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.

[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

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!