While I was at SAA last week, David Dwiggins and I discussed posting to this blog, and I’m happy to submit some thoughts as a guest blogger. Due to spotty internet access in DC, I saved my posting for the return to Boston. For the sake of organization (and just to confuse everyone, really), I’m going to backdate some of these posts so that they fall with the rest of David’s SAA posts.

A few words about me: I’m a GSLIS student, archives concentrator, and I started the program last fall. While I had some archives experience before coming to Simmons, I have gained a lot from both the internships and from the coursework, and I am really excited by the idea of joining the profession soon. I currently work part-time in the textual processing unit for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and I am the president of the Simmons student chapter of SAA (SCOSAA).

Because SCOSAA was selected for a graduate student poster presentation at the conference, I spent some time organizing the content and gathering photos of students and faculty for the display. The poster was large (28 x 44), and because it needed to be printed on a plotter, presented some difficulties. I definitely had an adventure during my grand tours of Boston and DC Kinkos stores– but it all worked out. I’ll post the finished product here, as well as in the GSLIS lounge if possible.

Our presentation slot was on Thursday evening, and many people stopped by to comment and ask questions about Simmons and the student group, including several prospective students. During that same time period, recent Simmons graduate Krista Ferrante presented her own poster session on Digital Object Identifiers, which was extremely interesting. She had quite a crowd, and Richard Pearce Moses (SAA President) even stopped by to talk with her!

Moldy Book

Originally uploaded by D-.

This session featured Ann Wakefield of the New Orleans Notarial Archives, Lee Hampton of the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, and Hank Holmes of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. The trio described their experiences dealing with the aftermath of last year’s devastating Hurricanes (especially Katrina).

Wakefield described difficulties returning to her facility (they had to negotiate a “hold harmless” agreement with the building’s owner before he would allow them to return.) When they were able to assess the state of facilities, they discovered extensive damage and many wet records. She noted the problems caused by water even on records that had been professionally freeze dried. The biggest problem was water soluble inks, which were commonly used on the legal documents held by the archive. In some cases, signatures have been entirely washed away. (Luckily, the state held backup microfilm copies of the documents.)

Hank Holmes described his trips to southern Misssissippi to salvage collections at small facilities located around the state. Challenges included being unable to access buildings because of damage, lack of supplies, electricity, running water, and workspace, and extensive damage and mold growth in many facilities. (He took the inset photo of a record book covered with mold.) They were able to make use of donated freezer space from a grocery company to freeze wet materials in Jackson, and later got a grant for a freezer truck which allowed them to travel around the state loading wet records. He noted another challenge in some areas was the lack of street signs – they had been swept away by the storm surge.

Hampton’s facilities fared relatively well. There was some water seepage in the main building, and an offsite storage facility flooded, but not to the level where records were stored. He also noted that Tulane was able to quickly contract with a company to provide generators and emergency air conditioning, which likely helped saved collections from mold growth. He noted the problems faced because Archivists were not considered official “first responders,” and were thus unable to get back into the city to assess the state of collections. To help preserve cultural heritage in the future, he proposed working on this for the future.

Original Aladdin Lunchbox Art

Originally uploaded by D-.

As part of the SAA 2006 reception at the National Museum of American History, the museum’s archives showed off some of its treasures. One of the coolest: these original paintings of the art destined to go on school lunchboxes manufactured by Aladdin Industries. (Note the Beatles design in the middle.) The museum acquired 50 cubic feed of records from the corporation in 2003 after it closed down its Nashville headquarters.

I missed the first few minutes or so of the presentation, but I got enough out of the rest to more than make up for it. The session discussed some of the projects undertaken by the CHNM such as the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, the 9/11 Digital Archive, Firefox Scholar and the Syllabus Finder.

They pointed out the new opportunities for historical research presented as large digital collections become available. For example, Dan talked about how he had extracted all items in the center’s September 11 digital repository that mentioned 9 AM, then geocoded them and plotted them using Google Maps. This allows viewers to pan around Lower Manhattan and click on pushpins to see and hear the experiences of people just after the planes crashed into the twin towers.

As another example, he discussed taking mentions of CNN, Fox News, the radio, and prayer and plotting them on a map of the United States using Google Earth. And of using the massive collection of syllabi gathered through the center’s syllabus finder to study which books are being used in history courses in the US. (And noted that if teachers are consistently assigning outside reading in, say, African-American history, this may be an indication that textbook authors are not covering the topic adequately in core texts.)

Dan lamented the fact that the APIs that enable this type of novel research are currently being offered mostly by private companies, and he called on librarians and archivists to learn from the example and open up their digital collections for this type of quantitative research.

Dan has a blog where he commonly discusses these topics and also promised to post a primer on creating Google Earth KML files from archival datasets. Cool stuff!

I also once again took a ton of notes at this session, which you can find after the jump. They’re a great read!

SAA 2006: Possibilities and Problems of Digital History and Digital Collections – An Impressionistic Transcript.

(Note that I came in a bit late, so these notes don’t start at the beginning of the session. -DD)

Roy:

Who built America CD – scandal over gay cowboys! (Apple refused to distribute it unless material on homosexuality was removed, but eventually backed down.)

Biggest censorship issues now take place outside the united states.(compare Google search on English versus Chinese Google for Tiananmen square.)

Another concern stems more from consumption than production. Can amateurs compete with corporations for attention on the web. Google for “History” brings you to history channel first.

Issues related to this are not just about free beer. The other freedoms that Stahlman has outlined. Eventually we will want more than just read only access to historical content. Some things, like our syllabus finder, rely on our ability to access Google’s API. We need API’s for digital humanities content, not to rely on corporations. Significantly, academics have generally lagged behind others in embracing open access, populist enterprises, etc. Tended to view things like Wikipedia with disdain. Nor have humanities scholars shown much interest in making scholarship freely available.

Historians have no unique vision of the future – they have enough trouble with the past. But we do need to take action to build open sources – should be what academic and popular historians are doing. Join with archivists, librarians, others to promote information openness, access etc.

DAN COHEN:

We are thinking about what we need to do in the present to provide future historians with what they will need to document our history. We have to be considerably more proactive in the digital era. A growing part of our lives are lived online in a digital form. Opportunities to document human experience we have potential to capture. But digital is fragile – we have examples in book of info that has gone away. We need to think now about how we will archive that stuff.

I’m cavalierly using the word archives. To avoid rotten tomatoes from the audience, I’ll say that we’re collecting. But I think our collections have some archival aspects.

Why collect history online? Just think about Sept. 11. Think about what happened. 100,000s of people who wrote email, who posted something to their blog, who blackberried to each other. There are tremendous resources here that historians will want in 50/100 years. Not just paper diaries, which are declining.

But websites change, people move on. The NYT online changed minute by minute. What should historians look at? If “Dewey Defeats Truman” had been online, they would have changed it in a few seconds and we might never have seen it.

Along with LOC, Pew, Internet Archive, etc. we were able to save tons of content. See http://911da.org

A lot of material on the site was not born digital – for example, things people posted on lamp posts that were then scanned and then uploaded. But more and more stuff is going digital – even things like Skype. One of the advantages of digital media is capacity. Prices for hard drives coming down extremely rapidly – will get better and better. We have the opportunity and possibility of saving quite a bit of material. I think the common view of NARA guide to archival science – number one thing is to decide what you will throw out. At top of hierarchy is the Declaration of Independence, and at bottom is a Post-It. We have a friend who discovered a major historical find in a book of WWII rumors – the Wikipedia of the day. With the capacity we can save a lot more.

Herodotus, first western historian, covered it all, talked to both Greeks and Persians. (quote) “make mention of both alike” We don’t know what’s going to be important to who when – to say which part of the web will be more important to the future.

This is not just an ethical decision, it’s a practical one, and I think we can do it. One quick example – when I look back at our 9/11 site, we had people who came there to study teen slang, because we have a huge collection of writings from teens. I couldn’t have anticipated that in advance.

Project began with the Echo project, funded by the Sloan foundation. Gathering recollections in digital files on the history of science technology and industry. http://echo.gmu.edu. Working on this about 5 years ago – about a year into it when 9/11 happened. After debating propriety of collecting 9/11 materials, we launched the archive based on some of the technologies developed for ECHO. This exceeded our expectations – we ended up collecting 150,000 digital objects. Includes everything – digital audio, blackberry communications, etc. In 2003, LoC took collection as first major digital accession and it is now a test case on preserving digital files.

We also have a dark archive of materials that won’t be released for 25 or 50 years. But the site still includes photos from around country and around world. Includes Photoshop art and other digital artwork that people did. We have scanned images that have been sent to us. More than 50,000 email addresses. We’re going to release a researchers interface in a few weeks that allows you to get deeply into the collection and study it as a scholar.

In coming years, these large, openly available digital collections will be common and usable in new ways: they have manipulability – the ability to manipulate these collections. An initial example – taking photos and stories that had 9 AM in a text string, found their locations, and mapped them onto a Google map. What was going on a few minutes after what happened. Allows you to pop up photos and text on map showing what happened at that time. This is the kind of opportunity of mixing things together that I’m talking about. http://911da.org/maps/ground_zero.php

Our next thinking about the needs of digital scholarship – what to scholars want – we realized we should have had better geolocation built into the system instead of having to extract that.

Similarly:

Hurricane digital memory bank
http://hurricanearchive.org/map_browse.php

If we had just asked to send stories without taking into account where they were, future scholars have fewer hooks to grab onto. So we asked people to pinpoint where they were before they contributed anything. One of the interesting things is that you can now automatically get latitude and longitude from addresses. So then we can have them upload multiple files about that location. So you can build up a collection this way.

One of the things I did for this talk – wanted to push boundaries. So I did some extractions onto Google earth of 9/11 collection. What I’ve done here is looked for stories – 4 slices of our collection. First was “people who were watching CNN, people watching Fox news (which had just started), people who prayed, and people who listened to the radio. So what would historian do? For example, people who were watching CNN – how did they react, what were they doing, where were they? I will make KML files available on Blog and write up how to do it.

Can also combine maps with also viewing digital files. So, for example, can see what artwork was like around Washington vs. New York. Meshing together a variety of sources. Can see a scholar in the future who has all these data resources and can move seamlessly between them.

Not just map based analysis. What can happen with open text archives?

For example, syllabus finder. allows you to aggregate sources scattered across the web. I did study where I downloaded 800 intro us history survey course syllabi and looked for what textbooks they assigned, grading system, other books, etc. using text analysis techniques. Because these resources are available, you can study the teaching of American history in colleges. Things I discovered, for example, heavy reliance on multiple choice. Looked at lots of additional reading on African American experience – perhaps means people feel textbooks don’t cover this enough. Making things available to be aggregated like this so they can be data mined is really critical and opens up new avenues.

By nature, close reading of original source texts is an anecdotal method. There will be things in the future where you will have to do a wide variety of sources. For example, imagine historian studying Clinton White House who has to deal with 40 million e-mails. Compare that to the letter output of the Clinton White House. At 1 minute per e-mail, it would take 70 years to read all the messages. (assuming no coffee breaks.)

Even for someone like me who does Victorian history, I think there are opportunities to be less anecdotal. For example, putting together a database of Victorian letters from scientists and looking at text patterns. Sure I’ve looked at hundreds of them, but are they really representative of hundreds of thousands of scientists?

So what does this mean for you? As Roy suggested, no longer sufficient for archives to be independent, gated silos. If you want to be fully used, you’ll need to open up and provide ways for researchers to have different entrees into your collection.

Roy talked about APIs. (Application Programming Interfaces.) Come from IBM in 60s to allow other programmers access to some but not all of technology. I think what’s sad now is that a lot of the APIs we survey are commercial. There’s a reason for that – it’s a free service. Google has a few billion left over to fund this kind of thing. But for a small archive to do this, to commit resources to allow people to bypass their website and get at data, that’s a tall order.

But standards like RSS and other simple XML standards may help. Providing search results in XML in ways that can be grabbed and mapped. We’ll think of other ways. How will you make your collections available so that they can be used in new ways?

Finally, I think resources that are free to use are more valuable than those that are gated, even if they are limited. You may sneer at Wikipedia – Stephen Colbert did a good job of that this week. But it’s valuable. Even if it’s run by cranks — we’ve actually downloaded the whole text to our hard drive and used it for research. For example, even if it’s wrong, I can use it to pull out relevant words on, say, evolution, and use them to analyze syllabi. That’s why the Googles and Yahoos are interested in supporting things like Wikipedia.

Of course I’d rather have perfect and open. And that’s where you guys come in. Your mission is to find ways to expose your data and your materials – to not gate them and put them out for the public to use.

Q: Stumbling block is rights issues… How do you deal with that? Copyrights on things people send in to you, etc?

Dan: I think you can include it in your export of, say, Dublin Core metadata, rights info. You can include that as part of the data. People can steal things anyway.

Roy: There’s no good answer to that question. This answer isn’t one the George Mason counsel would sanction, but universities tend to worry too much about that stuff. What we’re doing is the essence of what fair use is for – letting scholars do their work. I actually think that a lot of the cases they’re worried about we would win because of fair use. The number one thing that protects what we do is the fact that we can take stuff down if people complain. Compare that to a print publisher where you would have to physically recall books. And I do believe what we’re doing falls under the canons of fair use.

Q: When will historical methodology catch up with the potential of these types of research techniques? It seems like historical methodology has led to projects being scaled down to what will fit in one person’s head. Does this open up bigger opportunities to collaborate among historians and get at bigger issues?

Dan: Yes – we have a large staff now, and we think a lot about collaboration.

We are going to release free software in September – “Scholar for Firefox” like Endnote, operates right within browser. Citation manger. Allows distributed scholarship. I work on Victorian politics. Part of this software allows tagging and annotation of documents, which helps share content between researchers working on similar topics. Hoping to get additional funding from IMLS to build an exchange server to facilitate this type of transfer.

Roy: Another angle is one of scale. For example, we suddenly have databases like JSTOR and Proquest Historical Newspapers. But yet we’re still using the same tools we used to use – basically “reading around” like we used to do in school. There was a brief rise and fall of quantitative social history – but will it make a sort of comeback because people will be able to do this sort of thing. It’s no longer just census data.

One of the things we’re trying to work on is getting the tools to catch up so that non-programmers can do these things.

One of the people working at the center did an illegal hack to get the data he needed from the French national archives. This shouldn’t happen – doctoral students shouldn’t have to hack to get the info they need for their research. So we don’t necessarily have the tools available to do this yet.

Q: Sept. 11 info – you correctly described it as a collection – something that was assembled. You’re describing a universe in which all info is created equal. How does archival appraisal fit into this? How does what you’re talking about affect the role of the archivist?

Dan: I think the example of the teen slang researchers… On the first anniversary, we had 13,000 people write stories on our site. Many were probably school assignments. You may think, well those aren’t worth as much as those of WTC 2 people.

But it’s important to note that you may save it all because you can. But that doesn’t mean you lose the filters. For example, Smithsonian said they didn’t want swear words, they wanted to have “real” stories show up first, etc.

So maybe you should call what we’re doing storage – we’re not making decisions, and people can do that later.

The whole database fits on a hard drive the size of a deck of cards. So no physical limitation. So nothing stops you from creating a curated version. But I still think its important that people in the future who have different ideas on how to use things be able to do that.

Roy: We’re in the raw business, not in the cooked business. The idea of layering, which is central to the internet, is a good way to think about this.

Q: Maybe, the concern is that the foundation you’re building is somewhat skewed because you’re driving the collection rather than letting the records collect naturally as part of organizational activities.

Dan: The thing I did in Google earth. If I were going to do that right, I’d have to normalize for things like amount of data collected in each zip code, the baseline of how many people pray, etc.

We admit that this was fast. But if you look at blogs, after 3 months, half are abandoned. You have to act now to get the content.

Roy: I think another critical layer there is the interpretive role of the historian. There was a chapter in my dissertation about the playground movement at the turn of the century. Wanted to find out what kids thought about this at the turn of the century. A reporter interviewed kids in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, and it was a great source. But I had to think about whether the quotes were real, or whether the reporter just made them up. That’s the kind of thing historians do all the time. But the new tools offer some new quantitative ways for looking at things. And transparency is an important part of this.

Q: You’re doing a lot of things that archives aren’t yet doing in any systematic way. Can you talk about how to mobilize digital projeccts like the September 11 archive?

Roy: we’re pretty much a grant driven operation – and in that way pretty opportunistic. We’re inclined to move quickly and try things out. One of our slogans is “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” For better or worse, we made the decision to have all the people who do things with this on staff. (programmers, web designers, etc.) Most of those people have a history background, but that also enables us to move more quickly because we have all these people on staff who do all these aspects.

We felt like we needed to learn the technology and not just turn it over to other people. Unless you’ve worked on the programming, design, etc. it’s hard to think creatively about these things.

Q: Really interested in description process going along with collection? Did people describe things themselves?

Dan: for 9/11 project, we decided that in our naïve wisdom on this, we want contributions. If you have a really long form – more than a screen… If you look at web research, people leave if there’s more than one screen.

So we made decisions on what to emphasize. We wanted a location. We wanted a nice big text box – we know that text boxes scroll, but some people don’t. Can we post your name? etc. And then below the submit button we ask about demographics. Research shows that if we put that stuff above the submit, we would get a lot less responses. And remarkably, 2/3 people did give us a zip code. People are very willing to give that, not so much phone number.

So we went into this with the idea that if we did too much we would turn people off. So we have names, email addresses, etc. (average email has 2 year lifespan, so we’ll lose people eventually) but it’s enough to do things with.

Q: Can either of you say anything about the recent federal legislation that has been proposed with regard to community websites?

Dan: umm, we’re against it? This is like the Internet is a series of tubes thing. 13 year olds know the Internet far better than their parents do, so these things are bound to fail. I think one of the things that is going on right now is that these sites… Where is the most self documentation going on? Most of it is happening on these big commercial sites like Flickr, Myspace, Yahoo groups, etc. Yahoo groups used to have a policy of deleting groups after six months! So you’re always at risk. So places like the Internet Archive that are saving MySpace pages are doing a real service.

Q: For many repositories, use fees are a valuable source of revenue. Others will give some access, but not high res images to maintain control. Your thoughts?

Roy: I’d love to know more concretely about how much user fees actually generate compared to the costs of administering them. Read in the Chronicle this week that the Met has now decided to make limited use of images available for free. Strikes me as a great thing. I want to know what the economics of this are, but it’s a crazy thing that one set of nonprofit academic institutions is charging another to use material. It’s not generating new dollars. My wife is chair of English department, and a young colleague was asked by an academic publisher to pay a fee to quote in his book from a book published by another university press. This seems to me to defeat the point off what university presses were set up to do. I’m a little skeptical about this.

Q: So you’ve been dodging the preservation issue. How to you propose dealing with it.

Dan: we do have a chapter in the book on this. What can ordinary people do? We provide some practical advice in the last chapter. Using international standards in terms of how things are stored, not wedded to a specific database, etc. In terms of text, images, etc. trying to use nonproprietary standards. Things will improve next year when Open Document Format is released and incorporated into Word, since that’s how many things are produced. Documentation is also really important. We have some practical advice for preparing and making it live longer.

Don’t have so much advice for the 50/100 year problem. One option since hard drives are big is to save things in multiple formats – hopefully one will be readable in Photoshop 2025. We cede some of that to the computer scientists.

Q: We have the great collections from the 19th century because people collected stuff – even if they didn’t know how to arrange or describe it! I want to commend you for doing this and creating a practical problem that archivists will hopefully then have to solve!

The system runs on a PHP5 and MySQL platform — which can both be installed on a variety of operating systems. It allows for the heirarchical cataloging of archival collections (down to the item level if you wish), and has capabilities to both import and export standard formats such as EAD and MARC. It also provides a public frontend to the archival database, and even allows attachment of digital files for use as a digital library.

I can see immediate applications for this software, and I’m hoping to get it up and running at Simmons for use in archival classes. (Even if the software had no other capabilities, the ability to easily create EAD files using a form is extremely useful.)

The only thing that gave me pause on this was the license under which UIUC has chosen to release it. Rather than using a “true” open source license like the GPL, they have released it under an Academic and Research Use License (PDF) which prevents use by any commercial entity, and seems to include some other restrictions. (Apparently the GPL was rejected because UIUC could “lose control” of the software.) This is unfortunate, since if this software lives up to its promise, it deserves to attract a wide following of users and developers. The more proprietary restrictions UIUC puts on the software, the less likely this is to happen.

It’s also unfortunate that the software requires PHP5, since many servers still run older editions of PHP4 and the need to upgrade may make the software less accessible for some users. But this is surmountable, and after talking to Chris Rishel I understand why he did it.

The panel included views from two other early testers of the software: Deborra Richardson of the National Museum of American History, and Pamela Nye, an archival consultant. (Nye is pregnant and was unable to appear in person, but she sent a Powerpoint and some remarks.) Neither of the two reviewers was able to get the software running first hand — one due to technical problems and one due to organizational issues. However, it seems like these problems are not really related to the core product itself. Both had tested the functionality on the UIUC system, and seemed to think it offered a great deal of potential.

While talking with program attendees after the conference, I also became aware of a parallel development effort being sponsored by the International Council on Archives. It sounds like the two teams are tackling many of the same problems — there may be opportunities for collaboration in the future.

Archivists in the Movies

Originally uploaded by D-.

Leith Johnson, co-curator of the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, rounded out Thursday at SAA with a lighthearted look at how archives and archivists have been portrayed in film. There were audible gasps throughout the room whenever a character would do something that was not strictly archivally correct. Like, say, using the Declaration of Independence as a bulletproof shield (yeah, I’m talking to you, Nicholas Cage.) Or beating an archivist over the head and then eating the original document.

Plus, as Johnson pointed out, even the most mundane research task can seem thrilling if you have tension-filled soundtrack behind it!

Book Scanner

Originally uploaded by D-.

This BookScan system was being demonstrated by Kirtas Technologies. I had never seen one of these in action before. It’s quite hypnotic — a robot basically pages through the book while two SLR digital cameras capture high resolution images of two pages at a time. The device uses a weak vacuum to grab and turn the pages — it’s the same type of technology being used for efforts like Google’s book project. It’s fascinating to watch — and a bit hypnotic!

Blanton is with the National Security Archive, a repository at George Washington University that gathers and disseminates declassified materials. He is a thoughtful and passionate critic of excessive government secrecy, and his thoughts helped clarify how the current culture of secrecy came to be.

Chinoy made me wish I was back in journalism school. Although I became aware of Computer Assisted Reporting after attending a NICAR conference, I never took a formal class in it during my four years at Syracuse. Chinoy not only teaches such a class, but he requires his students to identify a database held by the state of Maryland that should be public record, and then attempt to get it from the state. Having provided technical expertise for reporters making this sort of request while I was at The Tennessean, I am very aware of the many ways government officials can find to stymie information requests. Having students do this sort of thing increases awareness of the importance of open government — both among students and among state government officials. Chinoy says his favorite thing is when students get so fed up with the fact that the information is being witheld that they pursue it after the end of the semester — one student kept going for nine months until he finally wheedled the database out of the state.

Look below for another voluminous set of notes…

Speakers:
Tom Blanton, National Security Archive
Ira Chinoy, Professor of Journalism, University of Maryland (Previously worked at the Providence Journal and Washington Post)
Rick Blum, Sunshine in Government Initiative (formerly of openthegovernment.org)
Tom Connors, Session Chair

Q: What are we talking about when we talk about this administration’s penchant for secrecy?

Blanton – According to government statistics, we’ve had more secrets created now than in the Cold War (according to number of classifications tracked by the Information Security Oversight Office.) At the same time things like Google and the Internet give record setting openness in government. The national sec. archive started in 1985, then in 1995 won “cool site of the day” award, and then web traffic exploded. We’re just a huge collection of released documents, Every day on our website people download 30,000 declassified documents. That’s the paradox – we have record setting secrecy and record setting access.

Also don’t want to blame it all on this administration. Two turning points; in 70s – Nixon didn’t trust bureaucracy and centralized a lot of power, but also opened up tons of formerly secret documents going back to ww1 to expose how government worked. Steve Garfinkel went to the Archivist and asked for more people to handle the load. So the archives then got 100 new professional positions to implement this order.

In 1995, Clinton did more declassification than all previous. presidents put together. Same Steve Garfinkel went to the archivist of the United States (Carlin), great opportunity, Clinton did this order let’s get more people. But the archivist declined to do this – “we’re reinventing government, we’ll make do with what we have.” So now NARA is mired in documents.

So system was already broken in 2001 when Bush administration came to government. The Bush people believed that the power of the presidency was at a low ebb. (I believe this is not true – while Clinton was being impeached, he was able to drop 75 missiles to try to get Bin Laden. That’s a sign of power.) But they said presidency was weak, we have to recoup power. This has been the unifying factor — does this expand presidential power or contract it. They have done anything that will expand presidential power. They were working on memos saying they would support those who blocked FOIA releases. They took away the power of archivists to decide release policies for presidential records, and instead gave it to former presidents and vice presidents.

The net result is the rollback or attempted rollback of a whole series of open government reforms. They’re in danger, but they’re not gone. That’s the good news and bad news.

Rick – I think we’re talking about a shadow in our government. We’re talking about a cultural change. In the week after Katrina hit, friends of mine were using Google Earth to get on their web connection to figure out if their place had been flooded. That’s a good thing. At the same time, we have a cultural difference. If you search for “Google Earth” using Google News, you get tons of articles about foreign governments saying say how Google Earth will destroy their internal security. It shows the cultural disconnect around access to information. There is a culture of fear about information flows.

The other part is that it’s a technical problem. The other week the house held hearings on technical changes to FOIA. The same week that was going on, the FDA called me and said “Hey, we’ve got a FOIA request here that you filed.” I said “I did?” Turned out it was from when I asked about FDA scientific advisory committees in February 2002.

I asked “Was this really a malicious attempt to undermine my right to find out what was happening with scientific advisory committees?” they said, “Well, you’re just next.” So there’s culture, and then there’s technical problems.

Ira – There is some continuity. The thing that hasn’t changed is that in the halls of government there are people called “public info. Officers.” But this is often a cruel misnomer. They walk around with notebooks that say “Just Say No,” the drug slogan from the 80s. That hasn’t changed. I think since 9/11 we’ve seen some strange things in public records request. I teach classes in computer-assisted reporting at Maryland. This turns out to be a centerpiece of the class – students try to get a database from the state of Maryland to use in class. I tell students that they are the defenders of democracy. They roll their eyes, but they get it by the end of the class, because they hear every excuse under the sun.

The discontinuity is that people are constantly finding new excuses not to give you records. A bunch of stuff was added to the Maryland equivalent of FOIA since 9/11. For example building plans. But it also says you can’t get things “related to the security of a database system.” If you know anything about databases, you know they’re not much good without documentation – without a record layout. Agencies now are saying “We can’t give you the documentation – it would compromise our security.”

Another example. There’s something called the national inventory of dams. All dams are inspected, and there is a database. A student was interested in db. Contains lots of pretty interesting stuff. Pretty important issue. The student was told we can’t give you that because then terrorist would know which were the weakest dams and they would blow them up. Let alone that the public should know which was the weakest dam. The irony was that even though the state wouldn’t give it, you could get the same data from the federal government.

We’ve decided in our course that fear is the big thing. I will ask you all a question. How many of you have ever seen a news story where there was an error and you knew something about it. So the question is, is the fear rational or irrational?

Tom – Re: NSA – the NYT found out that the NSA was doing warrantless wiretapping and sat on it for a year. If you’re a very careful reader of journalism, which I’ve learned to be. There are errors ins stories, but also a lot of truth. If you look at the material printed in the book, and the version that ran in the paper, you’ll see the kind of secrets that got the story in the paper. There are currently subpoenas about this.

What Jim Riesen had in his book was that the intelligence community rapidly expanded wiretapping with and without warrants after 9/11. NYT decided this wasn’t a big story because that’s what you’d expect after 9/11. What made it a story was that senior justice dept. officials believed that this was illegal and possibly criminal – not just the government officials, but telecom companies were possibly culpable.

I called up Ford library and asked about the original debates over FISA law. Found a memo about a conversation in 1975-1976 – Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, George HW Bush, Henry Kissinger, white house chief of staff Richard Cheney, Phillip Bukim and Levy (one of these white house council.) who said, look we need a law governing wire taps so that we can use this type of thing. At end of meeting, the white house council wrote a memo to file saying “well, at least we’ve gotten them to the point where they won’t veto it immediately.”

That the justice department felt the wiretaps were illegal was not secret and should not have been secret. But that distinction has been blurred. There is no distinction between what we need to know and the true secrets. Secrets are kept because they protect higher ups from accountability.

Ira- In some situations, people know what’s in the data and don’t want people to have it,. And in other cases, they don’t know but just suspect something in there might be bad for them, and so they come up with reasons for opposing release of data.

Tom – “Blacked out” is a good book by Syracuse Professor about this. The epigram to the whole book is Donald Rumsfeld’s quote along the lines of: “there are knowns and unknowns, and then known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, which are the most dangerous.”

Connors – government is contracting out so much now, and there’s no way that FOIA can affect them.

Ira – this is really important. Not just contracting out, but government agencies deciding to be profit centers with regard to information. You run up against this if you’re a journalist or citizen researcher.

Someone will go and want the database of parking tickets in College Park – and they’ll be told to call a company in Florida, because they run the database.

We’ve decided that this copy of the Maryland public records act is our best friend. And there’s typically a attorney general’s manual that goes with it. A public record is no more or less than what the law says it is. There’s nothing in the law that says records aren’t public if a private company helps maintain them.

But problem is that these agencies work on billable hours. And often when agreements were set up, no one thought to say “this is a democracy – we have to provide access to records’

Even if they don’t contract out, many governments have agencies that charge back the cost of work. The issue that goes along with this for databases is that they’ll say that will be $5,000/40 hours. That may be ridiculous. So sometimes you have to get someone elsewhere in government who understands the issues and can help go to bat for you.

One thing I love about this assignment is the students who get pissed off that they haven’t gotten anything in the 10 weeks they have for the assignment and keep going. Our masters students spend a semester working for our capital news service, and keep going on this. One student kept going on it for 9 months. At the end, he wrote them a letter, I know this takes your time, but I haven’t gone running to the Attorney General. Finally went to an official who understood and came to the college, we worked through it together, and we opened database, deleted several fields, and sent it to the student – took about a minute and a half. At the end of the day, you have to know the law and have someone who appreciates it.

Blum – There have been white papers about this method: to have “information sharing and analysis centers” funded by homeland security grants centers – which are quasi private organizations and as such supposedly not covered by public records laws.

A guy decided to test port security – asked a truck driver about it. Driver said to hop in! The driver showed an expired driver’s license got in to the port, the cargo was never inspected. Is this something that people who really want to do us harm know about? Yes!

Tom – this is the fundamental critique of secrecy – it just doesn’t work. A guy named Steiglitz won the Nobel prize recently for the idea that “there is no market ever where there is perfect info. So every market has asymmetries.” Same is true for government. Read the 9/11 report. There are hundreds of examples of info asymmetries. There was a whole FOIA request that was lost – data was withheld – because it would help guide terrorists to ports that were least inspected. In reality they were hiding the fact that they didn’t do systematic inspections. Secrecy is proven as not keeping us safe. That’s a cold war paradigm that doesn’t work anymore.

There’s the old story. Guy who runs across red square saying “Khrushchev is an idiot” He was arrested and given 5 years for being a counter-revolutionary , and 20 years for revealing a state secret.

It came out that the specs for Air Force 1 were public. Second and third day story was that the reason these things were public is so that first responders in all 50 states would know where to go to rescue people in case of an emergency.

Leslie Groves, guy who designed secrecy for bomb – His son asked: Why’d you need all that secrecy? He answered: “The Germans, the Japanese, the allies, congress, our own staff!”

Most of what the system generates isn’t truly a secret in that way.

They did a study of holes in Microsoft software in a computer magazine. Security problems were fixed 60% faster when the holes were published on the Internet. 60% faster if embarrassment was part of the picture. That’s what drives fixing problems – publicity.

Ira – People were outraged about 9/11. People don’t get outraged about government outsourcing database work. I get the feeling that it’s going to take something really horrible where someone tried to get info an the government blocked it on purpose. Someone blowing up a chlorine laden tank in a community and making it uninhabitable.

I want to get back to archives, though. Sometimes we can look to the past and see how this sort of things play out. We have more people in my class showing up from the archives track. What’s been interesting is to go back at agencies that used to be secret and now records are released and look at the records. Some of the outrage is lying in the places where you work – in your archives. Invite journalists and students in to have a look.

There’s a famous case where Bush rolled out Military tribunals which hadn’t been used since WWII, and several journalists went to archives and found the precedents he was calling on, which were two small teams of unsuccessful German saboteurs during WWII. Hoover and the FBI angled to have this story come out as having broken the case, instead of the actual fact that these guys basically turned themselves in.

Tom (moderator) : even Lyndon Johnson, who signed first FOIA wasn’t thrilled about it – he didn’t have a signing ceremony – and he edited press secy. Bill Moyers’ statement to avoid too much ringing language about revealing mistakes of officials. Ford vetoed an attempt to put teeth in it – it’s not just this administration.

Democrats under Eisenhower had proposed right to know, but couldn’t get a single sponsor. But – Rumsfeld actually signed on as a sponsor of FOIA because government was getting too big. He was then on presidential staff when congress overrode veto.

Blum – different than it was 10 years ago. It is not illegal in the US to disseminate classified info. And there is more reaction now. There are more attempts to monitor what is going on. But something almost slipped through – an amendment to the official secrets act. Clinton was going to let this thing become law on a Saturday. Some publishers made some calls, and it was vetoed. Now bills like this are introduced, and we hear about it right away. People are paying more attention.

Washington needs a media lobby – not just the business stuff, but journalism – how stories are covered, freedom, etc. This is not an issue that has been covered in the paper because it’s seen as a conflict of interest. We have to get past that. Now there are sunshine organizations formed that are doing this. There is 1 beat reporter in Washington who covers secrecy full time – Rebecca Carr from Cox newspapers. We need more.

There is not an institution in the executive branch or outside of it that looks at secrecy issues of policy. Why not? That’s a great use of taxpayer dollars.

Q – congress has introduced some reforms. Are these sincere efforts?

Blum – there are some efforts to make the obvious reforms. There have been some executive orders, and some agencies have realized that they have problems with their procedures.

Tom – You asked if the effort was sincere. Senator Cornan of Texas, when he was attorney general of Texas, actually put two people in jail for holding secret meetings and not releasing records. His sound bite is that “We need to bring Texas standards of openness to Washington.” I give Sen. Cornan points for credibility.

Senator C. of Oklahoma is proposing a web site that would help people sniff out corruption. The interesting thing is that these openness issues can be a threshold issue for everybody. That’s why these issues are getting bigger, why the press is covering them.

The other piece is the revolt of the JAGs. The top three JAGs of the military services are telling the congress that the president is full of sheep dip in what he’s saying about the tribunals. They say that the tribunals will hurt US security and make military personnel less safe.

What we know about these things now were because career people in government decided to blow a whistle.

Our founders never thought of a career civil service. Our founders thought the system would keep itself in balance. But what happens when you have a one party state, where the president only casts one veto in six years, because he’s in lockstep with the congress.

What’s important is a sense of ethical standards. It has become a savior of our democracy today.

Ira: I think we come back to this notion of fear. People who don’t want to release information are tapping into all our fears about security. But as Tom has pointed out, the facts don’t bear that out historically. A question: what do people fear more than the release of information.

We talk about laws, about changing these things. That’s not going to happen until there’s a groundswell. That comes back to you as archivists, and you as just citizens.

We’ve had a sea change – it’s taken us 30 years to get to this point of lockdown, and it’s going to take a while to turn it around. Maybe it needs to be taken up by PTAs and church groups. Grass roots. It’s the kind of thing where over time we need to see momentum in that direction.

Questions from audience:

Q: need to talk about misinformation… This administration is an expert at putting out disinformation. We have to be intelligent consumers of the news. We can’t expect our government officials to stop running and hiding.

Tom – I’m hopeless in this regard – I’m an optimist. There is a contested sphere. There’s this wonderful quote that Ron Suskind featured in a New York Times article from an unnamed Bush official a few years ago. Calls archivists, librarians, journalists, etc. “Reality-based people.” “While you people are out there studying this, we’re going to go out there and make new reality, and then you’ll get to study that too.” I thought it was a fantastic diss of 400 years of reason.

I agree with you that part of the problem is structural. I don’t know if you saw that the white house is going to change the press room to have a video wall behind the spokesman. The quote from Tony Snow was that “this is a way to get our message across directly, without filters.”

Jerry Mander had a quote in book re: abolishing TV. Image media bypasses thinking.

Dumbledore “Harry – I thought you were too young to handle the information.” Thus secrecy caused the death of Sirius Black!!!

Ira – when you see news coverage of something that doesn’t add up, call a reporter!! The best exercise I did in school was taking a paragraph out of a book and having to write five pages about it. Taught me a lot about parsing releases. If I see something, I call the reporter. If they don’t write about it, I call the editor.

Rick – before you call your reporter, call your member of congress.

Q: Could you give us an idea of how to engage young people who aren’t reading newspapers, who are blasé and uninterested in current events? How do you inspire that sense of outrage.

Connors – analogy might be Vietnam war. That got people in the streets. How can we do that for this?

Ira : I don’t know. I’m trying to do that one student at a time. People learn a lot in Journalism school – for example a lot of Fs first semester for misspelled names. They get accuracy, but this takes longer.

We’re the elders – we have to lead on this. We have to figure out how to get this in schools. Maybe that’s what we can do as journalists, archivists, public advocates.

Tom – I spent a semester in Louisiana in school on the war between the states, with the first piece being “the lost cause.” We’ve come a long way!

Essay by someone at Rice Univ: “objectivity is not neutrality – being fair to all views is different from not taking a position.” Archivists make decisions about what’s important to save, access, etc. To the extent that the human race has a saving grace, it’s this striving toward thought and empiricism – the opposite of how the Bush administration sneers at these things.

I have a friend at the Philly Inquirer who said to me “we have a business problem – our circ is at an all time low. Yet I have more readers now than ever before because of the web.”

I’m not as pessimistic. I think young people are absorbing a lot of information. These people have this stuff in their cell phones. They’re blasé about it. But if you look at the learning curve among young people about the Middle East over the last few years, you see a capacity to become engaged.

Ira: you make a good point – for young people, you have to meet them where they are. If you picked up your newspaper one day and four of the inside pages were blank, that might make an impression. If I told my daughter that she couldn’t have information about Lizzy Maguire or Pink for a week… Maybe that’s what it takes are these really visceral demonstrations.

Q: Re: reclassification project at National Archives – what could be the justification?

Tom : I’ll try to be fair, although it requires a great stretch! The mid 1990s, with first big burst of Clinton declassification, there were a billion records declassified. There were mistakes. They found three related to nuclear weapons. So they marched up to congress and got them to pass a law funding millions of dollars to pay people to look for information with vague connections to nuclear weapon design.

Given what we know now about Pakistan and North Korea, it wasn’t by poring through 50 year old records that they figured out how to do this. But they found these examples. They rehired all these people who retired from the DOE.

The Intel agencies got jealous, and they started having their people doing the same things. They found things that had come from their agencies that were in other agencies records.

This whole process has pulled only 12,000 out of a billion docs – which is an error rate Toyota would be proud of.

The CIA came in and found 55,000 docs that they had problems with – because they hadn’t looked at them before the state dept. declassified them. And they got the archivist of the United States to sign a memo and agree to lie to researchers about the declassification procedures. One of the people involved believed that signing that memo was a victory against the CIA, because what they were doing before that was out of control of the Archives. So that memo got the archival professionals involved. From their perspective it was regaining some of the power they had lost. Has any of those pages damaged our national security (of the 55000)? I would argue no, and that the classification laws are not for security – they are designed to protect the bureaucracy.

To the credit of Archivist Alan Weinstein, when he heard about this in his New York Times, he immediately stopped it and started looking at policies

The problem is that fundamentally that there’s no room for the archives to get back in the saddle on this. But the outrage has helped them fight against it,.

DSpace

Originally uploaded by D-.

After spending lunch at a roundtable targeted at Student members of SAA, I headed over to the International Ballroom for a session on DSpace, an open-source digital repository system written in Java. The system is now in use at a large number of institutions nationwide (and even worldwide.)

Two of the panelists were from MIT, which originally designed the system in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard. The third was from the Kansas State Historical Society, which is using DSpace to store an archive of digital reports submitted to the state legislature. (See KSpace)

The system has the benefit of being free, open source software, but it also has a reputation of requiring a great deal of IT support to maintain. The MIT folks emphasized that the policy decisions are much harder than making the IT work. But then again, we don’t all have the resources of MIT. Veatch (from Kansas) said that having an IT person leave had made it difficult to make progress on the project because of the skill level needed to do customization and modifcation.

Overall, this was a useful introduction to the system. I was aware of DSpace prior to this, but the session gave me a better understanding of how it’s being used in the real world. I’d like to try getting a copy up and running on a server in the Tech Lab back at GSLIS so that we can play around with it a bit. Hmm, maybe a project for this fall…

As before, see below for another impressionistic transcript…

DSpace and its Implementations: An Impressionistic Transcript:

MacKenzie Smith, MIT Media Laboratories.
Tom Rosko, Institute Archivist, MIT
Matt Veatch, State Archivist, Kansas State Historical Society

General intro to DSpace: open source app (since 2002)
“institutional repository platform” – “terrible term, because no one understands what it means.”
Voluntary federation of digital repositories run by many academic research institutions > 150 now. – has some benefits – for example, Google Scholar picks up all objects in registered DSpace Repositories. Development of system is complicated because different sites have very different ideas on what it should do.

Originally designed to be optimal for papers and publications, but same technology can be useful for a variety of other digital media – although it falls a part a bit for super complex digital objects.

Communities, sub communities, collections, and items. (Hierarchy of objects.)

Open Source – free, but TCO is not zero! Need hardware, IT experts, people to make changes, upgrades, etc. Smith believes it’s still slightly cheaper than a commercial vendor because vendors are too expensive. But the real benefit is being able to adapt if you have the skills available. (Commercial vendors are now starting to offer hosting and support for DSpace, though.)

Governance structure – loosely based on apache.org. A non-profit foundation is now being established to deal with intellectual property issues and other problems.

The platform is developing very rapidly, with rapid evolution and new releases every 6-9 months.

“within 10 years, every research university will have a digital repository based in the library or archives.”

- MIT now has 10,000 e-theses online. These are the biggest single type of content in repositories now, because everyone has them and no one knows what to do with them.
- Some places also using it for publishing. DPubS – an e-journal publishing system that can be laid over DSpace or fedora.
- Research data sets – like XML snippets representing molecules.
- Learning objects – developed for use in online courseware systems – should be preserved. (For example, MIT’s open courseware project.)

Most sites look similar, but you can customize the look and feel. Also some international adoption – for example – a large library in Brazil. (Biblioteca ___)

U of R has developed an entirely new front-end for the system. Duke now using it for student portfolios! You get certain things with it, but if you have the resources you can expand it to do whatever you want.

Big topic of contention re: policies: what is a community in DSpace? How do you define, what responsibilities does community take on? Decisions about content, access, who inputs metadata? What are the repository’s responsibilities to the community? What are the library’s rights (what if a community disappears??) Content guidelines? If determined by the community, raises issues relative to appraisal and collection development. So some places to appraisal centrally.

MIT offers guidelines of types of content, but will accept anything.

Need to determine access policies. MIT DSpace requires all content to at least be available to the MIT community.

Metadata policies. MIT assumes that submitters will provide metadata, and they usually do. But who does quality control and resolves conflicts? You have to look for other solutions other than hand-crafted item level data designed by an archivist, since there is such a volume of content. User-supplied metadata? (The Wikipedia approach to metadata.)

Can providers remove items? MIT says no – they will hide something, but it still remains. BUT – after 30 years the administrators can remove content if they feel it’s no longer worthy of preservation.

Preservation policies: for high risk formats, they don’t agree to do anything more than preserving the bits. Whereas, for common formats like PDF/A they’re pretty confident they can offer preservation. DSpace can’t figure this out for you – “preservation is a human activity.”

Physical stewardship: you might describe something even though all of the content isn’t physically in the system – for example, linked on a faculty web page. So you have to be careful.

IP issues – very complicated – some donors may not have copyright, but have right to give it to you. Have to make sure you have enough rights to do something useful. On the flipside, have to tell the public what they can do with content.

Libraries, archives, other institutions are merging in terms of the technologies they need, so it’s not smart for each discipline to continue doing everything the way they always have. Doesn’t make sense to have “the archives platform” and “the library platform.” Where the underlying platforms are 80% the same.

TOM ROSKO:

DSpace@MIT – research and teaching output of MIT. Doesn’t necessarily fit with what’s in the archives. Was set up originally to promote the idea of faculty ownership rather than library initiative. But this is difficult, because archives sees so many opportunities for what it could be.

Less stuff is coming into the archives in paper format. So they are going to go out and start proactively gathering content.

Other _Spaces (on the drawing board):

Because DSpace is “faculty owned,” doesn’t entirely serve the needs of the Archives. Hence, new ideas:

XSpace: (Digital Library)
- Digital library content (non-MIT created)
- Digitized Collections
ASpace (Digital Archives)
- Administrative records
- Manuscript collections (faculty papers)
- MIT “non-research” publications
- Other MIT-related materials
o News office photos, video, websites

But… this presents issues – there is overlap with DSpace (faculty research, for example.) Also raises issues for archival needs, such as retention schedules or access restrictions – these may not currently be fully supported in the DSpace software. Can be hard to map collection structure of records. (DSpace can theoretically do some of these things, but MIT has not implemented them.)

General DSpace issues at MIT:

“technical stuff is the easy stuff!” It’s the policies and procedures that are hard.

- multiple stakeholders
o MIT libraries, MIT, researchers
- Multi-level decision making process
- Collection Development
o Who is liasing with content providers?
- Communication – unified message of what _Space is and isn’t
- Administrative and faculty policies
o Access policies
- Intellectual Property
o Ownership of material and rights
- DSpace Policy
o Do items fir DSpace criteria?
o What community “owns” them?
- Withdrawals/Transfers of “ownership”
- Procedural/workflow issues: complicated in the paper world, and still complicated in digital world. How does, say, a thesis make its way through the organization and end up in the archives.

DSpace object can be one file, or a thousand file website. Makes it harder to make policy.

Matt Veatch
State Archivist, Kansas State Historical Society

“KSpace” – an implementation in a state government environment. Catalyst was 2002 law authorizing electronic submission of reports to Kansas legislature
KSHS and State Library of Kansas have statutory responsibility to collect and presser state government publications. They had preservation concerns about when law was being considered, and were told to “solve the problem”

Solution a collaborative project between KSHS, State Library, and all three branches of government.

Initial goal: create digital repository to preserve and provide access to ____

Decision to proceed with DSpace driven by functionality, budgetary constraints, comfort with open source (“culture is open source based” – this presentation is currently running on OpenOffice! We like the flexibility and adaptability of such products.) software, and technical staff. (We had at least one person on staff with the confidence to say we could do this. Tom and Mac. Say that the policy issues are hard, tech is easy. That’s true to an extent, but there can be significant technical hurdles. By we felt like we could do it.)

Initial proof of concept was running on a workstation under the web programmer’s desk – if he kicked it wrong, it went down. Showed it to a variety of people in government – successful. So planned a pilot implementation, but needed funding for this. Applied for a grant from the Information Network of Kansas. (Kansas.gov web portal). Run by a private entity, and they make a profit on things like licenses. So they are required to reinvest in projects. We asked for $50k, and spent about $40 – turned some back. Money was mainly for hardware –bought servers, firewalls, backup services, a bit off marketing. But didn’t spend a ton of money.

Generally followed DSpace planning and implementation guidance based on experiences elsewhere. (project team, policy advisory group, technical advisory group.)

Not a lot of customization, but submission screens and graphic layout changed. Mainly to simplify for busy state employees – they’re not going to provide a ton of metadata.. Worked with targeted agencies on content submission to develop training and memoranda of understanding.

Key decisions:
- Accept a limited number of file formats
o Mitigate future preservation issues
o Based on FL Center for Library Automation
o Three support levels – preferred (XML, PDF/A, etc.), acceptable (PDF, etc.), unsupported (Microsoft Word, Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft Anything!)
- Failover system to maintain access
o Duplicate server, firewall at offsite location
- Contract for backup services.

Pilot launched in late 2004 – narrowed scope to focus on reports on submitted to Kansas legislature. Manual process of getting them all in in 2005 – way too manual and not scalable, but got them all in. Now working on 2006 reports.

In our definition of terms, “State Agency” becomes a DSpace community. Then you might subdivide beyond that. – sub sub community might be “office of the secretary.”

Lessons learned:

- Technical staff is key – we lost the programmer who did implementation, and that has made it very difficult. It is written in server side java, which is required to do customization. So despite what Tom said, having some technical staff available is important.
- MOU process is time consuming.
- Manual submission by agencies is not feasible – automated harvest tools needed. Unlike faculty, state employees don’t have the motive to preserve their work for posterity.

Went to workshop in Baltimore, use tool developed but LoC center for technology in Government to assess digital preservation capability. Need to look at long term planning issues like scope, resources needed for maintenance and expansion, risk assessment, stakeholder analysis, evaluation criteria, automate content acquisition.

Phase 2: Capture publications on agency websites (definition of “publication” interpreted broadly

Working on automated content acquisition
- looking at “web archives workbench” a tool being developed on a grant by OCLC to help capture web content. (session on Saturday morning with Judy Kopp (sp?).) Looking at how this can be integrated with a digital repository.

Anticipate doing some pilot tests of non-web records within the next 12 months. Will require more systematic approach, but we think system can handle it. “not a true electronic records system, but it’s what we’ve got.”

Long term maintenance and expansion – we want KSpace recognized as an “enterprise application” in the state government, which would ensure funding stream from other agencies.

www.kspace.org
mveatch@kshs.org

Q: (From UCLA Archivist0 How many faculty at MIT? A: 900ish

Q: (From UCLA Archivist) Authenticity of records? –
A: Veatch – that’s one of the reasons we haven’t done records yet. How do you make sure something doesn’t change over time. If we’re going to use it for state records, we need ingest procedures, with good metadata so that we can be convinced that we can preserve authenticity.

MIT also has issues with authenticity because of the faculty control. At MIT, students can submit own thesis, in addition to the official copy (?) raises questions.

Q: University of WI at Madison guy – going to be putting time schedules of classes, etc. in repository because no longer being printed in paper. Are you planning on doing those types of large pubs?
A: Course catalog produced by a unit of presidents office. Half owned by registrar’s office.

U. of Wash. Is using it to preserve LDAP directory.

Q: University of Ca Irvine: KS is restricting formats, MIT is not. How does MIT deal with delivery of all those formats.
A: Mackenzie – we don’t deal with it. Content can be viewed in browser using whatever method the browser has defined for that kind of content. Must have software to view it on their own machine. (IE, if they send word doc, then people have to have word doc to read it.) Later we’ll probably look at providing alternate formats, but DSpace separates storage of content/rendering.

Q: Grant?
A: MIT’s grant from HP ran out four years ago. Now a broad based open source project. Trying to build something that’s sustainable without grant money, unlike a lot of other projects out there. We’ve been off that crutch for four years, and things are working fine. The basic platform is supported by the community of users.

The session focused on “Yuzkor books” and other ways in which communities decimated by genocide and massive displacement have come together to preserve a historical record of their communities.

Horowitz focused her presentation primarily on “A Tale of One City: Piotrkow Trybunalski,” a Yuzkor book edited by Ben Giladi. Riedlmayer expanded on this, and also discussed the websites that were created by survivors of the ethnic cleansing campaigns that took place in Serbia in the 1990s. (example)These websites present a special problem for historians and archivists because they are so ephemeral. If somone forgets to pay the hosting bill, valuable historical documentation may be lost forever.

Follow the link below for detailed notes from the session…

What follows is a highly impressionistic transcript of the session — basically my rough notes I typed out while listening.

Horowitz:

Because survivors of the Holocaust were unable to perform the traditional memorial rites for their friends and family, the books served as “monuments in print” that helped meet the need. But the books are also considered “books of life,” and a way for families with little first hand documentation of their own heritage to pass on something meaningful to their descendents. And the books serve as an important documentary source for the destruction of towns during the Holocaust.

Because the books were seen as memorials for those familiar with the town and people whose lives were chronicled, not as historical documents, they were printed and distributed in very small quanitites, and in some cases material was left out of some editions. (For example, a listing of those who died, which was assumed to be of little interest to those not directly related, was left out of some editions of an English translation of one book.) However, the books are now considered valuable historical sources, not just memorials. As such, they are attracting increasing interest from the library and archival communities.

Digitization project sponsored by the New York Public Library and the National Yiddish Book Center. The project allows electronic access to Yizkor books through the NYPL’s website. Users can also offer on-demand reprints of the books through the National Yiddish Book Center.

The HTML version greatly enhances the original material by providing contextual links, research sources, genealogical material, etc. However, it does not retain the structure of the original. Because users choose their own paths through the content, they may overlook the intent of the original author to portray the historical continuity of the community.

Andràs Riedlmayer of Harvard University. Broader view of memorial books. They go back before the Holocaust – for example the 1915 genocide of Armenian communities in Kayseri, Turkey or a book published by the Association of Polish Jews in Argentina published in Buenos Aires in 1949 to memorialize the lost Jewish communities of Poland. (This was published in Hebrew and English rather than Yiddish.)

Mentioned the Harvard Émigré Interview Project, an effort begun with funding by the US Air Foce in the late 1940s. Interviews were conducted of displaced people in the US and Europe. The interviews were transcribed, mimeographed, and bound, and are now held by Harvard. (They have also been microfilmed.)

Other communities have also created similar books – for example, ethnic German villages displaced from other parts of Eastern Eurpoe after WWII. Filipowa, Yugoslavia was destroyed by the Soviets in 1945. Its 5,000 german residents were placed in a camp, and its Lutheran Church was demolished. A book was later published documenting the community, and includes documentation of the community as it existed before its destruction. 350,000 Italians were also expelled from communities in the border zone between Italy and Yugoslavia, memorial books have also been created in this area.

In the more recent Bosnia, a country of around 4 million people, 2 million were displaced, and 200,000 were murdered. Memorial books have also been produced for some of these communities.

Town of Zvornik, Bosnia
In 1991, a census of the town revealed 48,208 muslims,
In 1995, the UN estimated that there were zero remaining. A book documents the community, including hand drawn maps showing where residents lived, photos of the town, etc.

The Bosnian Genocide happened just as the web was emerging, and websites were created from the beginning. These have evolved into born-digital “Yizkorbucher,” documenting the heritage of communities that no longer exist. Unlike the printed books, the online version grows on a continual basis as more material is submitted: photos, e-mail addresses of survivors, etc. An example: www.opel.ca (about Serbian town) bijelina. Website sare a precious resource, but are very ephemeral. Small groups of individuals create them, and their electronic nature means there is likely no physical artifact. If the creators forget to pay their hosting bills, the material may disappear forever.

How do we preserve this memory?

There is an Internet Archive, but most of these sites are built in layers, and picture albums and dynamic features are often not captured. Questions if there would be a way to enlist archivists in helping ensure that these materials are not lost.

Questions: copyright issues with print on demand Yizkor books? Unclear. Many are orphan works. The reprints now show a copyright of the NYPL and The National Yiddish Book Center.

R. observes that material seems to crop up everywhere. Material is easily shared or “borrowed” online. Multiple websites are created about the same place, and images show up in multiple places. Has the web subverted the concepts of authorship and copyright?

Naron asks: archivists are deeply concerned with primary sources – have there been any efforts to gather the original materials used in the creation of these books together into archives? In some cases – for example, Ben Gil. Requested that materials be sent to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC. But efforts are scattershot.

R. observed that these are adhoc publishing efforts – there’s not a single company gathering the material, and most contributors don’t want to give up whatever small pieces of their heritage that they have retained. So the orginal may never really be gathered into one place.

Someone from the US Holocaust museum asked about whether they have looked at “revisionist sites”. And is there any movement toward consensus history of these places, as opposed to personal histories?

There have been websites arguing that the genocide was justified by Serbian suffering in WWII, that parts of it didn’t happen, lionizing those convicted of war crimes, etc. But most of the memorial websites are not necessarily there to demonstrate suffering, but to bind the scattered communities together and mobilizing aid for rebuilding efforts.

Q: What types of organizations exist that could take in this material, within or outside of Bosnia?

A: R. the new consitution purposely weakens central government and promotes smaller ethic government. So the national government has little motivation and few resources for this type of project. You need server space, technical knowledge, and the language. All of these things are available. I would see the future of this happening outside of Bosnia (perhaps among refugee communities) because there is little attention to it within the country.

Why were necrology not included in some editions? Ben Gil. Saw two audiences: one composed of former pietrokovers, who cared about names as family histories, and the other a “historical” reader who was supposedly not interested in this sort of thing.

LoC Minerva project: using webcrawling to archive some things, such as Katrina pages, 9/11, or those related to congress. Would be worth talking to to see if they could help with this effort?

R. The main problem is that the Internet Archive does not go below the surface, possibly as a means of economizing. Not all parts of site are captured.

Q: How do you find these sites?

R. Frequent googling. Pointers from other sites, and personal networking. Aggregation sites that list hometown web pages – but often not maintained. It’s a hard thing, and it would be difficult to have an exhaustive registry, especially because many are so ephemeral.

Q: Any effort to contact the people making the sites and perhaps giving them suggestions on how to make sure things are archived?

Not really, other than impressing on them the value of what they have when communicating with them.