2008 October « Gayle’s Weblog

Archive for October, 2008

Of Interest

October 28, 2008

Press Release
Documents Compass (http://www.documentscompass.org/DCAbout.html) receives Mellon grant for Founding Era Prosopography

October 25, 2008
Charlottesville, VA

The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities announces that it’s newly formed service provider, Documents Compass, has received a $327,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create People of the Founding Era (PFE). The grant will allow Documents Compass to explore the feasibility of creating a biographical data source that will be a resource for scholars of the American Founding. It will include native-born and naturalized Americans born between the end of Queen Anne’s War (1713) and the Napoleonic Wars (1815) – and their children and grandchildren – and will be grounded in the existing documentary editions of the past half century. It will begin by working with the Papers of the Founding Fathers and the Dolley Madison Digital Edition.

Lawrence Stone, in his now-famous 1971 essay in Daedalus, defined prosopography as “the investigation of the common background characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their lives.” Historians continue to debate the definition of prosopography, and this dispute may never be resolved: prosopography is a methodology and thus reinvented by every scholar who uses it in their analysis. Even so, all prosopographical studies involve collecting and categorizing biographical information about a group of individuals. Therefore the PFE is both a resource and a tool for future prosopographers.

The PFE will be the first electronic prosopography of the modern era and serve as a model for the over-documented 20th and 21st centuries. It will enable scholars to explore individuals and/or select groups of people, making it a crucial research tool in fields as diverse as political history, local history, social history, demography, biography, institutional history, and genealogy.

Documents Compass (DC http://www.documentscompass.org), established in January 2008, is an intermediary resource for publishers and scholar/editors. Created to help plan and develop documentary editions, the service locates, develops, and employs the tools best suited to each project’s needs, and facilitates transcribing, proof reading, tagging, and copy editing.

The Virginia Foundation for the Humanities announced the new organization in August. Rob Vaughan, President of the Virginia Foundation, is enthusiastic about the project’s potential to transform and streamline digital editing. “We are excited to host Documents Compass. The time is right to create such an organization.”

For additional information:
Susan Severtson
Director, Communications
703-593-5338
Susan@DocumentsCompass.org

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Digitized books

October 26, 2008

Cody, William F. Life and Adventures of “Buffalo Bill.” (Chicago: Stanton and Van Vliet Co., 1917).

I checked out the Google books and Gutenberg, also archive.org. Archive.org is just a repository for Gutenberg, Google, and other organizations. It will give you all versions and tell you in what formats they are accessible. I searched for William F. Cody’s autobiography which was published before 1923 and thus is available in its entirety and downloadable from the Google website or archive.org. Gutenberg gives it to you in text format with the graphics but it’s not a scanned book per se. (As an aside, I searched for Pilgirm’s Progress also and noticed that Gutenberg did not put in the graphics from that book, it’s just all text. On the other hand, Gutenberg has audio versions [Pilgrim's Progress (this mp3 file will not play on IE but will play on Firefox through Quicktime)] of it in several formats!)

Back to Buffalo Bill. Google gives you the scanned book and other information under “About this book” (a tab on the upper left, next to “Read this book”). You can read the entire book with all of the graphics but it doesn’t do page flipping like archive.org does.On archive.org you can actually flip the pages as if you were turning pages on a real book. However archive.org does not show the graphics in the book where you can flip the pages at least not the book I was looking at. Archives.org does give you several different formats in which you can download and view the book: Flip Book, PDF, Full Text, DjVu (http://djvu.org/resources/whatisdjvu.php), and HTML. It seems that even though the book was scanned by Google, it is in the Americana collection and possibly many of the Americana collection books are flippable. I downloaded the .pdf version and that does have the graphics in it.

One thing I noticed about flipping the pages is you can flip more than one page at a time. If you put the cursor on the side of the pages and move it wherever you want, it will flip those several pages. If you hold the cursor over the side of the page it will say, “view leaf XXX.”

By the way, as an aside which has nothing to do with anything. You can download old movies and view them in their entirety on archive.org. Really cool!

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On the readings

October 26, 2008

NINCH on analog records:

However, as noted above, projects like those at the University of Michigan, Cornell, or the Library of Congress, which discard the analog originals following digitization, must treat the digital version as a preservation surrogate.

Maybe I am misreading the above paragraph, but what does the author mean when he says “discard the analog originals”? Surely, after a portion of George Washington’s letters were digitized by LC they were not discarded! And surely after some rare books were digitized by LC they were not discarded? http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/ So am I misreading the author?

NINCH on microfilm readers:

A fourth and more complex issue is the question of user needs and preferences, which may cause certain formats to become effectively obsolete even while they remain technically functional. For instance, user discontent with microform readers threatens to make microfilm obsolete even though it still fulfills the original goals of its creation. User acceptance—and its decline—will be one of the key “trigger events” that will compel migrations to new delivery versions of digital collections.

I will tell you that microfilm is not the easiest or best way to view something, but microfilm has stood the test of time as has paper. It doesn’t fade or deteriorate if kept in proper conditions. If you’ve ever gone to the National Archives to do research you will see where all of their census records and many of their old military records are on microfilm and their reader room always has researchers. Granted that if all of the records ever become digitized people will flock to the digitized format, but until that day they will depend on microfilm. And once the microfilm is no longer needed they will still preserve it as an analog record because, as we’ve seen, things can happen to digitized records..

NINCH on migration:

Choice of medium is equally important. Formats change rapidly and obsolescence is a perennial problem; it may be very difficult in the future to find a drive that can read ZIP disks, just as now it may be difficult to find readers for certain kinds of magnetic tapes. No one format can be guaranteed to persist and remain accessible in years to come, so you need to anticipate continuing developments and new products. Among currently available media, DVD, DLT (Digital Linear Tape) tape and CD-ROM are the most popular. Tape has a tried and tested longevity, while DVD and CD-ROM are newer media and current research has not yet agreed on their likely lifespan. Best practice in preservation is to migrate data from one medium to another, for example, from optical disc to tape, while the hardware and software are still available. Migration is an integral part of any digital project and should be set out in your preservation policy.

Roy Rosenzweig on migration:

But this “system” will not work in the digital era because preservation cannot begin twenty-five years after the fact. What might happen, for example, to the records of a writer active in the 1980s who dies in 2003 after a long illness? Her heirs will find a pile of unreadable 5 1/4″ floppy disks with copies of letters and poems written in WordStar for the CP/M operating system or one of the more than fifty now-forgotten word-processing programs used in the late 1980s.23

“Obsolescence”–tell me about it. I can’t tell you how many times as archivist on the listserv will ask if anyone knows where they can find a 5-1/4 inch drive (I have a computer that never had a 3-1/2″ drive), or a reel-to-reel recorder, or someplace that has something that they can play a wax cylinder on, and so on. That is a problem with archivists because some of the collections that are donated have really old materials in them.

However, one problem with the migration of digitized records is that it costs money. And every time they have to be migrated to a new format it will cost more money. Paper records do not have to be migrated and thus are more cost efficient. For many smaller archives with very low budgets this is a big consideration.

Cohen on metadata:

One of the most important factors in ensuring digital preservation is the creation of robust metadata to describe the process of digitization as well as the actual digital objects themselves. We need to preserve not just the byte stream, but also the structure of the digital object and its context.

Metadata is so very important. I think of all of the analog photographs I’ve worked with in archives that have lost any information about them. But even analog photos inherently have some metadata: what size they are, whether they are black and white or color, what the photo is about (scenic, portrait, etc.). Even my father’s photos that have very little subject data, I can put a little subject data and some metadata to them: How many people are in the photo, is my father one of them? Where was the photo taken? Is the photo black and white or color, what is the size of the original photo (8×10, 5×7, etc.), what is the dpi of the scanned image, is it scanned in color or greyscale, and so on. But metadata is critical.

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Invitations

October 26, 2008

You are invited to participate in the following research project.

Context and Digitization: Towards a New Model for Archives

Nearly a decade ago, in his inaugural address as president of the Society of American Archivists, Nicholas Burckel painted a vision of the future in which significant scholarship would be conducted exclusively via the internet, using digitized resources. That future has already been realized in some disciplines.

Scholars in these disciplines are now discussing the impact of digital resources on their fields. The concern for authenticity and accurate digital representation are common concerns. All researchers, both academic and amateur, have become increasingly reliant on digital information sources. Reference sources such as Wikipedia register millions of hits daily as the internet becomes the primary destination for those seeking information.

Archives are making more of their resources available in digital format, leading to investment in a vast array of archival digitization projects. Archival materials are fundamentally different from those found on Wikipedia and in most libraries. Archival materials are original records created in the course of events to document a transaction. They encompass a wide range of formats and genres that are today being digitized and made available by archives via the internet.

Are these resources being fully optimized? You are invited to participate in a series of surveys to elicit your thoughts on the effectiveness of digitized materials currently available on the internet and to evaluate a theoretical model of digitization, which will be developed over the next year. There will be two stages of survey, during late 2008 and again during 2009. During each stage you will be asked to thoroughly and considerately complete a short questionnaire. The results of these will be compiled and circulated to each participant. At this time you will have to opportunity to amend your responses, if you wish, in light of the general group response. It is estimated you will be able to complete each questionnaire within 1 to 2 hours. Some participants may be contacted for interviews.

Both archivists and archival users are sought for this study. Archivists should be involved in digitization or digital reference at their institutions. The ideal archival researcher conducts research both in the traditional manner and digitally.

This research project is being undertaken as part of the requirements of the PhD (Information Studies) degree at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Australia.

Should you wish to participate, please respond directly to the address below by 1 November 2008.

Mark Vajcner
Email: mvajcner@student.ecu.edu.au
===========================================

DigCCurr II is now recruiting for 2009 Ph.D. Fellows in Digital Curation

The School of Information and Library Science (SILS), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), is seeking applicants interested in Digital Archiving and Curation and in earning a Doctoral Degree. These Fellowships are funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

What the 3-Year Fellowships Offer:

    * A 20 hr/wk position as a Research Fellow in Digital Curation
    * An annual stipend of $19,000
    * In-state tuition and health coverage
    *Annual enrichment funds of $800
    *Extensive opportunities to meet key leaders in the Digital Curation research and practice arenas through workshops and symposia to be held at UNC.

About DigCCurr II:

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)-funded project, “DigCCurr II: Extending an International Digital Curation Curriculum to Doctoral Students and Practitioners” seeks to develop an international, doctoral-level curriculum and educational network in the management and preservation of digital materials across their life cycle. This project will prepare future faculty to perform research and teach in this area, as well as provide summer institutes for cultural heritage information professionals already working in this arena.

Applying for the Fellowship:

To apply for the fellowship, please follow the regular application procedures found on the SILS Ph.D. Admissions page (http://sils.unc.edu/programs/phd/admissions.html). The deadline for these materials is January 1, 2009.

In addition to the required written statement of your intended research focus, we ask that you write a separate essay elaborating on these goals and how they are related to the goals of DigCCurr II. Please see the DigCCurr II web page for more details (http://ils.unc.edu/digccurr/aboutII.html). Please send this essay in an email to Dr. Helen Tibbo (tibbo@email.unc.edu), Dr. Cal Lee (callee@ils.unc.edu), or Heather Bowden (hbowden@email.unc.edu), DigCCurrII Project Manager and Carolina Digital Curation Doctoral Fellow, no later than February 15, 2009. Earlier applications are encouraged. Please note that we are only able to accept applications from United States Citizens at this time.

For more information on Carolina Digital Curation Doctoral Fellowship opportunities, send e-mail to Dr. Helen Tibbo (tibbo@email.unc.edu), Dr. Cal Lee (callee@ils.unc.edu), or Heather Bowden (hbowden@email.unc.edu), DigCCurrII Project Manager and Carolina Digital Curation Doctoral Fellow.

Interested applicants may also direct correspondence to:

DigCCurr II Fellowships
School of Information and Library Science
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Campus Box 3360 Manning Hall
Chapel Hill NC 27566-3360

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Privacy and copyright issues

October 21, 2008

Here’s an interesting site in lieu of copyright and privacy issues and how they dealt with it:

http://www.lib.usm.edu/~spcol/crda/ipp/index.html

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Digitization, privacy, & copyright concerns

October 20, 2008

[Again from my SAA listserv.]

Subject:

Third-party privacy question
From: “Melissa Gerst” <mgerst1@luc.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:54:52 -0400
To: “Archives & Archivists (A&A) List” <archives@forums.archivists.org>

I am wondering how others have handled the digitization of 20th century materials, specially correspondence. The archive where I am employed contains a large quantity of correspondence between the donor of the collection and third-party correspondents. We would like to make this available on the web but are concerned about privacy issues as most of these correspondents are unaware that their letters are in the archives.

I am interested in how others have handled this issue. How is this issue addressed generally when researchers visit the archives vs. on the web in your institution?

If you have digitized similar material, did you make a best faith effort to contact correspondents? Did you redact personal information, such as addresses?

Thank you for your help,
Melissa M. Ford
Archivist
Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum
Saginaw Valley State University
7400 Bay Road
University Center, MI 48710

Subject:

Third-party privacy [digital publication/copyright]
From: “HARTSOOK, HERBERT” <HERB@mailbox.sc.edu>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 10:40:23 -0400

We discussed this after digitizing an important civil rights collection for preservation purposes. We decided to make the entire collection available on site only, and will make available on line only those portions of the collection for which we clearly hold copyright, the gentleman’s speeches, etc.

Herb Hartsook
Herbert J. Hartsook, Director
South Carolina Political Collections
University of South Carolina Libraries
Columbia, SC 29208
803-777-0577 Fax 803-777-0582
www.sc.edu/library/scpc/

Subject: RE:

Third-party privacy question
From: jim gilson <jgilson61@hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:52:02 -0400

Melissa–

I think before you worry about privacy you should think about whether you might be in violation of copyright laws and consult with your university lawyers.

I see from Peter Hirtle/Cornell’s handy copyright chart that unpublished works are protected for the life of the author + 70 years so only those authors who died in 1938 and before are inthe public domain.

And if that doesn’t do it for you I would think about the negative effect it might have on others who might want to donate their materials and decide not to because they don’t want their private thoughts made public. Especially if they’re not in the public eye. And even if they are in the public eye.

Jim Gilson
Archivist/Digitization Librarian (but not a copyright expert)
Vigo County Public Library
Terre Haute, IN

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From my SAA listserv

October 20, 2008

[Credit given to the archivist who posted this on the listserv below.]

Personal memory bits turned to bytes Analog treasures get digital homes

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008810190338

“Sometimes, in the decades after he came home from World War II, it seemed as if the movie camera was surgically attached to Christoffel Teeuwissen’s hand.” The article talks about how his children are dealing with his decades of movie and video film now that he has died (having it digitized), but also discusses the general problems of saving stuff, e.g., “The ways we have recorded our personal footprints – on paper and tape and plastic, things we could hold in our hands – are forever stalked by the ticking clock. That slow erosion is even more poignant when you consider that, today, we don’t have everything we might have saved. We had to choose which tokens to keep, based on what our wallets and our filing cabinets could accommodate.” [...]

This URL will probably be good for free access until about next Sunday (Oct. 26), but Peter might know a way to fix up one that lasts longer.

Christine

Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Information Services Librarian
Conrad N. Hilton Library: http://library.culinary.edu
The Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY 12538
(845) 451-1322
fax (845) 451-1092
c_crawfo@culinary.edu

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Free Culture a Ramblin’ Rose

October 20, 2008

So after slogging through Lessig’s Chapter 10 I’m still not sure what he was trying to say. I sort of know where he wanted to go with that rambling chapter but I don’t think he ever got to the point. He seemed a bit ambivalent, like he approved of the copyright law but, no, wait, maybe he didn’t approve of it entirely. Did he want us to go back to the original law or thereabouts as intended by the Founding Fathers? Maybe that was what he was trying to say. He just went all the way ’round Robin Hood’s barn to get there. I think it could have been said in fewer pages with less rambling and unnecessary graphics thrown in.

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