CMSWire SAA 2010 recaps

Six of the forty-six Louis Saint-Gaudens centurions standing guard over the Main Hall of Union Station, Washington, DC, 15 August 2010, 11:42 AM.

FYI, Mimi Dionne has written excellent recaps of four sessions held at the 2010 joint CoSA-NAGARA-SAA meeting for CMSWire magazine:

• #saa10: Is Structured Data Essential for Effective Archival and Discovery? (Session 102, Structured Data Is Essential for Effective Archival Description and Discovery: True or False?
• #saa10: The Cloud - Opportunity or Risk for Records Managers? (Session 202, Content in the Cloud: Opportunity or Risk for Records Managers?)
  
• E-Discovery and Records Professionals: Overcoming the Digital Tsunami #saa10 (Session 402, E-Discovery and Records Professionals: Overcoming the Digital Tsunami)
  
• #saa10: Archival Preservation Environment Isn't Just a Bit of Storage (Session 501, Distributed Archival Custodial and Preservation Environments (DCAPE) Project: Status Report and Demonstration)

SAA 2010

View from the sixth floor, Washington Marriott Wardman Park, 14 August 2010, 6:55 AM. Washington National Cathedral is in the background.

The 2010 joint meeting of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), the National Association of Government Archivists and Records Administrators (NAGARA), and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) has come to an end. Between working on my own presentation (which went pretty well) and being a bit under the weather on Thursday, I haven't had the chance to post anything here. Some of this year's presentations are freely available on the SAA Web site, more (my own included) will be added to the site shortly, and people have been tweeting up a storm about the meeting, so I'm not going to post any detailed session recaps this year. Instead, I'm going to offer up some of the most interesting insights and snippets of information I picked up at this year's meeting:

• Seth Shaw (Duke University): Archivists confronted with unfamiliar materials have an instinctive tendency to gravitate toward item-level description. Photography is an excellent example of this behavior, and it wasn’t until we were deluged with photographic materials that we began moving away from item-level description. Electronic records are another example, and we need to return to archival principles when dealing with them. (Session 104, Taking Scale Seriously: Practical Metadata Strategies for Very Large Digital Collections)

• John MacDonald (Information Management Consulting and Education): We need people who understand the evolving organizational landscape and its impact on recordkeeping and who know how to position themselves to support operational and strategic goals and priorities and individual needs of business lines and the enterprise, how to articulate records issues in business terms, and how to be seen as their organization’s “go-to” person for all records issues. How do we find these people? Do what human resources experts do: define the nature of records work, identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to do the work, develop competency profiles, assess the gap between those competency profiles and existing competencies, build recruitment strategies, develop training and education strategies, etc. (Session 302, So, Like, Byte Me: A Critical Response by Records Professionals to Born-Digital Records)

• Adrian Cunningham (National Archives of Australia): The International Council of Archives is working to reconcile the varied national electronic recordkeeping standards (e.g., DOD 5015.2) , and the results of this project have been been submitted for fast-track approval by ISO, the international standards body. (Session 302, So, Like, Byte Me: A Critical Response by Records Professionals to Born-Digital Records)

• Lisa Weber (National Archives and Records Administration): The Buddhist faith holds that life means suffering, that the origin of suffering is attachment, and that the cessation of suffering is attainable. Records professionals suffer because they are attached to the concept of preservation. However, all records are decaying -- sometimes slowly, and sometimes quickly. We need to think of digital preservation as a series of handoffs to the future and avoid falling into the trap of thinking that everything is too difficult or that we need to build perfect systems; the middle path -- neutral, upright, and unbiased -- is what we should seek. We need to act, observe, and learn, then act, observe, and learn. (Session 302, So, Like, Byte Me: A Critical Response by Records Professionals to Born-Digital Records)

• Victoria Lemieux (University of British Columbia): Traditionally, keyword searching and linear review has been the accepted approach to e-discovery. However, this approach is not scalable. Attorneys and others have been exploring a number of alternatives, including visual analysis, the science of analytic reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces. It facilitates processing of massive sets of data, produces quick answers, and facilitates discovery of the unexpected. It originated in the scientific community and has moved into business intelligence, fraud detection, and other fields, and now it’s moving into e-discovery -- particularly when e-mail is involved. To date, a lot of visual analysis focuses on social networks, but it can also be used to create cluster representations of content. Visual analysis isn't perfect and has yet to be tested in court, but research suggests that doing a “first pass” using visual analysis and then doing keyword searching and linear review is a highly effective approach. (Session 402, E-Discovery and Records Professionals: Overcoming the Digital Tsunami)

• Jason Baron (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration): Researchers have discovered that keyword and Boolean searches fail to retrieve substantial numbers of documents responsive to e-discovery requests. (Session 402, E-Discovery and Records Professionals: Overcoming the Digital Tsunami)

• Chien-Yi Hou (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) demonstrated a prototype of the Distributed Archival Custodial and Preservation Environments (DCAPE) system. He used it to detect a virus in a test batch of records submitted to the system, move files from his laptop to a storage location in North Carolina, and did some other cool stuff. (Session 501, Distributed Archival Custodial and Preservation Environments (DCAPE) Project: Status Report and Demonstration)
  

• Juan Williams's son once asked him, "What's the biggest building in Washington?" Wiliams named the Capital and several other buildings, but his son kept telling him he was wrong. After Williams exasperatedly gave up, his son told him the answer: "The National Archives, because that's where all the stories are." (Plenary III)

SAA Security Roundtable

I'm in the throes of packing, cleaning, and otherwise preparing to board a train to Washington, DC tomorrow morning, but opted to take a quick break to pass along the following news . . . .

The Society of American Archivists' Security Roundtable is meeting Wednesday, August 12 from 5:30-7:30 PM at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, DC. I deeply regret that my schedule won't permit me to attend this meeting, because it promises to be great: Mitch Yockelson and Larry Evangelista of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration's Archival Recovery Team (which is on Facebook) and Jennifer Schaffner of OCLC Research will discuss "Transparency and Theft Response and Recovery." They will discuss:

• Communicating with the archival community, dealers, and collectors
• Using social media to convey news about thefts and security matters
• Using dedicated electronic tools (e.g., MissingMaterials.org) to report missing records, books, and other materials
  

If you want to know more about how the Archival Recovery Team tracks down stolen federal government records, earlier today the Los Angeles Times published a really cool article highlighting its work. Even if you can't make to the meeting, it's absolutely worth checking out.

(A big tip o' the hat to my colleague Brittany Turner, who found this article earlier today!)

The week before SAA . . .

. . . is always hectic, and as a result there probably won't be a lot of activity around here until the 2010 joint annual meeting of the Council of State Archivists, the National Association of Government Archivists and Records Administrators, and the Society of American Archivists gets underway next week. I'm in the throes of readying my slides, battening down the hatches at the office, trying to figure out what to pack, and beating back the domestic clutter so my housesitting friend won't have to live amidst my mishegas.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the latest group of photos that my awesome colleagues at the New York State Archives have posted on Flickr. All of them are of the city of Saratoga Springs, which has a storied history and a surplus of loveliness. I'm particularly fond of this image of the elegant State Drink Hall (i.e., mineral water bar), which was taken in August 1908 (i.e., 102 years ago). Maybe it's just me, but the State Drink Hall looks like an upscale blend of Rick's Café Américain, Café du Monde, and the café that appears 18 seconds into this Duran Duran video.

Going to SAA this year?

Union Station, Washington, DC, 26 June 2009.

If you're going to the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Washington, DC next month, you have until midnight to register at the Early Bird rate. Effective 12:01 AM, the registration fee goes up by $50.00.

And if you live on the East Coast, I encourage you to consider Amtrak. Getting to DC will take a little longer, but it's by far the greenest transit option available, the security procedures are much more reasonable, the seats are much roomier, the coffee is much better, and every passenger -- even those in coach -- gets an electrical outlet. You'll also get to see all kinds of interesting scenery; I've seen bald eagles swooping over the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge at sunset, and parts of Baltimore (a city I really like) that could have served as shooting locations for The Wire. Moreover, instead of dealing with the sometimes unnerving approach to Reagan National or the chaos of Dulles, you'll be greeted by the Beaux-Arts beauty of Union Station.

See you in DC!