l'Archivista

Need help addressing your e-records issues?

2012-01-03T22:41:00.007-05:00

If one of your New Year's resolutions involves finally doing something about your electronic records, be sure to check out Preserving Electronic Records in Colleges and Universities: Getting Your Program off the Ground. This online workshop, which records and knowledge management expert Steve Goodfellow developed for the New York State Historical Records Advisory Board, will take about two hours to complete and covers a host of topics:

E-records to be aware of in your environment
Awareness of the issues
Standards and other e-preservation initiatives
Goals and strategies for your preservation efforts
Disaster preparation and recovery planning
Developing an action plan

As the title suggests, this non-technical workshop was originally developed for college and university archivists in New York State. However, the information it contains is relevant to archivists working in a variety of settings who are trying to figure out how to start addressing their electronic records issues, and the workshop videos -- which can be viewed in one sitting or in ten-minute increments as time permits -- and supporting materials are freely available to everyone with an Internet connection.

Catching up

2011-12-15T20:15:00.003-05:00

A few things you might have missed:

Late last month, President Obama issued a memorandum directing each federal government agency to perform a comprehensive review of its records management program and then prepare a report for the Archivist of the United States and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget that outlines its plans to maintain and improve its program, "particularly with respect to managing electronic records, including email and social media, deploying cloud based services or storage solutions, and meeting other records challenges." These reports are due on 27 March 2012.

Paper records created during an internal military investigation of a November 2005 massacre of civilians in the Iraqi city of Haditha were slated for destruction. However, the records, many of them marked as being secret, ended up in trailers purchased by a local businessman, who hauled the trailers to a Baghdad junkyard. Several weeks ago, a New York Times reporter covering the American withdrawal from Iraq inadvertently found them there. At present, it is unclear whether the military will open an investigation into the handling of these records.

After a legal review, the Massachusetts State Archives has decided to open approximately 460 boxes of paper records of former Governor and current Presidential candidate Mitt Romney to researchers. Staff will review the files prior to disclosure and either remove or redact legally restricted information. The repository initially restricted access to the records as a result of a court ruling stating that gubernatorial records were exempt from the state's freedom of information law. As you'll recall, during the last days of the Romney administration, all of the files on its e-mail servers were deleted, several high-ranking officials were allowed to purchase the state-owned hard drives they used, and leased computer equipment was replaced.

The administration of South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley routinely deletes internal e-mails. The administration claims that it does so in order to free up storage space on its server, but Erik Emerson, Director of the state's Department of Archives and History, asserts that it violates state records laws.

OccupyArchive is George Mason University's Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media effort to capture digital items documenting Occupy Wall Street and other Occupy movements throughout the world. As Rosenzweig Center director Sharon Leon notes, they're "documenting a post-print movement" -- something that archivists must do if they want to ensure a complete and accurate documentary record.

Finally, on a lighter note, here's why we need to caution teens about sexting: sooner or later, their sexts will be all over the Internet for everyone to read.

Barry Landau: motion to suppress

2011-12-14T23:37:00.004-05:00

Yesterday, attorneys representing Barry Landau, the collector accused of stealing and selling records held by the Maryland Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Connecticut Historical Society, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, filed a motion to suppress all evidence found during a search of Landau's Manhattan apartment. Judging from its content, it seems likely that Landau's attorneys plan to argue that Landau's companion, Jason James Savedoff, who pled guilty to the charges against him on 20 September 2011, committed all of the crimes of which Landau is accused.

Given that Saveoff physically possessed all the stolen materials recovered after he and Landau were arrested at the Maryland Historical Society in July 2011 and is cooperating with prosecutors, I'm not particularly surprised by this line of argument. Do I think it's a good one? Emphatically, no -- by all accounts, Landau is a seasoned researcher and Savedoff was new to the ways of archival research -- but I won't be sitting on the jury that determines Landau's guilt or innocence.

The copy of the motion that appears below was downloaded from Public Access to Electronic Court Records (PACER). I am posting it here so that interested archivists can read it. Downloaded PACER documents may be freely distributed, so please feel free to share it with others.

At present, Landau's trial is currently scheduled to begin on 13 February 2012 and is expected to last 5-6 days.
Barry H. Landau Motion to Suppress 2011-12-13

Thanks to "anonymous archivist" for drawing my attention to the filing of this motion.

Salvage and recovery of water-damaged solid-state electronic media

2011-12-06T20:38:00.006-05:00

In the wake of tropical storms Irene and Lee, I've done some research into how to salvage and recover data housed on flood-damaged electronic media. There are some great, media-specific resources out there:

Hard drives: Library of Congress; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
Data tapes and analog audio and video tape: Association of Moving Image Archivists; Library of Congress; NARA; Specs Brothers
CDs and DVDs: Library of Congress; NARA
Floppy diskettes (yep, some people still use them): NARA

However, at present, information about how to salvage and recover data housed on solid-state media such as flash drives and digital camera and smartphone memory cards and solid-state devices such as portable music players (sometimes used to record audio), tablet devices, and computers with solid-state drives (e.g., MacBook Airs) isn't readily available. As a result, I contacted several vendors who specialize in recovering data from electronic media and devices damaged in floods, fires, and other disasters and asked for their advice. What follows is an initial summary of these conversations. I hope that it fills a gap in the existing professional literature -- and that no one who reads this blog ever has cause to make use of the following advice.

First, a few general guidelines:

Restoring data from backups is always easier and cheaper than recovering data housed on damaged electronic media. Back up your data!
A good disaster management plan will reduce the risk that your media will be damaged. For more information about developing such plans, consult the New York State Archives publication Preparing for the Worst: Managing Records Disasters.
Floods and burst pipes aren't the only water-based disasters. First responders use water to fight fire and to keep down dust from collapsed structures. If your media is burned or crushed and wet, treat it as water-damaged.
In some instances, you may have no choice but to try to recover data from damaged media. Backups may be incomplete or become corrupt, and sometimes records created immediately before disaster strikes (e.g., photographs documenting a crime scene) are so valuable that the time and expense associated with recovery is warranted.
When disaster strikes, salvage damaged media and stabilize it long enough to determine whether your backups are complete and intact. If your backups are complete and readable or the records on the damaged media are less than essential, don't attempt to recover the data stored on the damaged media; however, as noted below, the cost of attempting to recover non-essential data from water-damaged flash drives and memory cards is so low that you might want to give recovery a shot. If the records are essential and backups don’t exist, are incomplete, or have been corrupted, attempt to recover the data housed on the damaged media.
Actions suitable for water-damaged paper records may destroy electronic media. Although solid-state media should be air- or rice-dried (see below), some types of electronic media (e.g., hard drives) should be kept wet. Freeze- or vacuum-drying or using heat to speed air drying will likely destroy most forms of electronic media, and using heat to speed air-drying may also damage or destroy media.
Protect yourself. Before you enter a flooded area, consult with emergency personnel and make sure that it's safe to enter. Contaminated water and live electricity -- keep in mind that uninterruptible power supplies attached to hardware may be live well after the power goes off -- pose serious safety risks, and noxious gases can build up, particularly in basements. Wear appropriate protective gear.
Be prepared to document the disaster. If you need to file an insurance claim, your insurer will likely want photographs illustrating the extent of the damage. If the disaster is small (e.g., you drop a thumb drive housing important records into a cup of coffee), you may want pictures for your own records. If you're an archivist, records manager, or conservator, you may also want images to incorporate into presentations, publications, or other training materials. You may also need to take notes about the scope of the disaster and the location of hardware and media (first responders sometimes disconnect stuff and move it around).

Now, down to the nitty-gritty of salvaging and recovering water-damaged solid-state media and devices. If you're confronted with water-damaged solid-state media or devices, the following guidelines will maximize your chances of recovering your data.

Before you begin your initial salvage and stabilization effort, make sure you have the appropriate supplies on hand. For solid-state media and device(s), you'll need, at minimum, some clean, dry, lint-free cotton cloths (in a pinch, old bedsheets or garments will do) and some gallon- or quart-sized zippered plastic storage bags. Odd as it may seem, you may also want to have some uncooked white rice on hand.

Salvage and stabilization of flash drives and memory cards

Remove memory cards from devices and disconnect drives from powered-down hardware.
Wipe off any surface dirt and water with a clean, dry, lint-free cloth and then air-dry the media as soon as possible: place the media on a clean, dry, lint-free cotton cloth and prop it up in a way that speeds drainage.
You may use fans and dehumidifiers to facilitate the drying process.

Salvage and stabilization of solid-state devices (e.g., cell phones, tablet devices, computers with solid-state drives)

Unplug or remove the battery as soon as possible and gently shake the device to remove water lodged in ports and other openings.
Wipe off surface dirt and water with a clean, dry, lint-free cotton cloth and then air-dry or "rice-dry" the device. To air dry the device, place it on a clean, dry, lint-free cotton cloth and prop it up in a way that facilitates drainage. You may use fans and dehumidifiers to speed the process. To rice-dry the device, place it in a zippered plastic storage bag and then fill the bag with uncooked white rice. If you must retain the device for more than 2-3 days, replace the rice to reduce the risk of mold growth. (FYI, this "rice-dry" technique may also bring water-damaged cell phones or digital cameras back to life . . . but I don't think I would trust such a device in a mission-critical situation.)

After you've salvaged and stabilized the media or device(s), assess whether recovery is warranted. Do you have complete, uncorrupted backups of the records stored on the media or device? If you do, restored the data from the backups and discard your damaged media. If you don't, how valuable are the records? Are they essential to your business operations or a court proceeding? Are they of immense historical (or, in the case of personal files, sentimental) value? How great is the cost of recovering the data? As noted below, the cost of attempting to recover non-essential data from a flash drive or memory card is quite low. The cost of having a vendor recover data from a solid-state device can be quite high. You have to determine whether the value of the records warrants the cost of recovering them.

If you determine that the data is essential and warrants the cost of recovery, you'll need to contract with a vendor that specializes in data recovery work. Many state archives maintain lists of such vendors, and a quick Web search will identify many others.

If the data is non-essential, discard the media or device appropriately; however, if the data is stored on a flash drive or memory card, you may want to try to recover it yourself. Damaged flash drives and memory cards that house legally restricted or sensitive data should be physically destroyed (by a recycling vendor or with a hammer or shredder), and damaged devices that house such data should be sent to a vendor that will destroy their drives and recycle their other components. Damaged media and devices that don't contain such data can probably be recycled by vendors who specialize in processing electronic waste.

Recovering data from flash drives and memory cards

If the data is essential, send the drive or card to a qualified disaster recovery vendor.
If the data is non-essential, attempt to read the files on the damaged device. If you are successful, copy the files onto new media and discard the damaged media. If you are not successful, admit defeat and discard the media or, if you are attempting to recover data from a memory card, decide whether the purchase of commercial recovery software (prices begin at around $30.00) is warranted.

Recovering data from solid-state devices

Air- or rice-dry the device(s) and then send the device(s) to a qualified disaster recovery vendor. These devices are difficult to open and require special handling. Do not attempt to recover the data yourself.

Establish a relationship with your disaster recovery vendor as quickly as possible. Most vendors have 24/7 phone coverage, and they may be able to provide additional stabilization and recovery advice, offer pickup service (particularly in major metropolitan areas), and provide special handling or packing instructions. Moreover, the sooner recovery begins, the greater the chance it will be successful.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has a great list of security and other considerations that should be discussed with prospective vendors and incorporated into service contracts. I have only one thing to add: be honest about the nature of your disaster. If your media or device came into contact with water that may have contained biological or chemical hazards, tell the vendor about it. Vendors have the protective gear and equipment needed to work with contaminated material and they deal with embarrassing situations (e.g., "I dropped my camera in the toilet!") all the time, but they need to know what's coming their way.

As far as sending the media or device(s) to the vendor is concerned, follow the instructions provided by the vendor. However, you will probably be asked to do the following:

Place each piece of media and each device into a zippered plastic storage bag.
Surround each bagged piece of media or device with bubble wrap.
Pack the media or device(s) appropriately.
If sending portable media to a vendor, you may be able to use a rigid shipping envelope. You can also use a box at least twice as large as the media.
If sending device(s) to a vendor, use a box at least twice as large as the device
If using a box, immobilize the media or device(s) with packing material (N.B.: some vendors will request that each piece of media and each device be placed in its own box)
Ship to the vendor via overnight delivery service

Disclaimer: I am not liable for any losses or damages resulting from following any of the advice contained within this post.

Robert A. Caro in conversation with Harold Holzer, Albany, N.Y., 5 December 2011

2011-11-30T23:21:00.007-05:00

Next Monday, the New York State Archives Partnership Trust will host an evening's conversation between Robert A. Caro and Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer. Caro is the biographer of President Lyndon Johnson (The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent, and Master of the Senate) and of urban planner Robert Moses (The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York).

The Power Broker is widely regarded not only as a compelling (and not particularly flattering) biography of Moses but also a carefully researched history of modern New York City. Several scholars have concluded that Caro did not appreciate the extent of Moses' decline in power in the 1960s, and a number of twenty-first century New York politicians frustrated by legislative and procedural gridlock have come to see Moses's unparalleled ability to transform the built environment in a positive light, but no one contests Caro's assessment of Moses' impact:

It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never lived. It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.

This event will take place on Monday, 5 December 2011, from 7:30-8:30pm at The Egg (Center for the Performing Arts) at the Empire State Plaza, in Albany, New York. Tickets, which are $10.00 apiece, may be purchased by calling The Egg's box office (518-473-1845) or visiting The Egg's Web site.

Image: Robert Moses speaks at the dedication of Bethpage State Park near Farmingdale, N.Y., 1933. From New York State Archives, New York (State). Conservation Dept. Photographic Prints and Negatives, [ca. 1904-1949], 14297-87_4232. Image courtesy of the New York State Archives. Click here for a magnifiable version of this image.

Freedom of information laws throughout the world

2011-11-22T20:27:00.002-05:00

Things are going to be quiet around here this week: my modem abruptly ceased working on Sunday afternoon. Owing to the holiday I expect that the new one won't arrive until Friday at the earliest and that the coffeeshop in which I'm writing this post and all of my other usual wifi hotspots will be closed.

However, I wanted to draw your attention to a recent Associated Press article highlighting the results of its first-ever test of freedom of information laws throughout the world. At present, 105 countries have such laws, but the experience of the AP, which submitted requests for information to all of these nations and to the European Union, reveals that the extent to which these laws are observed varied widely.

Only 14 countries supplied all the information requested within the time frame specified in their laws, and 38 more eventually complied. More than half ignored the AP's requests altogether.
Newer democracies often complied more swiftly than mature democracies. Moreover, newer democracies' laws, which tend to reflect the existence of the Internet, are often better suited to today's world than the laws that mature democracies enacted decades ago, when the overwhelming majority of records were created on paper and the Xerox machine was the height of technological sophistication.
Many countries adopted freedom of information laws as a condition of securing foreign assistance, and most of these countries ignore or seek to circumscribe these laws as quickly as possible.
In some countries, citizens who file freedom of information requests may be targeted for retaliation. In India, where activists are using such requests to expose and combat entrenched governmental corruption, at least a dozen people who have filed freedom of information requests have been killed and dozens more have been violently attacked.

It's an interesting, thought-provoking piece, and it bears close reading.

State government electronic records in the news

2011-11-17T18:06:00.010-05:00

Two stories relating to the management and continued accessibility of state government records popped up on my radar screen earlier today. Both of them warrant watching; it doesn't seem as if either situation will be resolved any time soon.

The first involves gubernatorial records, an ever-present matter of interest and concern. Earlier today, the Boston Globe reported that during the last days of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's tenure as governor of Massachusetts, eleven of his high-ranking staffers used personal funds to purchase their state-supplied hard drives and laptops, staff replaced all of the other computers in the governor's office, and all Romney-era e-mail was deleted from the office's e-mail servers. When Deval Patrick, a Democrat, took office, he and his staffers found an electronic blank slate.

Romney's position is that staffers who purchased hardware did so openly and that he and his staffers complied with all records laws. It does seem that the Romney administration did transfer a substantial body of records to the Massachusetts Archives: according to the Globe, the the repository holds 700-800 boxes of paper records documenting the Romney administration. However, it's not clear whether these records include print copies of the e-mails. The Globe doesn't provide detailed information about them, and the Massachusetts Archives doesn't have an online catalog or detailed online finding aids.

Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who oversees the Massachusetts Archives, told the Globe that the hardware purchases strike him as odd and that the gubernatorial e-mail should have come to the archives: "Electronic records are held to the same standard as paper records. There’s no question. They’re not in some lesser standard."

Romney's campaign manager asserts that the Patrick administration is making a stink about the hardware purchases, computer replacement, and e-mail deletion because it is acting as "an opposition research arm of the Obama reelection campaign." After the Globe story appeared this morning, he filed a state Freedom of Information Act request seeking "all email correspondence, phone logs, and visitor logs" documenting contacts between Patrick administration staffers and prominent Obama political advisers David Plouffe, David Axelrod, and Jim Messina. Governor Patrick’s chief legal counsel has stated that staff will "be happy to fulfill" this request.

I'm not an expert on Massachusetts records laws, so I'm going to have wait for the experts to weigh in on whether the actions of Governor Romney and his staff were legal. Do I wish that the e-mail had been preserved? Of course I do. I'm an archivist, and my job is to preserve records of enduring value and to provide access to them. Gubernatorial correspondence and internal memoranda, regardless of format, do have enduring value. Do I think that Governor Romney should be pilloried for destroying the e-mail? If he violated the law, I hope he gets what's coming to him. If he didn't, I hope that Governor Patrick and other Massachusetts politicians focus on strengthening laws concerning the retention and disposition of gubernatorial records.

Do I think that Governor Patrick brought up these issues in an effort to give President Obama a boost? I don't know. Patrick and Obama are close allies, so it's possible. However, I'm also under the impression that Governor Patrick has his own reasons for disliking Governor Romney, and I'm open to the possibility that he and his staffers are discussing the matter because they keep getting freedom of information requests for Romney-era records. I must admit that I am curious as to how well the Patrick administration is managing its own records.

The second relates to an outrage. As anyone who's been paying even the slightest attention to the American news media knows, former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was recently arrested on charges that he sexually molested eight young boys. Two university administrators have been charged with perjury, and the university's president and football coach have lost their jobs.

Questions as to precisely what the president, the coach, and other university administrators knew about Sandusky and when they knew it are rampant. However, Pennsylvania's Right to Know Law, which was extensively revised in 2008, explicitly exempts most records created by Penn State, Lincoln University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple University. As a result, there is a distinct possibility that only those e-mails, phone records, and other Penn State records introduced in open court will be disclosed to the public -- unless, as the New York Times urged earlier today, the Pennsylvania legislature and governor move to lift this exemption.

Publicly funded universities in many other states -- New York included -- are subject to freedom of information laws. For what it's worth, I really don't see why Penn State, Pitt, Temple, and Lincoln should be granted such sweeping exemptions, and I hope that Pennsylvania's law changes. At the very least, I hope that Penn State's new administrators recognize that openness and honesty are essential to restoring the university's good name and start releasing records of their own accord as soon as prosecutors permit them to do so.

Yes, I know that Penn State is going to be hit with civil lawsuit after civil lawsuit and that its lawyers would probably jump for joy if a fire or flood destroyed a ton of university records. However, the lawsuits will come and the cost of settling them will be staggeringly high no matter what the university does.

Of course, Penn State is not the only entity that has relevant records: Sandusky met the boys he is accused of sexually assaulting through The Second Mile, a charitable organization that he founded. However, earlier today, the New York Times reported that investigators have yet to locate some important Second Mile records:

Officials at the Second Mile . . . reported that several years of the organization’s records were missing and had perhaps been stolen. The missing files, investigators worry, may limit their ability to determine if Sandusky used charity resources — expense accounts, travel, gifts — to recruit new victims, or even buy their silence . . . .

Much of the [charity's] older paperwork was stored at an off-site records facility. The travel and expense records, for instance, had been sent over several years earlier. But select members of the charity’s board of directors were alarmed to learn recently that when the records facility went to retrieve them, some of those records — from about 2000 to 2003 — were missing.

. . . . Subsequently, the [Second Mile] foundation located apparently misfiled records from one of the years, but the rest seem to have disappeared.

As awful as the Sandusky-Penn State situation currently appears, I can't help but think that we've seen only the tip of the iceberg. All the more reason to be as honest and as open as possible. The sooner the truth comes out, the sooner the victims can focus on rebuilding their lives and the sooner Penn State can focus on rebuilding itself.

BPE 2011: building digital repositories

2011-11-14T20:56:00.006-05:00

Still playing catch-up re: the 2011 Best Practices Exchange (BPE). After the BPE ended, I spent a few days in Ohio with my parents, came back to Albany, prepped for and gave a presentation on salvaging and recovering data from electronic media, got sick, got well, got sick again, and got well again. Now I’m barreling through all kinds of personal and professional backlogs.

I took decent notes, but three weeks have elapsed. If you were there and your memory differs from mine, please let me know. I’ll update/correct as needed.

One of the most interesting BPE sessions I attended featured two speakers who focused on the creation of digital repositories. The first, Mitch Brodsky of the New York Philharmonic, discussed the creation and evolution of the Philharmonic’s repository. At present,staff are digitizing the organization’s international era (1943-1970) and will result in the digitization of 3,200 programs, 72 scrapbooks, 4,200 glass lantern slides (older but easy to do), 8,500 photographs, 8,000 business record folders. By the end of 2012, 1.3 million pages of paper records will be digitized and the repository will house 15 terabytes of data. Digitization of audiovisual materials will add another 2 TB of data to the system. However, the organization also plans to add materials created during the first 98 years of the Philharmonic’s existence (1842-1940) and to incorporate late 20th and 21st century electronic records into the repository.

The project’s larger goals are equally impressive:

Accurate representation of originals. The Philharmonic’s archivists want the digital repository experience to match the research room experience as closely as possible. They don’t want to flatten curled records, disassemble bound volumes, or do anything else that would make the digital surrogates noticeably different from the originals. As a result, they’re using a digital camera (and the photographer who produced the digital surrogates of the Dead Sea Scrolls) to capture the originals, and many of the digital surrogates have a three-dimensional look. (Click here for an example.)
Comprehensiveness. Staff are sensitive to privacy concerns, but want the digital repository to be as complete as possible.
Easy and free accessibility. The Philharmonic expects that its digital repository Web site will be the public access mechanism for its archives.
A new, sharable model for digitizing large collections.

As you might expect, the repository’s technical infrastructure is pretty sophisticated -- and entirely open source:

ImageMagick is used to convert images delivered by the photographer into various formats and sizes.
OpenMigrate is used to channel data into and out of Alfresco.
Alfresco, the open source content management system, serves as the repository’s core. (At present, the New York Philharmonic may be the only institution using it to build a repository of archival materials, so this project really bears watching.)
Alfresco is not yet developed enough to meet the Philharmonic’s data entry standards, and as a result it enters metadata into homegrown databases and then ingests the metadata into Alfresco.
The repository’s search functionality is handled by Solr, Apache’s search server.
The repository’s viewer component is a Javascript tool developed by the Internet Archive.
A suggested materials component based upon end user suggestions ties together related materials of different types and other end user input will be added via phpList.
Vanilla forums will promote end user discussions.

Brodsky also shared a number of lessons learned. As far as I’m concerned, anyone thinking of undertaking any sort of large systems development project should devote a substantial amount of thought to each of them:

You don’t know what you don’t know. Brodsky never expected that he would learn PHP, become a bugtracker, or proof code. However, he’s an on-the-ground project manager, and the Philharmonic had problems with its vendor.
Do it manually before you automate. The Philharmonic started out doing a lot of manual review and dragging and dropping. However, doing lots of hands-on work before setting up an automated system revealed where errors pop up and enabled Brodsky to figure out how to correct them. Deep and intricate understanding of every phase of your project is a must.
Vendors need to earn it. Do not be laid back. The vendor is there to do right by you, and it’s their job to convince you that they can be trusted. (Hear, hear! Managing vendor relationships and retaining or taking control of projects on which vendors work was a recurring BPE 2011 theme).
Archivists who develop systems are product developers. As Brodsky put it: “You are not the same sort of archivist you were before you went digital.” People are actively accessing your online resources from all over the world, and they expect that your system will be reliable.

John Sarnowski of the ResCarta Foundation then gave a demonstration of the ResCarta Toolkit, an open source, platform independent bundle of tools that enables institutions to create digital collections that range from the very small to the very large.

The toolkit contains a variety of useful, easy-to-use tools:

Metadata creation: assigns institutional identifier, adds directory organization with aggregator/root identifiers, adds metadata to image files using forms, and writes Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) XML files to root directory.
Data conversion: converts JPEG, PDF, TIFF, or existing ResCarta data to TIFF with embedded metadata, writes a final object metadata.xml file with checksum. Archives and libraries have the option of using preconfigured METS XML (ResCarta metadata schemas are registered METS profiles) or apply a custom metadata template to all of the files in a given directory or tree.
Textual metadata editor: enables viewing and editing of OCR metadata and addition of descriptive metadata.
Collection manager: creates collections, manages digital objects, allows editing or augmenting object metadata, outputs METS collection level XML file, and can output Dublin Core or Open Archives Initiative_Dublin Core data from the collection-level metadata.
Indexer: creates a Lucene index of collection contents, indexes the collection level metadata, indexes all textual metadata from each TIFF, rebuild and optimize options.
Checksum verification: creates a checksum and verifies against the original checksum.

A separate ResCarta Web Application facilitates Web publishing of ResCarta digital collections. Simply download the application and drop your ResCarta data directory into the application.

Libraries and archives can also use ResCarta to create metadata before adding objects to CONTENTdm, and the ResCarta Foundation is thinking of creating a tool that will enable METS and Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) metadata to be moved into CONTENTdm in a streamlined, easy fashion.

I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play around with ResCarta --I just bought a new computer, but haven’t had the chance to get the thing hooked up to the Internet or do miscellaneous software installs -- but I was pretty intrigued and impressed. I’ll report back after I get the chance to play around with it a little bit.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that ResCarta may not be an appropriate solution for everyone: at present, only images and textual files can be added to ResCarta repositories: the ResCarta Foundation is, understandably, waiting for the emergence of good, widely accepted metadata standards for audiovisual materials. However, if you want to build a simple digital repository to house digital images and textual records, by all means check ResCarta out.

Image: Mary Todd Lincoln Home, Lexington, Kentucky, 22 October 2011. William Palmateer built this two-story brick, late Georgian house, which originally served as an inn, in 1803-1806. It was soon purchased by Robert Smith Todd, one of Lexington's most affluent men, and became a home for the growing Todd family. Mary Todd Lincoln was born in 1818 and resided in this home, which is a stone's throw away from the hotel at which the BPE was held, until she married Abraham Lincoln in 1842.

A day in Oneonta, New York

2011-11-12T12:53:00.012-05:00

Yesterday was Veteran's Day, and as a result all New York State offices were closed and I had the day off work. On a lark, I accompanied my friend Ron, who lives in Albany but teaches at the State University of New York at Oneonta, to Oneonta for the day.

Oneonta, which is about 80 miles to the southwest of Albany, is a community of approximately 14,000 nestled in the rolling hills of the Susquehanna River valley. It's a college town, and it has the lively, slightly off-kilter charm that one often finds in such communities.

The land now occupied by the City of Oneonta was originally settled by the Algonquin and the Iroquois. The first Europeans to move into the area were Dutch and Palatine German settlers who moved out of the Schoharie and Mohawk valleys shortly before the American Revolution. The city experienced a boom with the coming of the Delaware and Hudson railroad during the late 19th century and during the early 20th century was home to the largest railroad roundhouse in the world.

The roundhouse was demolished long ago, and the city's economy now centers around higher education (the State University of New York at Oneonta and Hartwick College sit on the hillsides that overlook downtown Oneonta), health care, and retail; Oneonta may have only 14,000 residents, but it's surrounded by numerous small towns and villages whose inhabitants come to Oneonta to shop, eat in restaurants, see movies, and attend concerts and other cultural events.

Oneonta's late 19th century boom is manifest in its architecture, much of which dates from that era. The Wilber Mansion at 11 Ford Street is an excellent example. It was built by George I. Wilber, who was the son of the founder of the nearby Wilber National Bank and who served as president of the bank from 1890-1923. The mansion's inner core was built in 1875, and the porches, turret, port-cochere, and high Victorian decorative elements were added during an 1890 renovation. Since 1999, the Wilber Mansion has served as the headquarters of the Upper Catskill Community Council of the Arts.

The Chapin Memorial Church at 12 Ford Street is directly across the street from the Wilber Mansion. The church, which was dedicated in 1894, is home to the Unitarian Universalist Society of Oneonta. It is the second house of worship that the congregation has built at this site. A 1941 lightning strike destroyed its steeple, which was never rebuilt, and, sadly, most of the congregation's historical records.

Main Street is, as its name implies, Oneonta's main thoroughfare. Two- and three-story commercial buildings dominate the streetscape, and the image above should give you a sense of what Oneonta's downtown looks like. My friend Ron and I had a leisurely brunch at the always awesome Autumn Cafe at 244 Main Street (look for the red awning). If you're ever in Oneonta, this is the place to eat.

After brunch, we headed to the State University of New York at Oneonta campus so that my friend could teach a trio of courses. While he was in class, I took in the exhibits at the Martin-Mullen Art Gallery in the Fine Arts Building (and highly recommend Recent Work: Faculty Art Exhibition, which will be open until 16 December) and spent a little time pondering Joseph Kurhajec's Twisting Force (2005), which occupies a prominent position in the courtyard of the Fine Arts Building.

I then headed over to the James M. Milne Library, where I spent a couple of hours working on an upcoming presentation on disaster recovery and electronic records (posts on this subject are forthcoming), then stopped by the adjacent Jazzman's Cafe for a cup of coffee.

It started snowing while I was at Milne Library and continued snowing as I made my way back to the Fine Arts Building to meet Ron. A few minutes after I took this picture, snow stopped falling in the courtyard and the sun started coming out. However, snow continued to fall on the western side of the Fine Arts Building for at least ten minutes afterward. The SUNY Oneonta campus is no stranger to this sort of highly localized precipitation.

After doing a little shopping, Ron and I headed back to the Autumn Cafe for dinner. We sat in one of my favorite spots, a very Maxfield Parrish-ish elevated alcove, to which has been added a tree full of crows and the Wicked Witch of the West.

On our way back to the car, we took a few minutes to contemplate the Municipal Building at 238-242 Main Street, next to the Autumn Cafe. This Beaux Arts structure was built in the early 20th century and was originally the Oneonta City Hall. It now serves as an Otsego County satellite office building.

I haven't been able to find much information about Oneonta's current City Hall, which sits at 252 Main Street, but I suspect that it was built in the 1930s and that it was a Works Progress Administration project.

The above images are only a taste of what this fun, funky little community has to offer. If you ever get the chance to spend a little time in Oneonta, by all means take the opportunity to do so.

Landau-Savedoff indictment and Savedoff plea

2011-11-08T21:08:00.010-05:00

Sorry about the seemingly nonstop focus on the Landau-Savedoff case as of late -- this blog will return to its customary focus on electronic records very, very soon -- but I now have a Public Access to Electronic Court Records (PACER) account, which, for a nominal fee, allows me to access federal court documents, and have pulled up some of the records relating to the case.

It costs $.08 per page to view and download PACER records, but the documents themselves can be freely distributed. I've uploaded a copy of the July 2011 indictment against Barry H. Landau and Jason James Savedoff and a copy of Savedoff's plea agreement to Scribd so that anyone else who is interested in reading them may do so at no cost.
Savedoff Landau Indictment

These documents don't contain much information that hasn't been reported in the media, but there are a few small details that may be of interest. Most notably, Landau's plea agreement, which was signed on 20 September 2011 but not introduced in court until 27 October, includes a (very) partial list of the documents found in the Manhattan apartment that Landau and Savedoff shared.

Savedoff Plea

Savedoff will be sentenced on 10 February 2012. He faces a maximum of five years imprisonment for conspiring to steal documents and a maximum of ten years imprisonment for actually stealing them.

The case against Landau is still ongoing. According to a 4 November 2011 memorandum to Landau's counsel that is available in PACER, his trial is currently scheduled to begin on 13 February 2012 and is expected to last 5-6 days.

Jason Savedoff pleads guilty

2011-11-05T16:31:00.001-04:00

Last Thursday, Jason James Savedoff, one of the two men caught attempting to steal documents from the Maryland Historical Society on 9 July 2011, pled guilty to charges of conspiring to steal materials from the Maryland Historical Society, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library. He will be sentenced on 10 February 2012. He faces a maximum of sentence of 15 years in prison and a maximum fine of $500,000.

Savedoff's plea agreement states that his criminal misdeeds were performed "solely at the direction of" Barry Landau, the prominent collector with whom he was apprehended. Landau has pled not guilty to all of the charges lodged against him, and his lawyer insists that Savedoff masterminded the theft of the mass of materials found in the Manhattan apartment the two men shared and pled guilty in an effort "to save his own hide." Landau's lawyer went on to assert that prosecutors had no evidence proving any "misappropriation of documents before Mr. Savedoff came into his life a year and a half ago."

Forgive my skepticism of this claim. First, investigators found approximately 10,000 documents in Landau's apartment. Busy as Landau and Savedoff seem to have been, it just doesn't seem likely that they amassed this volume of material in a mere eighteen months. Second, as evidenced by articles in the Washington Post and the Daily Beast, Landau has long had, to put it charitably, a most flexible relationship with the truth.

In the meantime, the Federal Bureau of Investigation press release summarizing Savedoff's plea agreement (the full text of which I'm having difficulty accessing via PACER) contains details about his and Landau's activities that should make archivists, manuscript curators, and other cultural heritage professionals sit up and pay attention:

"Savedoff, under the direction of his co-conspirator, conducted research, including via the Internet, to identify collections containing valuable documents, which, when located, were targeted for theft." Making finding aids accessible via the Internet has many, many pluses, but those of us who hold materials that have market value should also be keenly aware that may also increase security risks.

"Savedoff and his co-conspirator visited numerous museums posing as researchers; accessed collections of documents which they had determined to be of significant value; reviewed the documents from the collections; and used various techniques to steal them. These techniques included concealing documents inside sports coats and other outerwear which had been modified to contain hidden pockets, as well as distracting museum curators to disguise their actions." Some repositories simply bar researchers from wearing sport coats and like garments while in their research rooms, but many women's suit coats are designed to be worn without a blouse underneath. In other instances, research rooms are so cold that rules concerning sport or suit coats or even outerwear can't be reasonably enforced. The overwhelming majority of researchers who wear sport or suit coats or other garments with pockets are decent, honest people, but all of them should be monitored closely.

"A checklist was prepared for each stolen document which identified the author and date of the document; the collection from which it was stolen; whether the museum card catalogue had been collected; whether there existed any microfilm or other 'finding aid' for the document at the museum; the nature of any markings on the document: and whether any museum markings had been removed from the document." Wow. I'm simultaneously impressed by the strength of the recordkeeping urge, praying that these checklists are now in the hands of prosecutors, and agog at the monumental hubris and stupidity that prompted the creation of these records.

"In an effort to conceal the theft, Savedoff and his co-conspirator often took the card catalogue entries and other “finding aids,” making it difficult for the museum to discover that an item was missing." And here's the plus side of putting finding aids and other access tools online: it's a lot easier to swipe a paper finding aid or catalog card than to destroy every electronic copy of a descriptive resource. Those of us who still have lots of single-copy, paper-based finding aids need to think seriously about devoting some time to converting finding aids that make mention of valuable materials to electronic form -- even quick-and-dirty scans to PDF, TIFF, or JPEG format should be sufficient to document ownership of an item in the event that both the item and the finding aid disappear.

Finally, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Office of the Inspector General, which is leading the effort to identify the approximately 10,000 documents found in Landau's apartment and return them to the repositories from which they were stolen. Tricia Bishop of the Baltimore Sun recently wrote a great article highlighting the work being done by Office of the Inspector General staff and the scant attention and resources that American law enforcement agencies typically give to crimes involving cultural heritage materials. It's fascinating and, all too often, frustrating reading. Let's hope that the amount of media attention focusing on what is, in all likelihood, the largest archival theft in United States history changes this state of affairs.

ARMA International and San Jose State records management Web events

2011-11-02T20:04:00.004-04:00

If you're searching for low-cost professional development opportunities, trying to figure out how to manage and preserve social media content, or seeking to develop workable records management policies, check out these upcoming online events.

First, Dr. Patricia C. Franks, coordinator of the Master of Archives and Records Administration (MARA) degree program at the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), will facilitate an ARMA International webinar, Records Management Policies in a Social Media World, later this month, that will focus on practical tools and strategies for managing social media records. Those who complete this webinar will be able to:

Analyze the impact of various social media technologies on records management
Apply current records retention schedules to records residing in social networking sites
Identify and use existing tools to capture and manage social media records.

This webinar will be available online from 14-29 November 2011 and is free to both ARMA International members and non-members alike, but you must register no later than 25 November 2011 in order to access it.

I heard Dr. Franks speak about strategies for managing social media records at an ARMA Central New York meeting in October 2010, and I was really, really impressed. I refrained from blogging about it only because I was coming down with what turned out to be a really rotten cold; by the time I recovered, I wasn't 100 percent sure that my notes and memories were complete and accurate. I'm really looking forward to this webinar, and I hope that you check it out as well.

Second, SLIS itself is making an upcoming MARA guest lecture available live via the Web. On 14 November 2011 at 1:00 PM PST, Fred Diers, vice president and general manager of GRM's Solutions Group, will discuss "How to Create a Credible Retention and Information Governance Package." Mr. Diers will discuss:

Proven steps to develop a retention schedule that is realistic and sustainable
How to reduce the risk of litigation, government investigations, and audits

Instructions for viewing this lecture online via Elluminate (and for accessing recorded Webcasts of past SILS events) are available here.

Happy Halloween

2011-10-31T20:24:00.005-04:00

New York State Governor Hugh Carey greeting a young guest at a Halloween party at the Executive Mansion, 30 October 1981. New York (State). Governor. Public information photographs, 1910-1992. Series 13703-83, Box 11, No. 020. Image courtesy of the New York State Archives.

Sorry for the light posting lately. After the 2011 Best Practices Exchange -- about which I'm not done posting -- ended, I headed to Ohio to spend a few days with my parents and took a bit of a break from the Internet. After I got back to Albany, I spent a few days digging out from under the mass of work that accumulated in my absence. Now that I've had a little time to recover, you'll see things perk up around here.

In the coming days, you'll see a couple of additional posts about the Best Practices Exchange, at least one post concerning the Barry Landau-Jason Savedoff case, and some other tidbits. However, today I want simply to wish you a happy Halloween and to share with you the above photograph, which was taken thirty years and one day ago and is found within my employer's holdings, and the recording below, which is of less certain provenance but was produced on 28 October 1940 by a San Antonio, Texas radio station. It brings together Orson Welles and H.G. Wells, who discuss Welles' infamous radio adaptation of Wells's War of the Worlds, which aired exactly seventy-three years and one day ago; you'll also hear a few words about Citizen Kane, which was released approximately six months after this conversation took place. Enjoy.

BPE 2011: tidbits and lessons learned

2011-10-22T13:25:00.002-04:00

The 2011 Best Practices Exchange (BPE) wrapped up about an hour ago, and I am both invigorated and completely exhausted. I’ll be posting more about the BPE either over the next few days or late next week (I may be without Internet access for a few days) , but I wanted to take this opportunity to share a few insights and lessons learned.

In yesterday’s morning plenary session, Doug Robinson of the National Association of State Chief Information Officers provided an overview of the challenges that state CIOs are facing. Those of us who work in state government need to be aware of the issues that these important partners face:

At present, 25 state and territorial CIOs are new appointments. Another 7 CIOs are serving in an acting capacity, and several new governors(Cuomo among them) have yet to appoint a CIO. About half of the CIOs report directly to the governor, but a growing number of states are moving the position of CIO out of the cabinet and placing it under the supervision of budget or procurement director. The CIOs of roughly half the states are currently situated within a budget or procurement office.

State CIOs come in from and return to the private sector, serve at the pleasure of the governor, and are in office for an average of 21 months. In contrast, private sector CIOs are in office for more than four years.

State CIOs are more interested in rationalizing and centralizing IT services than in introducing new technology. Their budgets are being cut, the budgets of the agencies that pay user fees for IT services are being cut, and they are very focused on saving money by consolidating and streamlining services. They’re also starting to explore sharing services across states. However, they’re pushing against agency resistance to consolidation, lack of a shared enterprise technology vision, the persistence of large legacy systems, outmoded and cumbersome IT procurement processes, and a host of other concerns. Many of them also have more accountability than authority.

State CIOs have identified electronic records management/digital preservation, authentication of data, social media, and the presence of state data on mobile devices as pressing concerns, but they’re doing much about them -- in large part because they’re not sure what they should do. Archivists and records managers should seize the opportunity to help CIOs address these issues.

Many state CIOs are also moving to private clouds, especially for e-mail, and this has records management implications: in many instances, individual users are getting very large inboxes, and many cloud contracts specify that service providers must destroy messages after a set period of time and certify that the destruction was carried out properly. It also has workforce implications: at present, states are accustomed to having one IT staffer administer roughly 20 servers. Google and other cloud service providers are accustomed to having one staffer oversee approximately 1,000 servers, and they’re always seeking greater efficiencies.

Other possible points of archivist/records manager-CIO intersection include enterprise architecture and policy, IT consolidation, shared services, and demands for government openness and transparency.

Some other interesting tidbits and lessons learned include:

In the past six years, state archives have accessioned over a million cubic feet of paper records. Agency consolidations, staff reductions, and budget cuts have propelled many records to push paper records out of storage space they pay for, and state archives are struggling to find space for masses of incoming records.

The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act a piece of model legislation governing how states authenticate, preserve, and provide access to electronic copies of the state constitution, session laws, codified laws or statutes, state agency rules with the effect of law, and, optionally, court rules and decisions, state administrative agency decisions, and other legal material, will soon be the subject of a lot of state-level deliberation. Archivists and records managers must be actively involved in these discussions.

Redaction remains a bottleneck and a burden. We’ve made considerable strides in automating the processing of electronic records and making them accessible shortly after we accession them. Even though new search tools that facilitate identification and redaction of legally restricted or classified information are starting to appear, we’re still doing a lot of record-by-record review, particularly when less cut-and-dried forms of information (e.g., attorney work product) are present. In an era in which citizens and oversight bodies increasingly expect that records will made accessible quickly, this is a challenge.

Adobe Acrobat X is currently creating regular PDFs that don’t fully conform to the published PDF technical documentation; at least one digital collection’s validation tool consistently rejects PDFs created with Acrobat X. PDF/A files created with Acrobat X do conform to the published specification.

BPE 2011: emerging trends

2011-10-21T16:52:00.004-04:00

The 2011 Best Practices Exchange (BPE) proceeds apace, and today I’m going to focus upon yesterday’s plenary session, which featured Leslie Johnston, the Director of Repository Development at the Library of Congress (LC). Johnston devoted a lot of time to discussing ViewShare, LC’s new visualization and metadata augmentation tool, but I’ll discuss ViewShare in a forthcoming post about some of the new tools discussed at this year’s BPE. Right now, I want simply to furnish an overview of her exhilirating and somewhat unsettling assessment of the changing environment in which librarians and archivists work:

Users do not use digital collections in the same way as they use paper collections, and we cannot guess how digital collections will be used. For example, LC assumed that researchers would want textual records, but a growing number of researchers want image files of textual records.

Until recently, stewardship organizations have talked about collections, series, etc., but not data. Data is not just generated by satellites, experiments, or surveys; publications and archival records also contain data.

We also need to start thinking in terms of “Big Data.” The definition of Big Data -- what can be easily manipulated with common tools and can be managed and stewarded by any one institutions -- is rather fluid, but we need to start thinking in these terms. We also need to be aware that Big Data may have commercial value, as evidenced by the increasing interest of firms such as Ancestry.com in the data found in our holdings.

More and more, researchers want to use collections as a whole and to mine and organize the collections in novel ways. They use algorithms to do so and new tools that create visual images that transform data into knowledge. For example, the Digging into Data project examined ways in which many types of information, including images, film, sound, newspapers, maps, art, archaeology, architecture, and government records, could be made accessible to researchers. One researcher wanted to digitally mine information from millions of digitized newspaper pages and see whether doing so can enhance our understanding of the past. LC’s experience with archiving Web sites also underscores this point. LC initially assumed that researchers would browse through the archived sites. However, researchers want access to all of the archived site files and to use scripts to search for the information they want. They don’t want to read Web pages. Owing to the large size of our collections, the lack of good tools, and the permissions we secured when LC crawled some sites, this is a challenge.

The sheer volume of the electronic data cultural stewardship organizations need to keep is a challenge. LC has acquired the Twitter archive, which currently consists of 37 billion individual tweets and will expand to approximately 50 billion tweets by year’s end. The archive grows by 6 million tweets an hour. LC is struggling to figure out how best to manage, preserve, and provide comprehensive access to this mass of data, which researchers have already used to study the geographic spread of the dissemination of news, the spread of epidemics, and the transmission of new uses of language.

We have to switch to a self-serve model of reference services. Growing numbers of researchers do not want to come to us, ask questions of us, and then use our materials in our environment. They want to find the materials they need and then pull them out of our environment and into their own workspaces. We need to create systems and mechanisms that make it easy for them to do so. As a result, we need to figure out how to support real-time querying of billions of full-text items and the frequent downloading by researchers of collections that may be over 200 TB each. We also need to think about providing tools that support various forms of collection analysis (e.g., visualization).

We can’t be afraid of cloud computing. Given the volumes of data coming our way and mounting researcher demands for access to vast quantities of data, the cloud is the only feasible mechanism for storing and providing access to the materials that will come our way. We need to focus on developing authentication, preservation, and other tools that enable us to keep records in the cloud.

There’s lots and lots of food for thought here -- including a few morsels that will doubtless induce indigestion in more than a few people -- and it’s just a taste of what’s coming our way. If we don’t come to terms with at least some of these changes, we as a profession will really suffer in the coming years. Let's hope that we have the will and the courage to do so.

A bottle of locally brewed Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale at Alfalfa Restaurant, Lexington, Kentucky, 20 October 2011. I highly recommend both the ale and the restaurant, but please note that Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale is approximately 8 percent alcohol. Just like the BPE, it's a little more intoxicating than one might expect.

BPE 2011: ERA and the move to the cloud

2011-10-20T23:44:00.006-04:00

This week, I’m spending a little time with my parents in Ohio and at the 2011 Best Practices Exchange (BPE) in Lexington, Kentucky. The BPE, which brings together state government, academic, and other archivists and librarians and other people seeking to preserve state government enduring information of enduring value, is my favorite archival conference. The Society of American Archivists annual meeting is always first-rate, but it’s gotten a little overwhelming, and I love the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC), but nothing else has the small size, tight focus on state government records, informality, and openness that characterize the BPE.

Before I start detailing today’s highlights, I should say a few things about the content of these posts. For the past few years, those of us who have attended the BPE have tried to adhere to the principle that “what happens at BPE, stays at BPE.” This doesn’t mean that we don’t share what we’ve learned at the BPE (hey, I’m blogging about it!), but it does mean that we’re sensitive to the fact that candor is both essential and risky. The BPE encourages people to speak honestly about how and why projects or programs went wrong and what they learned from the experience. Openness of this sort is encouraging; all too often, we think that we’re alone in making mistakes. It's also helpful: pointing out hidden shallows and lurking icebergs helps other people avoid them. However, sometimes lack of senior manager commitment, conflicts with IT personnel, and other internal problems contribute to failure, and colleagues and supervisors occasionally regard discussion of internal problems as a betrayal. As a result, BPE attendees should exercise some discretion, and those of us who blog about the BPE should be particularly careful; our posts are a single Web search away. As a result, in a few instances I may write about the insights and observations that attendees have shared but obscure identifying details.

Moving on to this year's BPE itself, I'm going to devote the rest of this post to the insights and predictions offered up by U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Chief Information Officer Mike Wash, who spoke this morning about the Electronic Records Archives (ERA), NARA’s complex, ambitious, and at times troubled electronic records system, and some changes that are on the horizon.

At present, ERA sort of works: staff use it to take in, process and store electronic records. At present, ERA holds approximately 130 TB of data. The Office of Management and Budget wants NARA to take in 10 TB of data per quarter, and NARA is working with agencies to meet this benchmark. However, ERA lacks an integrated access mechanism, and it contains multiple modules. The Base module handles executive agency data, the EOP module handles presidential records (and includes some internal access mechanisms), the Classified module holds classified records, and several other modules were built to deal with specific problems.

Building ERA taught NARA several lessons:

Solution architecture is critical. ERA’s multiple modules are a sign of a failed system architecture. Anyone building such a system must carefully consider the business and technical architecture carefully during the planning stage and must manage the architecture carefully over time.
The governance process must be clear and should start with business stakeholders. What do they really need the system to do, and how do you ensure that everyone stays on the same page throughout the process? Information technology invariably challenges control and authority, but if you set up your governance process properly, you should be able to retain control over system development.
Over communicate. Funders and other powerful groups need frequent updates; failure to keep feeding information to them can be profoundly damaging.
You must manage the project. The federal government tends to hire contractors to develop IT systems, and contractor relationships tend to deteriorate about six months after the contract is awarded. Most federal agencies cede authority to contractors because they are loath to be seen as responsible in the event that a project fails, but staying in control of the project increases your chances that you'll get the system you want.
Watch costs closely. Cost-escalating provisions have a way of sneaking into contracts.
Be mindful of intellectual property issues. The federal government typically reserves the right to all intellectual property created as a result of contracts, but this doesn’t always happen, and the vendor that built the first iteration of ERA has asserted that it controls some of the technology that now makes the system work; NARA will be much more assertive in working with future ERA vendors.

Wash also made some intriguing observations about some of the challenges that NARA and other archives are confronting:

At present, our ability to acquire data is limited by bandwidth limitations. It takes more than three days to convey 20 TB of data over a 1 gbps data line and at least a month to convey it via the Internet. NARA recently took custody of 330 TB of 2010 Census data, and it did so by accepting a truckload of hardware; at present, there are no alternatives to this approach.
The rate of data creation continues to accelerate. The administration of George W. Bush created 80 TB of records over the course of 8 years, but the Obama administration likely created more than 80 TB of data during its first year.

Wash indicated that NARA is starting to think that federal records should be created and maintained in a cloud computing environment and that transfer of custody from the creating agency to NARA should be effected by changing some of the metadata associated with the records being transferred.

Wash noted that the move to cloud computing will bring to the fore new preservation and authentication concerns. It also struck me that the transition that Wash envisions assumes the existence of a single federal government cloud that has adequate storage, security, and access controls and that, at least at this time, many states aren’t yet thinking of constructing such environments. Individual state agencies may be thinking of moving to the cloud, but most states don't seem to be preparing to move to a single, statewide cloud environment. Moreover, owing to its sheer size, the federal government is better able to negotiate favorable contract terms than state or local governments; the terms of service agreements that the feds hammered out with various social media providers are an excellent example. I have the uneasy feeling that some governments will accept, out of lack of knowledge, desperate financial straits, or inability to negotiate optimal terms, public cloud service contracts that prove problematic or outright disastrous.

Its nonetheless apparent that government computing will move into the cloud, that this transition offers both new challenges and new opportunities for managing and preserving records, and that archivists and records managers are going to have come to grips with these changes. The next decade promises to be most interesting.

The Lexington Laundry Company building on West Main Street, Lexington, Kentucky, 20 October 2011. This little gem was built ca. 1929, is an outstanding example of Art Deco architecture in the city, and is part of Lexington's protected Downtown Commercial District. It now houses an art gallery.

Drew University employee sentenced

2011-10-12T18:39:00.005-04:00

Last week, a federal judge sentenced 20 year-old William Scott, the former Drew University student employee who admitted to stealing 31 historical documents from the university's United Methodist Archives Center, to three years of probation and three hundred hours of community service.

When I first learned of Scott's sentence, I was a little steamed. In my opinion, just about anyone convicted of stealing cultural heritage materials deserve to spend at least a little time in a correctional facility; I might be willing to make exceptions for people who steal to feed their families or to pay for lifesaving medial treatment for a loved one, but that's about it.

I nonetheless recognize that imprisonment is expensive and that incarcerating a young, non-violent offender who does not have a prior criminal record might not be the best use of our limited resources. Moreover, the sentencing judge and prosecuting U.S. attorney clearly wanted to make sure that Mr. Scott's will have ample cause and opportunity to reflect upon his misdeeds. While on probation, Mr. Scott:

Must adhere to a 9:00PM curfew. (Most people would find such a curfew restrictive, but such restrictions are particularly painful for younger adults such as Mr. Scott, who once described himself as a night person who enjoys partying.)
Is barred from working any job that would give him access to cultural heritage materials.
Must write a monthly letter to the court describing the progress of his life.
Must write to each of the 72 people who submitted character letters to the court on his behalf and explain what his experience of theft, prosecution, and conviction has taught him.
May list his 300 hours of community service on his resume only if he specifies that said community service was court-ordered.

If I were 20 years old and forced to adhere to these conditions for 3 years, I suspect that the thought of spending 6 or 12 months in a minimum-security facility might seem like a reasonable alternative . . . .

Of the 31 documents that Mr. Scott stole, 30 have been recovered. The missing item is the two-sided second page of a letter that Charles Wesley wrote in 1755. United Methodist Archives Center staff scanned the Wesley letters in its holdings some time before Scott arrived on campus. If you ever come across an incomplete, double-sided document bearing Charles Wesley's autograph (stranger things have happened), you can compare it to the digital images of Wesley family letters that the repository contributed to the American Theological Library Association's Cooperative Digital Resources Initiative.

Former NARA employee pleads guilty to theft

2011-10-06T23:41:00.003-04:00

On Tuesday, Leslie Charles Waffen, a career U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) archivist who ultimately became head of its Motion Picture, Sounds and Video Recording Branch, pleaded guilty to stealing at least 955 NARA-held sound recordings worth approximately $30,000. Dozens of boxes of recordings were found were found when officials raided his home, but he sold others on eBay using the account name "hi-fi_gal."

The Baltimore Sun reports that the investigation into Waffen's criminal activities cost approximately $48,000. The sale that led investigators to swoop in -- a 1937 audio recording of baseball legend Babe Ruth -- netted him $34.74.

As an archivist who has lived through a major internal theft, I have immense sympathy for all of the NARA employees whose lives have been turned upside down as a result of Waffen's illicit activities, which came to light last October and will continue to affect NARA's operations for years to come. Internal theft leaves in its wake powerful feelings of outrage, betrayal, and humiliation, and it takes a long time for those emotions to become manageable. Some of my colleagues have said that it took about a year after my former co-worker's theft came to light for them to come to grips with our experience, and some of us (myself included) needed even more time. All of us will carry the experience with us throughout the remainder of our lives and our careers; if you look at the membership roster of the Society of American Archivists' Security Roundtable, you'll note the presence of a healthy contingent of New York State Archives employees.

Moreover, internal theft always prompts -- as it should -- changes in security procedures and protocols. It's not unusual to understand intellectually the need for these changes while at the same time resenting the ways in which they make it harder to do one's job. I'm a big proponent of improving security in archival repositories -- as evidenced by numerous past posts on this blog -- but every now and then I can't help but blame my thieving former co-worker for some minor security-related inconvenience.

I realize that the above statements may seem a bit gloomy, but I do want to say to any current or former NARA employee who reads this blog that things will get better. You and your employer will both come to terms with this experience, and you will eventually adjust to the "new normal," whatever it may be. It won't happen quickly or easily, but it will happen.

Leslie Charles Waffen will be sentenced on 5 March 2012. As noted in his plea agreement, he faces a maximum sentence of ten years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000.

A few small changes

2011-09-29T23:38:00.003-04:00

I've never been particularly attached to the visual appearance of this blog. When I started it, I simply chose the least obnoxious Blogger template available and made some modest alterations. However, l'Archivista the blog is now a little more than four years old -- which means l'Archivista the blogger has maintained it for approximately one-tenth of her life -- and its baby clothes don't fit so well anymore.

I'll continue playing around with the design of this blog during the next few days, so you might see a few tweaks, quirks, and works in progress. Apologies in advance for any confusion or disruptions resulting from my experiments.

If you're new to this blog (hello!) and would like to see what it looked like before today's design changes took effect, the Internet Archive captured it in April of this year.

Interesting thing

2011-09-26T21:02:00.004-04:00

Every archivist has at least one interesting-thing-I-found-in-a-box story, but an unnamed archivist working for the Central Arkansas Library System has what may well be the best interesting-thing-I-found-in-a-box story ever.

Government IT investments

2011-09-25T14:13:00.002-04:00

A couple of days ago, the New York Times published an article by David Halbfinger that highlights major problems with a City of New York information technology project. Shortly after Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office, the city opted to allocate $66 million to modernizing the system that manages information about the municipal workforce. At the time of this writing, the city has spent $363 million for a system that does far less than initially planned. What went wrong? According to Halbfinger, who relied heavily upon records requested in accordance with the New York State Freedom of Information Law, several things:

The Bloomberg administration was so intent on proving that outside consultants could streamline government that it failed to heed early signs that things were going wrong
The individuals given responsibility for administering the project did not have the power to make pivotal decisions and overlooked numerous cost-saving opportunities
The administration reacted to an early security failure by giving Accenture, the consulting firm responsible for developing the software, responsibility for defining precisely what the new system should do -- something that private corporations are loath to do for cost reasons
City agencies kept fighting over the system's features and functionality -- the city was slow to give a single person responsibility for setting policy -- and Accenture repeatedly made and undid changes as a result
Managers realized late in the game that they never wrote user instructions or provided training for staff responsible for using the new system and scrambled to cobble together documentation in the days prior to its rollout

At present, the new system is functional -- sort of. Although most City of New York employees can now access their personnel information online, retired employees and tens of thousands of Dept. of Education paraprofessonals and support staffers are currently not represented in the system. Moreover, at some point the city decided not to integrate management of its civil service system into its new personnel system. As a result, the civil service system that was developed in the 1980s is going to remain operational for the foreseeable future.

This is not the only government IT investment gone horribly wrong. The Bloomberg administration planned to spend $70 million developing CityTime, a modern municipal employee payroll system. To date, the city has spent $740 million, has a system that still isn't fully functional, and has suffered the humiliation of having the feds indict a bunch of CityTime contractors and consultants on charges of offering and accepting kickbacks. Several years ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation junked its Virtual Case File system, which cost over $100 million, after it determined that the system was already outdated and simply couldn't replace its paper-based records management system. Similar horror stories abound at the federal, state, and local government level. Billions of taxpayer dollars that could have been put to better use have been squandered, and I don't even want to think about how difficult it's going to be to pull archival data out of some of these hideously expensive, deeply flawed systems.

Given the frequency with which government IT investments go bad, it's not surprising that some people -- including several of the readers who commented on Halbfinger's article -- conclude that governments are inherently bad at making IT purchases and that we simply shouldn't expect otherwise.

I don't think that this is the case, and I started writing this post with the intent of articulating a few strategies for avoiding the sorts of problems that the City of New York, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and countless other government entities have encountered. However, upon second thought, I think I'm going to save these ideas for another post, simply because the problems that Halbfinger's article highlights are so fundamental that mere "strategies" can't solve them.

Personnel system project leaders and the Bloomberg administration itself knew that major problems existed and did nothing about them. The rollout of the first component of the personnel management system, which was completed in 2002, resulted in a massive security breach. Staff responsible for monitoring the system's development asserted in 2003 that "no sense of economy, efficiency or value is evident in any area of the project," but no one in a position of power paid any attention to their findings. Moreover, no government official has been fired or demoted as a result of the problems associated with this project.

In essence, what we have here is a woeful failure of leadership. No one in a position of power kept the scope and mission of the project from shifting and expanding, prevented city agencies from issuing multiple, competing change requests, or intervened as the contractor's bills skyrocketed. The City of New York did hire a private-sector project manager who was nominally responsible for keeping the project on track, but he quit after less than a year and has become an outspoken critic of the city's handling of the project. It also hired a human relations expert who was supposed to establish one city-wide personnel policy -- more than eight years after the personnel system project got underway. He returned to the private sector after less than six months in the city's employ.

At best, the Bloomberg administration failed to appreciate the differences between a multi-agency, public-sector operating environment and a single-entity, private-sector operating environment. At worst, it simply assumed that the public sector was inherently incapable of operating effectively and that the consultant would simply do an end run around the dysfunction -- real and perceived -- of the public sector. Instead of tackling the dysfunction head-on and ensuring that the personnel system project remained on track and under control, it sought to take the easy way out and gave its contractor free rein. City of New York taxpayers are now paying the price: the unanticipated $300 million that this project consumed would pay the salaries and benefits of more than a few teachers, nurses, firefighters, police officers, and sanitation workers.

SAA 2011: Theft Transparency in the Digital Age

2011-09-18T18:04:00.003-04:00

At long last, here it is: the last post concerning the 2011 Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists. I’m really glad I got the chance to attend Session 705, Theft Transparency in the Digital Age: Stakeholder Perspectives, and my only regret is that so few people were able to do so: Irene caused a lot of East Coasters to leave Chicago on Friday evening or Saturday morning so that they could get home in advance of the storm. (My friend Maggi and I opted to remain in Chicago until Sunday -- a decision that turned what should have been a one-day, fourteen-hour car trip into a two-day, twenty-two hour adventure, but not a decision that I particularly regret.)

This post is going to be long, but the topic of archival security is an important one -- and one that is all too often overlooked until one’s own repository is affected. I work at a repository that recently experienced major theft, and, I urge you not to wait until a theft comes to light and your working life is upended by the experience. Archival security is every archivist’s responsibility.

My former colleague Brittany Turner opened the session by highlighting recent changes in the ways archivists deal with theft: the older view that theft is a shameful thing that should not be discussed is being replaced by a new emphasis on openness and transparency, new technological tools can help archivists and rare book dealers recover stolen materials, and a new conception of stakeholder relations is leading to the creation of a united front against theft.

Travis McDade of the College of Law, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign noted that, thanks to the Internet, archival theft is a growth industry and that thefts of archival materials are now outstripping thefts of rare books. He also stressed that repositories, which often experience the process of criminal prosecution as long, tedious, and frustrating, are starting to explore other ways of taking action against thieves. For example, after federal prosecutors declined to take action against a nighttime library supervisor who was stealing and selling materials from the Kenyon Review archives, Kenyon College successfully filed a civil suit against him. This individual, who was ultimately prosecuted and spent a year in jail, will spend the remainder of his life paying several hundred thousand dollars in restitution. The Mariners Museum in Newport News, Virginia, also won a civil suit against its former director, who was later convicted of stealing materials from the museum.

Mimi Bowling, consulting archivist and co-instructor of SAA’s archival security workshop) focused on the importance of being open about theft. She began by highlighting the damaging effects of sweeping theft under the rug. Several decades ago, Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscripts Library discovered that one of its graduate student assistants stealing materials. A search of his home uncovered thousands of manuscript items and rare books, but the library’s director and staff kept quiet because they feared that an influential benefactor would find out and withdraw a large bequest. A grand jury investigation commenced and, as luck would have it, the benefactor was one of the jurors. He was outraged by the library’s failure to inform him of the theft and opted against leaving money to the institution. Moreover, staff learned that the young man had also been a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and had been caught stealing from the university’s museum -- but no one at Penn ever disclosed this fact. Had his past been known, Columbia would never have hired him.

She then discussed some of the benefits of publicizing theft. When the Edison National Historical Site (now the Thomas Edison National Historical Park) discovered that a board member was stealing archival materials, it called in the FBI, which searched the individual’s house and discovered thirty-three cubic feet of stolen materials. The Edison National Historical Site staged a press event highlighting the recovery of these materials and as a result many collectors of Edisonia came forward and said that they had bought materials from this individual. As a result, many items that might have been permanently alienated from the Edison National Historical Site’s collections found their way back to the repository. (Bowling later noted that, several years after the first Edison theft came to light, a dealer contacted indicated that the culprit was again selling material. The Edison National Historical Site recovered an additional three cubic feet of material as a result.)

Sarah Baldwin, the current president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), discussed recent ABAA efforts to stop the trade in stolen materials. Members of the ABAA, which has long had a Security Committee, contend not only with theft but also with forgery, credit card fraud, and other scams. There is little or no formal security training for rare book dealers, but no reputable dealer wants to buy or sell materials of questionable status: dealers who trade in stolen materials are professionally and financially liable for doing so.

In order to combat the trade in stolen materials, ABAA now maintains a security blog. Since its creation last year, it has been used to disseminate forty-two security alerts. Repositories and dealers wishing to have information posted on the blog should e-mail or phone the ABAA’s executive director. After the information is vetted, it will be shared via the blog, and the ABAA's Twitter feed and listservs.

Baldwin also noted that in some instances, it’s not easy to determine whether an item has been stolen. This is particularly true of 19th-century and older government documents, many of which entered into private hands shortly after creation. This flow into private hands was seen as legitimate at the time, but these records are now often subject to replevin. Some dealers prefer to donate the materials back to government archives in an effort to avoid remaining at risk of replevin.

Scott Peterson, a collector of original letters of U.S. Supreme Court justices, manuscripts dealer, board member and past president of the Manuscript Society, and a partner in the Chicago office of the law firm of Holland and Knight, which has been involved in a number of cases involving manuscript materials, offered an interesting perspective on archival security.

As a collector and dealer, Peterson has returned materials that turned out to be stolen, and as a board member and president of the Manuscript Society, he has helped to develop policies relating to theft and stolen materials. As an attorney, he has represented several individuals who were accused of stealing or holding materials –in large part because state governments have started trying to get back records that were alienated centuries ago. Many manuscript collectors view replevin as theft, and they are suspicious of archivists as a result; some people would prefer to shred a record than be subject to replevin. (I don’t know how other attendees reacted to this statement, but my heart skipped a beat.)

Peterson noted that the legal doctrine of laches, or “sleeping on one’s rights,” is in some instances a successful defense against replevin actions. If a defendant can prove that a government knew or should have known at some point in the past that a record had been offered for sale or was in the hands of a known individual but didn’t take action to recover it, it has essentially forfeited its right to recover the record.

The Manuscript Society been working with the Council of State Archivists to come up with some sort of replevin policy. It is also working with the ABAA; Mansucript Society and ABAA members are among the first people to be offered stolen materials, and it makes sense for us to work together.

Peterson also recommended reaching out to international archival organizations. The market in stolen materials is global, and anti-theft efforts should also be global.

Peterson then outlined a four-point plan for combating theft: proper security and monitoring, stiff warnings re: prosecution, inventory control, and a reporting protocol for theft (local law enforcement, groups and associations, press releases). Repositories should also be prepared conduct their own internal investigations, monitor the Internet and dealers’ catalogs, and to prosecute and to sue in civil court.

Building upon Peterson’s remarks, Bowling emphasized the need for archivists to get to know local dealers and establish broader contacts. Most dealers are honest, and establishing a relationship facilitates communication in the event a problem comes to light. She also urged reformatting of materials whenever possible. Doing so passively prevents theft by enabling researchers to use reformatted surrogates and provides clear proof of ownership.

During the question-and-answer part of the session, the panelists identified a number of other problems and needs:

There is no central clearinghouse for reporting thefts at present, and the reporting mechanisms that exist are not always tailored to librarians’ or archivists’ needs. For example, missingmaterials.org, which is maintained by OCLC, makes it possible to annotate appropriate WorldCat records. It has fostered recovery of rare books, but archives aren’t using it: the types of materials that are typically described in WorldCat are not the materials that are most likely to be found in archival repositories.
Libraries’ deaccession procedures vary widely, and as a result and the presence of an institutional stamp doesn’t necessarily mean anything; a book lacking a “withdrawn” stamp or other marker may well have been legitimately deaccessioned. This is frustrating, and dealers are less aggressive as a result.
We are just starting to explore cross-organizational collaboration. The ABAA has worked with the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association and OCLC on missingmaterials.org and has explored possibility of having an RBMS security workshop every year, but everyone who has a stake in archival and library security must be able to exchange suggestions, protocols, etc., across professional and organizational boundaries.
We have yet to figure out how to enlist researchers in archival security efforts. (None of the panelists was quite sure how to do this, and I’m not either, but it strikes me as an important and overlooked subject: in the wake of my own repository’s theft case, I was struck by the frequency with which researchers were deeply outraged the culprit’s actions. Honest researchers value archives, and they can’t abide people who steal, destroy, or corrupt our holdings. Surely they have a role to play in safeguarding our collections.)
We need an online mechanism for disseminating photographs and information about people arrested for or convicted of theft and quieter means (e.g., phone trees) of sharing information about researchers who behave suspiciously but haven’t been apprehended.

Good suggestions all. I really hope that the communication capabilities of the Internet, which to date has proven to be a superb mechanism for facilitating the theft and sale of cultural heritage materials, will soon become an equally superb mechanism for deterring and detecting thievery.

Photo: the main branch of the Chicago River and the corncob towers of Marina City, as seen from the 29th floor of the Hotel 71, 22 August 2011, 9:14 PM.

SAA 2011: Skeletons in the Closet

2011-09-16T21:16:00.008-04:00

This just about beats the record for tardy posting, but below you'll find the slides from my Society of American Archivists presentation, which was part of Session 101, "Skeletons in the Closet: Addressing Privacy and Confidentiality Issues for Born-Digital Materials." In it, I outline the current climate in which government archives operate, discuss how my repository responded to two sweeping freedom of information requests, and detail some of the lessons we learned as a result of these experiences.

Personal Privacy and Freedom of Information in the Digital Age: Challenges and Strategies for Government A...

I'll have a post concerning session 705,"Theft Transparency in the Digital Age: Stakeholder Perspectives," up later this weekend.

2011 Capital Region Archives Dinner

2011-09-15T19:59:00.004-04:00

The 16th Annual Capital Region Archives Dinner will be held on Wednesday October 5, 2011 at 6:00 PM.

This year's dinner will be at the storied Jack’s Oyster House in Albany, N.Y. The keynote speakers are Paul and Mary Liz Stewart, founders of the Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region (URHPCR). The URHPCR seeks to acknowledge the active Underground Railroad movement in our region, to raise awareness about and stimulate interest in this little recognized and inspiring part of our history, to understand it in its historic context, to encourage the recognition of local historic figures, and to preserve that history.

The cost to attend this year's Archives Dinner is $37.00 per person, payable by check to "Archives Dinner" and mailed to Kathleen Newkirk at 331 Clapper Road, Selkirk NY 12158; other members of the Archives Dinner Committee (l'Archivista included) can also accept your check. Please be sure to indicate your choice of entree: Chicken Tuscan, Herb Encrusted Salmon, or Rigatoni Pomodoro (vegetarian).

If you have any questions about the Archives Dinner, contact Brian Keough (bkeough-at-albany.edu).

The Capital Region Archives Dinner is the annual celebration of our documentary heritage in the greater Capital Region. Each year during Archives Month, the Archives Dinner Committee recognizes individuals and organizations which have advanced the appreciation of our documentary heritage in northeastern N.Y. For more information, please see the Archives Dinner Web site.

September 11: electronic records, service, and remembrance

2011-09-09T21:34:00.006-04:00

The New York State Archives has just published Ground Zero from the Air, an online exhibit that features aerial photographs, thermal images, and flyover simulations of the World Trade Center site created in September and October 2001. These records were created by EarthData, a mapping firm working under contract to the New York State Office for Technology, which ultimately transferred them to the State Archives for long-term preservation.

I helped to put this exhibit together, and I have to say that the experience was, in some respects, profoundly rewarding. The records document an event of profound significance and are visually compelling (the level of detail in the aerial photographs is nothing short of astounding). I got to work closely with several colleagues whose work typically doesn't overlap with mine, and I am once again in awe of their talent and dedication.

Moreover, all of these records were born digital, and this is the first time that electronic records have been featured in one of our online exhibits -- and incorporated into the Digital Collections section of our Web site. Electronic records can be every bit as haunting, fascinating, and visually arresting as paper records, and it's good to remind people -- archivists and researchers alike -- of this fact every now and then.

At the same time, the experience of putting together this exhibit was extremely difficult. Anyone who spends any time with these records will instantly be transported back to the days immediately following September 11. Magnify one of the aerial photographs of the World Trade Center site, and you'll understand instantly why the first responders who worked there always referred to it as "the pile." In some of the September 2001 images, you can see bucket brigades of emergency personnel removing debris by hand. In some of the October 2001 images, you can see tractor trailers carrying debris away from the site.

As glad as I am that these records exist and are in our holdings, sometimes I had to get up and walk away from them for a while. I wish with all my heart that the circumstances that led to the creation of these records had never come to pass, and I don't think that this wish will ever fade away.

There is, of course, nothing any of us can do to change what happened on September 11, 2001. However, we do have the power to determine how we respond to it. This morning, National Public Radio aired a quietly and profoundly moving story about Father Mychal Judge, the Fire Department of New York chaplain who died at the World Trade Center site. The story featured a substantial excerpt from the homily that Father Michael Duffy delivered at Father Judge's funeral, and I couldn't help but think that we should all strive to live as Father Judge did:

And he would say to me once in a while, “Michael Duffy,” he always called me by my full name, “Michael Duffy, you know what I need?” And I would get excited because it was hard to buy him a present or anything. I said, “No, what?” “You know what I really need?” “No, what Mike?” “Absolutely nothing. [MURMURING] I don’t need a thing in the world. I am the happiest man on the face of the earth.” And then he would go on for ten minutes, telling me how blessed he felt. “I have beautiful sisters. I have nieces and nephews. I have my health. I’m a Franciscan priest. I love my work. I love my ministry.” And he would go on, and he would always conclude it by looking up to heaven and saying, “Why am I so blessed? I don’t deserve it. Why am I so blessed?” But that’s how he felt all his life.

Father Judge knew that service, not self-aggrandizement, is the way to fulfillment and that meaningful work is a gift. The families of many of the men and women who were killed on September 11, 2001 also know these things: in 2002, they began pressing to have September 11 designated a National Day of Service and Remembrance focused on honoring the dead, helping the living, and recapturing the spirit of unity, generosity, and compassion that prevailed in the weeks following the attacks.

If you have a few hours to devote to community service on Sunday, Serve.gov can help you find an organization that could use a helping hand. If you live in the Northeast -- which has just suffered yet another round of catastrophic floods -- your help is particularly needed; if you do a Google search for "Hurricane Irene volunteer opportunities [your state]" you'll find ample opportunities. Of course, there are countless community organizations that can use your help not only on Sunday but also throughout the year; September 11 should be merely one day in a lifetime of service and purposeful work.

I'm going to spend Sunday morning sorting donations at an area food bank, and as I shift the canned goods, bottled water, and toiletries around, I'm going to reflect upon my good fortune: I have a home, my friends and family are safe, and I have work that gives me purpose and direction -- in large part because the archival profession is, on every conceivable level, a service-oriented profession.

I'm also going to think about the most important passage in Father Michael Kelly's funeral homily for Father Mychal Judge:

And so, this morning … we come to bury Mike Judge’s body but not his spirit. We come to bury his mind but not his dreams. We come to bury his voice but not his message. We come to bury his hands but not his good works. We come to bury his heart but not his love. Never his love.

Labor for Your Neighbor

2011-09-03T12:07:00.004-04:00

Being in Albany is a little strange right now. Anyone who stays close to the city and its environs could be forgiven for thinking that nothing's out of the ordinary. The bundles of tree limbs that appear on the curbs on trash day make it plain that a storm recently passed through, but that's par for the course for upstate New York in August.

Less than an hour away in any direction, however, life is anything but normal. Irene wreaked havoc in and around the Schoharie Valley, the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and in Vermont. Eleven New Yorkers -- one of them the wife of a recently retired colleague -- and Vermonters died, hundreds of people -- among them a colleague's son and daughter-in-law -- have lost their homes, tens of thousands of others are cleaning up flooded homes and businesses, and many others are largely cut off from the outside world as a result of washed-out bridges and roads. Farmers in eastern New York and Vermont have suffered devastating losses of crops and livestock.

It's increasingly apparent that history is one of the casualties of Irene: historic covered bridges in nearby Schoharie County and in Vermont were swept away by flood waters, the Revolutionary War-era Guy Park Manor in Amsterdam, New York may have to be demolished, and several of my colleagues have helped local governments salvage water-damaged records. All of them have come back to the office visibly shaken by what they've seen.

I realize that Irene's impact wasn't limited to New York and Vermont -- people in twelve states are dead as a result of this storm -- and that several other states are also dealing with severe flooding. However, I also know that a disproportionate number of this blog's tens of regular readers live in the Albany area, so I'm focusing on local matters in this post.

If you want to help your flood-affected neighbors, you have several options:

Governor Cuomo is asking New Yorkers to take part in a “Labor for your Neighbor” volunteer effort on Labor Day weekend to assist in local clean-up efforts in the Schoharie Valley, Catskill and North Country Regions. Volunteers will devote a few hours on Sunday or Monday in the affected regions helping people in flood-stricken areas clear their homes of the mud and debris Irene left behind. The New York National Guard and the New York State Office of Emergency Management will coordinate volunteer efforts and transport volunteers. If you are interested in taking part, sign up here. (N.B.: Advance registration is mandatory -- you can't simply show up and expect to be put to work!)

If other commitments or health issues prevent you from taking part in Labor for Your Neighbor, you can donate to the United Way of New York via the Labor for Your Neighbor Web page. All contributions will be funneled to reputable charitable organizations serving the affected areas.

If you're looking for other ways to help in New York, the Albany Times-Union has posted a list of organizations seeking volunteer assistance (advance registration required!) or monetary donations. N.B.: the list includes a historic site and a public library.

If you want to help our neighbors in Vermont get back on their feet, the Vermont indie newsweekly Seven Days has posted a list of ways you can do so.

Please, please do what you can.

Coming home to a disaster

2011-08-30T19:12:00.005-04:00

I have a post in the works about 2011 Society of American Archivists annual meeting session 705, Theft Transparency in the Digital Age: Stakeholder Perspectives, but circumstances have forced me to shelve it for a few days.

I was away from Albany for a little more than a week, and in that time the area experienced two earthquakes -- the big one with the Virginia epicenter and a little one with an Altamont, NY epicenter -- and the after-effects of Irene. The first earthquake jolted people but didn't do any damage (at least around here) and the second one seems to have slipped by without much notice, but Irene has done horrific damage and may do still more: at the time of this writing, water levels in several New Jersey and Connecticut waterways are still rising and new evacuations have been ordered.

Eight New Yorkers -- including the wife of a former colleague -- are dead, and more than thirty people in eleven other states have lost their lives. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers are still without power, and an estimated 500 homes have been destroyed. Prattsville, Maplecrest, Windham, Margaretville, and several other Catskills communities have suffered grievous damage, as have Keene and several other Adirondack communities. Flood waters entered Schenectady's Stockade District, which features homes built by Dutch settlers and their immediate descendants, and several historic neighborhoods in Troy. Roads and bridges throughout central and eastern New York are washed out or under water. The historic Blenheim Bridge in Schoharie County, which was until Sunday the longest covered bridge in the world, is among the casualties.

At present, several communities in New York and Vermont have lost all roads linking them to the outside world; the National Guard is airlifting essential supplies to several of the affected Vermont localities. Pervasive road and bridge closures make travel difficult if not impossible, and it may be weeks before anyone can truly assess the extent of the damage.

New York cultural heritage institutions affected by this disaster should be aware of the following resources:

The New York State Archives and New York State Library have created a special Web page that outlines the services that they can provide to libraries, state agencies, local governments, and other entities affected by Irene. The State Archives and State Library are also responsible for gathering information about disasters affecting cultural heritage institutions and can point to additional resources. Both institutions can be reached by phone or via e-mail.
The Library of Congress has published an online guide to recovering from floods and other water disasters; of particular note are videos showing how to clean CD's and audio and video cassettes that have been immersed in flood water.
Heritage Preservation has posted a 10-minute video outlining how to recover materials affected by water-based disasters and other helpful resources.

If you're an individual attempting to salvage damaged family treasures, the following resources may be helpful:

The Library of Congress has published a guide to salvaging and preserving family history materials affected by various types of disasters.
The Heritage Preservation video about recovering from floods and other water disasters contains a lot of good advice for anyone seeking to save water-damaged materials. Heritage Preservation has also compiled a handy list of links for people seeking to save family treasures damaged by disaster.

If you would like to help those affected by Irene, consider donating your money or your time to one of these reputable charitable organizations.

Practical Approaches to Born-Digital Records: Archivematica

2011-08-28T00:17:00.004-04:00

Archivists mingle around a full-sized skeleton cast of Sue, the largest, most complete, and best preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossil ever discovered, during a Society of American Archivists reception at the Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois, 26 August 2011. Sue is 42 feet (12.8 m) long and 12 feet (3.66 m) high at the hip.

I’ve always feared getting sick at the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists, and yesterday it happened. I stayed in bed and missed all of yesterday’s sessions and a section meeting. I somehow dragged myself to the last few minutes of evening reception at the Field Museum, but I felt quite like Sue, the magnificent T. rex who presided over the festivities: an empty-headed and mildly scary-looking dead thing.

I was still a bit shaky today, and I managed to miss all of this morning’s first session and part of Session 610, Practical Approaches to Born-Digital Records: What’s Coming Next, which focused on Archivematica. Archivematica is a digital preservation platform that brings together a wide array of open source anti-virus, metadata extraction, file conversion, and other tools and supports automated processing of archival electronic records. We’ve just started experimenting with Archivematica, and I really wanted to hear about other archivists’ experiences with it.

I didn’t get to hear Peter Van Garderen of Artefactual Systems discuss Archivematica’s development or plans for future enhancements and came in as Glenn Dingwall (City of Vancouver Archives) was wrapping up his presentation.

In lieu of recapping the presentations of Paul Jordan (International Monetary Fund) and Angela Jordan (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) or summarizing the question-and-answer component of this session, I’m simply going to highlight the most interesting points that arose during its second half. I think that Archivematica holds great promise, and many of the presenters and audience members were of the same opinion, so don’t let this post deter you from investigating it yourself. However, you should keep in mind that Archivematica:

Is not a complete digital preservation system. It creates Archival Information Packages (AIPs) that can be preserved over the long term, but it doesn’t provide for storage of these AIPs.
Is designed with scalability in mind. It can be run on a desktop in a small repository or on a very large server array. From a technical point of view, the chief bottlenecks limiting large-scale implementations are processing speed and capacity and limits on the time of staff needed to obtain intellectual control over the materials.
Will be of particular interest to small repositories; however, not all of them will be able to meet the platform’s hardware requirements or acquire the requisite technical knowledge.
Requires some degree of technical know-how and quite a bit of willingness to get one’s hands dirty. Archivematica requires a real or virtual Linux environment. Most archivists aren’t familiar with Linux and must be willing to learn. Moreover, the installation process isn’t as straightforward as it could be. Fortunately, Michael Bennett has written really useful installation instructions and Angela Jordan has posted about her experience; FWIW, I’ve also posted about our own installation experience.
May require customization. For example, the International Monetary Fund will have to do figure out how to keep classified documents that should be included in AIPs out of the Dissemination Information Packages that Archivematica creates.
Requires some additional development. (Given that it has yet to reach the beta stage of development, this need isn't surprising.) Session participants articulated several desired improvements that would give archivists the ability to specify which preservation/normalization formats will be employed, enable them to reinsert or otherwise deal with files or folders that Archivematica rejects, and shed light upon why the ingest process sometimes stalls. Participants also wanted to see Archivematica support creation of Submission Information Packages, improve processing of e-mail, and integrate records management.

Leather Archives and Museum

2011-08-25T11:49:00.000-04:00

It's been a long day. I presented this morning, and ran the Government Records Section meeting this afternoon. I'm still trying to process everything that happened, so this post focuses on a repository tour that I took yesterday.

The Leather Museum and Archives, which is located in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood, is a library, museum, and archives that collects materials documenting leather, fetishism, sadomasochism, and alternative sexual practices. Its collections document people of all genders and sexual orientations, and its scope is global. (Despite the impression left by the image above--yesterday was fiercely sunny--its building has four walls.)

I decided to go on this tour because I was deeply impressed by the presentation that Leather Archives and Museum executive director, Rick Storer, gave at the 2007 meeting of the Society of American Archivists' Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable. The Leather Archives and Museum was established because mainstream archival institutions weren't interested in documenting the history of the leather community, and its ongoing ties to the community are essential to its survival. At the same time, it has a small but dedicated and inventive professional staff who have successfully secured several grants and attracted volunteers and interns. It's a really good example of how to launch and sustain a small archival program and how to fill gaps in the documentary record.

The Leather Archives and Museum library, which also serves as its archival reading room, contains books, scholarly publications, and other published materials. Its pulp fiction collection, which can be seen in the above photograph, is particularly comprehensive. It also has a sizable magazine collection, but most of the titles have ceased publication: the types of information that they once contained is now disseminated via the Internet, and, like many other smaller organizations, the Leather Archives and Museum is not in a position to capture Web content or manage large quantities of digital files.

Neither the Library of Congress nor the Dewey Decimal classification systems work particularly well with the library's holdings, and as a result staff devised an in-house cataloging schema for the materials. For example, all of the "BDSM--How to and Informational" materials are grouped together . . . right under a "Read" poster featuring a member of the Chicago leather community.

It's not possible to check out library materials, but the Leather Archives and Museum will lend materials via Inter-Library Loan; to date, almost all ILL requests have come from academic institutions.

Archival collections, which are housed in a secure, climate-controlled 1, 425 cu. ft. room, include personal papers of people involved in the leather or other communities, records of leather and other organizations (the records of the Chicago Hellfire Club are visible above), and other materials; as is often the case with records of small groups, the organizational records are sometimes maintained by multiple individuals and may be transferred to the archives somewhat haphazardly. The archives also includes a sizeable vertical file documenting leather and other alternative sexuality bars and other venues throughout the United States and the rest of the world.

The museum collection contains a wide array of original erotic art and artifacts, some of which are on display in a small auditorium or in one of several exhibit halls. They document many different communities of alternative sexuality. The list of rules above was originally posed in the Mineshaft, the legendary Greenwich Village sex club that New York City health officials shut down in 1985.

This exhibit panel chronicles the emergence of the deaf leather community.

The newly created A Room of Her Own exhibit focuses on the women's leather community. Rick Storer noted that individual women and women's leather organizations have been far less forthcoming about donating materials than their male counterparts, and as a result the Leather Museum and Archives is proactively reaching out to them.

If you look closely at the above photograph, you'll note that I obliterated, none too skillfully, a few of the details in a couple of pieces of artwork depicted in it. I realize that some of my tens of readers visit this blog during the workday, and I try very hard to keep l'Archivista safe for just about everyone's workplace. My self-imposed obligation to do this highlights precisely why repositories such as the Leather Archives and Museum are so important. As one of the other tour participants noted, mainstream repositories -- particularly those that receive public funds -- are often reluctant to accept archival collections that contain any sort of erotic or sexual content. Sexuality is nonetheless an important aspect of the human experience, and if we are serious about ensuring that the documentary record is comprehensive, we need to preserve and provide access to materials that document individual sexual identity and behavior and the emergence and evolution of sexual communities. Community-based archives such as the Leather Archives and Museum are showing the rest of us how to do so.

Chicago History Museum and Old Town

2011-08-23T21:34:00.017-04:00

A few days ago, I drew up an ambitious plan for today . . . and decided this morning to put it aside in favor of exploring the city's north side.

First stop: the Chicago History Museum. I started out in its permanent Chicago: Crossroads of America exhibit, which interprets the history of Chicago and northern Illinois from the time of its settlement by Native Americans to its rise as a meat processing, industrial, and transportation center. As might be expected, the exhibit is vast and sweeping, and I really can't do it justice.

Not surprisingly, a significant portion of it focuses on the October 1871 fire that destroyed about four square miles of the city, killed more than two hundred people, and left roughly a third of the city's residents homeless. 19th century Chicago was ripe for disaster: the rapidly growing city consisted of densely packed wood-frame buildings, and many homeowners kept hay and livestock in adjacent wood-frame barns. (Contrary to popular legend, Catherine O'Leary -- whose status as an immigrant and a Catholic made her a handy scapegoat -- and her cow are not to blame for the the fire.)

The diorama above is actually located in another section of the museum, but I'm including it here because it conveys the scale of the devastation. (This diorama is one of a series that was built in the 1930s. Generations of Chicagoans have known and loved them.)

The Chicago: America at the Crossroads exhibit many artifacts from the fire, including this fused-together cluster of marbles.

Paradoxically, the fire paved the way for rapid expansion. Donations of money and supplies poured into the city, its building codes were revised, and business owners and land speculators rushed to rebuild. The city's architects pioneered the use of structural steel frames, which made it possible to build unprecedentedly tall buildings with unprecedentedly large windows -- thus helping to give modern Chicago its distinctive character.

Many of the new steel-framed buildings featured decorative terra cotta tiles that were produced in the city. Visitors are encouraged to touch this tile, which was produced by the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company.

The exhibit also highlights the labor struggles that accompanied the city's rise to industrial power. One section focuses on the Haymarket Riots, which remains one of the most serious miscarriages of justice in American history. During an anarchist-led 4 May 1886 rally protesting police violence against striking McCormick Harvesting Machine workers, someone hurled a bomb at the police line. Eight police officers and four workers died as a result, and authorities responded by arresting and trying eight people who had either helped to organize the rally or were otherwise involved in the city's anarchist organizations. Despite the absence of credible evidence tying the eight anarchists to the bomb-thrower (whose identity is still unknown), all eight were convicted and four of them were hanged.

The exhibit features fascimiles of the first and second versions of the flyers publicizing the rally; the museum's Research Center holds the originals. The original, which contains the sentence "Workingmen Arm Yourselves and Appear in Full Force!" was pulled at the urging of anarchist labor activist August Spies, who asserted that he would not take part in the rally if this statement appeared on the flier; the revised flier appears on the left. His insistence that the flier be revised was of little interest to prosecutors, who introduced both versions into evidence. Spies and three other Haymarket defendants were hanged on 11 November 1887 -- and became labor movement martyrs.

The exhibit also focuses on another widely known aspect of Chicago history: its reputation as a hotbed of organized crime. Throughout the 20th century, Chicago was not only home to gangsters such as Al Capone but also to a large publishing industry that sought to capitalize upon the public's appetite for lurid gangland tales -- as evidenced by this pulpy 1931 Lake Michigan Publishing Company item.

Chicago: Crossroads of America also highlights the fairs and expositions that made the city the subject of global interest. Above, a scale model of the stunning Art Deco Chrysler Motors pavillion erected for the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition.

An adjacent temporary exhibit focusing upon the city's Lincoln Park neighborhood is downright lighthearted at times -- as evidenced by the hat that Mrs. Walter Krutz created by crocheting together segments of cans of Meister Brau. The brewery that produced Meister Brau ceased operations in 1978.

Another permanent exhibit focuses on Chicago as it existed during Abraham Lincoln's lifetime. It consists chiefly of portraits of notable Chicagoans, but two haunting artifacts -- a plaster death mask of Lincoln's face and the bed upon which Lincoln died -- stand at its entrance.

I spent quite a bit of time in Out in Chicago, which focuses on the history of the city's large and varied lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities. It traces the economic and social changes that made it possible for sexual orientation and gender identity to become organizing principles of people's lives, highlights LGBT individuals as varied as those created by educated and affluent settlement house women and rough-and-tumble slaughterhouse and factory workers, traces changes in conceptions of sexuality, gender, and family, and documents the emergence of LGBT social, political, and economic institutions. Photography isn't permitted in the Out in Chicago exhibit, so I can't share any of its riches with you. All I can do is encourage you to see it if you can.

After a leisurely lunch, I explored the adjacent neighborhood of Old Town on foot. Old Town was initially settled by Germans and was rebuilt after the 1871 fire gutted much of the neighborhood. For much of the twentieth century, it was home to substantial numbers of artists, hippies, and lesbians and gay men -- many of whom were gradually priced out of the neighborhood. It remains a tranquil and pleasant place.

West Eugenie Street is home to many Queen Anne townhomes -- which reminded me instantly of Albany, New York's Center Square neighborhood.

More ornate row homes at the corner of West Eugenie and Crilly Court . . .

. . . just a short distance away from modest homes that housed working-class people. These houses must have been built after the 1871 fire but before passage of the 1874 city law barring construction of wooden structures.

This little house at 350 Menomenee Street may not look like much, but it really is: it is one of the few surviving fire-relief shanties built by the Chicago Relief and Aid Society in the wake of the 1871 fire. These two-room shanties were, at a cost to the city of approximately $100 each, transported by wagon to fire-devastated lots and provided shelter for displaced homeowners. The legacy of the 1871 fire is ever-present, and sometimes it manifests itself in the most unexpected ways.

Berwyn, North Riverside, Oak Park, and Forest Park, Illinois

2011-08-22T23:06:00.016-04:00

Yesterday, I left Albany, New York, for Chicago, Illinois, where the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) is just about to get underway. The meeting starts, at least for me, late Wednesday afternoon, and I'll be posting updates throughout the week.

We reached Chicago early this morning, and I spent my first night in the area with my friends Maggi (who traveled with me) and Heidi, who own a home in the adjacent city of Berwyn. Berwyn is filled with small but solidly constructed bungalows that originally housed the Czechs, Bohemians, Greeks, Lithuanians, Serbs, Croats, Poles, and Ukranians who worked in the slaughterhouses that were once located in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood. The city's blue-collar heritage remains strong, and established families now live alongside newer Latino, African American, and Asian American residents; lesbians and gay men of many different ethnicities have also found it a hospitable place.

It's quite evident that Maggi and Heidi's house was once owned by a slaughterhouse employee: it still has the open-air basement shower that allowed him to clean up immediately after he got home from work.

Maggi, Heidi, and I spent the day visiting several establishments in the nearby communities of North Riverside, Oak Park, and Forest Park. All of them are well off the beaten tourist path, but all of them are worth seeking out. My friends are great tour guides!

We started with a delicious (and massive) lunch at Yia-Yia's (pronounced "Yah-Yah's") Pancake House and Restaurant, which is owned by one of the Greek families that settled in the city and now gives diners the option of having tortillas instead of toast. You'll find Yia-Yia's at 2250 Harlem Avenue in the village of North Riverside, which adjoins Berwyn.

We then headed to nearby Oak Park. Frank Lloyd Wright lived here for more than a decade, and one can trace the emergence of his distinctive style in the dozens of Oak Park homes and other buildings that he designed. Wright's contributions to the community are honored by this very minimalist memorial at one entrance to Austen Gardens Park . . .

. . . which is literally a stone's throw away from the Wright-designed Frank W. Thomas House at 210 Forest Avenue. Many architectural historians regard the Thomas House as Wright's first full-fledged Prairie Style home in Oak Park.

Just around the corner from the Wright memorial and the Thomas House is the Book Table, a new and used bookstore at 1045 Lake Street. The Book Table is no Powell's, but it's just the sort of bookstore that every community should have: friendly, thoughtfully stocked, and filled with little surprises. Its visual arts, (Wright-heavy) architecture, local history, and mystery sections are particularly strong, and it's worthy of a place on anyone's Oak Park itinerary. (FYI, the Book Table's owners have penned a thoughtful response to the impending closure of the Borders bookstore chain.)

After leaving the Book Table, we headed to nearby Forest Park and visited the Brown Cow Ice Cream Parlor at 7347 West Madison Street. The Brown Cow makes all of its own ice cream, sherbets, sorbets, and root beer -- and offers lots of sugar-free, dairy-free, gluten-free, and fat-free options. I can personally vouch for its coffee ice cream, which was the perfect treat on a surprisingly hot afternoon. If you're ever in Forest Park, you owe it to yourself to take a break at the Brown Cow.

The building that houses the Brown Cow was built in 1913 as a movie theater. You can still see the projectionist's booth.

If you're in Forest Park on any day other than a Monday, be sure to check out Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore at 7419 West Madison Street. Centuries and Sleuths, which just won the Mystery Writers of America's Raven Award, specializes in history, biography, and mystery books, sponsors numerous discussion groups, and is the venue of choice for mystery writers on tour. It's closed on Mondays, so we confined ourselves to checking out its comprehensive and thoughtful window display.

After leaving Centuries and Sleuths, we returned to Maggi and Heidi's house and spent a couple of hours talking and playing with two very sweet cats. I then took the "L" train to my hotel in downtown Chicago. Owing to an ongoing labor dispute in which the conference hotel is embroiled, I found alternate accommodations at the nearby Hotel 71, which has successfully settled with its employee union. (Yes, I'm aware that my not staying at the conference hotel may have financial consequences for SAA, and, yes, I'm prepared to do my part to help make SAA whole.)

So far, so good. I'm currently perched high above the Chicago River, gazing out upon the twin corncobs of Marina City; if I walk over to the window--which runs the length of my room -- and turn to the right, I have a fantastic view of the Wrigley Building.

I don't quite know what I'm going to to tomorrow -- severe storms may hit Chicago tomorrow -- but I will tell you all about it. If you're coming to Chicago, I hope you get the chance to explore the city, even if for just a few hours. If not, I hope you get to see the city some time.

Landau-Savedoff: it gets worse

2011-08-12T21:25:00.005-04:00

I omitted a disturbing fact from yesterday's post concerning the release on bond of Barry Landau and Jason Savedoff, who have been indicted on charges of stealing records from the Maryland Historical Society, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, and the New-York Historical Society: Savedoff told prosecutors that he and Landau went to a Manhattan gym and stole the wallets of several patrons because they were looking for identification they could use when visiting repositories.

Some additional details, all of them unsettling, about Landau's bond hearing appeared in a recent Baltimore Sun article that I somehow missed last week.

First, the number of repositories that Landau preyed upon, possibly with Savedoff in tow, continues to grow: documents found in his Manhattan apartment have been traced to Swarthmore College, Columbia University, Yale University, the University of Vermont, the Smithsonian Institution, and the New York Public Library.

With the exception of Cambridge University, all of the institutions to which Landau and Savedoff have been linked are in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions. However, I don't think anyone should breathe a sigh of relief just yet. Landau has spoken at venues throughout the country -- I'm reproducing and annotating the list that appears on his Web site -- and he may have made "research visits" to nearby archives while plugging his book at:

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
President Benjamin Harrison Home in Indianapolis, Indiana, 30 September 2010
Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Birthplace in New York City (as noted above and in other posts, documents in Landau's Manhattan apartment have been traced to the New-York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and Columbia University)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York (the federal indictment against Landau and Savedoff accuses them of stealing seven signed speeches from the library in December 2010 and selling four of them for $35,000)
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, November 2007
Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, December 2007. (Director Timothy Naftali has publicly stated that Landau did not visit the Nixon Library research room.)
Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, 14 November 2007
George H.W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in College Station, Texas
William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum in Little Rock, Arkansas, 12 March 2008
Cuyahoga County Public Library, Fairview Branch in Fairview, Ohio, 3 March 2008 (Landau's site lists this engagement as the "Cleveland Public Library," which serves the City of Cleveland. The Cuyahoga County Public Library system serves the surrounding suburbs.)
Dallas Public Library in Dallas, Texas, 5 February 2008
Des Moines Public Library in Des Moines, Iowa
Denver Public Library in Denver, Colorado, 25 February 2008
State Historical Society of Iowa in Des Moines, Iowa, 23-24 October 2008
Iowa Historical Foundation in Des Moines, Iowa
Googleplex in Mountain View, California, 25 February 2009
Madison Historical Society in Madison, Connecticut, 17 July 2008
New Canaan Public Library in New Canaan, Connecticut
St. Louis Public Library in St. Louis, Missouri, 10 March 2008
Westport Public Library in Westport, Connecticut, 15 October 2008
Book Hampton in Southampton, New York
Borders Books in New York City
Borders Books in Washington, DC (documents in Landau's apartment have been traced to the Smithsonian Institution)
Borders Books, Philadelphia (Landau and Savedoff visited the Historical Society of Pennsylvania -- and aroused staff suspicions -- seventeen times in recent months)
R.J. Julia Booksellers in Madison, Connecticut
East Village Books in Des Moines, Iowa

Second, a fake ID in the name of "Christopher McGovern" was found in Landau's apartment. Jason Savedoff apparently used the aliases "Jason James" and "Justin Ward" on various occasions, and one has to be open to the possiblity that Landau used aliases that have yet to come to light. I have the ugly feeling that many, many repositories are going to have to check their registration logs every time a new alias or set of aliases comes to light.

And on a more surreal note: Landau was one of the witnesses whose testimony supported Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell's claims that Hamilton Jordan, White House Chief of Staff under Jimmy Carter, did cocaine at the club in 1978. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration holds the records of Special Prosecutor Arthur Christy, who investigated Rubell's claims, and it has made the finding aid, in which Landau's name appears several times, available online.

Several years ago, Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo wrote an excellent book, Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art, that details how a charming, socially prominent, and seemingly well-to-do Englishman named John Drewe passed off forged paintings to unsuspecting collectors. In order to obscure his tracks, Drewe visited several museum archives in Great Britain, stole records that would have exposed the ersatz provenance of the forgeries, and inserted bogus records that supported his claims. Salisbury and Sujo concluded that Drewe, who was ultimately brought down by a suspicious Tate Gallery archivist, was a fascinating but profoundly empty mix of narcissist and sociopath.

I have the feeling that Barry Landau's life and career are the foundation for one heck of a book. I'm not going to write it, but I'm sure looking forward to reading it.

Barry Landau and Jason Savedoff are free on bond

2011-08-10T21:33:00.007-04:00

Presidential historian Barry Landau addresses the staff of Google -- and flubs some facts about the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and Presidential recordkeeping -- as part of the Authors@Google program, Mountain View, California, 25 February 2009. Does anything about this man -- his face, his voice, his mannerisms -- seem familiar to you? If so, start checking your registration logs and reviewing your security videos.

On 9 July, Barry Landau, a noted collector of Presidential ephemera and author of The President's Table: Two Hundred Years of Dining and Diplomacy, and his research associate, Jason Savedoff, were arrested after staff at the Maryland Historical Society observed Savedoff take an historical document, conceal it in a portfolio, and remove it from the research room. The Baltimore Police discovered approximately 60 documents in a locker assigned to Savedoff.

The arrest of Landau and Savedoff sparked an investigation into their activities and a sweeping search of Landau's apartment. A host of disturbing things came to light:

Savedoff was apprehended in a Maryland Historical Society restroom and was flushing a document down a toilet as he was taken into police custody.
Only some of the documents in Savedoff's locker were held by the Maryland Historical Society. Others are the property of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Connecticut Historical Society, and Vassar College.
Investigators found a 1780 letter from Benjamin Franklin to John Paul Jones in Landau's apartment. The letter is owned by by the New-York Historical Society.
Landau and Savedoff visited the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library, which is part of the NARA system, in December 2010 and allegedly stole signed copies of seven speeches that Roosevelt delivered. Four of the speeches were later sold to a New York dealer for $35,000.
While a guest at the home of Betty Currie, President Bill Clinton's former secretary, Landau may have taken a book of speeches bearing Clinton's signature.
Landau's claims of working for various Presidents -- including claims made in the Authors@Google speech embedded above -- are, in all likelihood, exaggerations or outright falsehoods.

On 28 July, Landau and Savedoff, who also face state charges, were indicted on charges relating to the theft of materials from the Maryland Historical Society, Roosevelt Presidential Library, and the New-York Historical Society. Savedoff, a dual Canadian-U.S. national, was released on bond in late July, but Landau remained in federal custody while investigators combed through the masses of ephemera in his Manhattan apartment.

Last Friday, a Federal court judge allowed Landau to post bond and return to his home -- provided that he submits to electronic monitoring, does not use the Internet, does not sell any assets without first securing approval to do so, and cannot have any contact with cultural heritage institutions or his co-defendant.

At the hearing, prosecutors noted that they found a vast array of other questionable items in his apartment. They have traced over 200 of them to repositories in five states and Washington, D.C., and possibly, Cambridge University. Many others are, in the words of a prosecutor, "not the kind of things that are accessible — legally accessible — on the open market": letters written by Napoleon Bonaparte, Marie Antoinette, Sir Issac Newton, Ludwig von Beethoven, and a host of prominent scientists, artists, inventors, writers, and political leaders.

If Landau is indeed guilty -- the evidence is damning -- we may be looking at a criminal career that spans decades and continents. Dozens of repositories may ultimately find that they have been victimized. All of us should be mindful of the possibility that other smiling, cupcake-bearing career criminals may be out there . . . and that they may visit our own institutions sometime soon.

Given that providing access to our holdings is one of our core responsibilities, keeping our holdings 100 percent safe from theft is never possible. However, there are lots of things that we can do to discourage casual thievery and insure that the more determined criminals get caught, and you might want to check out the following resources:

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) regularly offers a first-rate archival security workshop
Library and Archival Security is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to security matters
Some strategies and tips from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's new Holdings Protection Team are available here and here.
If you're going to the SAA annual meeting in Chicago in a couple of weeks, Session 705, Theft Transparency in the Digital Age: Stakeholder Perspectives will highlight new Web-based tools that archives can use to deter thieves, share information, recover materials, and garner support from researchers.

What do you see?

2011-08-07T12:19:00.006-04:00

At first glance, there's nothing particularly ominous or significant about the above image. It looks like a random 1980s snapshot of some guy in cheesy 1980s clothes . . . being a tourist? Making fun of tourists? Making fun of himself for being a tourist?

The man depicted in this photograph was actually employed by the East German secret police, commonly known as the Stasi. The photograph itself is one of a series of photographs in the Stasi archives, which are now open to the public, documenting an "art of disguising" course for Stasi employees who spied on their fellow citizens. These images are featured in "Pictures from the Secret Stasi Archives," a new Berlin exhibit by artist Simon Menner.

The image above may seem risible, but it's really not: among other things, the Stasi imprisoned and executed dissidents and spied on millions of ordinary people. The "art of disgusing" photographs, a sampling of which Der Spiegel has made available, are accompanied by dozens of photographs that Stasi personnel took while clandestinely searching the homes of their fellow citizens -- so that they would be able to put everything back in place before they left.

In 1992, citizens of the former East Germany were granted the right to view their own files; to date, almost 2.75 million people have done so. At present, 1,800 German government employees are responsible for caring for the archives and reconstituting records that Stasi employees shredded as their world collapsed in 1989.

Look again at the above photograph. Now that you know about the circumstances that led to its creation, what do you see? Do you enjoy looking at it? Are you glad that you can look at it?

Help support diversity in the archival profession

2011-08-05T19:00:00.008-04:00

Remember the Spontaneous Scholarships that Kate Theimer over at ArchivesNext started? Well, 94 generous people stepped up to the plate, and 26 happy archivists will have their Society of American Archivists (SAA) Annual Meeting registration fees covered as a result.

My esteemed colleague Terry Baxter over at Beaver Archivist has come up with an equally innovative way to direct donations to SAA's Mosaic Scholarship, which provides financial and mentoring support to minority students enrolled in graduate archival education programs: if SAA receives $1000 in Mosaic Scholarship contributions by 26 August, Terry will, with the help of select donors, shave off his luxuriant beard.

As Terry explains on Beaver Archivist, the more you give, the more you get:

$any amount – listing on [Beaver Archivist] as a supporter of a more diverse archival profession
$25 – all of the above, and your choice from Terry’s Bag o’ Ephemera; come see me and I’ll hook you up. If you’re not at SAA Chicago, send me an email at terryx66 [at] tmail.com and an address and I’ll mail you my choice. Shipping and handling included!
$50 – all of the above and a picture of you, with the Beaver Archivist, on a special Facebook album dedicated just to diversity superstars. You can even hold the SAA chico bag if you want. If you’re not in Chicago, email me a head shot. I’ll photoshop something up.
$100 – all of the above and snip the beard! You get a pair off scissors and the opportunity for mayhem. Who can resist that? Must be present or willing to authorize proxy snipper.
$500 – all of the above and party with the Beav! An all expense paid weekend (transportation not included!) at the Beaver Den. Explore Portland’s food carts and microbrews. Take in a show. Sit on the fire escape while enjoying a tasty adult beverage and watching the lights of Portland. All on the Beaver Archivist’s dime. Tail-slapping optional.

I know times are pretty tough these days, but if you're in a position to do so, please help support this beautiful coming together of archives, diversity, and tonsorial practice. Make a donation to the Mosaic Scholarship via the SAA Web site or mail a check (be sure to note that you're donating to the Beaver Archivist's Mosaic campaign!) to SAA at 17 North State Street, Suite 1425, Chicago, IL 60602-4061.

Union label, Associated Master Barbers of America, 1938. Image courtesy of the New York State Archives. New York (State). Dept. of State. Union Label Registration Application Files, ca. 1901-1943. Series 12979-79, Box 3, Folder 9, No. 148.

Call for Proposals: Best Practices Exchange 2011

2011-08-04T18:25:00.011-04:00

As a member of the 2011 Best Practices Exchange Program Committee, I am delighted to bring you the following announcement -- and I hope to see you in in the Bluegrass State this fall!

The sixth annual Best Practices Exchange (BPE) will be held at the Hyatt Regency in Lexington, Kentucky, from 20-22 October 2011. The BPE focuses on the management of digital information in state government, and it brings together librarians, archivists, information technology professionals, and other practitioners to discuss their real-world experiences, including best practices and lessons learned.

Following the format of past Best Practices Exchanges, the 2011 Program Committee encourages you, the attendees, to present your projects and experiences, successes, failures and lessons learned. This year's conference has four broad tracks. Each track is enumerated below,
along with a list of themes embraced by each track. We ask that potential speakers be guided, but not limited, by the themes indicated.

Each session will be 90 minutes long with two or more speakers per session. We ask that you keep presentations to 10-15 minutes to allow for discussion and engagement with the audience.

Proposals should include an abstract of 100 words or less, the proposed track (if applicable), and the name, title, email, phone number and organization of each presenter. You may submit a proposal for one speaker, which will then be paired with others by the Program Committee, or a proposal for a full session with multiple speakers (please contact and confirm the other speakers prior to submission.)

For more information about proposals, please see the Presentations page on the BPE 2011 Web site.

1) Access: Online access; should everything be accessible; FOIA/Open Records issues; legal issues with access

2) Sustainability: Budget/funding issues; technology (IT consolidation, lack of IT support); life after the grant; evaluation, statistics, and user feedback.

3) Digital Projects: Lessons learned; what worked and what didn't; solutions; new tools or services

4) Collaboration and Community: Support groups and user communities; shared services; user services; library/archives crossovers

Proposals are due by September 15, 2011. Please send all session proposals to Mark Myers, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, at mark.myers[at]ky.gov

The hotel cost will be $139/night and conference registration will be $125. Registration information will be posted to the BPE Web site soon.

Be sure to friend the new BPE Facebook page!

The demise of Trinity Episcopal Church, Albany, New York

2011-07-16T21:59:00.022-04:00

The now-demolished Trinity Episcopal Church as seen from Trinity Place, Albany, New York, 12 August 2011, 7:58 PM.

This post is the first in a series focusing on the history and built environment of Albany, New York and the Hudson River Valley.

It is not the post I planned to write.

As you all know, this blog focuses on electronic records and other archival matters. However, it's also a (partial) record of the interests and preoccupations of one electronic records archivist, and I thought it would be nice to put together a summer 2011 series of posts focusing on the distinctive architecture and history of my little corner of the world. The Hudson River Valley and New York's capital city are home to some fascinating things. Some, such as Crailo State Historic Site, testify to the enduring influence of Dutch culture in the former colony of New Netherland. Others, such as a temporary installation of kinetic sculptures by George Rickey, are more modern and more fleeting. I thought that you might like to learn a bit about these things -- and I knew that I would enjoy carving out some time to visit, photograph, and write about them.

Unfortunately, this inaugural post highlights failure and loss.

On the morning of Tuesday, 12 August 2011, one of the exterior walls of Albany's Trinity Episcopal Church collapsed and the City of Albany had to demolish the entire structure. The church was designed by James Renwick, Jr.,who also designed the Smithsonian Institution Building and the Corcoran Gallery of Art building in Washington, DC, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, the Main Building of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, and many other noteworthy structures. Most cities would be proud to have a Renwick building, but Trinity Episcopal Church had languished in disuse for several decades. Albany County put the building up for auction last fall, and a New York City woman purchased it for $500.00.

I visited the site on 12, 13, and 14 July and took some photos and videos that document the demise of this neglected landmark and the efforts of demolition firm Ditonno and Sons to salvage the church's stained glass windows, which may have been the work of Renwick's friend Louis Comfort Tiffany, and wooden architectural elements.

On 12 July, a pedestrian strolling past Trinity Place on Westerlo Street or Madison Avenue might have thought that the church was disused but structurally sound.

However, anyone who turned onto Trinity Place would quickly see that something was very, very wrong. By the evening of 12 July, the back half of the building had been demolished. Piles of rubble filled the gap between the church and the headquarters of the Trinity Alliance, a venerable social services organization once affiliated with the church. Pieces of plywood were set against the glass doors and windows of the Trinity Alliance building to protect them from flying bricks.

If by chance an observer failed to notice the plywood and rubble, one glimpse at the church's open front door would have revealed that only the front half of the church was still standing and that a backhoe was sitting atop the rubble in back. ( If you're curious as to what Trinity Episcopal's interior looked like, fellow Albany blogger Chuck Miller took some stunning pictures on 13 July.)

The mood at the scene was strangely buoyant. Many people were stopping by and taking photos and reminiscing about the church; I spoke with one 80 year-old woman who had gone to dances at Trinity as a teenager. Neighborhood residents, who were ordered to leave their homes for the duration of the demolition, filed in and out to pick up changes of clothing and other necessities and to lament the loss of a local landmark. Everyone was nonetheless relieved that no one had been injured or killed as a result of the collapse and that none of the adjoining buildings had been compromised; every now and then, the unanticipated collapse of a vacant Albany building does irreparable damage to a well-maintained and occupied neighboring structure.

I was contemplating all of the things that could have gone wrong but didn't when a flash of movement caught my eye. As Ditonno and Sons was winding down its work for the evening, a gray cat ran over to the southern side of the building and meowed loudly. A black kitten emerged from the grass beside the southern bell tower. The duo moved slowly --the kitten was exhausted and terrified -- to the northern side of the church, where they paused to rest for a while. I called out to the mother cat in an effort to coax the pair away from the building, but she didn't trust me -- the neighborhood is home to a large feral cat population -- and her kitten simply didn't want to move. I looked for them on 13 and 14 July, but didn't see them. I hope they found sanctuary elsewhere.

I returned to the site on the evening of 13 July, by which time Ditonno and Sons had demolished the church's bell towers.

Owing to concerns about the structural integrity of the church -- a fire fighter at the scene told me that one of the side walls had started swaying ominously earlier that day -- Ditonno and Sons workers used sledgehammers to tear down the towers.

If you look closely at the remnants of the southern bell tower above, you can see just how badly the mortar holding together the bricks had deteriorated.

Bricks rained down onto the steps below the towers.

I stopped by the site immediately after work on 14 July to find that only part of the northern bell tower remained. As they had done throughout the demolition, Ditonno and Sons workers hosed down the rubble in an effort to keep down the dust.

They were also preparing to salvage the remaining stained glass windows. As noted above, Ditonno and Sons tried to save as many of the windows and wooden architectural elements as they could.

A fire fighter at the scene told me that the demolition of Trinity Episcopal Church marked the first time that a City of Albany demolition project had such a large-scale salvaging component, and he went on to say that, in his view, Ditonno and Sons "deserve a medal" for doing such great work. Having seen and filmed Ditonno and Sons remove the bricks and mortar surrounding the windows in the northern bell tower, I agree. I've never seen a backhoe operated with such precision and delicacy.

Apologies for the jumpiness of this footage -- despite the constant hosing down, dust was flying everywhere, and it got into my eyes a couple of times.

After the crew removed most of the brick and mortar surrounding a given window, a Ditonno and Sons worker (most likely one of the Ditonno sons) in a cherry picker tied the window, which had been sandwiched between sheets of plywood, to the work platform. He then pulled the window free of the building and carefully lowered it to the ground.

Owing to the church's poor condition, Ditonno and Sons wasn't able to save all of the windows. The fire fighter I spoke with on 12 July indicated that one window had been lost earlier that day, and a few minutes after I shot the footage above, part of the northern bell tower collapsed and the one remaining window fell to the ground. Owing to its plywood encasement and the relatively short distance it fell, it may be possible to repair this window, but I wouldn't bet on it.

At present, no one knows what will happen to these windows or to the other architectural elements that were salvaged. According to the Albany Times-Union, Ditonno and Sons, which per its contract with the City of Albany is entitled to keep materials salvaged from demolition sites, may be their legal owner. However, if the windows are extremely valuable, the City of Albany may be able to lay claim to them. And, of course, Trinity Episcopal Church's owner, who now owes the city almost $150,000 in demolition costs, may have a claim to them; however, she never listed the building on the City of Albany's vacant building registry, which was a condition of sale. For now, the windows and other materials will be placed in storage until experts can identify their creator and determine their cash value.

I left the site at shortly 7:00 PM on 14 July. By that time, Trinity Episcopal Church was little more than a pile of rubble. The iron railing at center right marks the approximate location of the church's front door.

A fragment of the southern bell tower remained standing, but it wasn't demolished until the following morning. Ditonno and Sons workers finished their day's work by sweeping the rubble off of Trinity Place. Behind the gap where the church once stood, you can see the Corning Tower, which is part of the Empire State Plaza.

I'm amazed and impressed that Ditonno and Sons was able to save most of the windows and other architectural elements from this historic church, and I'm deeply grateful that no one was hurt, killed, or rendered homeless as a result of Trinity Episcopal Church's collapse. I am nonetheless saddened and deeply angered by the loss of what should have been a carefully tended source of civic pride.

Warren Roberts, the distinguished historian of the French Revolution who has become an expert on the built environment of Albany, asserted last year that "no self-respecting city would allow Renwick's church on Trinity Place to decay [emphasis in the original]." On 12 July, the extent of Albany's lack of self-respect -- and, I fear, its lack of hope for its future -- became woefully evident.

Alleged thieves apprehended at Maryland Historical Society

2011-07-12T22:36:00.003-04:00

Barry Landau: Presidential Historian and Collector (November 14, 2007) from Gerald R. Ford on Vimeo. Have you seen Mr. Landau in your research room?

Barry Landau is a former White House protocol officer and a prominent collector of ephemera and artifacts associated with U.S. presidents; he has a particular interest in materials relating to presidential inaugurations and the dogs of presidents. Laura Bush consulted him when planning George W. Bush's second inauguration, he's met most if not all of the recent presidents at least once, and, as you can see above, he has spoken at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library on at least one occasion.

He may also be a thief. On Saturday, Landau and his assistant, Jason Savedoff, were doing research at the Maryland Historical Society. A staffer observed Savedoff take a document, conceal it in a portfolio, and take it out of the research room. They kept an eye on the duo and called the police, who opened the locker assigned to Savedoff and discovered approximately 60 documents belonging to the Maryland Historical Society, including:

Papers signed by Abraham Lincoln and worth approximately $300,000
Inaugural ball invitations worth roughly $500,000
A Washington Monument commemoration worth an estimated $100,000

The police called in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has opened an investigation into the activities of Landau and Savedoff. They also took Landau and Savedoff, both of whom live in New York City, to jail, where they remain at the time of this writing.

It's important to remember that, in the eyes of the law, Landau and Savedoff are innocent until they have their day in court. However, the evidence against them seems quite damning -- and the judge who denied them bail apparently agrees.

Owing to the ongoing investigation, Maryland Historical Society staffers haven't said much about the arrest of Landau and Savedoff. However, it's pretty plain that they were on the ball: they were keeping an eye on their researchers, observed behavior that aroused their suspicions, and continued monitoring the research room while waiting for the police to arrive. Once they're at liberty to discuss the incident, we may learn that they were also providing "enhanced customer service," performing "quality control audits," and videotaping the duo.

It's also apparent that Maryland Historical Society staff weren't unduly swayed by Landau's prominence -- or by the fact that he and Savedoff brought them cupcakes. Archivists are, by and large, a helpful bunch, and most of us want to make the research process as user-friendly as possible. It's all too easy to conclude that the friendly researcher who frequently graces our research room is trustworthy and thus doesn't need to be monitored very closely. It's also easy to decide that a prominent researcher should be allowed to bend a few rules -- or that a powerful, well-known person shouldn't be challenged or provoked in any way.

The arrest of Landau and Savedoff is an excellent reminder that neither friendliness nor prominence should induce us to disregard our security protocols or relax our research room rules. The Maryland Historical Society could have suffered grievous harm not only to its holdings but also to its public image and staff morale. Thanks to the actions of its staff, its collections have not been compromised, its reputation remains intact, and staff can hold their heads high.

Before you heave a sigh of relief that Landau and Savedoff are off the streets and out of the archives, please keep in mind that they have visited other repositories -- and that they might not have used their real names when doing so. The Baltimore Sun is reporting that:

. . . . Lee Arnold, senior director of the library and collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, said Landau and Savedoff -- using the name "Jason James" -- had visited more than a dozen times since December, identifying themselves as uncle and nephew . . . .
Landau introduced himself as a scholar and donated a copy of his first book to the society, and each time he came bearing cookies. But when officials tried to write him a thank-you note, it was sent back as undeliverable. An email address Savedoff gave also appeared to be invalid. Staff became suspicious and called a meeting, and planned to check their driver's licenses upon the next visit.

Moreover, Savedoff doesn't seem like the sort of person a legitimate researcher would hire as an assistant:

Of Landau, Arnold said: "He certainly was very personable. He had class. He knew how to conduct himself in a research library." But Savedoff, of whom little is known, was "rough around the edges" and "repeatedly asked naive questions," he said.
"He never understood what we were saying," Arnold said.

In the coming weeks, many of us will have to spend a little time reviewing our researcher registrations. For at least a few of us, this review will be the first step in a long, intensive effort involving the FBI and exhaustive inventorying of collections accessed by Landau and Savedoff.

Want to avoid being victimized by the likes of Landau and Savedoff? The Society of American Archivists has published an archival security guide and regularly offers a first-rate archival security workshop, there's a peer-reviewed journal devoted to security matters, and I've posted some strategies and tips from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's new Holdings Protection Team here and here. Other resources are out there if you look for them.

Spontaneous Scholarships for SAA Annual Meeting

2011-07-06T22:05:00.008-04:00

Kate T. over at ArchivesNext is a font of amazing ideas that would never in a million years cross my mind. A few days ago, she asked her Facebook friends and Twitter followers to contribute $20.00 each to help a grad student attend this year's annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA). The contributions quickly exceeded the cost of a single registration fee, and the Spontaneous Scholarships were born.

Here's the deal:

If you would like to attend the annual meeting but don't have the resources to do so, contact Kate at info[at]archivesnext.com no later than midnight on Friday, 8 July. You do not need to explain why you are requesting one of these scholarships, but you must be an SAA member and note whether you are a regular or student SAA member. Kate will select scholarship winners -- and create a "waiting list" of applicants who will be funded if more donations are received -- by drawing applicants' names from a hat.
If you are in a position to make a donation -- large or small -- to this effort, you can do so via PayPal (there's a handy link on the ArchivesNext homepage) or via snail mail (e-mail Kate for a physical address). Kate will accept donations received after 8 July, but please keep in mind that recipients will need some time to make travel arrangements and that 11 July is the Early Bird registration deadline.

Please note that the Spontaneous Scholarships are meant to defray the annual meeting registration fee and that recipients will be responsible for all travel and lodging costs. However, this is a great opportunity for people whose careers are just starting or are between jobs at the moment, and, as always, I'm once again astounded by the inventive way in which Kate identified a problem and unhesitatingly took practical action. The Spontaneous Scholarships won't fix the larger problem -- the manner in which the annual meeting registration fee inhibits students' and new archivists' participation in SAA -- but they will help several people who might not otherwise be able to attend this year's meeting.

I realize that times are tough and that donating to the Spontaneous Scholarships fund isn't an option for everyone. However, if you are able to do so, please consider making a contribution.

Image: Fireworks over the Empire State Plaza, Albany, New York, 4 July 2011, 9:03 PM.

Looking for a digital preservation workshop or course?

2011-06-30T20:57:00.003-04:00

The Library of Congress's Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) initiative has a new online calendar of online and in-person digital preservation courses and workshops offered by American academic institutions and professional associations.

At present, the calendar includes offerings from the following organizations:

AIMS Project
American Library Association
Amigos
Library of Congress
Los Angeles Preservation Network
Lyrasis
National Association of Government Archivists and Records Administrators
North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources
Northeast Document Conservation Center
Purdue University Libraries
Rare Book School
Society of American Archivists

You can sort the offerings by title, start date, format (i.e., on site or online), location, and cost. You can also use this dandy Web form to add information about courses and workshops that your own organization is offering.

Despite our best intentions, efforts to publicize continuing education opportunities are sometimes scattershot or excessively localized. We've needed a calendar of this sort for quite some time, and I'm really glad that DPOE has created it. I plan to consult it frequently and add to it as appropriate. Please do the same.

Archival mysteries

2011-06-22T20:31:00.005-04:00

Yesterday, Der Spiegel and Lens, the visual and multimedia reporting blog of the New York Times, published a lengthy, unsettling, and thought-provoking post about a Nazi photo album that has recently surfaced. The album is unusual in that it depicts both Nazi leaders -- Hitler among them -- and victims of Nazi persecution. No one, including the elderly garment industry executive who received it in lieu of cash repayment of a loan, knew who created it, but it documents the travels of a Nazi Party unit responsible for planning mass rallies from Berlin to Minsk and Smolensk -- via Danzig (now Gdansk), Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), and Barysaw -- and to Munich.

The owner of the album, who has pressing health and financial problems, wants to sell it, and he hoped that pinpointing its provenance would increase its selling price. The New York Times, intrigued by the historical mystery, researched the album, digitized some of its images, and put them online in hopes that readers would be able to shed light on its origins; however, they made it plain to the owner that their findings might decrease the album's monetary value and that they would not ask any of the experts that they consulted to furnish an estimate of the album's selling price.

Lens author David Dunlap and his colleagues consulted with staff at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, and New York University and with professors at New York University and Columbia and learned the following:

As even a cursory glance at the well-composed and well-executed photographs reveals, the photographer was a skilled professional. Moreover, the photographer may have been attached to the Propagandakompanie of the Wehrmacht, and this album may have been his personal property.
The pictures were taken in 1941, as evidenced by images of a meeting between Hitler and Admiral Miklos Horvathy, the regent of Hungary, in what was then the East Prussian city of Rastenburg (now Katrzyn, Poland).
The album contains a number of images of prisoners of war, including several of prisoners who wore yellow Stars of David. Photographs of Jewish P.O.W.'s are relatively rare: in most instances, Jewish P.O.W.'s were swiftly turned over to the S.S. and executed, a fate that almost certainly befell the Jews depicted in this album.
One of the images of prisoners is identical to photograph No. 1907/15 held by Vad Yashem's Stephen Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.
The photographer himself appears in several of the images, most notably those taken in Bavaria, where he wore civilian clothes. Moreover, many of the Bavarian photographs, including several in which the photographer is depicted, feature an anonymous woman.

In a textbook example of the value of crowdsourcing, the mystery of the album was solved a few hours after the New York Times and Der Spiegel published the images. Harriet Scharnberg, a German doctoral student who is researching German propaganda photographs depicting Jews, recognized the images of Jewish prisoners and identified the photographer, Franz Krieger (1914-1993), a native of Salzburg, Austria who left the S.S. to join the Propagandakompanie in 1941. Dr. Peter Kramml, the author of a book on Krieger's work, also identified Krieger and supplied confirming evidence.

Scharnberg and Kramml shed light on the circumstances that led to the album's creation and, to a lesser extent, its arrival in the United States:

Krieger traveled to the Eastern Front in August 1941, and the album documents his journey. He photographed the meeting between Hitler and Horvathy on his way home from the front.
The woman in the Bavarian photos is Krieger's wife Frieda, who died in the 17 November 1944 Allied bombing raid on Salzburg; the couple's two year-old daughter, Heidrun, also perished.
Shortly after Krieger returned from the Eastern Front, he left the Propagandakompanie and became a regular soldier, and when the war ended he became a businessman. He never again worked as a professional photographer.
The album, which might have been among the photographs that his mother apparently gave away at one point, was most likely brought to the United States by an American soldier, but its postwar chain of custody may always remain a mystery.

I strongly encourage you to check out the Lens posts (or, if you're fluent in German, the Der Speigel post, which is available here). The images are compelling and disturbing, and the speed with which the album's creator was identified ought to be an inspiration to archivists and other people seeking to learn more about records that have a tantalizingly incomplete provenance.

We should nonetheless keep in mind the counsel of Marvin Taylor, the head of New York University's Fales Library, who noted before the images were published that the photographs were printed on two different types of paper and thus may have been the work of more than one person, that the album might have been assembled by a third party, and that the photographs might not have been in chronological order: "We think we can get so close to these people [i.e., records creators], but we can’t. They are not the same people we are. We come up with assumptions -- and the material always undermines what we think." Although it's heartening to see an archival mystery solved with such speed and accuracy, we archivists should always keep in mind that some of our mysteries resist solution and that our own assumptions and conclusions may lead us astray.

And if you believe that the digital age will be devoid of archival mystery, let me assure you that, thanks to missing and incorrect metadata, corrupted files, ill-advised migrations and conversions, murky transfers of custody, and a host of other problems, we are on the cusp of a most mysterious age. Earlier today, I was looking through a series of born-digital photographs in an effort to find exhibit-worthy images and started scrutinizing their internal timestamps, which are visible only when the images are displayed at 10 times their original size and which aren't included in the metadata that accompanied these images. I quickly realized that when sorted by file name, these images, which were taken seconds apart and run through a variety of systems before they were transferred to my repository, are actually in reverse chronological order -- something that escaped me when I initially processed these files several years ago. This isn't the first digital mystery I've encountered, and it most certainly won't be the last.

E-mail management, part two

2011-06-05T13:13:00.003-04:00

. . . And now for something completely different. David Stephens's approach to managing e-mail, which I posted about yesterday, is an enterprise-level solution to an enterprise-level problem. What about those of us -- l'Archivista among them -- who just can't seem to manage their personal e-mail appropriately? I've got a couple of personal accounts that are filled with sales pitches, listserv detritus, and other stuff that I really should delete, but I've got generous storage quotas and a finite amount of time. I've also got pretty decent search capability, but the volume of junk is starting to affect my search results. I recently needed to track down a Continental e-ticket and had to wade through a bunch of old Continental sales pitches before I could find it. Urgh.

For some of us, a new service, GiveBackMail, may help. GiveBackMail displays a new advertisement each time a user sends, opens, or deletes a message, and the service makes a small donation to charity each time a user performs one of these actions. At present, GiveBackMail allows users to earmark their donations for one of seven non-profit organizations working in a variety of areas: cancer, education, conservation, animal welfare, people with AIDS, microlending, and victims of the recent tornadoes. GiveBackMail hopes to add additional charities, and account holders can suggest charities that might warrant inclusion.

GiveBackMail users have the option of routing one or more of their existing AOL, GMail, Hotmail, and Yahoo accounts through GiveBackMail or setting up a separate GiveBackMail account; if they opt for the latter, they can keep their existing e-mail addresses and their correspondents will be none the wiser. Users can also the service to post updates to their Facebook or Twitter accounts.

A recent New York Times article notes that GiveBackMail's business model seeks to redirect users' eyeballs: instead of viewing ads served up by AOL, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, GiveBackMail wants you to route your e-mail through its servers and to view the ads it displays, and its charitable donations are designed to induce you not only to reroute your e-mail but also to change your e-mail management practices.

The Times article also notes that GiveBackMail is built upon the embedded-giving model that myriad corporations have recently embraced. If you purchase something or do something, a portion of the purchase price or corporate funds (up to a certain amount) will be donated to a specific cause. As Laura Starita points out, we should all think critically about this model, which can render "philanthropy subject to the retail cycle," undermine donor trust by failing to communicate how donations are being used, corrupt the desire to give by melding it with the desire to acquire, and paper over problematic environmental, labor, or other practices. However, if you're comfortable with viewing a few ads, think that the prospect of directing small sums of money to a non-profit organization will motivate you to clean up your inbox, and keep in mind that using GiveBackMail won't make you any sort of activist, then you might want to check it out. Moreover, GiveBackMail supplies monthly statements outlining how each users' donations have helped the charity he or she selected, which ought to help users feel more confident about the service.

I recently registered with GiveBackMail, and I found the process simple. I have only one complaint: I discovered only when I first attempted to register that GiveBackMail cannot be used to manage free, basic Yahoo e-mail accounts. GiveBackMail works only with Yahoo Plus accounts, but there is no mention of this fact anywhere in the "How It Works" or "Features" sections of the GiveBackMail site. I can't determine from the GiveBackMail site whether GiveBackMail works with the free versions of AOL, GMail, or Hotmail.

Undeterred by GiveBackMail's inability to help me get a grip on my Yahoo accounts, I set up a separate GiveBackMail account and plan on using it for a few routine things. GiveBackMail is currently in beta mode, and, as the Times points out, there's always the possibility that Google or one of the other big Web e-mail providers will undercut GiveBackMail by replicating its view-an-ad-make-a-donation business model, so I'm not 100 percent certain I want to make it my primary account at this time. However, so far I've been pretty pleased with GiveBackMail. Its interface is simple and intuitive, and it seems to do what it's supposed to do -- enable me to send, receive, organize, and delete messages and keep track of contacts -- without any hitches. Moreover, at least in the short term, I've gotten better at deleting all those useless messages . . . .

E-mail management, part one

2011-06-04T13:22:00.005-04:00

A few days ago, I attended a Central New York ARMA event at which David O. Stephens analyzed the Top Ten Issues Driving Records Management Today. As might be expected, Stephens devoted a lot of attention to the challenges posed by electronic records, and I was particularly struck by his strategy for improving the management of e-mail.

Stephens noted that e-mail is now the dominant form of business communication: more than 60 percent of electronic business documents are transmitted as e-mail attachments, and up to 60 percent of business-critical information is stored in the messaging environment. However, IT departments struggling to keep e-mail systems operational typically purge all messages after a relatively short time (e.g., 90 days) or force end users to limit the number of messages stored in the system. End users who need to retain older messages must either save them to an "archive" on a local or shared hard drive or print them out.

From a legal discovery standpoint, these practices are profoundly troubling: retaining messages that could have been disposed of increases an organization's legal exposure, combing through individual e-mail archives, paper printouts, or backup tapes is time- and resource-intensive, and overlooking an obscure archive or tape stored offsite can have devastating consequences.

Stephens also pointed out that the orthodox records management approach to e-mail -- having end users match the content of individual messages to a specific records series and organize the messages accordingly -- is, quite simply, a recipe for failure. Unfortunately, too many records managers still believe that end users must be responsible for managing their own e-mail.

Stephens asserted that individual messages fall into one of three categories -- short-term value, medium-term value, and long-term value -- and treating each category as follows:

Short-term. This category comprises messages of transitory value. Users should be trained to identify such messages and to delete them from their mailboxes on a daily basis. Most users will have to devote 10-15 minutes a day to doing so, and supervisors should support and encourage this practice.
Medium-term. Messages not deleted by users should be classified as having routine business value and should be automatically transferred to an e-mail archiving system at regular intervals. These messages should be retained in the e-mail archiving system for 3-7 years depending upon the organization's resources and needs; 3 years is generally the minimum retention period needed to satisfy legal requirements, but organizations that opt for a more conservative approach may opt to keep e-mail for 5-7 years.
Long-term: The number of employees who send or receive messages that should be retained for more than 3-7 years is relatively small, and the total number of messages that warrant lengthy retention is also small. Employees who are likely to send or receive such messages should be taught how to identify them and to either print them out or transfer them to an electronic records management (ERM) system.

As Stephens points out, this approach isn't perfect: some employees simply won't identify and delete messages of transitory value, and some employees who send and receive messages that have long-term retention needs won't consistently identify them and remove them from the messaging environment. However, it is a vast improvement upon current practice: it relieves end users of all responsibility for managing messages of routine business value, relieves IT and legal staff of the obligation to go through backup tapes and those pesky individual e-mail archives, and ensures that messages that have reached the end of their retention period won't hang around and increase the organization's legal exposure.

The only problem that I have with Stephens's approach is its reliance upon technology -- not because I believe that e-mail archiving systems and ERM systems are inherently deficient but because many records managers will find it hard to justify their purchase, particularly in the current economic climate. In the absence of pressing e-discovery concerns or regulatory requirements, governments and a substantial number of non-profit and corporate bodies will no doubt continue to classify e-mail archiving systems and electronic recordkeeping systems as second- or third-tier priorities.

Moreover, in some instances, organizations that see the need for these IT investments may have difficulty finding products that truly meet their needs. Owing to the market dominance of Microsoft Enterprise/Outlook, users of Enterprise/Outlook systems can select from a wide array of compatible e-mail archiving products. Lotus Notes users also have a decent number of choices, but users of other systems have fewer options. Users who are outsourcing their e-mail to the cloud may well be dependent upon their cloud service providers.

I nonetheless hope that records managers embrace this approach and start pressing their employers to make the requisite IT investments. Stephens noted that when we get snail mail at home, we toss the junk mail, put the magazines on the coffee table or nightstand, and place the bills in our "to-do" pile, but we don't put any of this stuff back in the mailbox. Why, then, are we storing e-mail in our inboxes? We need to start asking senior managers and IT personnel this question and pushing them for a better answer.

Government social media records

2011-05-29T19:03:00.009-04:00

Local, state, and federal governments are increasingly using social media to convey important information and to solicit feedback from citizens. However, governments and officials are still struggling to adapt to a Web 2.0 world. Michigan, for example, is actually taking down some social media content as a result of legal considerations and resource limitations. U.S. Representative Patrick McHenry (R-NC) and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration have recently learned that citizen feedback isn't limited to "likes" or approval. At this moment, U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) is probably wishing that he had never gotten a Twitter account. And Kent County, Delaware has recently issued a policy that bars employees from posting negative comments about their colleagues or county government -- whether via county-owned computers while at work or via their own computers and cell phones while off the clock .

What to do? I can't help you strike the right balance between the need to present an appropriate face to the public and the free speech rights of your employees -- the courts will probably do that -- but if you're a government official or employee contemplating using social media, be sure to check out the following resources:

Government Technology's Five Social Media Missteps to Avoid
iDisaster 2.0's Top 36 Items to Include in Social Media Policies
The Center for Technology in Government's Designing Social Media for Government: Eight Essential Elements, which contains links to a wide array of state and local government policies

Even a cursory glance at these resources will underscore the fact that, in most jurisdictions, social media content typically meets the statutory definition of a "public record" and must thus be managed properly. For tips on how to do so, consult the following:

Patricia C. Franks's How Federal Agencies Can Effectively Manage Records Created Using New Social Media Tools
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's NARA Bulletin 2011-02, Guidance on Managing Records in Web 2.0/Social Media Platforms

At present, just about everyone seems to agree that most social media content has a short retention period. Unfortunately -- but not surprisingly -- there is no consensus regarding how best to capture and preserve content that has enduring value. There are lots of tools out there, and all of them have different features and save content differently. Given that most social media content will likely be destroyed within a relatively short timeframe, this isn't as big a problem as it might be. However, I suspect that those of us charged with capturing and preserving content deemed archival may run into some preservation problems a few years down the road -- and I hope that the federal government's 2009

My own experience is limited to capturing content created by others, which poses some additional challenges: some social media capture tools are expressly designed to help people preserve their own content and require full login rights. In such a situation, use of a Web crawler may be the best approach. I've experimented -- with decidedly mixed results -- with using OCLC's Heritrix-based Web Harvester to capture Facebook, IdeaScale, Twitter, and YouTube content, and I know several people have had somewhat greater success with Heritrix-based Archive-It service. If you're interested in exploring Web crawling of social media content, check out this nice list of Web crawling software and services.

If you're looking to preserve your own content, other options are available:

Several low- and no-cost tools that support capture and archiving of one's own Facebook and Twitter content are out there. For more information, consult April Edmonds's superb overview.
TwapperKeeper enables you to capture and preserve tweets (i.e., individual Twitter posts) that contain specified hashtags or keywords. Using this tool to capture all of the tweets created by a specific office may be a challenge, but it can be used to capture all of the tweets related to a specific subject or event. Sadly, the "download and export" and "API" components features present within the Web-based version of TwapperKeeper were recently removed at the behest of Twitter. However, it's still possible to install an open source version of the software that still includes these features on your own server.
A growing number of software companies, among them Arkovi, Backupify, LiveOffice, Smarsh, Sonian, and Symantec, are creating social media archiving tools or incorporating them into larger e-mail archiving products. If you're already using an e-mail archiving product, investigate whether it also supports social media archiving. If you're not, a stand-alone commercial product or service may meet your needs.

Finally, please note that, at present, the imperative to manage state and local government social media records may conflict with the terms of service agreements governing usage of social media services such as Facebook or Twitter; in many instances, these agreements limit the extraction or repurposing of content. The federal government has negotiated special agreements with many social media service providers, and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers has negotiated a model Terms of Service agreement for state and local government Facebook users and is currently seeking to develop similar agreements with other social media service providers, but it's likely going to be some time before the legal issues that might affect our ability to manage social media records are resolved conclusively.

New NARA trustworthy digital repositories guidance

2011-05-28T23:07:00.004-04:00

I've made it back to Albany and am wading through piles of mail and other stuff that either accumulated in my absence or simply wasn't dealt with before I left town. Included in that pile are a few nuggets of information that I wanted to pass on to you, and over the next few days, I'm going to do just that.

The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration has just released Establishing Trustworthy Digital Repositories: A Discussion Guide Based on the ISO Open Archival Information System (OAIS) Standard Reference Model. It contains a brief overview of the six core business processes -- ingest, archival storage, data management, administration, preservation planning, and access -- outlined in the OAIS Reference Model and a series of nicely thought-out questions that enable agencies to assess how well their current high-level policies, practices, and procedures support each of the six processes and to identify needed improvements.

As might be expected, this publication is directed at federal agency CIO's, program managers, and records officers. However, anyone charged with developing and implementing policies, procedures, and processes that support the long-term preservation of college/university, local or state government, or corporate digital materials should examine it closely. It's only twelve pages long and refreshingly free of jargon, which means that non-archivists and non-records managers may actually read it, and almost all of the questions it asks are broadly applicable. Strongly recommended.

Ohio public records controversy

2011-05-24T20:49:00.006-04:00

Apologies for the virtually non-existent posting during the past few weeks. I've spent three of the past four weeks attending to family matters, and I've simply had to put this blog and a bunch of other things on the back burner.

At the moment, I'm in Ohio, which is the site of a fascinating court case centering upon management of and access to public records. Ohio's Public Records Law currently allows citizens to receive civil forfeitures from local governments that have improperly destroyed requested records, and late last month the Ohio Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case involving Timothy Rhodes, who originally sought approximately $5 million in damages from the city of New Philadelphia, which destroyed audio recordings of roughly 20 years of 911 calls.

Rhodes initially submitted identical requests to several Ohio communities, all of which had destroyed their recordings. However, New Philadelphia was the only one that did not have an Ohio Historical Society-approved records schedule that gave it the legal right to destroy the recordings after they reached the end of their retention period.

New Philadelphia contends that Rhodes' multiple requests prove that he had no interest in the content of the records themselves and was seeking to exploit the Public Records Law for personal gain. Rhodes asserts that even though he did have a legitimate need for the information in the records -- he was involved in a group that opposed tax increases earmarked for countywide 911 services -- the Ohio Public Records Act states very plainly that records requesters do not need to explain why they want to see records or what they plan to do with the information the records contain.

A lower-court jury determined that Rhodes was seeking financial gain and ruled in favor of the city, an appeals court overturned the verdict on the grounds that Rhodes' motives were irrelevant, and now the matter is in the hands of the Supreme Court. Local governments throughout the state are eagerly awaiting the Supreme Court's ruling. Several other small cities are currently being sued by requesters seeking millions of dollars in civil penalties, and many, many others fear that a ruling in Rhodes' favor will lead to a deluge of requests from citizens seeking to turn bad records management practices into a source of personal income.

For what it's worth, I'm really of two minds about this case. I understand the fear of officials in New Philadelphia -- which is about an hour southeast of my current location -- and other localities about the ramifications of a ruling in Rhodes' favor. I don't have ready access to any statistics regarding open records requests, but my own experience and that of many colleagues at all levels of government suggest that public records requests are increasing in both volume and complexity. My experience also suggests that the local governments that would be most negatively affected by such a ruling are those that are least able to bear the burden: northern cities battered by decades of deindustrialization and southern small towns that struggled even when the rest of the state prospered and now compete to attract minimum-wage jobs.

At the same time, I believe that governments should take their records management responsibilities seriously, that citizens have the right to access public records, and that they shouldn't have to explain why they wish to access records. It's been a while since I've been in contact with anyone at the Ohio Historical Society, which serves as Ohio's state archives and records management agency, but it seems to me that the financial penalties outlined in the Public Records Act is a powerful inducement to get one's records management house in order; of course, one might ask whether the financial penalties for non-compliance might best be directed to a dedicated records management improvement fund or otherwise amended to reduce profiteering.

I have no idea when the Ohio Supreme Court will hand down its ruling, but I'm certainly looking forward to reading it.

MARAC Spring 2011: New Tools to Address Electronic Records Challenges

2011-05-07T22:51:00.006-04:00

Fifth order Fresnel lens used in the Jones Point lighthouse, Alexandria, Virginia, during the 19th century and now held by The Lyceum, Alexandria, Virginia, as seen on 5 May 2011.

The first session of the Spring 2011 Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference focused on three electronic records research projects sponsored by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. All of them are intriguing, and all of them promise to help many electronic records archivists do their work.

Peter Bajscy (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) detailed the cloud-based solutions that he and his colleagues have developed in order to the challenges associated with the increasing number and complexity of file formats, the increasing volume of electronic records, growing hardware and software complexity, and ephemeral support for proprietary software. I haven’t had the opportunity to check out these tools, but I certainly will do so as soon as I get the chance:

Conversion Software Registry: A registry and freely accessible search tool that enables users seeking to convert files from one format to another to specify the format of the records with which they’re working and the desired preservation format and then review a list of appropriate conversion tools. Over 2,000 software packages are documented in the registry.
Polyglot: a cloud-based, open source conversion tool suitable for classified and proprietary information.
Versus [in development]: a tool that can compare original and converted versions of the same digital object -- simple and complex -- and evaluate resulting information losses. The results of these comparisons can be used to determine which preservation approach results in the least loss.

Bajcsy and his team are also interested in developing a Universal File Viewer, a cloud-based service that could provide a preview of files encoded in any format.

Bajcsy also posed a few questions for the audience to consider:

His team can deliver, on average, 1537.41 file conversions in one hour (50% utilization of a single CPU virtual machine and 50% virtual uptime of the virtual machine). Does this conversion rate meet archival needs?
How many file formats have you personnally encountered in your work?
Would the Universal File Viewer provide an added value?
Is data-driven file format selection for preservation a viable approach?
Is software robustness evaluation a viable approach to determining whether a given file is well-formed? (i.e., determining how many applications can open a given file might be a more practical means of determining well-formedness than comparing the file to the format specification.)
What is the value of data-driven evaluation of quality of software input/output functionality?

William Underwood (Georgia Tech Research Institute) then discussed his work on new tools for identifying file formats, identifying document types, and extracting metadata.

Archivists must identify file formats for a variety of reasons: assessing compliance with submission agreements/transfer memoranda, reading/playing files, conversion to standard or preservation formats, extracting information from archive files (e.g., .zip, .arc), password recovery and decryption, and repairing damaged files. In some instances, it may be possible to use external identifiers (e.g., file extensions, MIME types) to identify unknown formats. However, in some instances, external indicators are not sufficient., and the most popular analytical tools, the Linux file command and magic file, have some limitations: their output is sometimes ambiguous, they test output metadata as well as file types, and their tests for character set and language of text files are less than perfect.

Underwood and his colleagues are refining the Linux file command and magic file so that they produce file format signatures that can be compared to signatures of known file formats. To date, they have defined roughly 850 file format signatures and have collected examples of approximately 700 different file format types. They have also created a file signature database and, as moderator Mark Conrad noted afterward, contributed file signatures to the National Archives of the United Kingdom (NAUK) PRONOM file format registry; these signatures have been incorporated into DROID, NAUK’s open source file format identification tool.

Underwood and his colleagues are also testing new techniques for recognizing document types and extracting descriptive metadata. Their focus is on legacy documents that do not conform to XML document type definitions. They examine the intellectual form (i.e., structure) of these documents and then construct “intellectual grammars” for each document type (e.g., memoranda) and use intellectual extraction techniques to pull out names, dates, and other metadata elements.

Underwood noted in passing that after and his colleagues have extracted this metadata, they can write rules that enable us to create item-level descriptions. From those item-level descriptions, they can write rules that enable us to create file-level and then series-level descriptions. I was really struck by this statement, which suggests that automation is going to lead to some really intriguing -- and to many people unsettling -- changes in archival descriptive practice.

Underwood and his team hope to apply induction techniques to examples of a particular document type and generate a “document grammar” automatically and to expand their extraction techniques to include physical elements of documentary form (e.g., fonts) and document grammars of physical layouts. Cool stuff.

I really can’t do justice to the third presentation. Maria Esteva (Texas Advanced Supercomputing Center) and her colleagues are exploring possible archival uses of visualization technology, and, not surprisingly, her presentation included a lot of illustrations and multimedia material. If you want to get a sense of these materials look like -- and I recommend that you do so -- some of them are featured and on the Texas Advanced Supercomputing Center site and in this month’s issue of Discover magazine; the team has also outlined its findings here.

Visualization tools can be used to depict, compare, and contrast many different types of data. Esteva and her colleagues hope that visualization, which is often easier for the mind to grasp than lengthy textual or statistical analyses, will ultimately help to guide archival processing decisions, facilitate analysis large quantities of electronic records that consist of multiple document types and complex digital objects, and to enhance access to large, complex grouping of electronic records.

Using an electronic records testbed supplied by NARA, Esteva and her colleagues use a variety of automated techniques to identify groupings of files and data objects related by provenance and extract information about content and organization, and then place the resulting data in a relational database. They then use data mining, alignment algorithms, natural language processing, data distributions, and information classes to compare, contrast, and identify intellectual relationships between records and use visualization tools to create graphic representations of the results of their analyses: pie charts, network graphs, and, in particular, tree diagrams.

Esteva presented two visualization case studies that drew upon the testbed. The first highlighted how visualization could help archivists process electronic records by highlighting intellectual content and relationships that were not immediately apparent, assess preservation needs, and identifying other salient characteristics of the records. The other showed how visualization could help users identify collections that were particularly relevant to their research needs. Researchers searching for materials that contain specific intellectual content, have a specific provenance, were created at a specific time, exhibit specific patterns, or have some combination of these and other characteristics could visually assess which collections would be the most fruitful.

Maybe it’s a sign of advancing age (not to mention my fondness for the written word), but at this point I’m not quite convinced that researchers seeking records that possess a specific characteristic or cluster of characteristics will invariably prefer analyzing a tree diagram. However, I am intrigued by visualization technology and I think that we’ll soon come to accept that it can help us identify materials that have particular preservation needs, are responsive to specific freedom of information requests, or have specific traits or patterns that might have otherwise escaped our attention. In addition, I think that researchers will embrace visualization technology as an analytical tool; for example, many researchers will likely use relationship graphs to highlight patterns of interaction embedded within large clusters of e-mail messages.

MARAC Spring 2011: Archival Ethics and the Call of Justice

2011-05-06T23:46:00.004-04:00

1315 Duke Street, Alexandria, Virginia, 5 May 2011. Between 1828-1861, this unassuming brick building was used as a holding pen for slaves awaiting sale in Natchez, New Orleans, or elsewhere; neighboring structures were also part of the city's slave trade district. It now home to the Northern Virginia Urban League and its Freedom House Museum, which documents the lives of the men, women, and children who were imprisoned here.

The Spring 2011 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives conference got off to a roaring start with Rand Jimerson’s thought-provoking plenary address, "Archival Ethics and the Call of Justice." Jimerson’s words have been bouncing around my head since this morning, and this post is an effort to nail some of them down. First, however, a disclaimer is in order. I’m a little sleep-deprived at the moment, and as a result some of the first half of Jimerson’s address bounced right off my benumbed skull. In other words, this post may not be fully faithful to his remarks. However, what I heard (or think I heard) got at least a few of my mental wheels spinning.

Jimerson began by summarizing several propositions put forth at a 2005 colloquium sponsored by the Nelson Mandela Foundation:

Archivists must avoid allowing normative conceptions of society to color the ways in which they select, acquire, and furnish access to materials.
Archivists must fight against destruction or neglect of records that document oppression.
(Oppressive regimes tend to be really good at documenting their crimes but attempt to destroy their records when their demise is imminent.)
Archivists must proactively create archives that reflect the full diversity of their societies.
Archivists should not be passive documenters of society but active participants in efforts to achieve social justice.

All of these propositions are new (or relatively new) to the archival profession, which has traditionally seen itself as objective and neutral. However, archives have traditionally served and reinforced he interests of entrenched power: their holdings reflect the words and deeds of the powerful, the successful, and the educated, and people and groups lacking one or more of these characteristics have either remained undocumented or documented only by records creators opposed to or indifferent to their experiences and perspectives. In recent years, Archivists have consciously started making an effort to make the documentary record more inclusive, but our emphasis upon provenance and upon the written word ensures that we are subtly biased toward the powerful and the influential.

Jimerson noted that many archivists might have trouble accepting that their work and their holdings reflect and perpetuate existing relations of power and might be deeply wary of the "call to justice" articulated in Johannesburg in 2005. However, he noted that it is possible to maintain professional standards of objectivity while at the same time accepting the impossibility of being personally neutral: as historian Thomas Haskell has asserted, a commitment to telling the truth does not prevent one from engaging in advocacy, but it does place certain intellectual limits on one’s advocacy. Moreover, answering the "call to justice" does not mandate that one adopt a particular partisan affiliation. However, it does mandate that one embrace and defend democratic values (e.g., government openness and transparency, the right of all citizens to participate fully in the life of their society and to have their histories and perspectives documented).

Jimerson then offered a variety of ways in which archivists can answer this "call of justice":

Ensure diversity in the archival record. The Society of American Archivists has recently identified the need for diversity in the record and in the profession as one of three key priorities, and this is a step in the right direction.
Welcome the stranger into the archives. We seek to include previously marginalized groups in archival documentation and ensure that they are full partners in the recordkeeping process. In the end, the entire community must be the provenance.
Base selection and appraisal decisions should be based upon clearly articulated and widely accessible criteria. We need to document our decisions.
Listen for oral testimony. Many peoples throughout the world -- including some residing in Canada and the U.S. -- do not write down their histories. If we do not seek out oral testimony and conduct oral histories, we will not know large parts of the world from the inside.
Make archival description sensitive to power relationships and conscious of the coded language that describes the social dynamics that led to their creation.
Make records accessible freely and openly, within the bounds established by privacy concerns and cultural concerns (e.g., access to tribal records).
Embrace new technologies. Social media and electronic records make it easier to make information widely available. Moreover, we need to embrace Kate Theimer’s conception of Archives 2.0: promote openness, flexible, user-centered, efficient, assessment-oriented.
Support open government, transparency, and democratic values.
Engage in public advocacy, which may include becoming whistleblowers when powerful people and groups try to destroy or alter records.

As noted above, Jimerson’s address was provocative. First, it made me painfully aware of the manner in which I still privilege the written word and literary aptitude. I came to archives as an aspiring labor historian seeking to recover the experiences of men and women who created few written records. My earliest work in archives focused on increasing the inclusivity of the documentary record, and I will argue to death the importance of ensuring the comprehensiveness of the historical record. I am nonetheless unduly impressed by people who “write well” and can be quite uncharitable toward people who are not proficient writers (especially if they’re hard-partying or unfocused undergraduates -- hence my decision not to finish my Ph.D. and go into academe).

I don’t think I will ever overcome this bias -- and in some respects I don’t really want to -- but Jimerson’s words were a stinging reminder that I need to be aware of it and to ensure that I go out of my way to treat with respect records creators, researchers, and other people who don’t embrace the written word as I do, to understand how they understand the world and document their histories, and to do what I can to ensure that they are equitably represented in the documentary record.

I also started thinking about the ways in which Jimerson’s ideas seem to be rooted in relatively recent developments in historical scholarship. The historians who pioneered the "new social history" -- "history from the bottom up" -- in the 1970s and 1980s began scouring records created by elites for information about the lives and perspectives of non-elite people: slaves, laborers, women of all classes, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Barbara Hanawalt’s superb The Ties that Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England, which mines records of royal inquiries into unnatural deaths for evidence of everyday peasant life, is a superb example of this sort of reading against the grain: Hanawalt was able to reconstruct how these largely illiterate men and women bathed and washed their clothes (yes, they did these things!), cared for children and the elderly, attempted to regulate sexual relationships and negotiate internal social hierarchies, distributed food and other essential resources, and grew crops, tended animals, and produced various necessities of life. Charles Joyner’s Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community, which draws upon plantation owners’ diaries and records in addition to oral histories of and narratives written by former slaves, is another stellar example.

I can easily envision a scenario in which this sort of historical inquiry might be viewed as oppressive in and of itself. For example, one person whose life is partially documented in the records of government social service agencies might welcome the sort of inquiry undertaken by a social historian intent upon treating his or her subjects respectfully, but another might view it as yet another unwelcome and painful intrusion perpetuated by yet another educationally, socially, and economically privileged person. However, it strikes me that the philosophical commitments of the new social historians (e.g., belief in the inherent dignity and value of all persons, desire for a comprehensive and equitable historical record) are closely related to those of Jimerson’s justice-focused archivists. The new social history is still reshaping the archival worldview -- and, in my view, that’s a very good thing.

Southern archives in need

2011-05-05T09:31:00.004-04:00

As you all know, the southeastern United States experienced a record-breaking and devastating series of tornadoes. Approximately 350 people were killed, entire neighborhoods were destroyed, and recovering from the physical damage wreaked by the storms will likely take years.

Given the loss of life and property and the profound psychological impact of this catastrophe, worrying about the fate of historical records may seem like a trivial thing. However, records are essential to the recovery process: government records document the civic and property rights of citizens struggling to rebuild their lives, and other types of records can help to reconstruct the sense of place and context that disaster tears asunder.

Folks on the ground have the best grasp of the situation, but here's what I've been able to find via the Web:

The Pratt City branch of the Birmingham Public Library was severely damaged and will likely have to be torn down. However, the Pratt City Historical Archives, which was housed in the building, was not damaged.
Public libraries in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee were destroyed or badly damaged, and staffers at some other libraries have lost their homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency recently added public libraries to its list of community resources that merit immediate assistance following a disaster, but these libraries and their communities have a long road ahead of them.
Some the archival and other records created by the city of Riverside, Alabama suffered water damage.
The genealogy and local history collections of the Dade County (Georgia) Public Library System were stored in a facility that suffered terrible damage. A contractor is currently sifting through the collections and identifying salvageable materials.
The Alabama Department of Archives and History is still trying to contact local governments in the hardest-hit parts of the state.

If past disasters are any guide, the coming weeks will bring a mix of news that is good and very, very bad. Please consider making a gift to a charitable organization helping people rebuild their lives and a gift to the National Disaster Recovery Fund for Archives.

Installing Archivematica

2011-04-20T14:47:00.008-04:00

Last week, my intrepid colleague Michael and I started playing around with Archivematica, the first open-source, Open Archival Information System Reference Model-compliant digital preservation system that can be installed on a desktop computer; it's fully scalable, so it also works well in a large-scale Linux server environment. Archivematica, which is being developed by Artefactual Systems in collaboration with the UNESCO Memory of the World's Subcommittee on Technology, the City of Vancouver Archives, the University of British Columbia Library, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and several other collaborators, is still in alpha testing mode, but it integrates a lot of open source digital preservation tools, including BagIt, the Metadata Extraction Tool developed by the National Library of New Zealand, and JHOVE and uses PREMIS, METS, Dublin Core, and other widely used metadata standards.

My intrepid colleague Michael and I have wanted to play around with Archivematica for some time, and last week we finally got around to downloading and installing it. The process went a lot more smoothly than we anticipated -- in large part because we read Angela Jordan's candid Practical E-Records post about her experiences and Michael J. Bennett's detailed Archivematica installation instructions as well as some of the instructions provided on the Archivematica site -- but we did hit a few sticking points. I'm sharing what we learned in hopes of helping other archivists who are interested in experimenting with Archivematica.

Archivematica is designed to operate within an Ubuntu Linux environment, but Mac and Windows users can easily install a virtual appliance that makes it possible to set up an Ubuntu environment on their computers. We opted to install Oracle VirtualBox, which is recommended by Archivematica's developers, and we were both really impressed by the clearly written, logically organized, and complete instructions that accompanied the software. I've encountered a lot of bad installation instructions and user manuals, and it's always a pleasant surprise when I run across manuals produced by good, careful technical writers. However, the manual didn't mention one thing that we and Angela Jordan encountered: as you install VirtualBox on a Windows machine, Windows will repeatedly warn you that you are attempting to install non-verified software and ask you whether you're certain you want to do so. Be prepared to click through lots of dire dialog box warnings.

After we set up VirtualBox, we followed Michael Bennett's instructions for installing Xubuntu 10.4. The installation process was simpler than we anticipated -- we basically clicked through a setup wizard -- but we had to stop work for the day a few minutes after the installation was complete.

Installing Archivematica itself was a bit more challenging. It took us a little while to figure out that we really did have to install it via the Web; much to our dismay, copying the files on the Archivematica Launchpad onto a DVD -- something that we had done several days before -- and then installing Archivematica via the DVD simply doesn't work.

Moreover, Michael and I are both completely new to Ubuntu, so we were a bit flummoxed by the Ubuntu Repository Package instructions that appear on the Archivematica site. I did a little Googling and discovered that we had to access Ubuntu's command line interface to install Archivematica and that we could do so via Terminal. We also found Michael Bennett's step-by-step instructions, which highlight some trouble spots, really helpful. However, Bennett's instructions illustrate how to copy the installation commands from the Archivematica Web site and paste them into the Terminal interface, and for some reason we simply couldn't paste the text we copied into Terminal. We were a little pressed for time, so in lieu of troubleshooting our copy/paste problem, we opted to type all of the installation commands into Terminal -- and hit a few trouble spots of our own as a result.

We hesitantly entered the command to add the first Archivematica PPA, and were gratified to discover that it apparently worked: the screen displayed a few lines of text, the word "error" didn't appear anywhere, and we were prompted to enter another command. We ran the second Archivematica PPA command and the trio of archivematica-shotgun commands without incident, but we had real problems running the vmInstaller-environment.sh. After about half a dozen error messages, we figured out what we were doing wrong: our all-too-human minds led us to read "enviroment," the last element in the command, as "environment."

There is only one "n" in "enviroment"!

Entering the flock (i.e., file lock) call also posed a few problems. Because we were typing, not copying and pasting, the commands, we first had to figure out whether the five asterisks at the start of the call were separated by spaces; they are. Then we had to figure out how to access the end of the flock call, which is hard to see on the Archivematica Web site. Fortunately, M.J. Bennett's instructions revealed that the text was indeed there, and we could view it when we highlighted it.

The highlighted segment of the flock call reads: /sharedDirectory/watchedDirectories/quarantined" Note the presence of the the quotation mark at the end.

After we rebooted our Ubuntu virtual machine, we were able to access Archivematica without any problems . . . but had to shut it down immediately and make our way to a previously scheduled event.

Michael and I estimated that it took a total of about four hours to install VirtualBox, Xubuntu 10.4, and Archivematica, and I'm pretty sure that the fumbles outlined above and our repeated readings of various installation manuals took up approximately one hour of that time. Moreover, a lot of the Archivematica installation time was taken up by sitting around and waiting for the commands to execute -- be prepared to see many, many lines of text appear in Ubuntu's Terminal -- and we could have done a little light work (e.g., proofreading draft MARC records, completing travel paperwork) while waiting to enter the next command.

I'm out of the office at the moment and Michael's going to have to focus on other projects during the next couple of weeks, but we'll start experimenting with Archivematica as soon as we get the chance. In the coming months, I'll put up at least a couple of posts outlining our findings.

Digital Preservation Management workshop, Albany, NY, 5-10 June 2011

2011-04-12T20:46:00.004-04:00

On June 5-10, the University at Albany, SUNY will host the Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short-Term Solutions for Long-Term Problems workshop.

This workshop, which is a radically revised and expanded version of the workshop (with accompanying online tutorial) that Nancy McGovern and Anne Kenney developed at Cornell University in 2003, is aimed at managers at organizations of all kinds who are or will be responsible for managing digital content over time. Nancy McGovern will be the lead instructor, and three other instructors will teach sections of the workshop. Theresa Pardo of the Center for Technology in Government will deliver a keynote address.

The workshop will begin on the evening of Sunday, June 5, continue Monday -Thursday from 9:00 AM- 5:00 PM, and conclude on Friday, June 10, at noon. The cost of registration is $950.00.

Additional information about the content and instructors is available at: www.icpsr.umich.edu/dpm/workshops/fiveday.html.

N.B.: Prospective attendees must submit an application. The application will be made available at http:// www.regonline.com/DPMworkshop-Albany2011 at 1:00 PM ET on Wednesday, 13 April (i.e., tomorrow!) and will be available until all 24 workshop slots have been filled. Applicants will receive notification of acceptance or denial within five business days of applying, and successful applicants will able to complete the registration process in early May.

Unfortunately, I won't be submitting an application: I'm not a manager, training funds are scarce these days, and I have a conflicting commitment. However, everyone who has attended one of these workshops has raved about the experience, and I obsessively studied the accompanying online tutorial when I first became an electronic records archivist. If you manage an archives, you should attend this workshop if at all possible. If you work with electronic records, you should strongly encourage your boss to attend this workshop.

"Newly found documents shed light on MLK's convicted killer"

2011-04-04T20:33:00.007-04:00

Forged Canadian passport used by James Earl Ray, who was apprehended at Heathrow Airport in London on June 8, 1968 and extradited shortly afterward. Image courtesy of the Shelby County, Tennessee Register of Deeds.

I was perusing CNN's Web site this weekend, and the above headline jumped out at me; looking for records-related news is one of the occupational hazards of being an archivist and one of the chief avocational hazards of being an archivist blogger. I clicked the link, and my curiosity was amply rewarded.

Forty-three years ago today, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., was slain in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was lending his support to striking sanitation workers. James Earl Ray was apprehended approximately two months after the shooting and ultimately entered a guilty plea in order to avoid undergoing a jury trial.

Until recently, little was known about Ray's state of mind in the months following his arrest or the inner workings of the investigations into King's murder. However, several years ago, staff from the Shelby County, Tennessee Register of Deeds who were processing unidentified materials in the Shelby County Archives found a large bundle of photographs, documents, and other materials relating to Ray, who later recanted his confession and unsuccessfully sought a jury trial.

All of these materials -- crime scene photographs, letters between Ray and members of his family, audio files, court records, and records of local, state, and federal prosecutors and law enforcement agencies -- have been digitized and are now accessible via the Web site of the Shelby County Register of Deeds.

These records have a broader context that is reflected in the rich holdings of King Collection at Morehouse College, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Archive at Boston University, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University -- and in countless collections that document the lives and work of civil rights activists and white supremacists, slaveowners, abolitionists, and slaves, and countless other Americans of all races, ethnicities, religions, and social and political beliefs.

These materials nonetheless add significantly to our understanding of the environment in which Martin Luther King, Jr. lived and worked, our knowledge of the man who was convicted of murdering him, and our understanding of how the police and the courts dealt with a murder that had a profound and lasting impact upon American society. (And to think that people -- including those who really should know better -- sometimes assume local government records are dull or inconsequential!) Thanks to Shelby County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood and his staff for devoting a lot of time, effort, and resources to making these important records widely available.

New York State Capitol fire

2011-03-29T20:30:00.000-04:00

First page of the Flushing Remonstrance, a petition from the freeholders of Flushing and Jamaica, Long Island, to New Netherland Governor Peter Stuyvesant protesting his ban on Quaker religious meetings, 1657. This document, which is particularly noteworthy because it was written by non-Quakers and is widely regarded as a precursor of the United States Constitution's guarantee of religious freedom, was badly damaged by the 25 March 1911 New York State Capitol fire. Dutch Colonial Council Minutes, 1638-1665, series A1809-78, New York State Archives, Albany, N.Y. Zoomable version available here.

One hundred years ago today, fire swept through the west side of the New York State Capitol, which then housed the collections of the State Library and the State Museum; the State Archives, which eventually took custody of the State Library's collection of state government records, had yet to be created. The fire claimed the life of night watchman Samuel Abbot and consumed 450,000 books, 270,000 manuscripts, 1,000,000 catalog cards, all of the State Library's other administrative records, and almost all of the State Museum's mammoth collection of Iroquois artifacts.

The 1911 fire remains one of the worst library fires in American history, and my colleagues and I deal with its aftereffects on a daily basis. Owing to the manner in which the records were stored, records from the British colonial and Revolutionary War eras were particularly hard-hit. Although some of these records had been transcribed and published prior to the fire, others were lost forever. Every archivist who staffs the State Archives references desk has had to tell researchers who found citations to colonial and Revolutionary War records in old books that the records in question were destroyed on 29 March 1911. Our State Library cohorts are accustomed to conveying the same sad news to researchers looking for certain manuscript collections and rare books.

Earlier today, my State Library colleagues Paul Mercer and Vicki Weiss, who have written a book about the 1911 fire and its aftermath, gave a lunchtime talk that focused on Albany's built environment at the time of the fire, the holdings of and physical space (oh, what a gorgeous space it was!) occupied by the State Library, and the utter devastation wrought by the 1911 fire.

The talk also highlighted the heroic salvage efforts undertaken by State Library staffers, some of whom risked their lives to save books and historical records, and for the rest of the day I kept thinking about the things that they did and said. For example, I knew that State Archivist A.J.F. Van Laer had been instrumental in rescuing the badly burned Dutch records, which he was in the midst of translating. However, I had no idea that he began salvaging records while the firefighters were still putting out the last of the flames, that he spent all day working in dripping wet clothes, or that he walked home, still soaked from head to toe, in freezing temperatures. I had never heard of Joseph Gavit, the librarian whose position as head of the stacks endowed him with intimate knowledge of the library's layout and holdings and who rescued the State Library's folio prints of John James Audubon's Birds of America -- deeply "human things" that, in his estimation, particularly warranted saving -- as bricks rained down around him. I understood instantly why Van Laer and Gavit unhesitatingly took such risks.

As Vicki and Paul pointed out, the recovery effort is ongoing. Van Laer, Gavit, Harland Hoyt Horner -- who rushed into the burning State Capitol to rescue the state's constitutions, a draft copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in Abraham Lincoln's own hand, George Washington's farewell address, and other treasures -- and the many nameless men and women who appear in photographs of the 1911 salvage operation began the work that my contemporaries are doing today. As you can see in this new online exhibit, my State Archives colleagues Susan Bove and Michael Grant are still conserving records that were burned in the 1911 fire. Our State Library colleagues are also conserving manuscripts and books and seeking to replace items that were lost in the flames a century ago. When my contemporaries and I are gone, future generations of archivists, librarians, and conservators will (I hope) carry on the work that Horner, Van Laer, Gavit, and their contemporaries began. The State Library and the State Archives both hold boxes of ashes and charred scraps that our predecessors found in areas known to house valuable materials and carefully preserved in the hope that technology would someday facilitate their reconstruction. We've discovered that scanning these scraps sometimes recovers text that cannot be read with the naked eye, and technology may well enable our successors to reconstitute the materials that our forebears saved.

If you live in New York's Capital District, WMHT will air an hour-long documentary about the State Capitol fire and its aftermath this Thursday, 31 March 2011, at 9:00PM -- immediately after the 8:00PM American Experience documentary about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which took place four days before the State Capitol conflagration. Given that these two fires spurred New York State and the nation to modernize fire safety and building codes, it's entirely fitting that these documentaries are being aired back-to-back.

New York State Archives Triangle Shirtwaist Fire exhibit

2011-03-25T19:07:00.004-04:00

Floor plan showing the layout of the ninth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. From Factory Investigating Commission, Press Clippings Concerning Commission Activities, 1911, 1913-1914. A3023-77, Box 1, Folder 19140401, 4, New York State Archives, Albany, N.Y. Image courtesy of the New York State Archives. A zoomable version of this image is available here, and a Cornell University School of Industrial Relations three-dimensional model of the floor plan is available here.

One hundred years ago today, fire quickly spread through the cramped, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building (now the Brown Building of Science) on New York City's Washington Square. Most of the employees on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape, but those on the ninth floor learned of the fire only when flames began spreading around them. A locked exit, a woefully inadequate fire escape, and elevator cars stopped by heat and the weight of the bodies of desperate women and men who jumped down the shaft hampered their escape. Dozens were overcome by smoke and flames, and dozens more -- many of them on fire -- leaped to their deaths before the fire could claim them. Within roughly half an hour, 146 workers, most of them young women or teenage girls who had immigrated from Italy or Eastern Europe, died. Six of those who perished remained unknown until earlier this year, when a dogged researcher who spent years combing through archival and library collections and old newspapers finally established who they were.

In the wake of the fire, New York State took dramatic action. It established a Factory Investigating Commission that began by examining fire safety issues in manufacturing facilities throughout the state and ultimately probed every aspect of the state's industrial economy. It then passed an ambitious series of laws concerning fire safety, working hours, and worker safety. Many other states and, ultimately, the federal government enacted legislation modeled upon New York's post-Triangle laws; Frances Perkins, who headed the Factory Investigating Committee's fire safety investigation and later served U.S. Secretary of Labor, asserted at one point that, in some respects, the New Deal began on 25 March 1911.

Several of my New York State Archives colleagues have created a new Web exhibit that brings together images of Triangle workers held by the Library of Congress and our own images of Factory Investigating Committee records highlighting the unsafe conditions, long working hours, and low rates of pay that investigators found in facilities located throughout the state. Please take a moment to check it out -- and to remember that sprinkler systems, fire alarms, accessible exits, and many other things that we take for granted were once rarities in the United States and are still rarities in many parts of the world.

Preserving Electronic Records in Colleges and Universities workshop, Plattsburgh, New York, 30-31 March 2011

2011-03-23T21:05:00.003-04:00

If you live in or can travel to New York's North Country, you might be interested in the Preservation of Electronic Records in Colleges and Universities workshop being offered on at SUNY Plattsburgh. This workshop, which will be held from 9:00 AM-Noon on 30 and 31 March, will focus on:

types of records that should be preserved
legal and technical issues surrounding electronic records
standards and best practices
multiple file formats you are likely to encounter
tactics for developing productive partnerships within your institution
what you need to know about disaster planning

I reviewed a couple of early versions of the workshop slides and presentation materials and attended the workshop when it was first offered in Albany last year, so I can vouch for its usefulness. I can also vouch for my highly capable colleague Denis, who will teach this workshop in Plattsburgh.

To register for this workshop:

Go to the New York State Archives' Workshops page.
Type "colleges" into the keyword search box to search for this event.
Click "Add to Cart" for both Day 1 (30 March 2011) and Day 2 (31 March 2011) of this workshop.
Click "View Cart."
Click "Check Out."
Use the drop-down menu to identify the type of institution for which you work and, if you work for a New York State local government, the county in which your are employed.
Complete and submit the registration form.

Your workshop materials will be made available electronically, and you will be emailed instructions for downloading and printing materials within one week of the workshop date.

If you have any questions about this workshop, please e-mail ARCHTRAIN[at]mail.nysed.gov or call 518-474-0670.

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire commemoration in Albany, New York

2011-03-22T23:33:00.009-04:00

Image courtesy of the American Labor Studies Center.

At approximately 4:45 PM on 25 March 2011, an improperly extinguished match or cigarette butt started a fire that quickly spread through the cramped, fabric-laden Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, which occupied the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the Asch Building (now the Brown Building) on New York City's Washington Square. Most of the employees on the eighth and tenth floors were able to escape, but those on the ninth floor learned of the fire only when flames began spreading around them. Flames kept them from using one of the exits, factory owners kept another exit locked in an effort to prevent theft, and the wrought iron fire escape quickly collapsed under the weight of desperate employees. Two courageous elevator operators were able to save some of the workers, but one car was soon stopped by the heat and the other by the weight of the bodies of employees who had jumped into the elevator shaft. Fire Department ladders reached only to the sixth floor. Dozens of desperate workers chose to leap to their deaths before the flames reached them. Less than half an hour after the fire broke out, 146 workers, most of them young women or teenage girls, were dead. The names of six of those who perished remained unknown until earlier this year.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire spurred a wave of activism and governmental reform at the local, state, and, ultimately, the federal level; future U.S. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and several other people who rose to prominence during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt were among the horrified onlookers who watched dozens of young women and men plunge to their deaths, and the experience remained with them for the rest of their lives.

This Friday at 4:00 PM in the New York State Museum's Clark Auditorium, Albany will join New York City organizers in honoring those who perished on 25 March 2011 and highlighting the reforms that followed. This hour-long program will feature members of the New York State Legislature, prominent academics, and members of the media and will provide background on the fire and its aftermath, an important event in New York's labor history and in the creation of progressive legislation aimed at improving working conditions for New Yorkers and Americans. As a special tribute, names of the victims will be read.

This event is sponsored by the American Labor Studies Center, the Civil Service Employees Association of New York State, New York State United Teachers, the Public Employees Federation of New York State, the New York State Department of Labor, and the New York State Archives Partnership Trust. Driving, parking, and public transportation information is available here.

Where have all the (old) hard drives gone?

2011-03-21T19:46:00.011-04:00

If you can't come up with an answer other than "long time passing," you may have a problem.

The State Comptroller of New Jersey recently recently released an audit report detailing problems in the state's disposal of surplus computer equipment. The state requires that its agencies degauss (i.e., use a powerful magnet to obliterate data) the hard drives of all surplus computers prior to disposal, but the auditors found that many state agencies were not complying with this policy. They examined a lot of 58 desktop computers and hard drives, some of which were to be auctioned off to the general public within a short time, and discovered that 46 of the drives still housed readable data. Some of the data was legally restricted and could have damaged citizens' lives or the state's information technology infrastructure if disclosed [p. 10-11]:

More than 230 files related to State investigative case screenings and reports of child abuse, endangerment and neglect. Many of the reports contained the names and addresses of the children. The files also included a child fatality report, child immunization records and a child health evaluation.
Information identifying the user of the hard drive as a high-level State agency official, internal agency memoranda, internal written briefings for an agency Commissioner, draft documents, personal contact information for multiple members of the then-Governor’s cabinet, and work plans for individual staff members.
A list of vendor payments referencing names of children and names, addresses and phone numbers of children placed outside of the parental home, along with case information.
A Microsoft Outlook e-mail archive containing 46 e-mails, including one listing multiple users’ computer sign-on passwords, as well as 11 personnel reviews for State employees that included their Social Security numbers.

A laptop computer that had been used by a judge who worked both at home and in an office also contained an array of legally restricted or otherwise sensitive information [p.7]:

The judge’s life insurance trust agreement, his tax returns for three years and a final mortgage payment letter that included the address of the property and the account number.
Two documents with the judge’s Social Security number.
A “confidential fax” to the New Jersey Lawyers Assistance Program concerning an attorney’s “personal emotional problems."
Non-public memoranda by the judge concerning potential impropriety by two attorneys.

The results of this audit propelled the Office of the State Comptroller, which oversees the auction of surplus state computers, cellular phones, and other equipment, has suspended the auctioning of hard drives and computers, but it's quite likely that hard drives containing readable data have been auctioned off in the past.

What an ugly state of affairs. However, those of us who work in large organizations are all too accustomed to having our old computers "taken away" by "the IT people" who configure our replacement machines and assuming that "the IT people" will dispose of them properly. Those of us who work in smaller organizations may not think about what happens to computers that are offered up for recycling or reassigned to interns or volunteers.

This state of affairs must change. Those of us who work with legally restricted or "sensitive" materials have to raise questions about what happens to our old desktops, make our managers aware of the potential consequences of not disposing of such equipment properly, ensure that existing disposal policies are actually observed, and, in the absence of existing policies, push for creation and enforcement of appropriate policies. Those of us who are archivists or records managers have a particular obligation to raise these issues and educate our customers, and those of us who do hands-on work with archival electronic records must ensure that old hardware and portable media is purged of any legally restricted or "sensitive" records prior to disposal. And, of course, we are all responsible for purging the hard drives of the computers that we purchase for our personal use prior to disposing of them.

How do you ensure that your hard drives (or other digital storage media) don't contain any recoverable data?

Remove them and destroy them. If I had a hammer, I'd hammer hard drives in the morning, I'd hammer hard drives in the evening, all over this land. Seriously, a 40-oz. hammer will do the job quite nicely. One county in New York State slices through its surplus drives with a plasma cutter. Some large organizations and computer recycling facilities have special shredders that can handle hard drives, data tapes, optical discs, and floppies, and many home and office shredders can destroy small quantities of floppy disks or optical discs (watch out for the resulting shards of plastic!) The options are endless. Of course, if you want to re-use the hard drive or give it to someone else, destruction is not a good option.
Degauss them. As noted above, degaussing involves exposing magnetic storage media to a strong magnetic current and thus obliterating the data they contain. Degaussing almost always renders hard drives completely unusable, so it's not a good option for people who want to re-use them or give them away. Degaussing equipment also requires an upfront investment ranging from several hundred to several thousand dollars, so it may not be a practical approach for individuals or organizations that do not regularly dispose of storage media; however, some firms rent degaussing equipment, and others may degauss small quantities of media for a fee.
Overwrite them. There are a number of software applications, including some open source options, that will repeatedly overwrite all of the data on your hard drive(s) with zeroes or, better yet, a numeric pattern and verification mechanism, thus rendering the data unrecoverable. This process may be time-consuming, but overwritten hard drives can be reused. If you're interested in overwriting the data on your personal computer's hard drive, check out the nice overview that Gizmodo posted about a year ago; it explains the readily available options for sanitizing hard drives, flash memory cards, and USB keychain drives. If you're responsible for disposing of hard drives that contain legally restricted or national security information, make sure that you comply with any applicable standards and policies governing the use of overwriting software.

Preventing insider theft: lessons from NARA's Holdings Protection Team

2011-03-19T13:09:00.010-04:00

On Thursday, I had the good fortune to attend a training session offered by representatives from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)'s newly established Holdings Protection Team. I've already posted about the team's tips for preventing thefts committed by researchers, and today I'm going to post about -- and reflect upon -- the team's recommendations regarding prevention of thefts committed by staff.

Approximately 75 percent of archival thefts are committed by staff, and Holdings Protection Team member Michael Knight suggested that this figure is probably low.

This is a sad truth, but there's a definite logic to it. We archivists have ready access to the collections and the expertise to identify records that are intellectually significant or have the greatest resale value. We enter this profession mindful of our role as stewards and guardians of the historical record, but a few of us ultimately repudiate this obligation. The reasons for doing so are, of course, varied:

Life-changing developments such as addiction, a sick child, a messy divorce, or a disastrous investment decision can render a person desperate for cash. Some people feel compelled to ensure that their families enjoy a certain standard of living.
In some instances, an archivist's love of the past has a covetous component.
Workplace resentments may lead a person to lash out at an employer or decide that he or she could take better care of the records at home.
Some people become archivists because they seek access to materials that they can steal and sell. Others enter the profession and then realize that theft can augment their earnings.

Before we all get jumpy and paranoid about our co-workers, let's keep in mind another fact that Knight emphasized: less than 1 percent of NARA employees have been proven to be thieves. I suspect that the percentage of dishonest staff at other repositories is similarly low.

Most of us are honest, and we have to keep in mind that security policies are meant not only to protect our holdings but our own sanity and reputations. Several years ago, my colleagues and I learned that one of our co-workers had been stealing materials from our holdings and that of our sister institution. Fortunately for us, the authorities quickly pinpointed him and he readily admitted his guilt. Archivists at several other repositories that experienced similar thefts haven't been so lucky: they worked under a cloud of suspicion for months on end, had their personal lives and finances picked apart by law enforcement personnel, and couldn't lean on each other for support.

Moreover, good security policies support our efforts to maintain physical control over our holdings. As Knight pointed out, records " go missing" for a variety of reasons:

Staff fail to complete sign-out cards or pull-slips. A slip or card should be completed every time a box is moved . . . even if the staffer plans to bring it right back.
People make mistakes when re-shelving -- especially when supervisors give the impression that speed is more important than accuracy.
Catalog records or box tracking systems are outdated or inaccurate.
Staff leave them unattended, either at their desks or in public areas.
Inadvertent discarding or destruction -- a threat in facilities that house both archival and non-permanent records or in areas in which a lot of rehousing is taking place.
Deliberate discarding or destruction. In one instance, a disgruntled contractor working in a NARA facility sporadically pulled boxes off the shelves and tossed them into the trash.

What to do? Senior management must create and enforce policies that safeguard holdings:

Insist that staff complete pull slips, sign-out cards, or otherwise document the movement of records.
Make it plain that leaving records in unsecured and unattended areas -- even for a moment -- is prohibited.
If stacks have electronic card key access, each person who enters the stacks must swipe his or her ID. "Piggybacking" (i.e., following a person who has swiped his or her card and failing to swipe one's own card) is not appropriate.
Emphasize that accuracy, not speed, is paramount when reshelving records.
If at all possible, monitor contractors who work in areas housing records.
Staff who discover security breaches must report them to their supervisor or to another person in the organization and, if appropriate, take immediate action to rectify the situation.

Knight mentioned at the start of his presentation that one of the Holdings Protection Team is, in essence, helping to create an institutional culture that enables everyone to take ownership of physical control and security matters. In the days following the training session, I spent a lot of time thinking about the Holdings Protection Team presentation and Richard Strassberg and Mimi Bowling's archival security workshop, which I attended a couple of years ago. For what it's worth, I drew up a list of what I consider to be the core characteristics of a security-focused institutional culture:

Senior management encourages and expects all staff -- managers, archivists, technicians, clerical/support -- to identify and address security issues.
Senior management solicits input and feedback from all staff.
Supervisors train subordinates properly, encourage subordinates to share their concerns, use minor lapses as teaching opportunities, and use punitive measures as a last resort.
All staff understand why security and physical control policies exist, accept that everyone is responsible for helping to protect the repository's holdings, and feel comfortable speaking up when confronted with the unusual or unexpected.

About 15 years ago, when I was still in graduate school, Richard Strassberg came to my Archives and Manuscripts class and gave a guest lecture on archival security. He placed a lot of emphasis upon the relationship between labor-management relations and archival security. A few people are inherently honest, a few people are inherently dishonest, and the vast majority of people can go either way depending upon the situation. Creating a work environment in which everyone -- custodial and security staff included -- is made to feel valued and respected reduces the risk that staff will steal because they feel demeaned, excluded, or powerless. In light of the Holdings Protection Team's training, I would argue that a work environment in which everyone is made to feel valued, respected, and empowered to address security issues also increases the chance that insiders who steal for monetary gain or to augment their own collections will be caught sooner rather than later. In the final analysis, repositories intent upon protecting their collections from insider theft must consciously create a positive, open, and supportive work environment.

NARA's Holdings Protection Team hopes to offer additional training sessions for non-NARA staff in the coming months. If you get the chance to attend, by all means do so.

Preventing researcher theft: lessons from NARA's Holdings Protection Team

2011-03-17T18:45:00.009-04:00

"It's easy to miss something you're not looking for." Remember that friendly researchers who frequently visit your repository may not be as honest as they seem and that trustworthy colleagues can experience life-changing events that leave them desperate for money, vengeful, or covetous.

This morning, representatives from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)'s newly established Holdings Protection Team gave archivists, librarians, and curators in New York's Capital District an abbreviated version of the security training that NARA staff receive. I had the good fortune of attending this session, and want to pass along a few things that I learned. In this post, I'm going to focus on the presentation given by Holdings Protection Team head Larry Evangelista, who discussed how to protect one's collections against thefts committed by researchers. In tomorrow's post, I'll focus on prevention of insider theft.

As might be expected, Evangelista's presentation focused on NARA's procedures and protocols, which naturally reflect NARA's status as a large institution that operates multiple facilities. In some instances, what follows reflects my own effort to interpret the team's guidance in ways that might be more applicable to smaller institutions. Moreover, what follows is at times purposely vague: the last thing I want to do is give some Web-trawling bad actor detailed information about NARA's security measures.

Evangelista, a former police officer and veteran retail store security specialist, set the stage by outlining the work of the team, which was started in the wake of the theft of a hard drive containing Clinton presidential records and is responsible for training NARA staff, conducting site inspections, scrutinizing movements of records (e.g., shipping, loan), and improving NARA's researcher registration process.

He then discussed theft committed by researchers, which accounts for approximately 25 percent of thefts from NARA and other repositories. Individual thieves are propelled by one of several desires:

Money. As we all know, some people steal records and then sell them via eBay or another venue.
Augment a personal collection. Some people covet records relating to a particular person or topic and are willing to steal in order to get them.
Employment. Private collectors who don't want to risk getting caught sometimes hire experienced thieves to purloin the items they want. This sort of "stealing to order" is common in the retail world, and it's increasingly common in the cultural heritage world as well.
Acquire a conversation piece. A thief spots something "cool" and decides that it would look good on her living room (or dorm room) wall. Unlike private collectors, most of whom deeply value and take good care of the records they steal, the person who wants a conversation piece may eventually get tired of looking at the record and destroy it or throw it away.
Destroy negative information about themselves or family members. For example, someone seeking to cover up a bankruptcy may attempt to steal court records relating to his or her case.
Alter the historical record for monetary gain or scholarly acclamation.

He then detailed the researcher behaviors that should put any archivist on alert:

Being more interested in what's going on in the research room than in the records on his or her table.
Constant monitoring of the whereabouts of staff and other researchers.
Moving records around in a haphazard or disorganized fashion.
Moving around the research room in an effort to find a "quiet spot" or to minimize the chance that his or her actions will be recorded on camera (if cameras are in place).
Arranging boxes, carts, etc., in an effort obscure what he or she is doing.
Frequently bending below the table or fussing with clothing . . . particularly if the clothing isn't appropriate for the environmental conditions inside -- or outside -- the research room.
Asking to see records that aren't even remotely related to each other (e.g., Civil War service records and court records from the 1980s).

He then offered some a series of steps for deterring potential thieves who exhibit these behaviors. However, it's important to note that these steps assume that you have and enforce policies relating to researcher registration, handling of records, staff review of records in the research room, and staff examination of researchers' notes and other materials prior to departure. Having these policies and practices in place will enable you to:

Provide enhanced customer service: walk over to the researcher, make eye contact, cheerfully ask if she or he needs any help, make specific requests as appropriate (e.g., "please remove only one folder from the box at a time"), and wrap up the encounter by noting that you'll "be right over there" if he or she requires assistance.
If this doesn't work, provide more enhanced customer service: ask a colleague to accompany you -- you want a witness -- and approach the researcher, make eye contact, and ask again whether he or she needs any help. Again, conclude the encounter by stating that you will "be right over there" in the event that your assistance is required.
In the event that the problem isn't solved, command presence is necessary. In larger repositories, this step may be carried out by a supervisor, but if you're a lone arranger or work in a small repository, you will likely be responsible for carrying out this step, too; however, if at all possible, you should have someone else serve as a witness. Approach the researcher, make eye contact, and in a calm, firm, and no-nonsense manner (this is not a time for "please" or "thank you"), instruct him or her to put all the records back into the box in their original order. Step away for a few minutes in order to allow the researcher to do so: you're giving him or her the opportunity to put back any records he or she may have hidden away. In addition, it paves the way for the next step:
Perform a "Quality control audit": carefully examine the records that the researcher has been using. Does anything seem missing or out of place? If anything seems even the slightest bit out of place, firmly but calmly query the researcher.
Exit checkout: carefully inspect the researcher's notes, laptop, etc. If you find records, demand that they be returned. Keep in mind that, depending upon the laws in your state, the researcher may not be guilty of a crime until he attempts to leave the building. Above all, remember that your goal is to keep your collections intact, not make accusations. Don't ask the researcher to lift or remove any article of clothing -- not even a suit jacket; doing so may be against the law in your state.

Needless to say, if you have a security camera that you can control, you'll want to start focusing on the researcher who exhibits suspicious behaviors sooner rather than later.

Finally, Evangelista noted that in in some instances, it's more appropriate to call building security or law enforcement:

If you witness a researcher destroy a record. You've just seen a crime take place.
If a researcher becomes hostile or threatening. Disengage and step away; do not allow the situation to escalate.
If a researcher flees the building. The researcher's home address should be on the registration form -- staff should copy it directly from a government-issued photo ID onto the form -- and the police can meet him or her there. Do not attempt to detain the researcher yourself; doing so may be against the law, and you may get hurt.

Many of us know these things, at least on some level, but it's good to be reminded of them from time to time; in fact, NARA now requires its personnel to take security training on a quarterly basis so that the essentials remain fresh in their minds.

New York in Bloom 2011, part four

2011-03-13T13:24:00.038-04:00

New York in Bloom, the New York State Museum's annual fundraiser for its after-school programs, ended two weeks ago today. I usually don't post about things that happened so far in the past, but a couple of you have asked for a post focusing on the arrangement that were featured in the State Museum's Metropolis Hall, which chronicles the history of New York City. Moreover, I always relish the opportunity to highlight not only the State Museum's after-school programs, which have placed thousands of low-income young people on the path to college and careers, but also the good work being done by the State Museum's curators.

Fittingly, the entrance to Metropolis Hall features a relatively recent panoramic photograph of New York Harbor; this photograph replaced an older image in which the twin towers of the World Trade Center were prominently depicted.

Carol Zapp of the Bill Doran Company used salal, heather, sweet William, protea, brazillia, curly willow and grape vine to create the crowd-pleaser above; I was moving through the exhibits rather purposefully and stopped at one point to chat with one of the New York in Bloom volunteers, and several other museum-goers who realized that I worked in the building asked me to help them find this arrangement.

One of the first galleries in Metropolis Hall focuses upon New York's coastal life, including recreational activities such as cycling. Marilyn Ryan of the Garden Club of Kinderhook used roses, daisies, mums, and greens to create an arrangement that fit beautifully with the velocipede and other bicycles on display.

At one time, New York City and several Hudson Valley communities were whaling centers. Now, the sight of whales off of Long Island and, occasionally, in New York Harbor itself, is cause for a different kind of excitement and enthusiasm. This simple arrangement of spider mums, ginestra, pincushion protea, emu feather fern, bells of Ireland, croton leaves, trachelium, statice, and moss, created by Arnie Maliszewski of The Country Florist, subtly blends in with the skeleton of a right whale.

There were several lovely arrangements in the section of the exhibit devoted to the Port of New York, but the light was so dim that many of them didn't photograph well. However, this simple yet appealing arrangement was sitting under a spotlight; sadly, I neglected to record who created it.

Another gallery in Metropolis Hall chronicles the city's development from the seventeenth century to the present, using the development and expansion of Fifth Avenue as an organizing theme.
Barbara Guyette of W&P Enterprises used spray roses, "Amnesia" roses, Fiji mums, asters, solidago, carnations, Queen Anne's lace, and ferns to create an arrangement that complements a display of furniture that would have been found in an affluent colonial New Yorker's home.

Independent floral designer Mary Lourdes Genevieve's arrangement of fleur de lis ivy, standard and garden roses, forsythia, magnolia foliage, berzelia, French tulips, iris, eriostomen, and sheet moss beautifully complements pieces from the State Museum's extensive collection of colonial and early republican stoneware.

One Metropolis Hall gallery focuses on New York City's transition from a busy colonial port to the city of skyscrapers we know today. Eileen Horton of Laurel's Flower Shop created a refreshingly springlike arrangement of bells of Ireland, miniature carnations, lilies, gladiolus, larkspur, and lemon leaf that greeted attendees who entered this gallery from the south.

Medina Jones and Sarah Lince of the Albany BOCES created an arrangement Gerbera daisies (full-sized and miniature), amaranthus, leather leaf, Ti leaves, snapdragons, limonium, and larkspur that complemented panels chronicling early skyscrapers.

The City of Albany Garden Crew -- the public employees who beautify my city's public spaces -- created a miniature skyscraper of pussy willow, white birch, box elder, grapevine, white pine, oak leaves, heather, amaryllis, eucalyptus, carnation, rose, solidago, lily, chrysanthemum, sunflowers, bamboo, rubber tree leaves, and liatris.

Linda Knipper of the Capital Hudson Iris Society created twin arrangements of chrysanthemums, willow, and leather leaf wholly consistent with the sleek formalism of modernist towers of mirrored glass.

Most of Metropolis Hall focuses upon different Manhattan neighborhoods. The section focusing upon the Lower East Side chronicles the lives of immigrants who worked in the neighborhood's garment factories or did piecework at home and organized collectively on their own behalf. Jane Hulsopple of the New York State Home Bureau Federation-Rennselaer County created an arrangement of roses, pine, carnations, tree ferns, pussy willow, and curly willow to complement a display relating to garment production.

Above, my hands-down favorite, created by Beverly Kallner of the Kinderhook Garden Club. It consists of chrysanthemums, dasies, alstromeria, limonium, pompom mums, iris, baby's breath, million star, and . . . records documenting the immigrant experience!

At the top of the arrangement, a marriage certificate.

And at bottom, a certificate of naturalization. How could any archivist fail to love this arrangement? (Okay, I realize that, from a preservation point of view, this sort of display is less than ideal, but New York in Bloom is a three-day event and all of the records were placed well away from the flowers' water source. Moreover, these records are the property of the designer, who is absolutely free to incorporate them into her arrangements if she so chooses.)

This striking composition of lilies, gerbera daisies, pussy willow and other elements sat in the doorway of the storefront of the Tuck High Company, a Chinatown retailer. Unfortunately, I recorded minimal information about the creator, Maria K.

Another favorite, created by Merilyn Niles, Jane Arsenau, and Marge Lansing of the Blue Creek Garden Club for the southern entrance of the gallery documenting life in Harlem in the 1920s. It consists of lilies, faciated willow, alium, and Spanish moss.

Martha Kissinger and Marcy Corneil of the Bethlehem Garden Club created arrangements of chrysanthemums, roses, alstromeria, limonium, leather leaf, seeded eucalyptus, and bells of Ireland that would have met the approval of African-American cosmetics magnate and society hostess Madame C.J. Walker.

My first thought upon seeing this arrangement, which sat between the Harlem gallery and a section of the Fifth Avenue exhibit focusing upon Art Deco: "Take me here, under the disco ball." Independent floral designer Matt Decker used fiddlehead ferns, craspedia, "Schwartzwalder" calla lilies, crosconia, agapanthus, kiwi vine, a disco ball, and boogie music to pay homage to Studio 54.

The section of Metropolis Hall focusing upon a fictional Manhattan neighborhood -- Sesame Street -- is an enormous hit with the youngest museum-goers. Even though it doesn't feature any animatronic Muppets or sophisticated video, the under-fives approach it reverentially and gaze at it rapturously until their parents get bored and prod them to move on.

Oscar the Grouch doesn't seem to like the arrangement to his left, but then again, why would he? Margie Amodeo of Emil J. Nagengast Florist built it of green trachelium dianthus, Gerbera daisies, and greens.

Amodeo also placed glass bowls of Gerbera daisies -- Popover, Kayak, Carambale, Grandiva, Fire Starter, and Colt -- on the stairs of the Sesame Street brownstone.

Another section of Metropolis Hall focuses upon New York City's transportation infrastructure. It features a subway car (ca. 1940), a scale model of Grand Central Terminal (which I could devote hours to examining), and other artifacts such as this ornate West 58th Street ferry sign. Donald Bennett of White Cottage Gardens created an arrangement of ivy, quince, variegated pit [sic], lemon leaf, gladiolus, roses, and dusty miller that complemented it.

This appealing composition by Kathleen Rohlfs of Chatham Flowers and Gifts was comprised of knifeblade acacia, curly willow, magnolia, flax, fern shoots, dubium, green muscari, clematis, cymbidium orchids, anthurium, green ball dianthus, pincushion protea, lotus pods, sweet huck and quince. In the background, you can see graphic works documenting the growth of New York City.

With the exception of a small arrangement at its entrance, the most recent addition to Metropolis Hall--a gallery focusing on the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001--was devoid of flowers. It's a place for sober reflection, not aesthetic appreciation, and even the most subdued arrangements would have been out of place there.

The Fire Engine Hall, which occupies the northeastern corner of the State Museum, was another story. Always a favorite with children, the Fire Engine Hall demands bold compositions. This little engine stands ready to bring curly willow, plumeria, hydrangea, lilies, roses, and carnations to those in need. It was designed by Mark Felthausen of Felthausen's Florist.

This trio of arrangements by Lindsey Janawicz and Lisa Binnacchia of the Albany BOCES features hypericum berries, spider mums, anthurium, spiral eucalyptus, curly willow, solidago, snapdragons, roses, statice, calla lilies, delphinium, carnations, and alstromeria.

Connie Strong Wilbur of the Bethlehem Garden Club created this eye-catching composition of lemon leaf, amaryllis, anthurium, tulips, and curly willow.

Red was also a popular choice for the arrangements in the State Museum's main lobby, which featured a Sears Model K automobile (ca. 1910) that was placed on display for New York in Bloom. Erin Brady of Crazy Daisy Florist used roses, hypericum berries, Gerbera daisies, carnations, black fiddlehead ferns, alstromeria, and bear grass to create these twin pieces.

This stunning piece by Joan Reilly of Henry F. Clas Florist featured Ti leaves, carnations, hypericum, and gerbera daisies.

Although not nearly as eye-grabbing as some of its neighbors, this sweet, simple arrangement of iris, hydrangea, and delphinium made me smile. It brought to mind crocuses peeking up through the snow -- a sure sign of spring.

New York in Bloom really does seem to have given spring a much-needed push: after a colder, snowier, and icier than usual January and February, March is being relatively kind to us. The days are getting longer, and the daytime temperatures are consistently above freezing. The daffodils and the tulips -- a particularly welcome sight in this old Dutch city -- will soon start emerging from the ground, and in a few short weeks, New York really will be in bloom.

Archival continuing education opportunities in New York's Capital District

2011-03-10T20:53:00.005-05:00

If you're an archivist who lives or works in the Hudson Valley, southern Vermont, western Massachusetts, or eastern Connecticut, the following continuing education opportunities may be of interest to you.

17 March 2011, Albany: FREE Security Training
The New York State Office of Cultural Education Security Committee is hosting a special training event on the protection of cultural property. Entitled "Identifying and Responding to Both External and Internal Loss Incidents," this interactive session was developed by the National Archives and Records Administration’s new Holdings Protection Team and is being delivered to NARA branches throughout the country as part of their security initiative. Larry Evangelista, Michael Knight and Lee Johnson, members of NARA’s Holdings Protection Team, will present and facilitate this 90-minute version of the training session, especially customized for us. Topics include:

Warning signs of external and internal theft
Loss Prevention techniques for all types of facilities
Policies and procedures for prevention strategy
Communicating security concerns and incident response
Strategies for interacting with the public when a theft is suspected

The session is Thursday, March 17, 2011 from 10:00am until 12:00pm, with a brief break. It will be held at the Cultural Education Center's Huxley Theater. The CEC is part of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, NY and is on Madison Avenue, across the Plaza from the State Capitol Building. For directions, public transit and parking information, visit http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/information/general/muswhere.html.

There is no cost to attend this presentation; however, reservations are required. To RSVP, please contact Brittany Turner at bturner-at-mail.nysed.gov call 518-473-0130 by Wednesday, March 15, 2011.

27 April 2011, Waterford: Fundraising for Preservation and Conservation Workshop
The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Conservation's Bureau of Historic Sites is hosting a fundraising workshop at its Peebles Island Resource Center (PIRC) headquarters.

Through thoughtful planning and effective grant writing, your organization can be competitive in the race for public and private funding to preserve cultural collections. This workshop will examine the planning process that funders want to see in place and the components that make a grant request compelling. With examples drawn from success stories at museums, historic sites, libraries, and archives, program participants will gain an understanding of how to effectively develop and implement a funding strategy to raise money for their collections.

The workshop will address:

Planning: Moving from a preservation needs assessment to a funding strategy
Potential funding sources: Triaging your time to focus on your best funding prospects
Writing the request: Anticipating the funder's questions and answering them concisely
Evaluation: Incorporating the new standards

Instructor Lee Price, Director of Development at the Conservation Center for Art & Historic Artifacts, has worked as a fundraising consultant for many regional and national cultural institutions. He has written successful grant requests for preservation funding from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Save America's Treasures.

WATERFORD, NY - APRIL 27, 2011
Peebles Island Resource Center (PIRC)
Peebles Island State Park
Waterford, NY 12188
Driving directions are available at: http://nysparks.state.ny.us/historic-preservation/bhs/getting-there.aspx

Program times
8:45 AM - 9:15 AM Registration & Refreshments
9:15 AM - 4:45 PM Program
4:45 PM Optional tour of the Conservation Laboratory, PIRC, Waterford, NY [not to be missed!]

There is a program fee of $110, and registrations must be completed two weeks prior to the workshop date. Registration, secure credit card payment, and additional program information are available at:
www.ccaha.org/education/programm-calendar

Lunch will not be provided. However, a list of local restaurants will be available and
participants are welcome to bring lunch.
Refunds will be given until two weeks prior to the program date, minus a $25 cancellation fee.
If you have special needs, please contact CCAHA three weeks prior to the workshop date so that accommodations can be made.

The Academy of Certified Archivists will award five Accreditation Recertification Credits (ARCs) to eligible Certified Archivists (CAs) attending this program. For more information, go to: www.certifiedarchivists.org.

To learn more about CCAHA and its programs and services, please visit its website at www.ccaha.org. If you have any questions about this workshop, call CCAHA Preservation Services at 215-545-0613 or send an e-mail to pso-at-ccaha.org.