SAA: Day three of sessions

Immediately after the conference ended on Saturday, a friend from North Carolina and I spent some time exploring Pier 39 and Golden Gate Park. I had to start packing as soon as I got back to my hotel, so I didn't get the chance to do any blogging. Most of this entry was written during a long layover in Chicago yesterday afternoon, but I wasn’t willing to pay the $7.00/hour fee for WiFi access at ORD and was simply too tired to post it last night.

Old Movies, New Audiences: Archival Films as Public Outreach Tools
I went to this session because a colleague of mine who isn’t here in San Francisco is overseeing the digitization of many of our audio, video, and motion picture holdings. Now that we’re starting to receive digital files from our vendor, we need to figure out not only how to manage them properly but also to make them widely accessible, so I’ll give her my notes when I get back.

I came in a bit late, so I didn’t get to hear all of Bill Moore’s presentation. However, I did get to learn a little bit about how the Oklahoma History Center, which has worked with the National Film Preservation Program (NFPF) to preserve some of its holdings, highlights its audiovisual holdings through community screenings, production of DVDs, and provision of footage to television and film producers; his repository, which has commissioned creation of a new score for a private film and can supply footage in formats required by professionals, has apparently managed to develop a substantial technical infrastructure.

Christine Paschild, formerly of the Japanese American National Museum (JANM), discussed how the JANM sought to make footage documenting life in prewar Japanese American communities and in World War II concentrations accessible to the K-12 educators who attend its summer curriculum institutes. JANM conducted focus groups with teachers and learned that the teachers wanted the ability to view snippets of footage, access footage without doing a lot of technological prep work, keyword searching, and subject headings that aligned with their lesson plans (i.e., geographic location, names of specific camps, topics such as family life and sports).

JAMN, which got NFPF funding, then worked with a vendor to digitize the footage, break it into short snippets, and create detailed descriptions of each snippet. The snippets are available online via the Nikkei Album, which also allows people who visit the site to comment upon the films and to add their own films, photos, lesson plans, etc. The Nikkei Album allows people to browse JAMN’s motion picture holdings and highlights the value of home movies to viewers and may as a result lead to increased preservation of such footage. JANM makes quite a bit of money through licensing, and Nikkei Album may enable producers to do more of their own searching.

JANM really lucked out in that it worked with a vendor willing to do all of the descriptive and editing work that it needed, and the editing and tagging took 4-5 times longer than JANM initially anticipated.

Paschild concluded by noting that the cataloging of materials on the Nikkei Album site doesn’t correspond to the cataloging of all of its other holdings and that this poses problems. However, the project also made JANM realize that access involved more than simply placing stuff on the Web: archives need to understand what kinds of description people need in order to make use of the material. Of course, Paschild isn’t alone in coming to this realization, and those of us specializing in archival description will likely spend the next decade or two coming to grips with its implications.

Snowden Becker of the Center for Home Movies focused on Home Movie Day, an annual event that began in 2003 and now is held in more than 60 cities on four continents; the next Home Movie Day will take place on October 18. Organizers of each Home Movie Day event invite local people with amateur film in their possession to have their film inspected, screened, and shown in a community setting. They are also encouraged to narrate their films, and audiences can often identify places, people, etc., depicted on the screen. Organizers get local businesses involved as sponsors and contributors and work with volunteers to secure equipment that enables film to be shown safely.

Becker argued that sponsoring a Home Movie Day event has a number of benefits for archivists and audiences alike. It’s an easy way for archivists to raise their repository’s profile (even though the focus will not be on existing holdings), allows staff to hone their identification, evaluation, and interviewing skills, and start identifying materials that they might wish to add to their collection. Moreover, Home Movie Day encourages audiences to recognize that home movies can be historically significant even if they don’t depict famous people or momentous events and to start learning about preservation of home movie footage and to become actively interested in preserving their own movies. Home Movie Day can also result in discovery of previously unrecognized personal or historical connections and bring together people with related interests.

Given my other commitments, there is no way I could organize a Home Movie Day. However, I really hope that someone else in my corner of upstate New York does so.

Game On: Leading Your Championship Team
The always amazing Rosemary Pleva Flynn was the solo presenter at this session, and she succinctly distilled a whole lot of business literature on team characteristics and dynamics and leadership styles and attributes. Pleva Flynn, who is keenly attuned to the managerial dimensions of archival practice, is absolutely right that a) archivists need to pay more attention to these issues and b) generally don’t have the time or, more importantly, the inclination to do so; even those of us who spend the bulk of our days supervising people and directing projects tend to see ourselves chiefly as archival practitioners.

Pleva Flynn’s presentation was really detailed, so instead of recapping it in detail, I’m simply going to point to the resources she identified as being particularly valuable:

• James Dyke, Leading Teams: How to Inspire, Motivate, Lead, and Succeed
• J. Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman, www.leadingteams.org/open/ToolsforCoaching.htm

Pleva Flynn gave us a lot to think about, and I plan to spend a lot of time mulling over the notes I took when I get home (and get some sleep) and make use of her guidance whenever I can.

SAA: Second day of sessions

NB: Sessions occupied only one time slot today.

Digital Revolution, Archival Evolution: An Archival Web Capture Project
Dean Weber (Ford Motor Company), Judith Endelman (Henry Ford Museum), Pat Findlay (Ford.com), and Reagan Moore (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) discussed their joint effort to use Web crawling software to create preservation copies of the main Web site (www.ford.com) maintained by the Ford Motor Company.

As Findlay emphasized, this site is extremely large and complex: the site contains content created by many different Ford units, pulls content from a large number of different feeds, has Flash and non-Flash and high- and low-speed versions, and has features that allow people to view cars by color, passenger number, etc. As a result, there are literally millions of different page combinations. Moreover, it has strong anti-hacking protection and is hosted on geographically dispersed servers located throughout the world.

The Henry Ford Museum, which wanted to preserve periodic snapshots of the site, worked with San Diego Supercomputing Center (where Moore worked until a very short time ago) to conduct three crawls of the site and store and furnish access to the results. In an effort to improve results, staff from the Henry Ford Museum and SDSC consulted with Ford's IT staff; as Endelman noted, everyone entered into this project thinking that it was about technology, but it was really about management, people, and relationships.

Moore furnished a great overview of the various challenges that the group encountered over the course of the project, and he explicitly linked them to the traditional archival functions of:

• Appraisal--understanding what was actually present in the Web site and deciding what to preserve;
• Accessioning--using a crawler to produce copies of the site and place the copies into a preservation environment;
• Description--gathering essential information needed to identify and access the crawl and system metadata guaranteeing authenticity, etc.
• Arrangement--preserving the intellectual arrangement of the files and determining their physical arrangement (SDSC actually bundles the files into a single TAR file, which means that it needs to maintain checksums, etc., for only one file per crawl. The iRODS software that SDSC developed can search within TAR and files and pull up content as directed);
• Preservation--determining whether to store, e.g., banners indicating the archival status of the files, with the files or in a separate location;
• Access--enabling people using multiple browsers on multiple platforms to examine the files.

I've done quite a bit of Web crawling, and I'm glad to learn that Moore and other researchers are actively trying to figure out how to capture content that current crawlers can't preserve (e.g., database-driven content and Flash). The session was nonetheless a bit disheartening: even with the active cooperation of Ford's IT staff and the involvement of visonary computer scientists, Web crawling remains an imperfect technology. However, for those trying to preserve large sites or large numbers of sites, it nonetheless remains the best of a bunch of bad options.

SAA: ER Section Meeting

I didn't go to Government Records Section meeting this morning as I had initially planned. Instead, I walked around the exhibit hall and spent a few minutes chatting with a former archivist who is now the VP of an archival consulting firm. The two of us met at SAA in DC in 2006 and realized that, although we had never met, we had close friends in common, and now we make it a point to catch up with one another at SAA.

This year's Electronic Records Section meeting was very state government-oriented: we had four speakers, all of whom were heading multi-state National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program (NDIIPP) grant projects focusing on state government records.

Steve Morris spoke about the Geospatial Multistate Archive and Preservation Partnership
(GeoMAPP) project, which focuses on bringing geographic information system and archival professionals together and identifying and transferring to archival custody geospatial data that has enduring value. GeoMAPP is led by the North Carolina State Archives and the North Carolina Center for Geographic Information and Analysis, and the state archives and geospatial data agencies of Kentucky and Utah are project partners.

Justin Jaffee of the Washington Digital Archives outlined the Multi-State Preservation Consortium, which is designed to test whether the digital archives infrastructure developed in Washington State can be extended to other states. State archives and libraries in Alaska, California, Colorado, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, and Oregon are participating in this project.

Richard Pearce-Moses of the Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records discussed the Persistent Digital Archives and Library System (PeDALS), which involves using BizTalk to automate, to the greatest extent possible, the processing of archival records and the use of Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) for secure, redundant storage of preservation copies records. State libraries and archives in Florida, New York, South Carolina, and Wisconsin are participating.

Bob Horton of the Minnesota Historical Society discussed the Preserving State Government Legislative Information project, which works with state legislatures to improve access to born-digital legislative materials. The project has partners (sometimes multiple partners) in California, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Vermont.

Of all the presentations, Bob Horton's was the most intriguing (I'm actively involved in the PeDALS project, so most of Richard Pearce-Moses's comments, which Richard delivered with his usual grace and good humor, covered terrain that was quite familiar to me). Horton gave us a version of the presentation he usually delivers to legislatures, and he stressed the following points:

• Legislators self-consciously set themselves apart from the executive and judicial branches of government, and they generally don't want to hear about "best practices" for managing electronic records and publications; they believe that their needs and circumstances are unique. Horton has learned not to confront this belief head-on and instead makes it a point to emphasize that "appropriate practices" should govern the management of digital legislative resources.
• E-discovery and other legal issues relating to electronic records and publications are of great concern to legislators, and as a result archivists and librarians should emphasize the legal risks associated with poor management of electronic records and publications.
• Legislators who discount the advice and pleas of archivists and librarians from their own states may give greater heed to the input of associations; once Horton got the Council of State Legislatures to start publicizing this project, legislators in Minnesota and other states who had initially ignored the project started taking an interest in it.

Horton's conclusions and strategies are in fact more broadly applicable: there are lots of people in the executive and judicial branches of government who are resistant to the concept of overarching "best practices," don't want to hear about records management per se but are profoundly worried about e-discovery, or who are more likely to pay attention to records, etc., issues when regional or national organizations they respect get involved. I'm planning to pass on his words of advice to several colleagues when I get back to the office.

SAA: John Dean

It's late and I need to go to bed, so this post is going to be brief. Today's plenary speaker was John Dean. Yes, that John Dean. His research has led him to become a friend of archives and archivists, and he had some interesting things to say about the undue influence that the foundation supporting the Nixon Presidential Library has had over the library's processing, access, and exhibit decisions; he also questioned whether major donors to the Clinton Presidential Library have had too much say over the library's operations. He also roundly condemned President Bush's efforts to undermine the Presidential Records Act of 1978.

Dean's remarks were largely extemporaneous, and he fired off a few funny zingers ("Mitt Romney is Nixon on Prozac," "Rudy Giuliani is Nixon on crystal meth") but it's blazingly evident that he is no fan of the Republican Party as it currently exists. I happen to share his basic outlook, but some of his remarks--and those of some audience members who asked questions after his speech ended--must have made my Republican colleagues in the audience feel just a bit unwelcome.

FWIW, John Dean and I hold undergraduate degrees from the same small liberal arts college.

SAA: Day one of sessions

YourSpace, MySpace, DSpace? Finding a Place for Institutional Records
Sessions got off to a great start this morning, at least for me: the first session I attended, was really thought-provoking. Tim Pyatt (Duke), Erin O'Meara (University of Oregon), and Nancy Deromedi are all using DSpace, an open-source digital repository, to house access (but not preservation) copies of archival university records, government documents, and other materials.

Although Pyatt, O'Meara, and Deromedi saw DSpace as a valuable access tool, they noted that it was developed to capture the grey literature created by university faculty--the papers and other research products that don't go through peer review or formal publication but which contain information warranting preservation--and wasn't really designed for archival materials. As a result, it doesn't readily accommodate the contextual information (data about records creators, relationships between records, etc.) that enables users to make sense of archival records. Moreover, it requires manual entry of descriptive information about each file placed within it--a real challenge for archivists responsible for managing thousands of files.

Erin O'Meara noted that DSpace's limitations forced her both to be creative in figuring out how to associate contextual information with records and to ponder whether she was creating this information because her archival background demanded it or because users actually needed it. Nancy Deromedi and several audience members concurred that it may be time to rethink our descriptive practices and to focus on providing the item-level access users want.

However, it was Pyatt and O'Meara's responses to an audience member concerned that archivists are creating multiple access systems for electronic records in various formats that really got me thinking. Pyatt noted that we're simply not at the point where we have a single system that can provide all types of electronic records. O'Meara then questioned whether we've ever had a single system for providing access to records of any type: we've all inherited legacy systems--paper files, index cards, ordering schemes--and in many cases we can't integrate them into one overarching system. I started thinking about the multiple and overlapping legacy systems developed at my repository. We continue using some of them even though we've clearly outgrown them, and we're making only halting progress toward building the integrated system that we need. I think most, if not all, archives are in the same boat.

I then started thinking about something that Pyatt said earlier in the session: when he and his colleagues were planning to build Duke's institutional repository, researched the various options for doing so--DSpace, FEDORA, Greenstone, Eprints, various commercial applications--and determined that all of them were somehow fatally flawed. He didn't elaborate, and I didn't get the chance to follow up with him, but I suspect that the flaws stem from the simple fact that these applications were all designed to meet the needs of libraries, not archives.

To make a long story short, those us who work with electronic records typically use a variety of overlapping systems that were built with specific purposes in mind, often fail to exchange information easily, and don't always meet our current needs. We also spend a lot of time adapting tools and practices designed for the library community to meet our own needs. In a lot of ways, the new world of electronic records isn't new at all. Maybe it's time for us to stop making do and start designing systems that truly meet our current needs; doing so would require substantial institutional (or, preferably, multi-institutional) commitment and, in all likelihood, substantial grant funding, but the end result might be worth it.

Convergence: R(e)volutions in Archives and IT Collaboration
Another good session. Phil Bantin (Indiana University), the panel chair, noted at the outset that IT folks don't view archivists and records managers as "players" because they don’t know what we can contribute to system design, etc., and that we need to work on winning small victories that will eventually lead others to recognize what we bring to the table. Rachel Vagts (Luther College) and Jennifer Gunter King (Mount Holyoke College) discussed how the merger of the library and IT departments at their institutions benefited their archives. Daniel Noonan (Ohio State) discussed how he was able to leverage concerns about e-discovery and users' lack of knowledge about the differences between archiving and backing up files to establish relationships with IT staff; however, owing to IT staffers' reluctance to avoid "scope creep," he hasn't been able to get involved in existing system design projects.

However, the real standout was Paul Hedges (Wisconsin Historical Society), who started out as an archivist but eventually became head of IT at his repository. He emphasized that archivists are like most people in that they see IT as responsible for maintaining basic services such as e-mail but that they should see IT as a strategic tool that will further their mission and aims. He also emphasized that archivists need to educate themselves about the basics of IT and that IT personnel needed a basic grasp of archival terms and concepts--and that, in his experience, it's been far easier to explain archival concepts to IT people than it is to explain IT concepts to archivists. In his view, archivists need to start reading Government Computing News, eweek, etc., so that they know, in a general way, what IT folks are concerned about and become familiar with IT acronyms and terminology. They also need to start going to IT conferences--even if it means they have to skip archival conferences in order to do so--and learning about IT departments' stated missions and goals.

CONTENTdm Brown Bag Lunch
I attended this lunch so I could meet the awesome Erik Mayer from OCLC, who was there to outline recent improvements to CONTENTdm, OCLC's digital collections management application. I've spoken to Erik many times over the phone and have exchanged hundreds of e-mails with him, but this is the first time we've actually met. He's as delightful and helpful in person as he is online, and he had all kinds of interesting things to say about OCLC's new Web crawler and CONTENTdm, which is due for a really promising upgrade.

Digital Dilemmas: Dealing with Born-Digital Surrogate Audio and Audiovisual Collections
I attended this session because a colleague who is responsible for overseeing the digitization of our multimedia holdings couldn't come to SAA this year. The technical presentation given by George Blood (Safe Sound Archive) was fascinating but a bit over my head, but he and Angelo Sacerdote (Bay Area Video Coalition) identified a number of resources that I'll pass on to my colleague. I'll also let her know about the Monterey Jazz Festival audio and video digitization project; Hannah Frost (Stanford University) highlighted some of the technical problems she encountered as the project unfolded and discussed how the digitized recordings will be made accessible to the public.

SAA: LAGAR meeting

Today was a work day. I spent the morning doing some stuff that I didn't have the chance to finish before leaving for San Francisco and the afternoon helping to run the annual meeting of the Lesbian and Gay Archives Roundtable (LAGAR) of the Society of American Archivists (SAA).

As usual, we met away from the conference hotel and at a local LGBT Archives. The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, which is located a few blocks away from the conference hotel, was an incredibly gracious host, and we all appreciated being able to see its exhibits on the Folsom Street Fair and GLBT people who served in the military from World War II to the Iraq War.

The meeting followed its usual format, which meant that we had a little time to socialize, then introduced ourselves, and got down to the business of electing a new male co-chair. Congrats go to (newlywed!) Jim Cartwright, who was just elected, and profound thanks go to Steve Novak, who just stepped down.

We then listened to reports concerning LAGAR's newsletter, Web site, online manual for community-based archivists who lack library/archives/information science backgrounds and revised our bylaws so that they conform to recent changes in SAA regulations concerning roundtable leadership; SAA now mandates that roundtable chairs serve no more than two consecutive years.

In addition, we got an update from Ben Primer, who just finished his term as SAA Council liaison and let us know that Council is planning on phasing out every roundtable that has less than fifty official members (i.e., dues-paying SAA members who indicate on their membership renewal forms that wish to be a member of the roundtable). To make matters worse, SAA now allows each member to join only two roundtables; at one point, one could join as many roundtables as one wanted.

LAGAR currently has fewer than fifty official members, but our bylaws allow non-SAA members to join our roundtable: we try very hard to bridge the gap between archivists who have academic credentials and professional positions and the community-based practitioners who began preserving LGBT archival materials long before research repositories took an interest in LGBT history. We also have some SAA dues-paying members who haven't indicated on their renewal forms that they wish to be official LAGAR members.

What a mess. I understand that roundtables consume a certain amount of SAA's resources and that there are a few roundtables that are not particularly well-run, but this policy is a disaster in the making. SAA has gotten so big during the past few years, and it's hard for newbies to get to know one another. Roundtables, which tend to be small, allow people to get to know one another and to take on their first SAA leadership roles.

Moreover, SAA is currently trying to promote diversity within the profession. Its new roundtable policy, which will likely have a negative impact not only upon LAGAR but also upon the Archivists and Archives of Color Roundtable, the Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Roundtable, and other roundtables that seek to make this profession more inclusive, isn't going to do much to make SAA more diverse.

No one at the meeting was happy about this new policy. In the coming weeks, LAGAR's Steering Committee is going to have to figure out how to respond to Council's directive. We discussed a few ideas at the meeting, but we need to flesh them out.

LAGAR was founded in 1988, and in honor of our anniversary, we then moved on to an informal panel discussion on LGBT archives. Ron Grantz of the Lavender Library, Archives and Cultural Exchange of Sacramento, Karen Sundheim of the San Francisco Public Library's Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, and Greg Williams of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives talked about their repositories' history and holdings.

I wish we had had more time (I always wish that), but I'm glad for the time that we did have. Everyone had lots of great stories about their holdings (Ron Grantz's story about the papers of Jerry Sloan, a gay ex-minister who won a legal battle against Jerry Falwell, was particularly delightful), and it's apparent, at least to me, that those of us seeking to document LGBT history face some challenges that didn't exist twenty years ago:

• As Greg Williams so aptly put it, a lot of community-based LGBT archives (i.e., archives that were started by LGBT activists and are not affiliated with academic institutions or other research entities) have gotten too big to manage properly or to die a peaceful death. What's going to happen to these archives when the current generation of community-based archivists passes from the scene? Will they simply be absorbed by research institutions? If so, what will it mean for LGBT people?
• Staffing, funding, and space are real concerns for everyone. However, as Steve Novak noted, these are concerns that all kinds of community-based archives (i.e., local historical societies) face. The fact that we've encountered them is in some ways a sign that we've joined the archival mainstream.
• Lots of people at the meeting expressed a need for a national network of LGBT archives and archivists. LAGAR has a guide to repositories holding LGBT materials on its Web site and encourages non-SAA members to join, but it's plain that the need is greater. Just how much LAGAR, an all-volunteer organization, can do to build such a network isn't clear, but the Steering Committee needs to do some brainstorming.

Thanks to Ron, Karen, and Greg for being such great panelists!