Hot Brainstem

Today I received an email reference request and over the course of 20 minutes, located four helpful resources (2 printed, 2 microfilm) in the Archives and Library. I took snapshots with my iPhone, emailed the photos to myself, then composed a reply describing the content of the photos and forwarded everything to the researcher.

The image to the right is all the detail I’m looking to provide at this early stage of the researcher/resource conversation.

Beware, this is one of those revelations that is completely obvious once it has happened: Being able to email myself photos from speeds up reference and makes me more likely to send along more resources that I identify.

Ideally, I would be able to register that a digital surrogate exists for some library/archives resource, but that is exactly what tends to slow me down in the first place. It is the extreme quick and dirty approach that makes the whole process work. Doing “proper imaging” of resources bogs me down. The slowdown caused by the initial setup of the scanner or photo staging area lends itself to waiting until a threshold has been reached — say, once I have 20 things to scan (across different researchers), I will set aside time for a scanning session.

The thing that drove me to escape this session-based imaging and changed my mental approach was researchers themselves. At least a 70% of our in-house researchers simply take reference snapshots of materials rather than making photocopies or requesting scans. I decided that if it was OK for them, it was OK for me to give to them. That is when I started taking quickie snapshots of everything with my point-and-shoot digital camera.  But the transferring of photos to the computer also tended to cause a slowdown for me: the former scanning session slowdown morphed into an image transfer session slowdown — a smaller bottle-neck than before, but still a bottle-neck.

My new camera-phone approach has become:

1. Find a resource
2. Take snapshots with my phone (including any photos need for citation info)
3. Email photos to my work email address (low-res is usually fine)
4. Tweak file names to make sources clear
5. Email snapshots to researcher

This approach has not only saved me hours of time but also improves the response time and thoroughness of reference requests.

While I do have an iPhone, this would certainly be true of any camera/phone that would allow for emailing or wireless image transfer.  I’m interested in hearing what quick and dirty approaches others use.

I’ve noticed that when people use Google Earth to fly over places from their past — where they grew up or places they used to live — it seems that their memories are dislodged in a different way than when you have people recall memories based on other techniques.

It is the difference between asking “Where did _______ happen?”
and asking “What happened near _______?”

I’ve worked with several people who were flying and zooming around in Google Earth and ended up saying things like, “Oh, I remember when this place …” or “That was where I saw …..” Last year, I was using Google Earth with my dad and I heard several stories that I had never before heard from him about growing up outside Cleveland.

There is something about Google Earth’s birds-eye (aka, oblique) views that gets people recollecting in different ways than they do with street map views or even straight-down aerial photos. Skimming over the earth with a 45-degree birds-eye perspective imbues a more narrative sense of the landscape than the straight-down view. It is really about going beyond strict geographic context to convey a larger sense of perspective.

I’m interested in knowing if oral historians have used Google Earth as an “oral history memory motivator.” I know that the PhilaPlace Project is using a mapping component to “feature an interactive map through which visitors can explore both personal stories and historical records mapped to specific locations.” They map stories and eventually may use maps to obtain those stories. Later today I’m heading over to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania to talk with Joan Saverino and Melissa Mandell about the mapping component of PhilaPlace.

This approach would only work for certain types of location-specific recollections and would be difficult to use in a field interview setting (due to reliance on speedy network access). But for certain types of interviews, it may be a good tool. One might even be able to employ the tour-recording-and-narration feature of Google Earth to “easily” record an entirely georeferenced oral history.

If anyone knows of projects using Google Earth to jog people’s memories, I’d love to hear about it.

I just got a great challenge from my good friend and former boss Megan Fraser (currently at UCLA Special Collections):

If you had to sum up the virtue of catablogs in one or two sentences, what would you say? Sentences consisting entirely of “they are awesome” will be disqualified.

I came up with something kind of long and boring, and I don’t want to besmirch anyone’s wording quite yet.  Please submit your pitch in the comments!

Links for catablogs…please add more to the Catablog page @ the Archives 2.0 Wiki (thanks Kate).

• UMarmot @ UMass Amherst (the original catablog)
• Drexel University Special Collections & Archives
• Emma @ Brooklyn Historical Society (soft launch version, as of this writing)
• Independence Seaport Museum (some sweet day…)

Last summer I had the opportunity to talk to a group of Museum Studies students from the Syracuse University (program link). I wanted to come up with an interesting approach since I knew the group would be arriving with a museum-centric rather than an archives point of view.  As such, they understand the exhibition value of items more than the research value.

For my own part, my default mode of operation is to see archives collections from a research value point of view.  But working in a museum, I am also constantly having to consider exhibition value, which is interesting and enjoyable but very time consuming.

I decided to use these two types of uses — research value vs exhibition value — to characterize how good or bad an archives collection is.

So I broke it down into two factors:
Coolness = Exhibit value
Usefulness = Research value

Generalized Examples

Cool and Useful
Collections of any size where items/groups in the collection provide direct context for the other items/groups in the collection. Bonus if collection comprises multiple genres or types of materials.
Cool and Useless
Small to medium size collections containing disparate or random material, but with items pertaining to well-known people, subjects, or events — especially collections containing pictorial material, ephemera, or objects.
Boring and Useful
Sizable groups of business records and personal papers, pertaining to people, subjects, or events that are not well-known.  Especially typescript material — it isn’t even cool enough to be handwritten on old paper.
Boring and Useless
Small collections of manuscripts that lack significant content, context, or cohesiveness. Looks like “just some old paper.”

Specific Examples

Cool and Useful
Beautiful, comprehensive architectural drawings showing the interior spaces on one of the finest ocean liners built in the 1910s.
Cool and Useless
Non-itemized receipt signed by James Forten, important Philadelphian and African-American sailmaker around 1800.
Boring and Useful
Institutional records of 20th century social welfare organization devoted to serving the needs of merchant sailors.
Boring and Useless
Bundle of legal and financial papers relating to the sale of a steamship in 1890.

Of course, these are not the only four options. Each factor is actually a continuous variable, with the stated levels being the extreme values, so each level represents the endpoint of a continuum.

It all comes down to context.
If a collection provides its own context, even on a narrow scale, it tends to be more useful to researchers and exhibit-designers — it can be used in a variety of ways by a variety of people.  Lacking that context, a collection must rely on other resources or contextualizing-work for its values to be realized.

If the goal is to make a collection maximally useful, then a collection with minimal usefulness has to be placed in context and/or somehow pimped out to a specific researcher who already understands that general context.  This is what we try to accomplish by making a finding aid and by generally advocating for our collections.

If the goal is to make a collection maximally cool, then we need to build up the context in such a way that it appeals to a wider variety of people — we’ll call them “the public.”  This may mean pulling in resources from many different places, even if it means that the end product contains a very small proportion of our own collection material.  This is what we try to accomplish by making an exhibit, whether online or in a gallery.

In practice, these ideas and approaches are mixed and balanced to match the needs of the situation. For many museum folks, an exhibition is the best way to use the material. Personally, I often think of archives exhibits as just another outreach tool that essentially functions as an advertisement for a collection. But again, it is a messy situation: often the archivist is the collector, describer, caretaker, exhibit designer, barker, lover, and fighter all at once.

That’s what’s so fun.

So it warms my heart to see all the new ways that archives repositories and archives collections can be publicized and made discoverable, using tools and approaches beyond the finding aid.  This has long — well, Internet-long — been true of online exhibits or mini-exhibits, but also certainly all of the other outreach and exposure approaches going on, like (to be Philly-centric):

• Penn Museum Archives blog
• Drexel Archives catablog and website
• Chew Family Papers processing blog
• Seamen’s Church Institute processing diary and mini-exhibit
• Drexel College of Medicine Archives blog
• Twittering archivists and #archives

Want to play with a Boring and Useless Grid? Download your own poorly sketched copy!

I have a dream of having an juicy endowment to pay for internships.  Even a small stipend would be nice to consistently be able to offer, but my quickie calculations suggest needing a $150,000-$200,000 gift to fully support even this level.

Alas, my idealized program would require a gift in the neighborhood of $1,000,000* — to support a full-blown, proper internship program, paying a fair hourly wage.

Of course the thing that keeps this from happening is that such a gift would always be used to endow a position such as a department/division head, not to mention that the size of institution that could support this sort of intern workforce is probably already big enough to be assuming some of the cost of having interns in the first place.  And in the end, in a smaller institution that could really benefit from the extra intern help, the money would be better spent hiring an additional regular full-time employee.

My real dream however: When I win the lottery, my plan is to set up endowed assistant archivist positions throughout the area. I would give enough money to pay the salary of assistant archivists & librarians, etc. with the cruel stipulation that to receive the gift, a full time department head would have to be in place and paid for by the institution (or by another endowment I suppose).  This should guarantee that every institution has at least two full-time staff, the minimum you need to really get a lot of things done.  I fully acknowledge that this is a self-reflective pipedream for myself.

Does any institution have atypical endowments anything like these?

The upshot: If anyone wants to set up an internship endowment — or better yet, an assistant endowment — don’t hesitate to contact me.  I’m willing to entertain offers of anywhere from 0.15 to 1.00 million dollars.  And just to sweeten to pot, I’ll allow you to adopt me.

*Internship calculation based on three cohorts of two interns each.  Two cohorts each of 20 weeks at 2 days/wk; 1 cohort of 12 weeks at 4 days/wk (equilavent to 48 weeks of full-time work, just short of being equilavent to a single full-time employee’s worth of hours).  Plus I added oversight coverage at 30% of supervisor’s time. The whole thing assumes a modest 4% yearly return on the invested endowment funds.

(To jump right to the survey and not read my blurblings, go here: Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon use in the Philadelphia Region)

Several months ago, I was able to tweak the EAD-XML exported from Archivists’ Toolkit and successfully import it into Archon.

In general, I feel that AT has more robust and stricter guts and works well for “the work of processing.” Archon, on the other hand, is about 500% friendlier, is easier to install and maintain, and has a public interface with the ability to serve up finding aids and digitized content right out of the box (so to speak). I know this kind of public interface is in the works for AT, but until it arrives and proves itself easy to use, my vote has to go to Archon for a smaller repository like mine.

While messing with AT and Archon, I got curious who in the Philly / Delaware Valley region is using Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon, and to what extent. I had heard from various people about testing both of them but I want to know the current state of things.

If I can get a decent numbers of responses, it might start to help us all make connections if and when we decide to use or test this packages. One way or another, I will post the aggregated responses.

If you are the broad Philly region, please take the survey: Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon use in the Philadelphia Region

I’ve been lucky enough that Christine Di Bella and Laura Blanchard have agreed to send out pleas to the DVAG and PACSCL mailing lists, which will happen in several weeks. Thanks!

[Survey respondent update - As of early on July 17]
10 people have completed the survey and there have been 111 abandoned visits to the survey page, where the visitor left without answering any questions. There is a good chance that many of these “bouncers” were robots and the like, but if you were a looker-and-leaver, please come back and fill it out! Thanks! Yet another link to the survey.

[Survey respondent update - As of July 23]
18 people have completed the survey and there have been 134 abandoned visits to the survey page.

John Armstrong, master of all trades and my pal, designed this collapsible custom book cradle for use with a large set of over 200 oversize volumes. The challenge was:

1. None of our current book cradles were large enough.
2. The content of this set of volumes (Philadelphia Maritime Exchange Records) is such that researchers use 2 to 4 volumes simultaneously.
3. The book cradles should be stored with the volumes, on already-cramped shelves.

John will be tweaking the design and making a total of four cradles, which I like to call the Franklin Street PortaCradle — named after John’s burgeoning tote bag business, Franklin Street (via Etsy).

I need to post photos of the tote John made me which is waxed cotton, blue, and awesome.

(video via Flickr; or video via YouTube if you prefer)

Update: John made four more PortaCradles on July 31.  We ended up using three of them the very next week for a researcher.  Check below for an action shot.

[View with PicLens]