The
first presenter, Jennifer Huebscher of the Minnesota HistoricalSociety, discussed her repository's quick-and-dirty but highly
effective approach to increasing access to electronic records. She
focused on the electronic records of former Governor Timothy
Pawlenty, who was exploring a presidential run at the time the
records were transferred, and on the records of a gubernatorial
redistricting commission.
From
the start, the Minnesota Historical Society's collaborative
relationship with the Office of the Governor smoothed the way. The
records were covered by a retention schedule that was devised during
the tenure of Pawlenty's predecessor, and as a result Pawlenty's
staff knew that certain types of records should be kept. Toward the
end of Pawlenty's second term, his staff contacted the Minnesota
Historical Society and then arranged an in-person meeting to discuss
the impending transfer.
At
the end of the year, the Office of the Governor placed the records on
portable media and gave them to the Minnesota Historical Society.
Owing to its discussions with the governors' staff, the archivists
had a clear sense of what to expect, were able to compare the files
it had in hand with the list of files it anticipated receiving, and
were able to obtain a missing set of files from Pawlenty's staff
The
files consisted of image files, sound files, and one moving image
file. The image files, which consisted of digital photographs of
Governor Pawlenty and the First Lady, were transferred on two DVD-R
discs and consisted of 1,740 files, most of which were in JPEG format
but also included some TIFF, PDF, and BMP files. Images of the
Governor were placed on one disc, and images of the First Lady were
placed on the other, and each disc contained nine folders – one for
each year the Governor was in office. The file names ranged from
descriptive to vague, and the naming conventions used for images of
the Governor differed from those used for images of the First Lady.
Some
of the sound files were transferred on CD and DVD, and Minnesota
Historical Society harvested others from the Web using HTTrack. Most
of the 410 files were in MP3 format, but others were WAV or CDA
files, and one was an MP4 file.
Minnesota Historical Society's electronic records archivist copied the files
onto a secure Storage Area Network maintained by the state's
Enterprise Technology department, and staff continue to run checksums
periodically; however, a full-fledged framework for preserving these
files has yet to be developed.
Internal collaboration made the records broadly accessible. The electronic
records archivist produced a set of copies that cataloging staff
processed and described, and the two worked together to figure out
how best to provide access to them. Owing to significant public and
media interest in the files, Huebscher and her colleagues sought to
apply the principles of More Product, Less Process processing. They
didn't alter file names or the overall arrangement of the files
unless duplication or other problems made doing so absolutely
necessary, they didn't create a set of preservation masters in
normalized formats, they didn't add any extra metadata, they didn't
do any additional research that would have enhanced description of
files that had non-descriptive or undated file names. They created
the finding aids describing the records by using a simple template,
extracting file names, and using matching the hierarchical
arrangement of the finding aids to the hierarchical arrangement of
the files themselves.
The
finding aids also facilitate access to the files themselves. The
sound recordings finding aid covers a mix of born-digital files and
physical cassettes and CDs, the display is simple and uncluttered,
and the access copy of each born-digital file is hyperlinked in a
field so users can easily download the files; the
finding aid also includes file sizes to that users could estimate
download times. The photographs finding aid includes a thumbnail
illustration for each photograph (housed within a tag),
and the amount of description varies depending upon information
provided with each photo.
The
Minnesota Historical Society took a similar approach to making
accessible geospatial data created by a gubernatorial redistricting
commission, and plan to use the procedures they developed when
processing the Pawlenty records and the redistricting commission
files to make other records transferred on disc accessible via the
Web.
I
was in pretty bad shape by the time Jim Williams of Middle Tennessee
State University's Albert Gore Research Center began discussing his institution's efforts to rescue
two U.S. Representatives' constituent service files, so my notes and
my memory of his presentation are both deficient; as a result, I'm
limiting my comments to the portions of the presentation I remember
semi-clearly.
The
constituent services files Williams and his colleagues sought to
preserve were created using Lockheed Martin's Intranet Quorum (IQ)
application. The offices of many U.S. Representatives use IQ to track
correspondence, store constituent contact information, and track the
progress of constituent cases. IQ is proprietary, and each office
that uses it pays roughly $60,000 per year to do so. Lockheed can
convert the data in IQ systems to a more user-friendly format, but
there is a cost associated with doing so.
Middle
Tennessee State University was able to persuade the U.S.
Representatives who donated their records to pay for the conversion
of their IQ data, but other repositories may find themselves forced
to pay for conversion or to convert the data themselves. As a
result, the university hopes to take the lead in developing ways to
reconstruct IQ databases and to collaborate with other archives
seeking to to the same thing. Anyone interested in participating in
a consortium devoted to preserving IQ data should contact Williams at
Jim.Williams-at-mtsu.edu.
Image: Light fixtures in Sapphire Room OP, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, 10 August 2012.
Image: Light fixtures in Sapphire Room OP, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, 10 August 2012.
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