Hot Brainstem

I was thinking of using this for high school students, but this exercise would also work well for undergrads.  Two main goals and two smaller goals:

1. Construct a narrative history of some person, event, topic, etc. using primary and secondary sources.
2. Explore what it means to have a written history of something — what are the biases that go into creating a history.
3. (Exposure to working with primary source materials.)
4. (General archives outreach and instruction.)

In the first part of the exercise, you use a secondary source’s source material to explore how the author(s) constructed a history:

1. Find a book that has includes tons of citations, many of which are from a single repository (see example below).
2. Identify an interesting 1-2 page passage from the book and retrieve all of the primary and secondary sources that the author used to build that history.
3. Students read the passage first, then they work together to identify where the author found all the information by going through the body of records, books, and other materials you’ve pulled.  You could create a worksheet to guide the students through identifying each cited concept or quote.
4. Discuss what the students found and where they found it.  Also talk about what else was in the source material that the author chose to not include — what do these extra details add to the story?
5. Optional: It would be nice to also pull a couple documents that extend the story beyond the written passage.  The book should be helpful in identifying such material.  You can discuss what these other materials add to the story.

The second part of the exercise has students building histories from from scratch.

1. Using a different passage in the book, again pull all the cited source material.
2. Without showing the students the passage, have them use the materials to build a 1-3 paragraph history of the topic you’ve laid out for them.  This might be more effective if students are broken into manageable-sized groups.
3. At the end, have the groups present their histories.  Optional: Create a more complete history using all groups’ histories.
4. Give the students the author’s passage and discuss the differences.  Use this as a jumping off point to discuss things like:
   • What details had more focus in the book than in the students work?
   • How does background and point of view affect one’s understanding?
   • How can one person’s understanding of history differ from another person’s and why?
   • Who determine’s what is history? How do different types of biases play a role?
   • Are primary sources reliable and how do they related to secondary sources?
   • What if sources disagree with each other?
   • Is history the truth?

Comments:

• This exercise would also work online or as a packet of reproduced materials, which would also allow for cross-repository source material.  I think it would it have more impact and get students more engaged if they were dealing with the original documents in-house, but that means the expense of a field trip.
• This would be a good National History Day small-group exercise.
• When writing the grant proposal to support such a program, don’t forget to use phrases such as “introduce historiographical methods” and “interrogate sources.”
• Transcriptions of tricky handwritten documents would help.
• An example of a book that has includes tons of citations from a single repository is A New and Untried Course, Steven Peitzman’s book about the history of Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania (1850-1998) which draws heavily from the collections at the Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center Archives.

This falls into “positive it’s been done before category” — I assume a number of teachers are using this approach.  So, as usual, I’d love to hear about any archivists, educators, whoever who have been doing this sort of thing at a repository or has struck up standing teacher-school-repository partnerships.

I tweeted out a question last Friday:
What’s a compelling reason for an archivist who doesn’t know EAD to take a workshop, rather than just skipping the XML & learning AT/Archon?

And got some thoughtful answers (for the most part, Rebecca!):

• @helrond: AT is much easier to learn once you know EAD.
• Susan @kitschqueen: future job opportunities?
• Sibyl Schaefer @sibylschaefer: Sometimes its easier to edit the xml than work through the program. The AT doesn’t do find/replace, for ex.
• Dee Dee @DerangeDescribe: Understanding http://derangementanddescription.wordpress.com/tag/ead!
• Mark Matienzo @anarchivist: you need to understand EAD to do stuff w/ the data. XSLT, etc. also need to understand it’s limitations and how apps implement it.
• Christine Di Bella @cdibella: What, personal growth and the joy of learning ain’t enough? Also, to set ‘em up and actually make the output work, you need to understand what’s behind them at least a little.

I agree with all of these, but especially the last 4 words of Christine’s response, “at least a little.”  I also completely agree and completely disagree with Mark’s comment — I agree with the points but think need is much too strong a word in practice. (Granted, Mark had to get it across in 140 characters while here I can decree loquaciously.)

But for those archivists and librarians who are simply trying to get finding aids done and get stuff online, this could be done by entering their collection info in AT into fields that look familiar (bio, scope, bulk dates, etc.), spend some time figuring out what child and sibling mean (seems to be a tricky point for a lot of people), and clicking the Report button to spit out a finding aid in html or as a pdf.  (For the purposes of this post, I will just refer to AT instead of AT/Archon — this is actually easier to do in Archon if you would use it as a public interface.)

When I first learned EAD, I was using the UNIX vi editor with SGML EAD.  Similarly, when I first started doing web stuff, you had little choice but to write the raw code.  I still feel more assured working in the xml than in AT, the same way that I often prefer working in the html code view rather than a wysiwyg editor.  In general, knowing what’s going on with the guts means that you are more flexible and much more able to troubleshoot.

But these days, there are lots of lovely and useful webpages that have been built by people who I assume don’t know the first thing about html. They’re using existing tools and services that shift the technology burden to someone else (the nerds), thereby allowing them to skip straight to getting stuff online. I’m using Wordpress here because it is dead easy, even if some of its code is a bit off.  I use Archivists’ Toolkit because it is much faster and easier than touching the EAD, even if my output is not ideal (which is more the stylesheet than the EAD itself).

To think about this issue a different way: If learning EAD stands in the way of learning a tool like Archivists’ Toolkit or Archon, that as a big problem.  Yes, the “right way” to do it is to learn EAD, DACS, XML, XSLT, and AT.  But I think if someone skipped straight to AT, perhaps taking a 2 or 3 hour AT workshop for some helpful handholding, they would get to a comfort level where they could go back to the repository and start getting stuff online.

Is it negligent to skip straight to AT?  No, and it doesn’t make someone a bad archivist. It is less than ideal and maybe even a bit risky, but it’s also a very practical approach.  And the more I think about it, the more I realize that this is the most immediate value of a tool like AT/Archon.

I welcome your comments, the more horrified the better. Although I’d love to hear from people who have taken this approach.

DisclaimerFest:

1 – If you are at an institution that has either of the following, please disregard this post and get back to submitting your reimbursement receipts for the last conference you went to: A dedicated IT person associated with the library/archives or more than 10 staff members who are some kind of archivist.

2 – This is admittedly a bit disingenuous, using a “skip straight to AT” argument, since the details of installing AT are often beyond the abilities of exactly the type of repositories that would benefit from using it for finding aid production.  I should look into this, but I bet some people are just using the AT Sandbox, exporting the finding aid as html or pdf, and mounting it on their own repository website. After AT and Archon merge, I hope someone offers hosted versions or service subscriptions (like Omeka.net or LibLime).

3 – In the interest of full disclosure, please visit the homely and overly long webpage that contains the finding aids that I have control over: www.phillyseaport.org/library. You will find pdfs, html, and more recent AT-output html finding aids.  I use AT at the Seaport Museum solely for the purposes of outputting finding aids to mount online, not in any way as a long-term archives management system.  I hope to go into why I do this in a later post.

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.

[Add-on, March 29, 2010:] Just got this forwarded to me — “Capture and Release: Digital Cameras in the Reading Room” by Lisa Miller, Steven K. Galbraith, and the RLG Partnership Working Group on Streamlining Photography and Scanning: http://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2010/2010-05.pdf

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.

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.