.

Yangqin Zhao plays the Chinese hammered dulcimer and is the formost performer on the instrument in the western hemisphere. The dulcimer travelled via the silk road from persia. The silk road was the original information highway. It was the way east and west were connected in the ancient eras.

Then a recording of Monk’s Moods on piano was played. Then Zhao performed the same piece on the Chinese hammered dulcimer. To achieve this, Brown and Zhao had to work together to translate the original arrangement. Excerpt from Gershwin’s rapsody in blue – recomposition – reorchestrated for his orchestra. A piece of music or a dance chart cannot come to life until you breath life into it. Enabling access to performing arts is different.

The second piece that Zhao played was Andantino from Rhapsody in Blue. Samples of both Andantino and Monk’s Moods are available on the Ten CD page. Zhao then thanked Anthony for teaching her Jazz.

Tango

The dance portion of the session was brought to us by Richard Powers of Stanford University Dance Division and his dance partner Joan Walden. Powers founded the Flying Cloud Academy of Vintage Dance. He has a design and creative process degree from Stanford where he is an expert in 19th and early 20th century social dance. Stanford has an extensive dance manuals collections and Powers is the director of Stanford’s 70 member vintage dance ensemble.

Stanford Dance department wanted Richard to make dance more visible on campus to help make sure that it didn’t get cut (partially or completely). Outreach is important – strengthen funding or let potential donors know about you. He recommends that you can bring back dance manuals from your archive. With movies like Mad Hot Ballroom and Shall We Dance? and TV shows like Dancing With The Stars, the American public is predisposed right now to be interested in dancing. Most of the dances in dance manuals were meant for teaching regular people to dance so they could dance with their friends. They were part of a self improvement movement.

Think of unique way to encourage others to use archival records. Powers encourages everyone to NOT hand it off to others. Being a non-dancer gives you a better chance for colloboration. The more we know, the harder it is to get into a true collaboration. But if it is new for you you are more open minded and more open to true collaboration.

There are other resources beyond dance manuals: dance magazines, etiquette books, anti-dance manuals (which sometimes describe the illicit dances that the proper dance manuals won’t mention), novels that give background, journals/diaries/letters, iconography – lithographs, photos, drawings, etchings, sculptures .. to help get the visual idea.. costuming. Dance cards and ball programs give lots of information – when, who.. what music.. maybe where. This also gives you a chance to see which dances were popular (vs the manuals which are promoting dances). Motion pictures from the times. So – how can we weave all of this together?

For more information about how to reconstruct dances, read Powers’ Guidelines for Dance Research and Reconstruction.

We then got a crash course in Tango history. I took notes as fast as I could, but I know I missed a lot along the way. Here are the bits I managed to get down – but don’t trust me to be an authority:

  • 100 years ago in Buenes Ares or Paris – you could find the argentinian tango. 1908 – just arrived in paris.. in the outskirts from Buenes Ares. But that version would seem simple. And then they danced!
  • 1st Myth of the Tango: It was born in the brothels. His informed opinion is that it was created by the poor, but that doesn’t mean they were pimps & prostitutes. Most tango scholars today believe it was created by the honest poor in the bario.
  • 2nd Myth of the Tango: The Tango was imported to Paris (1908-1912) and tamed by the French who found it too passionate and make it more appropriate for the ballroom. Lots of documentation from many sources that prove that the French ADDED more passion.. and that the dance was carried to Paris by young aristocrats.
  • Tango was presented in response to the dance called the Apache – exchanged influence from 1912-1914 in Paris.
  • A Buenes Arnes dance manual from 1914 (dated by the illustrations) called El Tango Argentino includes detailed illustrations and foot diagrams. Going back to the source shows us the meaning behind the names and rules about steps. Most drama and stalking was added 15 years later.
  • The true roots of Tango are unknown.
  • The main trunk of Tango is the version known in Paris 100 years ago.. social Tango today is still the same. Three branches of
  • Tango are: 1) stage performance (more dramatic), 2) ballroom competition and 3) Beunes Ares – every 10 years or so it changes dramatically.

Then they got everyone up and out on the dance floor. We went from learning history and thinking about how to one might decipher dance manuals to actually learning to Tango!

My Thoughts

If you are wondering why I am posting this over four months after the conference – you can blame Beaver Archivist’s post about Dancing Archivists. It immediately made me recall the largest gathering of dancing archivists I had personally witnessed. The session itself was really great. It was so far from people sitting in silent rows staring at powerpoint slides (not that there is anything wrong with that) that you might have thought you had wandered into the wrong conference.

It was the takeaway that was especially appealing to me. I really like the idea of finding new ways to bring performance based archives back to life – of finding new ways to reach out to people and make the records sing and dance again. Hearing music reinterpreted and reinvented is of course fundamentally different from seeing sheet music in a glass case. What if every archives that had performance art related records found a way to have two live, participatory events each year? I can only imagine the new audience who might be drawn in to learn about what is hidden in the archives — they might just come back because it is fun. My fingers are crossed that I can get my 2nd Tango lesson in Austin, TX in August 2009.

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2008, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

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Library of Congress Inauguration 2009 Audio and Video Project

President Taft and his wife lead the inaugural parade, 1909 (Library of Congress: Prints and Photographs Division)

Amazing how much can change in 100 years. In March of 1909, the stereograph above shows African Americans driving the carriage that carried President and Mrs. Taft from the Capitol to lead the inauguration parade to the White House. On January 20th of 2009, Barack Obama will be the guest of honor. The American Folklife Center‘s Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project aims to collect recordings, transcriptions and ephemera of speeches addressing the significance of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first African American president.

It is expected that such sermons and orations will be delivered at churches, synagogues, mosques and other places of worship, as well as before humanist congregations and other secular gatherings. The American Folklife Center is seeking as wide a representation of orations as possible.

The Inauguration 2009 project is modeled after prior Library of Congress collection projects. Two great examples of these earlier projects are:

If you want to organize a local recording, here are the basics:

  • Recording must be made between Friday, January 16th and Sunday, January 25th, 2009 and postmarked by February 27, 2009.
  • The project website provides the required Participant Release Form for speakers, photographers and those making the recordings.
  • The project is accepting audio recordings, video recordings, and written texts of sermons (see their detailed specifications page for information about accepted formats). Also accepted will be accompanying ephemera such as photographs and printed programs.
  • If you are sending materials to the Library of Congress, they encourage you to use FedEx, UPS, or DHL because of the danger of damage due to security screening done to USPS packages.

If you want to get a taste of  other recordings held by the Library of Congress, you can spend some time browsing the fantastic list of Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture Containing Sermons and Orations provided on the project site.

So spread the word. Honor the Library of Congress’s goals by helping this collection include the perspectives of as many communities as possible. Your local religious or secular leader could have their point of view preserved as part of a snapshot of our country’s response to the Inauguration of 2009. While they hope for audio and video recordings, they are also accepting text transcriptions – so this doesn’t have to be a high tech endeavor. That said, perhaps this is the inspiration you have been waiting for to learn how to make an audio or video recording!

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SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities

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

Title: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online

Abstract: As more archival materials move online, archivists must become adept at participating in and managing online communities. This session will discuss real world experiences of this involvement, including putting images into the Flickr Commons and links to archival materials in Wikipedia, as well as guidelines on cultural norms within online communities. We will also discuss choosing between building new communities from scratch vs joining a broader, existing community (such as the Flickr Commons).

I will be serving as session chair and moderator for our group of fabulous panelists (finances and travel plans permitting):

The intention is for this session to begin with very brief presentations showing off the current projects at our panelists’ institutions and follow that up with lots of time for discussion and answering of questions.

We see our target audience as archivists who want to hear about real world experiences of working within existing online communities (such as Wikipedia or Flickr) and building new communities dedicated to cultural heritage materials. The session will target individuals with less experience with Web 2.0 and social media implementations, but the lessons learned should also be of interest to those already in the implementation stages of their own projects.

I will put out a call for questions as we get closer to the conference so that our group can get an idea of what people are interested in learning about specifically, so start making notes now. Hope to see you in Austin!

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Google Tackles Magazine Archives

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

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

Science and technology:

Lifestyle and city themed:

African American:

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

Health, nutrition and organic:

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

Sports and the outdoors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Susa 2.0: Max Evans’ Finding Aid Prototype

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

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

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

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

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

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