MARAC Fall 2010, day one

Market Street Bridge over the Susquehanna River, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 12 November 2010. The Ionic columns at the entrance of the bridge were salvaged from the old State Capitol building, which burned down in 1897.

The Fall 2010 meeting of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference got underway today. I'm offering only a few highlights from a jam-packed and rewarding day:

• Colgate University, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and Syracuse University are investigating the possibility of developing a New York State EAD consortium, with particular emphasis on assisting repositories that have some EAD knowledge and experience but are having problems with publishing their finding aids and securing adequate technical support. If you're interested in seeing how this project proceeds or in contributing your expertise, contact Colgate University Archivist Sarah Keen at skeen - at - colgate.edu

• Kathleen Roe (New York State Archives) delivered a great plenary address on the importance of advocating for archives. Noting that we all need to explain -- to administrators, boards of directors, or local, state, and federal politicians -- the value of archives and what we need to do our jobs as effectively as possible, she offered some practical words of advice:
• Learn the rules of engagement and accept them for what they are. You don't have to compromise yourself or your principles, but you do need to learn how to find your way through established channels. For example, if you're seeking Congressional support for legislation, you simply have to accept that you'll be making your case to the incredibly bright twenty-somethings who run Congressional offices.
• Archival issues are generally poorly understood, and you need to explain, clearly and succinctly, the value of archives: records safeguard rights and benefits, influence major policy decisions, enable people to connect to family and community history, help to document and correct longstanding injustices, and, in some instances, help to save lives. When dealing with legislators, make the story local -- how do records help their constituents? Have records helped constituents secure benefits to which they're entitled? Are archives attracting tourist dollars to their districts?
• Archivists have substantial competencies and qualifications that can be of use to legislators and other stakeholders. We can help legislators manage the ever-increasing volume of records that they create and can help all stakeholders care for electronic materials.
• Don't listen to people who tell you that you can't do what you need to do; just go ahead and do it. You may be pleasantly surprised by the results.
• Don't forget to state plainly what you want. Legislators, administrators, and board members aren't mind readers.

• In "Replevin: Pros and Cons," Joseph Klett discussed the New Jersey State Archives' new Document Recovery and Amnesty Web pages, which encourage holders of alienated state government records to convey them to the State Archives without penalty, lists records known to be missing, and lists records that have been returned to the State Archives. Most of the missing records listed are enrolled laws of the Royal Colony of New Jersey (1703-1775) and the State of New Jersey (1776-1804), which were alienated from state custody a long time ago and which have been sold openly for decades; in fact, the listing on the Web site is based upon auction catalogs from the 1950s onward. Making these lists, which have been shared with law enforcement, readily accessible alerts dealers and members of the public to the fact that the listed records are the property of the State of New Jersey. This is a good thing -- after these Web pages went live, several people contacted the State Archives and voluntarily returned listed records that they held -- and I hope other states follow New Jersey's lead.

• In "Compulsory Candor? Open Records Laws and Recordkeeping," Pennsylvania State Archivist David Haury noted that new ways of doing government business can eliminate documentation of how things are done. For example, press releases, which were once issued and retained in paper format, are now issued electronically -- and even the electronic master copies may be deleted after the releases are posted on the Web. Archivists and records managers have yet to come to grips with the transitory nature of modern recordkeeping.

MARAC Fall 2009: S6, EAD Perspectives at the Institutional, Research, and National Level

Moon over Manhattan, as seen from the Newport, Jersey City esplanade, 4:50 PM, 29 October 2009.

Post corrected 7 November 2009. I was sitting in the very back of the room in which S6 was held, and sometimes had trouble hearing the presenters. I completely misheard a couple of things that Michael Rush said during the start of his presentation, and this post contained some inaccurate information as a result. Thanks to Mike for setting me straight, and apologies all round.

I’m not doing a ton of description these days, and but I cut my professional teeth on Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) records and have lots of colleagues who are still doing a lot of MARC and Encoded Archival Description (EAD) work, so I always make it a point to attend conference sessions relating to description whenever possible. I’m glad I caught this one.

Michele Combs (Syracuse University Special Collections Research Center) opened the session by outlining the internal and external benefits of EAD, technical options for creating and providing access to EAD finding aids, and how her repository has integrated EAD into its workflow. I particularly liked her discussion of SU’s More Product, Less Product (MPLP)-influenced approach to description: Combs and her colleagues create EAD finding aids for new collections during the accessioning process, and they’re tackling the backlog by converting paper finding aids to EAD and using existing MARC records to generate basic EAD finding aids. As a result, every collection gets at least a basic EAD finding aid.

Jeanne Kramer Smyth (Discovery Communications and, BTW, the force behind Spellbound Blog) discussed ArchiveZ, an information visualization project that uses EAD finding aids from a variety of institutions as a source of structured data. Focusing on subjects, time periods, and linear footage, Kramer-Smyth and her associates normalized the data and decomposed compound subjects into tags; the latter dramatically increases the chances of finding overlapping collections. They also cross-tabulated subjects and time periods to identify the volume of records covering a given subject at a given time.

This is very cool stuff that promises to open up all kinds of new avenues of access, but Kramer-Smyth and her colleagues have run into a few problems, almost all of which stem from the flexibility inherent in the EAD specification. Each repository that provided finding aids to the ArchivesZ project had its own encoding quirks and particularities, and standardization across certain tags was lacking; for example, some repositories measure quantities of records in linear feet, while others use cubic feet, etc. Some of the finding aids had incomplete subject assignments (e.g., subjects reflected in the collection title aren’t listed as subjects).

Kramer-Smyth emphasized that these problems are fixable: she and others who use EAD as a data source can figure out how to write better code and ask repositories to submit “configuration files” that resolve data inconsistencies (e.g., by explaining local practices regarding quantity/extent information). However, it’s pretty plain that EAD still has a long way to go before it truly transcends institutional boundaries.

Michael Rush (Beineke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University), who heads is drafting the charge for the soon-to-be reconstituted EAD Working Group, is charged with revising EAD, provided a useful overview of the Working Group’s goals some of the changes that may be incorporated into EAD 3.0:

• Reduction of mixed content, i.e., mixing of text and tags.
• Allowing namespace interoperability, i.e., giving implementers to embed MODS, PREMIS, and other XML schemas directly into an EAD finding aid.
• Improvement of data handling, e.g., getting rid of forward slashes, which are ignored by many programs.
• Eliminating anything that doesn’t describe the records, e.g., the head and attribute labels used to mark scope and content notes; formatting info should be in stylesheets, not EAD schema!
• Possibly removing table and list coding and recursive tags.
• Reining in the diversity of practice, which is a political challenge: people do things a certain way because a given way meets a given need, but this diversity makes it harder to exchange data across institutions or pull EAD data into a database. In an effort to accommodate everyone, the Working Group might come up with a strict EAD and a loose EAD that allows greater diversity of practice.

The Working Group is seeking will need volunteers who will to steer the revision process; if you’re interested, contact him at michael.rush-at-yale.edu

Session chair Mark Matienzo (New York Public Library) then asked the panelists a really provocative question: should archivists should think of finding aids as documents or as data sources? All three panelists concurred that we need to start seeing finding aids as data sources from which documents, which still have many uses, can be produced as needed; conceptualizing finding aids as documents has led to many of the quirks and inconsistencies that become apparent anytime one looks at multiple institutions’ finding aids. As Michael Rush pointed out, we’ve moved beyond the point at which documents meet our needs. With MPLP and other developments, description is never done, and although we need the capacity to take a snapshot of a given description as it exists at a given point of time, we need to focus more on standardized creation of data over time.

All in all, a phenomenal session that brought to mind my own long-ago (and subsequently back-burnered) realization that the MARC format could be thought of as a highly flexible and repurposable information source, not just a cluster of templates organizing the presentation of various chunks of information. It also called to mind various past efforts to increase the consistency of MARC cataloging across institutions, most of which didn’t pan out. Here’s hoping that past experience, the profession’s increasing comfort and familiarity with databases, etc., and the emergence of new tools that make use of structured descriptive data make it possible to standardize descriptive practice in the EAD era.