Archives Found

Have you been reading the updates on the Haiti earthquake and wishing that you could help? Are you an archivist, conservator, preservation professional? Read on.

There has been a call for volunteers through the Blue Shield network, and according to the International Council of Archives, as of February 11, 2010, there have been over 500 volunteers.

From the Blue Shield press release:

The Blue Shield is the protective emblem of the 1954 Hague Convention which is the basic
international treaty formulating rules to protect cultural heritage during armed conflicts. The
Blue Shield network consists of organisations dealing with museums, archives, audiovisual
supports, libraries, monuments and sites.
The International Committee of the Blue Shield (ICBS), founded in 1996, comprises
representatives of the five Non‐Governmental Organisations (NGOs) working in this field:
- The International Council on Archives (www.ica.org),
- The International Council of Museums (www.icom.museum),
- The International Council on Monuments and Sites (www.icomos.org), and
- The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (www.ifla.org)
- The Co‐ordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (www.ccaaa.org)
National Blue Shield Committees have been founded in a number of countries (18
established and 18 under construction). The Association of National Committees of the Blue
Shield (ANCBS), founded in December 2008, will coordinate and strengthen international
efforts to protect cultural property at risk of destruction in armed conflicts or natural
disasters. The ANCBS has its headquarters in The Hague.

The Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield (ANCBS) wants to help the people of Haiti

The earthquake in Haiti of 12th January has caused an enormous devastation. The amount of people that lost their lives is beyond imagination. At the moment basic humanitarian aid and the rebuilding of a functioning infrastructure is crucial.

However, as soon as the situation in Haiti has become more stable, Blue Shield wants to help to enable experts from all over the world to support their Haitian colleagues in assessing the damage to the cultural heritage and therefore to the identity of their country. Subsequently, Blue Shield wants to support recovery, restoration and repair measures necessary to rebuild libraries, archives, museums, monuments and sites.

An important task of ANCBS is to coordinate information. ANCBS needs to know who and where the experts are. ANCBS therefore calls upon archivists, restorers, curators, librarians, architects and other experts to register online as a volunteer.

ANCBS wants to be able to bring experts in contact with those organizations that will send missions to Haiti, and make sure that volunteers will be informed about the situation in Haiti.

Please join Blue Shield to help your Haitian colleagues.

More information at the website.

Information from the ICA- first and second update on Haiti; list/statement of needs (download pdf at this link)

The International Council on Archives wants to publicize throughout the international community the efforts of our Haitian colleagues, who have formed a crisis cell “Heritage in danger”, on the fringes of the official commission for the evaluation of buildings and reconstruction. An initial statement of requirements has been issued and you will find a copy of it attached. The Secretariat has very recently been in touch with Jean-Wilfrid Bertrand, the National Archivist of Haiti, and Jérémy Lachal, Executive Director of Libraries Without Borders, currently on mission in Port-au-Prince. Jean-Wilfrid and others have confirmed that the items on the requirements list are really needed, and that, if anything, it is an under-statement. Jean-Wilfrid has in particular emphasized the urgent requirement for tarpaulins. These are needed to protect records that are at present lying on the ground, because the buildings that previously housed them have been destroyed. If nothing is done now, they will be completely exposed during the forthcoming rainy season. ICA is now working as a matter of urgency on ways of getting these and other materials to him at Port-au-Prince as quickly as possible.

… from the “equipment” section of the list:

2.2. Equipment
2.2.1. 60,000 acid-free archive storage boxes (350 x 350 x 350
mm)
2.2.2. 150,000 plastic gloves
2.2.3. 150,000 protective masks
2.2.4. 30,000 rolls of adhesive tape (neutral glue)
2.2.5. Pencils, felt-tips, labels, acid-free wrapping paper, glue,
string, zinc-coated paper clips, staplers, needles, 8½ x 11,
8 ½ x 14 size paper
2.2.6. 50 laptop computers
2.2.7. Three computer servers
2.2.8. 100 tents to act as temporary shelters for records and
salvage personnel
2.2.9. 20 two-way handheld radio transceivers
2.2.10. 20 mobile phones
2.2.11. 15 digital cameras of semi-professional specification
2.2.12. 8 GPS (global positioning system) devices
2.2.13. 200 safety helmets with lamps (miner’s helmet-style)
2.2.14. 30 heavy duty flashlights
2.2.15. 10 pick-up trucks
2.2.16. 5 lorries
2.2.17. Temporary storage facility measuring 10,000 square meters.
The managers of the Canne-à-Sucre historical park have
offered a storage facility, which is far too small
2.2.18. 2000 struts or props with hydraulic jacks
2.2.19. 2000 tubular scaffoldings with gaskets
2.2.20. 30 20 x 40 feet containers
2.2.21. 100 metal trunks (or durable plastic)
2.3. Financial Resources
We need money to:
2.3.1. Provide logistical support (fuel, food, transportation,
communication expenses, etc.
2.3.2. Rent storage facilities
2.3.3. Rent or buy second hand containers
2.3.4. Offer incentive pay for non volunteer workers
2.3.5. Purchase records, photographs, audio and video material
created prior to the earthquake
2.3.6. Write a damage report with photographic evidence
2.3.7. Purchase inventory software and set up a database

Full list of needs, requirements available in PDF at the bottom of this ICA announcement.

A few sources of information:

dLoc (Digital Library of the Caribbean)

IFLA- Haiti update

Cultural riches turn to rubble in Haiti quake- New York Times

A quick roundup of things that have recently caught my attention:

Are archivists today’s real peacemakers?

Politicians, beauty queens, and rock stars all claim they want world peace. But could the unassuming archivist, more likely to be found buried in a stack of yellowing newspapers than at a global summit, be the true peacemaker of our time?

That was the prevailing theme at the Scone Foundation’s “Archivist of the Year” awards, held last week at the CUNY Graduate Center: archivists aren’t here merely to perform the dutiful-but-dull task of preservation, but to defend civil liberties, encourage transparency, and maybe–just maybe–facilitate historical reconciliation between former enemies. Underscoring the idea of archivist-as-peacemaker, this year’s award was shared by representatives of both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Khader Salameh of the Al-Aqsa Mosque Library in Jerusalem, and Yehoshua Freundlich of the Israel State Archives.

You can also listen to the fall 2009 podcast of Dr. Saad Eskander’s talk on Recovering Iraqi Records to the Simmons GSLIS community here.  Eskander’s 2006-2007 blogs on the topic are available at the British Library.

Torn Lincoln paper digitally reunited with other half:

Call it a scholar’s birthday present to Abraham Lincoln. David J. Gerleman, an adjunct history professor at George Mason University, has digitially stitched together a torn document whose pieces are held by two different archives.

The lower half of document bearing President Lincoln’s signature is held at St. Lawrence University, in Canton, N.Y., while the upper half is at the Illinois State Archives, in Springfield. While the two pieces are still physically states apart, digital images of them have been pasted together to form an entire legal document with a coherent history.

Full article in Wired Campus. Digital image can be seen on this site (scroll to very bottom under “reunited documents”)

Now’s a good time to start thinking about MayDay 2010- what are you doing to promote disaster preparedness?

ALA-ALCTS is launching a national Preservation Week May 9-15, 2010 and there’s a call for two-minute advocacy speeches.

From the announcement:

Contest — Making the Case for Preservation Action to Save Collections

We all know how hard it is to lift the sense of urgency and priority for preserving collections, especially in our economically tight and
digitally oriented times. The American Library Association’s Association of Library Collections and Services (ALA-ALCTS) is
sponsoring a competition for the best “2-minute speech” to convince 3 key audiences of the importance of action for preservation as a part
of the first national collection Preservation Week (May 9-15, 2010).

The target audiences are:

●       Decision makers-directors, board members, elected and appointed officials, and other people who choose priorities for action and provide
the resources;
●       Friends, family, visitors and users, and others who work outside collecting institutions, and the cultural heritage, conservation, and preservation fields-public support is essential for preservation action;
●       Library, archives, and museum staff outside the preservation or conservation fields – shelvers, check-out and ILL staff, building operations, and housekeeping personnel can have a significant impact on collections preservation.

Here’s how the contest will work:
1.      Select one or more target audiences (i.e. decision makers; general audience; and/or library/archive/museum staff) to persuade with a 2-minute speech to support preservation and take preservation action.

2.      Write a short, compelling, and easy-to-understand argument that will persuade your target audience.  Send in one 2 minute speech per target audience.

3.      Send your written submissions in one e-mail per target audience to Yvonne Carignan, Library Director and Head of Collections, Historical Society of Washington, DC, carignan@historydc.org.

4.      Yvonne will distribute all submissions to a review panel representing preservation, conservation, and collecting institutions of a variety of types and sizes.  The panel will select the top three entries in each category.  The winning “speeches” will be highlighted on the Preservation Week Web site (www.ala.org./preservationweek) and the winners will also receive a surprise from ALCTS.

5.      The deadline for submission is March 8, 2010,  so don’t delay.

Here are some hints to help:
Send us the reasons for supporting preservation that have worked with people you know.

Audience:  Key decision-maker  –

If you had only 2 minutes to convince your institution’s doubting Board Chair, Director, Major Funder, that collections preservation should become a strong priority, budget priority, high priority, core function  of your institution, what would you say? what points would you make?

If you had only 2 minutes to convince your institution’s doubting Director that collections preservation should become a core function of your institution, what would you say?

Audience:  Friends, family, and neighbors outside the field
If you had only 2 minutes to convince your — Great aunt, cable or satellite installer, or neighbor that preserving cultural heritage collections should become a
well-funded activity, budget priority, high priority in your community, what would you say? what points would you make?

If you had only 2 minutes to convince your neighbor that preserving cultural heritage collections should become a high priority in your community, what points would you make?

Audience:  Line staff in your institution outside preservation and conservation

If you had only 2 minutes to convince your colleagues that by making collections preservation a strong priority, high priority, core function, they could make a real difference to your users, what would you say?  what points would you make?

If you had only 2 minutes to convince your institution’s volunteers that by making preserving your collections a high priority, they could make a real difference to your users, what points would you make?

I’m preparing to spend 1.5 days as a participant at THATCamp Columbus, and I’m really excited about the possibilities. Some of you may recall that I was also a participant in THATCamp Austin back in August, and I came away from that experience with some solid ideas and some good starting points for future exploration.

A partial description from the website of the Ohio Humanities Council:

THATcamp (The Humanities And Technology Camp) Columbus, a collaborative effort of the Ohio Humanities Council and the Center for Public History and Digital Humanities at Cleveland State University, is a user-generated “unconference” on digital humanities inspired by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University.    We’ve already received a lot of support from the Digital Humanities community, so we’re expecting this to be an exciting and entertaining event.

Looking back, I see that I never posted a review of my experiences at THATCamp Austin. Lo siento. While a full review may not be in the cards, I can say that I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of interest in the topic of crowdsourcing and archives/cultural heritage. As it turned out, Ben Brumfield and I ended up chatting with a decent-sized crowd in the large auditorium during the first session. Ben’s working on a neat volunteer transcription project called From the Page that he had previously demoed at THATCamp 2008. The Austin version of THATCamp was short, and Ben’s talked about some of the other challenges elsewhere. On the plus side, I found that this was a fantastic opportunity to meet/mingle with digital humanities folks that I’d wanted to meet for awhile, and while there were some familiar faces, I think this was a great way for a lot of newer, digitally minded archivists and programmers to share and receive ideas. There was a lot of positive energy generated even in that short evening, and because of the tie-in with the Society of American Archivists annual meeting, I had the chance to talk with some (though not all) of the THATCampers during the rest of the conference week. I’m hoping that something similar can be organized for the Washington DC meeting this summer.

I’ll be back to talk about THATCamp Columbus after it’s over! *fingers crossed*

Fifteen museums and cultural institutions (including the Smithsonian American Art Museum) are participating in Wikipedia Loves Art , a scavenger hunt/content-building contest that looks like a whole lot of fun. Check out the Flickr group and rules here.

Some of the prizes that looked most toothsome to me:

Indianapolis Museum of Art

The photographer with the most points (who shot at IMA) will win a fabulous prize package that includes a FREE iPod Touch, a fabulous IMA Blog t-shirt and a limited edition IMA Blog Rubik’s Cube.

Museum of Modern Art

Private after-hours tour for up to 10 people guided by an art historian.

Smithsonian American Art Museum

The winner(s) will receive a boxed set of books from our “Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum” series. In addition they will receive a special American Art Museum tote with an imprinted design based on our Kogod Courtyard roof, a tie featuring our building, a boxed set of museum note cards, and a copy of our publication Temple of Invention, about our historic building.

What are you waiting for? Get out there with your camera, and don’t forget to include me when you win that free membership or iPod!  (Thanks to Jeff Gates over at the Smithsonian Eye-Level Blog for this one!)

A (somewhat) similar local project is happening on Saturday night in Columbus, Ohio at Gallery Hop in the Short North. Several shops will be holding a photo scavenger hunt using Twitter, with gift certificate prizes. I didn’t find any information about what they’ll do with the pictures at the end, but it’s still a neat way to get patrons participating. Follow the Tweets here.

These are pretty low-budget ways to get tech-savvy folks involved that might otherwise never set foot (virtually or otherwise) in your establishment. Could you make this work for your institution, too?

Memphis TV station WHBQ put together a website containing historical video footage from the Memphis sanitation workers strike that brought Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to their city during a period of demonstrations and unrest. Take a look here: A View From the Mountaintop

I think this is an interesting example of a group of non-archivists/historians/librarians/professional records people taking charge and creating a way to share and preserve the materials that they have.

News article about this project: Memphis TV Station Uses Archives As Online Resource

Over the years, different portions of the voluminous “King papers” (if they can even be distilled into something like one group) have been in and out of the media. Currently, many institutions hold materials relating to Dr. King, and there has been no small amount of fighting over where the various papers should be kept and accessed. I’m glad to see that this TV station, not in the business of historical memory, has decided to share their materials with everyone.

Some of the places that Dr. Martin Luther King’s papers can be found:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Archive at Boston University

The King Papers Project at Stanford University

Morehouse College Collection at Atlanta University Center

As an archivist (and come to think of it, as a person), outreach is something that I am passionate about. When I hear stories like the one below, my first instinct is: how can I help? How can I make this better?

The story, from NPR: Saving Folk History, One Recording at a Time

 ”Judy Hyman plays fiddle in a band called The Horse Flies. In her living room in Ithaca, N.Y., there’s a pine-wood dresser right next to the couch. It’s not for shirts and sweaters — this used dresser holds hundreds of precious cassette tapes, an archive of rare recordings that spans more than three decades. She recorded many of them herself; the rest were gifts from other musicians and collectors…”

“…A few years ago, Alden began to wonder what he was going to do with his collection of field recordings. He considered giving his collection to the Library of Congress, or to a university. However, Alden says he worried that they’d be hard for musicians like him to access, and that they’d gather dust lying on a metal shelf. Besides, what librarian in his or her right mind would let someone into the stacks with a banjo or a fiddle to learn a rare ballad or breakdown?

If the people who are really interested and want to play it or hear it, have difficulty assessing it, what good is that?” Alden asks. Alden talked to a few of his friends, like Hyman, and together they came up with an idea: Why not preserve their old recordings themselves? They call their ad hoc group The Field Recorders’ Collective. They decided to use the Internet to bring this little-heard music to a new audience. Every year, they remaster and release 10 to 15 old recordings. Using their home computers to edit audio, the collective then packages every CD in a simple cardboard sleeve. Liner notes are available online, with photos…”

From the “about us” section of the Field Recorders’ Collective site:

“Further, these recordings have never before been generally made available to the old time and traditional music community. In so doing, the Field Recorders’ Collective hopes to “democratize” these collections and see them form a public archive. This is opposed to seeing them disappear in the “black hole” of university and government archives which are, at best, difficult to gain entrance to or at worse, only for those with credentials for accessing them. “

There are a few issues at hand here, but in my mind this is primarily a problem of perception. I understand the idea that there are people who don’t want to surrender their collections to places that don’t really seem to care about them (either the collection or the collector). The aforementioned “black holes” do exist–  there are few active collecting repositories that I can think of that don’t have a backlog of unprocessed materials. Are there archives with onerous researcher restrictions? Well, yes, but I don’t believe that’s true for the majority of university archives, nor many government repositories. I’ve been on the researcher side of the desk at the Library of Congress, and while the first visit required some paperwork, subsequent trips have been fairly seamless.

How to combat some of these negative perceptions? On an institutional level, have a clearly defined collection scope and mission statement. In order to cut down on the “black holes,” we shouldn’t be collecting anything that doesn’t fit the needs of the institution. Further, I think there’s a larger argument to be made here for minimal processing, robust indexing and cataloging, and some form of digital access– whether that’s an EAD-encoded finding aid, full digitization of text/audio/video, or somewhere in-between. Finally, deaccessioning of collections that don’t fit the scope– whether donated to a another institution or giving them back to the family– is important but rarely done. In many cases, referral of a donation to a more appropriate repository is ultimately the best thing for almost any collection, which would likely be used more often if housed with similar materials. Have you recently examined your research policies from the other side of the desk? How do your procedures stack up against those from similar institutions?

Coming back to the story above, this collection of rare recordings is currently stored in a wooden dresser drawer in someone’s living room, which is not an ideal environment for magnetic tape. While the Field Recorders’ Collective may release 10-15 recordings per year, the vast majority of the music is even less accessible to the public than if it had been donated to an institution. I’m glad that there’s a group out there that cares about this music and wants to distribute it, but what will happen to the tapes if the Collective is not able to finish re-releasing all of them? Even if they are able to release all of the music eventually, what happens to the original recordings?

Think about this: how do you challenge the idea that archives are not a place where materials are accessible to the public? Who uses your collection, and who would you like to use it more often? How do you effectively reach out to collections that fit your scope? What do you do with donors or collections that would be a better fit elsewhere? Food for thought.

One of the more exasperating things about travel (and particularly holiday travel) is the dearth of time that I seem to have for sitting down and thinking (and then posting) about things that I want to discuss– and I’ve been doing a lot of traveling over the past few months.  Something that I’ve been thinking about in both a general, and more specific sense is the access and use of electronic records. I don’t have time to get into my own project and thoughts now, but I wanted to share a general article about the transfer of the Bush documents to NARA. The AP article really doesn’t get into the ingest process and anticipated entry into the ERA, but a I wanted to share a quick quote that I found to be really interesting:

 ”The electronic-records archives system may be able to take in a tremendous amount of e-mail and other records,” Brachfeld said. “But just because you ingest the data does not mean that people can locate, identify, recover and use the records they need.”

Full article from The Columbus Dispatch:  Bush’s electronic data a major archiving task

Hope everyone had a safe and lovely holiday break– and I’m hoping to be back on the blog more often once I make it home!

I’m in Chicago this week, attending NEDCC’s Persistence of Memory conference, and I hope to share some thoughts about that soon, once I’ve digested things a bit.

Until then, a quick article about public records and a recent ruling by the Ohio Supreme Court from the Columbus Dispatch. A brief snippet:

Even deleted e-mail messages are public records if they deal with official business, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

In a unanimous ruling, justices ordered commissioners in Seneca County to scour their computer hard drives for e-mail messages requested by a Toledo newspaper last year that had been deleted.

The decision was a rare legal victory for public-records advocates in Ohio.

Full article- Deleted emails are still public records.

As a sort of side note to recent conversations in the archivo-blogosphere about preserving digital conversation, and the sometimes fleeting nature of born-digital materials, I’ve been following a few discussions about the nature of blogging and how that fits with the academic system. The question of whether blogs can be “worthwhile” and “academic” has been floating around out there for awhile– and I think has already been ably answered by many, so I won’t rehash that discussion. I believe that blogs can be not only a way to reach out to a wider audience, but also a great way for  students and other faculty, including librarians and archivists, to become better informed and engaged with the university community. Blogging and participating in reasoned, thoughtful discussion can provide the participants with a greater understanding of viewpoints and opinions that they might not have previously encountered. However, should publishing on academic blogs and other digital scholarship be part of the tenure-track discussion for librarians and archivists? Does building a website based on interpretation of primary source materials serve as an academic contribution? How should digital scholarship be evaluated, and can it be adequately compared with old-media contributions? Should it be?

Anonymity is something that critics decry as a problem with giving blogs and their contributors credibility– another is the lack of peer review. However, for those already following the outrage over the Annoyed Librarian, it might seem as though we’ve crossed both of those bridges already–the most recent issue of the “peer-reviewed” Journal of Access Services was entirely written by that same pseudonoymous blogger (though I’m not sure that’s the best example). Eric Schnell over at The Medium is the Message has posted recently about rethinking scholarship in academic librarianship and the need for us to redefine the understanding of scholarly communication to fit with changes in the profession– go take a look. Eric has some great links, including one on the Modern Language Association’s discussion of tenure requirements and this report (pdf) from the Ithaka Group that explores how (non-librarian) faculty are using digital scholarly resources.

So, why am I bringing all of this up? Well, if blogs and other digital media are considered to be scholarship of enduring value, how will all of this information be kept? Who will be storing it, and what will become the “authoritative” copy? How will it be accessed, now and in the future? What kind of architecture do we have as archivists and “keepers of memory”, as contributors, as bloggers, as users and consumers of information to ensure that digital scholarly contributions will be around and available for the long haul? I don’t have all of the answers, but I’d love to hear your thoughts.

With the news today that The Christian Science Monitor is moving away from their traditional print-based platform to an online-only daily version (and a weekly print magazine), I’m wondering how archives and libraries who currently receive this and similar paper publications are planning to keep these digital representations long-term. I know that there are other small publications out there that have gone to a web-only presence– how are the articles being stored for long-term access and use? Are they being stored at all for research use? (I’m not thinking just of the CSMonitor here, but of local, small papers without a national readership).  How is the information organized (content management system, I’m guessing) and is it commercially available (and viable) for other institutions who wish to purchase or license  access to materials? Do you know of small (or large) papers that have gone this route with success? Are they charging an arm and a leg for access to their stored material?

Announcement by The Christian Science Monitor