Archives: Thinking About the Future

With the end of archives class approaching faster, our readings have taken a turn to the future. As an avid science fiction fan, I love contemplating the future. My historian side is equally interested in how past people did the same thing. Perusing Archives in the News I was delighted with the article “100 Year Old Time Capsule Opened In Oklahoma City.”

This particular time capsule contained a variety of documents and artifacts, not different from the types of things that museums and archives collect. Judging from the images the time capsule did a decent job protecting the material, probably due to being buried under concrete in a church basement and not in the great outdoors.

Though access is by far the most important purpose of archives, there is some truth, and a good deal of romance, to archivists needing to speculate about what people of the future will need.    One of the concerns with digital technologies in archives is the limited lifespan of different formats. In 1913, The Ladies Aid Society was aware enough of changing technologies to include an Edison Phonograph in the capsule with their recordings.

Most documents in archives were not created with the future in mind. Nor are most documents in archives meant for specific individuals, as are the letters from the time capsule. Archives continuously re-interpret their collections for researchers in the present. Sometimes archives users imagine that they are in a time capsule when the actuality is that the material they are researching have gone though many hands. A feeling of discovery and nostalgia are inherent in time capsules, but the research value of their contents is limited. Regardless, for archives thinking about how the field will develop, time capsules represent moments when people in the past thought about, and tried to develop solutions to the same thing.

Archives: Archives and Education part 2

In response to this week’s readings about outreach, and the prompt on the syllabus, I took a look at the lesson plans from NARA’s Teachingwith Documents. The homepage is written for teachers and the material is separated into sections that easily align with chronological American history teaching sections. I clicked on ‘Expansionand Reform (1801-1868)’ and because I have recently spent time at APS, was drawn into 'The Lewis and Clark Expedition' lesson plan.

The main page of the lesson plan includes a short narrative of the Lewis and Clark Expedition followed by links to documents from the archives. On a sidebar are links to more resources, including the National History Standards that the lesson correlates to and more distinct teaching activities. The lesson plan emphasizes the Louisiana Purchase and Manifest Destiny. The website does not specify target ages, but this one seems to be most appropriate for high schools.

That the documents only include items from the National Archives highlights one of the limitations of this type of lesson plan. The Lewis and Clark journals, along with much of the expedition’s documentation are at the APS. This absence has little affect on the lesson plan, and to its credit it does list the printed copy of the journals as an additional resource. In terms of teaching students how to do research, it could be beneficial that the National Archives only has a limited selection of relevant documents because students can learn that finding an answer to a question involves looking in multiple places.

In terms of outreach, the lesson plans are effective. Making the lesson plans involve consulting with high school teachers, who wrote the narratives introducing the topics. Linking the plans with school standards also follow Rettig’s suggestion of capitalizing on what the target public already uses and needs. Now having looked at two different education sites, and visited a few more (DocsTeach from the National Archives may be a later post), I am only beginning to understand the scale and possibilities of this type of outreach.

Archives: Copyright Complications

Copyright is this week’s issue. Dharma Akmon’s “Only With Your Permission” wrangles with the practical challenges for archives trying to get permission from copyright owners to use their stuff, primarily for digitization. Akmon defends her study because of its financial benefit. Since archives projects are often dependent on grants, knowing just how much time and money it takes to get permission to digitize material is essential to the process. 

I also looked over Cornell’s handy chart of copyright terms and was reminded of the copyright extension legislation debates that were in the news a few years ago (and will undoubtedly be back in the future). Most of the debated revolved around whether corporations like Disney should be allowed to lobby congress ensuring that their early material will not become public domain. While sources like The Washington Post lament the creative loss of not having Mickey Mouse in the public domain, other sources like Animation Anomaly are clearer about the distinction between copyrights and trademarks.

One aspect of copyright terms is that they typically point to the time of creation and the death of the author as being the most important factors in determining expiration. For most materials in archives this seems reasonable. I would argue that the copyright extensions Disney (to be fair, other too) lobbied for are a result of the way that the production of creative, cultural materials changed during the twentieth century. The way that film studios and comic publishers create characters and actively build upon them, franchise them, and profit from them, is something that copyright law has difficulty accounting for.

Historical pondering aside, this case displays how archives that collect material from living institutions face a host of challenges. How to make the material they collect accessible to the public if opposed by the creators is another challenge. In combination with the cost of it all, and opposed to the part of me that is all about access, I can sympathize with archives deciding against projects that require obtaining permissions.

Reading

Dharma Akmon,"Only with Your Permission: How Rights Holders Respond (or Don't Respond) to Requests to Display Archival Materials Online." Archival Science 10 (2010): 45-64.

Archives: The Stereotypical Images Teaching Collection

This week I looked at the recently released Stereotypical Images Teaching Collection accessible from the Temple Libraries website. The collection appears to primarily derive from the Blockson Collection, but also incorporates some Special Collections materials, particularly the Temple Sheet Music collection. My interest in graphic materials, and longstanding interest in old cartoons, drew me to think about the pros and cons of organizing a collection based on graphic stereotypes.

One aspect of digital collections that could help or hinder researchers is the ability to easily remove materials from their original order. The Stereotypical Images Collection imposes organization based on the content of the image, not its context. The person in charge of putting the collection together decided what is and is not a stereotypical depiction. Stereotypes are tricky things. From a historical perspective, taking the stereotype out of its context can make it more difficult to understand. right now, the content is solely African American, but once other groups are included the separation of sub-groups within the collection could potentially enforce categorical stereotypes.  

Nevertheless, I can image that an undergraduate course could easily access the material. The classes using the material would have additional context provided in class. As a teaching collection, there is a lot of potential. For an independent researcher or graduate student the collection would be useful for finding material to supplement ideas and for finding jumping off points to study particular subjects.

I know this collection is still in development, there are a few things I would like to see. In addition to the list of courses that use the collection, I would like a guide that suggests how this can be a teaching resource. I would also like to see some type of reflective writing about what it means to include an image in this collection. Both of these things would involve inquiries into what a stereotype is and provide some additional context to the collection.

A completely unrelated note: I was watching Supernatural a few days ago (something from Season 9) and was both surprised and little proud that even though the artifact the characters fawned over in the forefront lived in a mysterious, wooden box that would never hold any type of historic material, they did have legit, plain grey archival boxes as props in the background. Archives on TV!

Archives: Paper History and Balzac

After this week’s discussion I began to develop a new perspective on a book that I have been reading intermittently for the past few months, Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions. This book tells the dual stories of David Séchard in his attempts to manufacture cheap paper and David’s brother-in-law Lucien who dives into the world of journalism. For archivists, especially those concerned with preservation, historic paper types and manufacturing is often a technical discussion. Alternatively, Lost Illusions illuminates the social context of the technical development of paper production and the social implications of abundant and cheap, albeit poor quality, paper.

 In Lost Illusions David gives a detailed description of history of printing and paper making, giving particular attention to the transition from linen to cotton paper. Lamenting the fragility of cotton paper that easily falls apart, David acknowledges that the expense, and literal weight, of linen makes it impractical to printers publishing newspapers and pamphlets in massive quantities. David’s interest is to decrease the cost of production and increase productivity. Lucien, on the other hand, depends on the fast paced newspaper market where paper, and the accompanying writing, is digested, gossiped, and disposed on a daily basis. For the newspaper printers, the quality and longevity that David desires are not important.

Throughout the book Balzac created a parallel between the poor quality of paper and the poor quality of journalism. The materiality of paper became grounds for harsh social criticism. Currently, archivists take special precautions to take care of the types of mass printed newspapers that Balzac detests. Analogously, people today quickly complain about the abundance of digital material that will somehow, in some way, be a part of the archival record of the future. Though Lost Illusions is a work of fiction the themes within the book are relevant to archives, and provide food for thought for historians working in archives.

Reading

Balzac, Honoré. Lost Illusions. Translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley. New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2007. Originally published between 1837 and 1843. (There are a few sections of the book that directly discuss papermaking, commercial printers, and the histories of paper. In this edition, pages 97-101, 336-338, and 452-453 are particularly useful.)

Lost Illusions on Project Gutenberg.

Archives: Crowdsourcing

This week’s Paul Conway, Oya Rieger, and James O’Toole readings grapple with the evolution of archives in the digital age. Digital archives have many advantages such as enabling use from far off locations and protecting originals from handling. Nevertheless, the digitization process involves time and resources that can be overlooked. Rieger and Conway spoke specifically of how digitization can have unforeseen consequences such as prompting the disposal of original materials and poor quality standards. Thinking about how archives can best handle large digitization projects led me to consider the benefits and costs of crowdsourcing. Archives are implementing a variety of crowdsourcing techniques, most of which revolve around user transcription and metadata.  

From an idealist standpoint, crowdsourcing is a great idea. It creates a reciprocal relationship between user and archive. In order for the archive to make large amounts of information available to everyone, everyone can put in a little help. In “Crowdsourcing: How and Why Should Libraries Do It?” Rose Holley articulates the relationship between crowdsourcing and social engagement. The reality of getting people to give their time, how to monitor them, and how to thank them are other issues.

Crowdsourcing could be a way to solve some of the problems that large scale digitization brings about for archives, but it is a solution that comes with its own costs. I have begun looking at the variety of projects that use crowdsourcing. While I am a huge fan of many of these projects, I am interested in how they force people and archives to create new relationships. Many of these projects exist outside of finding aides and mainstream scholarly work. Often the materials used revolve around popular topics that archives can get people excited to help out with such as old menus and war diaries. 

Some projects that have or are currently using crowdsourcing:

(Being one of the Internet’s largest crowdsourcing projects, it is only fitting that I got most of these from Wikipedia’s “List of crowdsourcing projects” page.)

Australian Newspapers Online 

Cambridge Public Library 

California Digital Newspaper Collection 

Citizen Archivist Dashboard 

Dickens Journals Online 

DIY History 

Europeana: 1914-1918 

New York Public Library Labs 

Transcribe Bentham

Zooniverse –

Ancient Lives 

Old Weather

            OperationWar Diary 

Readings

Conway, Paul. "Archival Quality and Long-Term Preservation: A Research Framework for Validating the Usefulness of Digital Surrogates." Archival Science 11, no. 3-4 (2011): 293-309.

Holley, Rose. “Crowdsourcing: How and Why Should LibrariesDo It?” D-Lib Magazine 16 no. 3-4(March/April 2010). 

O'Toole, James M. "On the Idea of Permanence." American Archivist 52, no. 1 (1989): 10-25.

Rieger, Oya Y. "Preservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitization: A White Paper.” Council on Library and Information Resources. Washington D.C. (2008).

Archives: Photographs in the Archives

In their article “Fields of Vision” Paul Conway and Ricardo Punzalan developed a theory of visual literacy specifically concerning digitized photographs. The authors categorized the ways that people approach archival photographs as landscaping, storytelling, and discovering by surveying a diverse user group. Having more of a background in art than history, I was excited to read about archivists grappling with the issue of visual literacy. I believe that Conway and Punzalan’s methods provide a more useful theory of visual literacy for historic pictures than an art historian could. Nevertheless the article also brought to light key differences between history and art.

Opposed to photography collections in art museums, the photographs in archives are predominately there because of subject matter rather than the photographer. This difference leads to differences in the ways that people interpret photographs that can lead to divergent results. Opposed to looking at content first, if the researcher thinks about the person behind the camera they begin to see the deliberate decisions that a person makes to construct a photograph. Likewise, attention to the print can divulge darkroom manipulations that were, and still are, common despite photography’s reputation for being a direct window into another era. Thinking about the photography process also forces the realization that most photographers, whether art, survey, or commercial, work in series.

Conway and Punzalan do not look at these aspects of photography, likely because they were not important to the users surveyed. Archivists emphasis original order and provenance for most of their collections, yet the individualized, content-oriented uses of photographs sometimes obscures original order and provenance. Many digitized photographs are displayed via subject, like the National Archives exhibits (for example Photographs of the American West: 1861-1912), or via place, like Philly History. Few archival photography collections (at least that I have found – still searching) emphasize the work of the photographer, or the commercial studio, in the same way that manuscripts or institutional archives emphasize an individual or institution. Visual literacy is a great stepping stone to make digitized, archived photographs accessible to users, but I believe the next step is for archivists to think about the people who produce photographs and the photographs themselves with the same critical awareness that they give documents.

Reading:

Conway, Paul and Ricardo Punzalan. "Fields of Vision: Toward a New Theory of Visual Literacy for Digitized Archival Photographs." Archivaria 71 (Spring 2011).

Archives: Education and the Archives

Today I spent some time looking at digital educational programs from archives. The topics included all fit into a national, twentieth century timeline of events. I landed on the Presidential Libraries and Museums page of the National Archives that lists different educational initiatives. 

I focused my looking on the Presidential Timeline, which includes historical sources, exhibits, and activities for presidents beginning with Hoover.I specifically looked at the educational activity “Visiting History - President Clinton and Little Rock Central High School.” It is a historical investigation into an event commemorating a historical event. “Visiting History” was particularly poignant because it asked student to look at primary source materials from Little Rock in 1957 and about President Clinton in 1999. Additionally, it involved an activity where the students research a historic site local to them and track down primary sources about the site. I appreciated the reflectivity of the assignment. Asking students to consider primary sources from two periods is a good way to get them to think about change and what it means for a source to be historical. Asking the students to find their own historic site engages them in the question of how society labels certain sites as historic.

Besides linking to digitized sources, the website exists segregated from the archives. I wish that the primary sources had a link back to their place in the actual digital archives website, as that may be a way to make them consider the archives as the place where all of the information comes from. (See: here for an example of how the sources are formatted.)

Most of the educational initiatives that I looked at incorporated a combination of materials such as timelines, introductions to events and historical context, and activities where the students can look at primary sources and actively interpret them. I am curious if there are any studies about the use of these types of digital activities and feedback from the students and teachers that use them.

Archives: Historians and the Archives

Many of the archivists in this weeks reading asked themselves how the archives affect historians. As a historian-in-training, I admire the desire from one professional discipline to consider changing their methods in order to benefit another. I also wonder if historians would ever do the same. Do historians, who rely on archives for a great majority of their research, consider the big picture about the archives that they use? Should they?

When historians do research they want to make sure that their interpretations add to the existing historiography of a subject. Duff, Craig, and Cherry’s study asked historians how they became aware of and located primary sources, with archivists, finding aids, and footnotes being most popular. (Duff, Craig, and Cherry, 13-14) From my research experience, I have most often become aware of sources through footnotes and colleagues. While this allows me to read a primary source firsthand, it also means that I may be missing out on archives collections that may have value to my topic just because they were not used in past historians’ work.

Mary Pugh urged archivists to be reflexive about the assumptions they make and suggested that subject fields could be a great way to make archives more accessible. (Pugh, 42) Pugh’s conclusions are relevant to digital archives today. The ability to connect collections by subject could urge historians to try new collections that they possibly would not have found otherwise. Like archivists thinking about access, I feel like historians should think about the way that digital tools can expand their audience. This type of access to historical research involves the historian stepping outside of familiar historiographical conversations and also acknowledging that history is a collaborative process despite how solitary the historian in the archives may seem. 

 

Archives: Perspectives

The past two weeks have exposed me to some of the internal logic that archivists use to create and maintain archives. This internal perspective is different than my typical user perspective. Two articles, Cory Nimer and J. Gordon Daines III’s "What Do You Mean It Doesn't Make Sense?" and Jennifer Schaffner’s "The Metadata Is the Interface” tackled questions about how the archives can manageably make their collections more accessible.

Nimer and Daines advocated for social navigation tools integrated in online finding aides while Schaffner concluded that collection descriptions should be revised to meet user needs. Both of these articles highlighted that people often interact with archives in a way that bypasses interacting with the archivist.

Over the summer I conducted research in the archives of The Print Center at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. With a finding aide containing little, occasionally misleading, description I was able to navigate the not-yet-completely processed collection. Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner advocated that archivists should strive to make as many collection available as possible and that the archivists work be adequate, minimum, and sufficient. The Print Center’s archives meet these requirements, yet after these readings, I wondered how the collection could benefit from Schaffner, Nimer, and Daines suggestions.

An online finding aide with searchable keyword headings would help to prioritize series or boxes. A personalized way to keep track of this prioritization would also benefit the research. Thinking about what it would take to actually accomplish either of those things, I realized that archivists play an active role facilitating the access of their archives on the web, even if their presence is hidden.

 Readings:

Greene, Mark A., and Dennis Meissner. "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing." American Archivist 68, no. 2 (2005): 208-263.

Nimer, Cory, and J. Gordon Daines III. "What Do You Mean It Doesn't Make Sense? Redesigning Finding Aids from the User's Perspective." Journal of Archival Organization 6, no. 4 (2008): 216-232.

Schaffner, Jennifer. "The Metadata Is the Interface: Better Description for Better Discovery of Archives and Special Collections, Synthesized from User Studies." Dublin, OH: OCLC Online Computer Library Center, 2009.