CoSA-SAA 2013: Thinking Beyond the Box

The 2013 joint annual meeting of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) ended at around 1:00 PM today. I'm feeling a bit crispy around the edges and a bit sad about not getting to see everyone or everything I wanted to see, but I'm nonetheless happy. The sessions I attended were all excellent, and most of the people with whom I spoke were also pleased with this year's meeting.

I particularly enjoyed Session 610, Thinking Beyond the Box: How Military Archivists Are Meeting 21st Century Challenges, which started at 8:00 AM this morning (N.B.: I would be remiss if I failed to mention that I am not a morning person. As enthused as I was about this session, I suspect I didn't catch some of the details.)

I asked to serve as the Program Committee's liaison to this session because I thought it would be really interesting, and I was not disappointed. In a society that has for four decades relied upon an all-volunteer military, it's all too easy for those who don't have deep connections to individual military personnel or to the armed forces as institutions to overlook the size, scope, and complexity of the military and the volume, richness, and variety of the records generated by the armed forces and the personal papers created by individual military personnel. This is a problem: if we're to gather and maintain a documentary record that does justice to American society, we need to give the military its due. As today's session emphasized, military records also help to document other aspects of our history and culture. Moreover, the approaches that military archivists have developed to ensure that the documentary record is sufficiently comprehensive and that vast quantities of electronic records are processed quickly and appropriately ought to be of broad professional interest.

Anthony Crawford (Kansas State University) emphasized the value of military records and personal papers of individual servicemen and -women to scholars researching a wide array of subjects:

• Papers of medical personnel are of interest to historians of medicine and, in the case of women who served, historians of women and gender.
• Military records and persona papers also document the history of the communities in which they served. A historic preservationist seeking to preserve a British refugee facility that had originally been a military hospital made extensive use of the personal papers of a Using the papers of a member of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps who had been stationed there during the Second World War.
• Artwork that appears in military publications and on military posters is of interest to historians of art. Hollywood has often sought assistance from the military, films that depict the armed forces in a positive light are sometimes shot on military bases and use soldiers as extras, and historians of film will find these relationships documented in military records.
• Historians of food and foodways will find that military has reached out to experts of various kinds to obtain information about the nutritional needs of troops and to supply information about the nation's food supply. Menus documenting the meals served to troops are also of interest to these researchers.

James Ginther (Library of the Marine Corps) detailed his repository's efforts to ensure that the Marine Corps's involvement in the recent conflict in Iraq is appropriately documented. The Marine Corps views command chronologies prepared by commanders as the official record of unit-level involvement in conflicts, but many of these chronologies lack essential detail. Marine Corps archivists devised a variety of strategies to overcome these deficiencies – and did so in ways that will be of interest to other institutional archivists seeking to encourage improved recordkeeping:

• They assembled lists of the personnel responsible for preparing command chronologies. Recognizing that units engaged in combat had other priorities, they didn't press those responsible. However, they did start sending letters of acknowledgement to commanders, who for a long time thought that the reports were disappearing into a black hole in Washington; the letters also indicated that archivists could help them obtain historical information about their units. Once commanders realized that their reports were being read, their reports became more detailed.
• They trained captains who attended the annual Expeditionary Warfare School and stressed that command chronologies constitute the official record of a unit's activities: the Marine Corps assumes that anything not mentioned in the reports didn't happen. They also emphasized that the Marine Corps uses command chronologies to set budgets and grant awards and that the Veterans Administration (VA) also consults them.
• They began collecting personal papers and other materials that supplemented the command chronologies. A friend of Ginther's who was deployed to Iraq took a vast number of photographs and conducted oral histories that formed the basis of an award-winning book and donated all of the materials to the Library of the Marine Corps.
• They also reach out to visiting groups of veterans and other people. When visitors learn about the archives' holdings, they often donate personal papers or agree to an oral history interview with a Marine Corps archivist.

Joel Westphal, who was until recently employed by the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), detailed how CENTCOM is preserving the joint headquarters records created as a result of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The Iraqi conflict is significant in that it marked the first time in military history that the majority of records (more than 95 percent) were created in digital format, and the joint headquarters records were at the center of the largest single transfer of electronic data from a war zone during an ongoing military operation. At the present time, the records, which comprise approximately 52 TB of data, constitute the largest single collection of electronic war records ever assembled; however, the records documenting joint headquarters operations in Afghanistan will ultimately comprise roughly 150 TB of data.

Efforts to preserve these records grew out of a previous failure: only a small percentage of Gulf War records were ever transferred to the U.S. Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and both CENTCOM and NARA were intent ensuring that Operation Iraqi Freedom was documented appropriately. CENTCOM began working on records preservation projects as early as 2003, and NARA began asking about Operation Iraqi Freedom records in 2009. As a result of NARA's inquiries, a war records group was established and United States Forces-Iraq was pushed to establish a records management program and to transfer its records to CENTCOM.

 In April 2010, a five-day assessment of United States Forces-Iraq recordkeeping practices was completed. Although some of the published findings of this assessment turned out to be inaccurate, its estimate of the volume of records was both accurate and extremely important. The records were then inventoried, and CENTCOM established a technical transfer team and a technology team to prepare for the transfer of 52 TB of data.

On August 31, 2010, President Obama declared that Operation Iraqi Freedom had ended, and CENTCOM focused on copying the records onto a storage array and transferring the storage array to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Florida; a full backup copy of the unprocessed data was conveyed to NARA.

A team of three CENTCOM staffers is currently processing the records and sending those identified as permanent to NARA, and the team's processing decisions will be of interest to anyone attempting to implement More Product, Less Processing to born-digital records:

• The team was adamant that the original order of the records be preserved at all costs, which saved vast amounts of time; the team can now processing 175,000 records per staff member per month.
• Millions of the records are e-mail messages, and many of them are of transitory value or are non-record material. In order to speed processing and avoid retaining an unmanageable mass of records, the processing team decided that e-mails of generals, admirals, and colonels who held important positions are permanent and that all e-mails of lower-level personnel are retained for 6 years and then destroyed.
• The team is working with a document analytics vendor whose tools could weed out redundant or near-redundant records, empty folders and zero-byte files, executable files lurking in data-only directories, and other materials that clearly don't warrant preservation.

One final word about this session:  it was assembled by the Military Archives Roundtable, which was established last year.  I took a few minutes today to read the petition to SAA Council seeking permission to form the roundtable, and it's a pretty impressive document.  I expect all manner of interesting things from this group.

Image: the Beauregard-Keyes House, 1113 Chartres Street, New Orleans, 17 August 2013.  This home, which was built in 1826, is an elevated center hall colonial -- a bit of an odd sight in the French Quarter.  Confederate general Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard lived in the house in 1860 and from 1866-68.

CoSA-SAA 2013: The Web of Sites

 I had the good fortune to attend three great hour-long sessions today:

• Session 304, Training in Place: Upgrading Staff Capabilities to Manage and Preserve Electronic Records, in which Richard Pearce-Moses (Clayton State University) discussed how online graduate education programs can benefit working archival professionals, Lori Lindberg (San Jose State University) highlighted SAA's new Digital Archives Specialist program, and Sarah Grimm (Wisconsin Historical Society) discussed the educational offerings developed by CoSA's State Electronic Records Initiative project.

• Session 407,  The Web of Sites: Creating Effective Web Archiving and Collection Development Polices, which is discussed in greater detail below.

• Session 504, Records Management Training Gumbo for the Digital Age, in which Cheryl Stadel-Bevans (Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development) facilitated a series of lighting talks given by Jane Zhang (Catholic University of America), Donna Baker (Middle Tennessee State University), Daniel Noonan (Ohio State University), and Lorraine Richards (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).

However, I'm desperately in need of sleep, so this post is going to focus solely on Session 407, The Web of Sites: Creating Effective Web Archiving and Collection Development Policies drew a standing room-only crowd, and with good reason.  The three panelists represented three very different institutions with three very different goals: 

• Olga Virakhovskaya discussed how one collecting repository, the University of Michigan's Michigan Historical Collections (MHC) devised a Web archiving policy that dovetails with its collecting policy, which calls for aggressive collecting and broad documentation of the state's history and culture.  In an effort to balance topical importance and the quality of information found on a given site, MHC staff identify sites that are created by individuals and organizations that MHC seeks to document, fill in gaps in its holdings, or contain material that fall outside MHC's collecting priorities but nonetheless warrant preservation and determine whether the sites content that is rich, unique, or new.  If the site meets all of these requirements, MHC will archive it.  MHC, which uses the California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service, stops archiving sites when no new content has been added for three consecutive years; it will also cease archiving sites upon creator request.

• Jennifer Wright of the Smithsonian Institution Archives discussed the Archives' efforts to ensure that the 257 websites, 10 mobile sites, 89 blogs, 26 apps, and 578 social media accounts maintained by various Smithsonian entities are managed and preserved appropriately.  The archives is responsible for providing retention guidance to creators, maintaining periodic snapshots of Smithsonian Web resources, and maintaining a registry of Smithsonian social media accounts. It has developed distinct approaches to preserving websites, Intranet sites, and social media accounts:
• Public websites are generally treated as permanent records, and the Archives tries to crawl them annually, before and after major redesigns, and on days of major events.  However, it will attempt to configure Archive-It's crawler to exclude content that is being transferred to the Archives in other formats, is the responsibility of other Smithsonian units, or consists of collections (as opposed to organizational records), or which merely points to other Web content.  Crawls of public sites are made publicly accessible almost immediately after completion.
• Intranet sites are appraised individually. Given that most Intranet sites block Web crawlers, Intranet content is transferred to the Archives via FTP, hard drive, or other non-crawling mechanism.
• Most social media accounts are captured once in order to document their existence and show how they are used. After this initial capture, staff reappraise each account annually and recapture it if significant new content is present. Social media content often resists capture, so the Archives uses multiple tools (Archive-It, export tools, and screenshots) as needed.  These captures are not made available online.

• Rachel Taketa discussed how she created the California Tobacco Control Web Archive CTCWC, a topical collection of archived sites that complements the University of San Francisco's Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL), which consists of 14 million internal business records created by major tobacco companies.  The archive consists of about 90 sites that were captured with the California Digital Library's Web Archiving Service and complement materials found within the LTDL, but most focus on the other side of the tobacco control movement:  they were created by public health advocacy organizations, anti-smoking campaigns, and sites relating to proposed tobacco control legislation.  A written scope statement that establishes the archive's geographic focus (California and anti-smoking campaigns in the state's large metropolitan counties) and collecting priorities (original and/or unique content found in blog posts, interviews, multimedia, sites of established tobacco control groups, and local government sites).  Site captures cease when a given site hasn't been updated for a year or when a given issue is no longer relevant; as one might expect, reappraising sites consumes a lot of time.

 My key takeaways from this session:

• Your Web archiving policy should, to the extent that your resources and Web archiving tools allow, align with your main collecting policy.
• Just as collecting policies vary from one institution to another, Web archiving policies will vary from one institution to another.
• Given the speed with which sites change and the frequency with which once-active sites become dormant, reappraisal is a must.  However, it's incredibly time-consuming and we need some tools that will help us analyze the evolution (or lack thereof) of site content over time.

Image: traces of a rainbow over the West Bank Crescent City Connection, the twin cantilever bridges that span the Mississippi River, in New Orleans, Louisiana, 16 August 2013. Thanks to my friend S.G. for pointing out to me; I never would have noticed it otherwise.

CoSA-SAA 2013: 14 and 15 August

For me, at least, the 2013 joint annual meeting of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA) got underway yesterday.  However, I learned an important lesson before my first meeting got underway: if you're in New Orleans in August, always take an umbrella with you.  I left my hotel room about forty minutes before my first meeting began and decided to take a brief walk down by the riverfront. The clouds didn't look too ominous . .  .

. . . until the instant the sky opened and water started pouring down. I spent about twenty minutes sheltering under a stairwell and hustled back to the hotel once the torrent slowed to a light rain.

I spent most of the afternoon in a CoSA work meeting, with a brief break for a meeting of the 2013 Program Committee. All I want to say about these meetings is that a) CoSA is, in my view, the most cohesive archival professional organization in the United States and that b) serving on the Program Committee has been an amazing experience.  Seeing how annual meeting programs are put together is fascinating, SAA's staff is incredibly supportive and efficient, and the co-chairs and other members -- most of whom I didn't know prior to our first meeting -- were just fantastic.  If you're an SAA member and you're ever asked to serve on a Program Committee, by all means do so.

This morning, I chaired a session on cloud computing that I think went quite well; however, it's hard to tell when you're up on the dais how things are really going. At this moment, I'm just glad it's over.

Every Program Committee member serves as liaison to six annual meeting sessions. Before the meeting begins, we answer any questions that session chairs and participants have.  We then attend all of the sessions we've been assigned and help to resolve any audiovisual problems that may arise, walk around with microphones during the question-and-answer component of the session (if the session is being held in a large room), and provide other forms of assistance as needed.

This afternoon, I served as liaison to Session 210, Reaching Out: Building and Managing Satellite Archives, which featured five archivists who work in a variety of decentralized environments:

• Session chair Michael Everman discussed the establishment of the St. Louis branch of the Missouri State Archives.
• Tamar Chute detailed how Ohio State University has tried to ensure that the permanent records generated by its five small regional campuses are preserved.
• Scott Grimwood discussed how the corporate archives of SSM Healthcare has tried to preserve the records of a large, multi-institutional healthcare system.
• Paul Daniels outlined the origins of and challenges associated with the informal system of regional Evangelical Lutheran Church in America archives.
• Steve Hausfeld highlighted how the Nationwide Life Insurance Company has used its archives to create exhibits and other materials that build upon employee interest in the company's history and reinforce the company's marketing and branding efforts.

The panelists offered a wealth of helpful suggestions for other archivists and records managers who find themselves working in decentralized environments, particularly when each unit within the organization enjoys a substantial degree of autonomy:

• Focus less on power and control and more on ensuring that archival records are saved. Be willing to break established “rules” or disregard precedent if doing so will save materials.
• Recognize that in at least some instances, the records created and maintained by regional or branch entities may help to document local or regional history; if this is the case, there may be a strong case to be made for not transferring them to a centralized archives.
• Help and guide the regional or branch personnel who find themselves responsible for caring for archival materials. Visit their facilities in person whenever possible, and use listservs and other mechanisms to share best practices and keep lines of communication open.
• Request that certain types of materials (e.g., publications, photographs) be sent to the main archives facility.
• Ask regional or branch personnel to create an inventory of the records in their care and to send a copy of the inventory to the main archives facility.
• Consider digitizing important records so that they're accessible regionally.
• Be willing to deaccession or transfer materials to branch facilities once they are willing and able to care for them.
• Be willing to take in regional or branch facility records that can no longer be kept within these facilities.
• If you are creating internally-oriented exhibits that document the history of a large, complex, and decentralized organization or reinforce branding messages, keep in mind that treating each building, wing, floor, or office of the organization as a de facto branch facility may be necessary; employees may rarely stray from a single facility, building, or floor

New Orleans Museum of Art

The 2013 joint meeting of the Council of State Archivists and the Society of American Archivists will start -- for me, at least -- at noon tomorrow. I got into town late last night, and I spent most of the day at the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA).

NOMA is situated on the edge of the 1,300-acre New Orleans City Park, which is one of the oldest urban parks in the nation. City Park suffered extensive damage as a result of Hurricane Katrina (2005), but New Orleanians rallied to repair it.  As a result, the park is once again a beautiful, inviting, and extremely popular place; however, if you look closely, you can still see lingering damage in many areas.

City Park is home to a wide array of trees, among them bald cypress, magnolias, live oaks, and a wide array of other oak varieties . . . .

. . . . And every now and then you find a tree growing in another tree.

 NOMA occupies a 1911 neoclassical building designed by Chicago architect Samuel Marx. A 1971 addition dramatically increased the museum's storage and exhibition space, and the Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden (which I visited in 2010) opened in 2003.

NOMA's collections comprise approximately 40,000 objects.  Although the museum's collection spans the world and ranges from ancient to contemporary works, French and American art are particular strengths.

NOMA allows visitors to take non-flash photographs of works that it owns and which are on display in its permanent galleries, so I'm going to share a few of my favorite pieces.

NOMA has a small but carefully chosen collection of 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings, and Marinus van Reymerswaele's The Lawyer's Office (oil on wood, 1545) has long been a favorite.  How could it not be?  The documents depicted in this painting relate to an actual lawsuit that was filed in 1526 but not resolved until 1538 . . . by which time the property at the center of the suit had been destroyed by storms.

Jehan Georges Vibert's The Cardinals' Friendly Chat (oil on canvas, ca. 1880) was meant to be at least slightly anti-clerical; the men are sitting in Marie Antoinette's Fontainebleau boudoir, completely oblivious to the upheavals heading their way.  To 21st-century eyes, however, there's something appealing about the contrast between their opulent surrounding and dress and their relaxed, informal demeanor.

NOMA's collection of French and American Impressionist works is impressive, and I was particularly taken by Elizabeth Woodward's Paradise Wood, Beaux Bridge, Louisiana (oil on canvas, ca. 1910).  If I hadn't seen the painting's title, I would have guessed that Woodward had depicted City Park.

Wassily Kandinsky's Sketch for "Several Circles" (oil on paper, laid down on canvas, 1926, draws the eye of every visitor who walks into the room in which it is hanging.  Owing to its fragility, it's kept under glass, and photographing it means photographing a reflected image of nearby works . . . and oneself.

As one might expect, NOMA's collection of contemporary New Orleans and Louisiana art is particularly strong.  Robert Gordy was known for his whimsical portraits, and his Female Head #2 (oil on canvas, 1976) made me chuckle aloud.

Alexis Rockman's Battle Royale (oil on canvas, 2011), seems humorous at first, but it's really deadly serious.  Rockman depicts fifty-four native and invasive species fighting for dominance in a Louisiana swamp.  Non-native plants and animals -- some of which have been present for a long time and some of which have recently arrived -- are placing increasing stress on the state's ecosystems, and the warfare Rockman depicts is quietly taking place all over the state.

Robert Warrens's The Command Ship of the Toxic Flotilla (painted wood, light bulbs, and mixed media, 1986) is another work that initially seems light-hearted but, as it's name indicates, it's anything but.  Southern Louisiana has long been a center of petroleum drilling and refining and chemical manufacturing, and Warrens's work draws attention to the impact of these human activities upon the natural world.

In contrast, Willie Burch's North Villere Street (acrylic and charcoal on paper, 2007) is a sensitive depiction of one small human community. 

I have a finite capacity for museum-going. After a few hours, my eyes start to skim over the works and my ability to comprehend the contextual information recedes.  When this starts to happen, I leave; there's no point in forcing oneself to look at things one can't appreciate and won't remember afterward. As a result, I didn't view NOMA's galleries of Indian, Japanese, Chinese, or African art -- and thus have a compelling reason to go back the next time I'm in New Orleans.

Spontaneous Scholarships for SAA/CoSA joint annual meeting: June 30 deadline

In 2011, Kate Theimer, who comes up with more good ideas in a single week than I typically manage in an entire year, started the Spontaneous Scholarships, an informal program that helps to defray the cost of attending the annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists (SAA).  The scholarship pays only the conference registration fee -- applicants must pay their own travel, lodging, and meal costs -- and anyone who feels the need to ask for this form of support is welcome to do so. Kate collects the donations and awards the scholarships by drawing applicants' names out of a hat.  Spontaneous Scholarships helped make it possible for 26 students, new professionals, and other archivists in need to attend SAA's 2011 meeting in Chicago and for 34 people to attend the 2012 meeting in San Diego.

The deadline for applying for a Spontaneous Scholarship or donating to the Spontaneous Scholarship fund is June 30.  If you need a little help getting to the annual meeting this year, simply contact Kate, state that you're applying for a Spontaneous Scholarship, and let her know whether you're a regular or student member of SAA (NB: only SAA members may receive Spontaneous Scholarships). If you're interested in donating to the Spontaneous Scholarship fund, you have multiple options for doing so.  If you can donate only $5.00 or $10.00, that's okay. Every little bit helps.

And if you're going to the joint 2013 annual meeting of SAA and the Council of State Archivists (CoSA), which will be held in New Orleans on 11-17 August, here's a friendly reminder: Friday, 5 July is the deadline for registering at the Early Bird rate.  If you're a full member of SAA or CoSA and fail to register by 5 July, you'll have to pay an additional $50.00.  If you wait until after 15 July, you'll be on the hook for an additional $110.00.

Image: "Renascence" (1998) by Enrique Alferez, New Orleans Botanical Garden, New Orleans, Louisiana, 24 March 2010.

SAA 2013

Apologies for the long silence.  During the past four weeks, I've driven over 2500 miles, written and delivered two presentations, reviewed 137 conference session proposals, tended a seriously ill (and now recovering) cat, and flown to Chicago in order to help turn those 137 proposals into a 70-session conference -- and that's just the stuff I did when I wasn't at work. 

As a member of the Program Committee for the 2013 joint annual meeting of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) and the Society of American Archivists (SAA), it gives me great pleasure to state that the meeting program is going to be really exciting.  Unfortunately, I can't share any details at this time.  However, I can tell you that some of the Saturday sessions are going to be fantastic; if you have to book your airfare before the preliminary program comes out next year, keep this fact in mind!

I'm particularly glad that I got the opportunity to serve on the 2013 Program Committee:  next year's meeting will be held in New Orleans, and those of you who follow this blog know that the Crescent City holds a special place in my heart.  SAA last met in New Orleans in 2005, and the meeting ended less than two weeks before Hurricane Katrina exposed catastrophic weaknesses in the city's levee system.  I'm elated that SAA is finally returning to New Orleans this year.   If you've never visited the city, you're in for a treat -- it's like no other place in the United States.  If you attended the 2005 annual meeting, you know that New Orleans archivists are incredibly proud, gracious, and vivacious hosts, that the city itself is fascinating, and that the Hilton New Orleans Riverside is a great venue.

I'm heading home to Albany tomorrow morning.  Once I get settled in, you'll see a little more activity around here.  In the meantime, I hope you're well and that I'll see you in New Orleans next August.

Image:  decorative metalwork entryway to the Sullivan Center (originally the Carson, Pirie, Scott and Co. building) at 1 South Street, Chicago, Illinois.  Sullivan Center was designed by Louis Sullivan, and the distinctive metalwork is commonly attributed to George Grant Elmslie, who served as Sullivan's chief draftsman following the departure of Frank Lloyd Wright.  This entryway is literally a stone's throw away from SAA's headquarters at 17 North State Street.

SAA is meeting in New Orleans in 2013!

Lower Pontalba Building and Café du Monde, corner of Decatur and St. Ann Streets, New Orleans, Lousiana, 17 August 2005.

I noted the other day that I really wanted to see the Society of American Archivists (SAA) meet again in New Orleans sometime soon, and it turns out that SAA will indeed return to the Hilton New Orleans Riverside (which I really liked) on 4-11 August 2013.

I discovered this piece of good news in the January/February 2010 issue of Archival Outlook, in which Nancy Beaumont succinctly outlines the many, many considerations that SAA must take into account when selecting annual meeting sites. The print copy of this issue showed up at my office earlier today, so the SAA members among you who haven't yet received it should get it soon (you can also access the e-version online).

I'm sure that a few SAA members will grumble about the heat and humidity that pervades New Orleans in August, but I'm overjoyed that we'll be going back. From my point of view, at least, the prospect of seeing over a thousand archivists descend upon New Orleans makes missing Lombardi Gras (YEA, SAINTS !!!) almost bearable.