Rob Beschizza toured the the Preservation Research and Testing Division and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center of the Library of Congress recently and posted gorgeous high-res photos (and a couple videos) and descriptions of a lot of the preservation technology on BoingBoing. He talks about both the preservation of old print materials and digital items–everything from the Gettysburg Address and the 500-year-old Waldseemüller world map to nitrate film and RCA Selectavision and DVDs–touching on some of the issues involved (damaging an item to learn about it, DRM, digitizing vs maintaining old technology) and explaining some of the different tools and the science of preservation. Preservation nerds will love this, but everyone should click through just to check out the photos.
A piece of strange, sad news: a public library in Dover, New Hampshire recently discovered 5,000 anti-public school bookmarks tucked into books in their collection; staff spent 30 hours removing all of them. The bookmarks espoused the ideals of the School Sucks Project and Freedomain Radio and were strategically placed in books in certain sections of the library. Other nearby libraries have also found the bookmarks in their own collections. And lest anyone think the library was trying to censor the School Sucks Project’s message,
Although Beaudoin said she didn’t want library patrons to think the library supported the messages on the bookmarks, she wouldn’t have denied a request to post a poster or literature on a public board or display.
But library policy prohibits the dissemination of information through bookmarks in books, she said.
“If I had found 5,000 bookmarks staying ‘Stop the oil spill in the Gulf,’ a message I think everyone can get behind, I still would have pulled them,” she said. “It’s not what it was about, but that the act was done.”
Brigham Young University recently took a page from Old Spice’s book and put together this fantastic video, “New Spice: Study Like a Scholar, Scholar,” in which BYU student and comedian Stephen Jones extolls the virtues of studying at BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library. So many elements of the Old Spice commercials are nailed so perfectly and it’s a great mix of silly and accurate and man I love this video.
I so enjoyed guest blogging for PLA during the PLA National Conference in March, so I’m excited to announce that I’ve been accepted as a regular contributor for the YALSA blog. Tonight I wrote my first post, Preservation Week: Think Digital.
Preservation Week started yesterday and continues through Saturday and while the official campaign focuses a lot on internal concerns about library materials and on community members’ physical artifacts, it’s important that we also take the opportunity to talk about preserving digital content with teens in the library. Check it out!
ALA sent out an email today announcing the addition to the ALA Store of posters and bookmarks for Preservation Week, which is 9-15 May this year. I was disappointed to see that except for the short acknowledgment that “Digital copies allow treasures to be easily shared, but remember digital items need preservation, too,” Preservation Week seems to be mostly focused on preserving physical artifacts like books, maps, family heirlooms, and clothing.
To be sure, saving these physical objects is important and libraries can take this opportunity to teach library users about preserving items they care about. And ALA does provide links to digital preservation resources. But so much information created today only ever exists in digital formats, so it’s critical that libraries also heavily promote digital preservation.
I’d love to see a bookmark and poster that address digital preservation specifically. It might include the following tips:
Choose open file formats. Digital items such as emails, photographs, and documents require software to read and display them. If the company that makes a particular piece of software stops supporting that software, you may lose the ability to read your data.
Make backups across multiple storage devices. If your hard drive crashes or you misplace your flash drive, will you lose your family photographs? You can also create hard copies of certain kinds of content as a means of backing up that data.
Create good metadata. Metadata tells you about the digital objects you have. Who is in the photo? When was the photo taken?
Be selective. While digital photography allows you to keep every photograph you take with no concern for filling up your home with physical photo albums, will you really still want all of those pictures a year from now? Five years from now? Fifty years from now? How long will you keep that online boarding pass confirmation? Not all digital content is equally important and our cognitive associations fade over time and file formats change, so it’s important to be able to identify what’s important so it can be documented, organized, and preserved.
The “how” of digital preservation can be tricky: new file formats and the sheer overwhelming amount of data can be daunting. But librarians continue in their quest to organize and preserve the world’s information. Earlier this month, Andrew K. Pace, the Executive Director for Networked Library Services at OCLC and the President of LITA, wrote an entry at Hectic Pace called “Librarians Give Permanence to Twitter.” He outlined how Twitter posts could be cataloged using MARC records. And today, the Library of Congress announced (via Twitter!) that they’re acquiring all public tweets since March 2006. (There’s a privacy/content ownership side of things here, too, but that’s another post for another time.) Also, from the Library of Congress’s Facebook announcement, check out their stance on digital information:
So if you think the Library of Congress is “just books,” think of this: The Library has been collecting materials from the web since it began harvesting congressional and presidential campaign websites in 2000. Today we hold more than 167 terabytes of web-based information, including legal blogs, websites of candidates for national office, and websites of Members of Congress.
The organization and preservation of digital content is still a developing field with interesting new projects, and it’s not some inaccessible academic issue or for tech nerds only. It’s something that librarians need to learn about themselves and then educate library users about.
Erin–whom you may know as the champion of metadata from her earlier blog post–has a new post over on her own blog about our trip to Eckhart Public Library if you’re interested in another perspective on the project.
She tackles in more detail than I did the difficulty of digitizing certain things and the way best practices can’t always be implemented within the context of real-world constraints.
How many of you have a digital camera? How many of you make sure your photos are TIFF files instead of JPG? TIFF is the current standand for archival quality photos. Which is great and fine and dandy if you’re scanning old documents into your computer, but a bit more problematic when you have digital camera pics that are already saved in jpg format.
Erin also touches on why this project is so cool. Not only are we getting a chance to advance a public library’s project, but we’re also finally getting to apply what we’ve learned in class in the real world and see why things work the way they do and how, as librarians, we can use the tools we’ve learned about to do cool things.
This project is great — not only is it fantastic experience, but its a lot of fun, and I feel like we’re contributing to a pretty cool project. After completing my digital libraries class last fall, I kind of hated metadata — its a lot like cataloging, with lots of rules and details and UGH. But the cool thing, that I’m realizing now, is that with metadata, the rules are always changing. So while it is a bit like cataloging, its much more fun, since we get to create the schema and the fields, and while there are standards to adhere to, the rules we get to make ourselves.
I must confess that I’m not as excited about metadata as Erin, so my current piece of the project, figuring out what metadata we need for items we’re expecting teens in particular to want to include, isn’t firing my jets quite as much as the project in general. But it does hint at the notion that teens understand digital content–and as a result the world–differently than people of other ages might, which I do find interesting.
So go read Erin’s post. She does a good job of discussing something I probably won’t talk about in much detail.
The William H. Willennar Genealogy Center
We started at the William H. Willennar Genealogy Center where we met Gregg Williamson, the Manager of Genealogical Services (and a SLIS-Indy grad!), who gave us a tour of their building. We started off with the print collection, which has the largest collection of genealogy materials dealing with DeKalb County, and includes yearbooks for local schools dating back to 1905, family histories for local families, phone books, and individual files of research people have done on their own families. They also have a large microfilm collection of local newspapers, microfilm readers and scanners, and computer stations where patrons can use online resources to do genealogy research.
The seating space in the main room of the Genealogy Center. Photo by Erin Milanese.
Part of the print collection. Photo by Erin Milanese.
Gregg then took us through the staff workspace and talked about the people who work at the Genealogy Center (they’re mostly part-time employees and volunteers) and showed us the basement archive and the permanent archive upstairs. The basement archive is mostly local newspapers; some date back to the 1800s, but the collection also includes recent issues as well. As Gregg explained it, we’re very fortunate to have those two hundred-year-old papers, and people two hundred years from now are only going to have resources like that if we save current newspapers now.
Archival boxes in the basement archive. Photo by Erin Milanese.
The Genealogy Center has a lot of really cool technology and tools; one of the ones I found the most interesting was the microfilm camera. EPL still sends some of its things out to be microfilmed since it’s such a labor-intensive process and they do depend so heavily on volunteer work, but there are some items that they scan themselves. I can’t remember what the exact claim to fame was, but this may be one of the only microfilm scanners in a public library in Indiana. It was something really impressive like that.
EPL's microfilm camera. Photo by Erin Milanese.
The upstairs archive is the permanent archive and contains records that are available upon request but aren’t immediately available to the public (e.g., old gradebooks from local schools). We had a short but interesting conversation about balancing privacy and access; Gregg said that rather than siding with archivists who’d be more interested in privacy and protection of the physical materials, he tends to err on the side of making things open to people, reasoning that it’s a public library, so their holdings should be open to the public. He did say that there are some things that aren’t available to the public at all because of privacy concerns, like old library card registrations from earlier decades that include people’s names and addresses.
We also got to check out the digitization lab. Alaina Ring is in charge of the metadata for the library’s photo archive and database and she walked us through the creation of a database record. The digitalization lab has some neat technology, too, including a 35mm slide scanner, and what’s really cool about it is that it’s open to the public. They’ve done a lot of grant writing to build their collection and the tools they have available to them. It’s really impressive.
Two of the computer workstations (and the slide scanner) in the digitization lab. Photo by Erin Milanese.
This trip also gave us all a chance to better understand the specifics of and our own roles in this project. The Genealogy Center already has an extensive collection of photographs and documents, but most of it is of historical materials–which makes sense, since the people who use the Genealogy Center are doing research into their family’s history or into local history in general. But in the same way that Gregg is saving local newspapers now for the researchers of the future, Andrea wants to start saving the digital content of today for the researchers of tomorrow.
What we’re hoping to do with this project is to target some people whose stories reflect what’s going on in the community now: the woman who owns a local cafe, a teenager growing up in Auburn, a prominent politician, the factory worker who recently got laid off because of the economic downturn. We’ll solicit from them real and digital objects that represent their lives in the community and then figure out how to ingest that content into the library’s digital collection (or find a home for it at the DeKalb History Center or return it to its owner after scanning or photographing it). We’d also like to collect oral histories (maybe even on video) and find a way to include those in the library’s database. After an initial pilot program this year, we’re hoping to expand the project to include more community members in future years, and to promote the collection during Auburn Pride Week.
Andrea’s big on co-created community resources and on knowledge exchanges, so since we (both we students and the public library) are learning from community members with this project, we’ll also be doing workshops this summer to give some knowledge back to the community. The library’s done programs before on creating scrapbooks and preserving photographs and they’ve brought in outside speakers to talk about preserving digital information, but we’re hoping to build on what they’ve done before to help teach people about collecting, organizing, and preserving their digital content. We’ll also do workshops on privacy and copyright issues when dealing with digital content.
During our discussions, I was thinking about the different people we’re going to recruit for the pilot program and it really struck me how people of different ages understand digital content in completely different ways. Most teenagers are very at home in a digital world and are very nearly swimming in digital content. But maybe there’s also an older person in the community who doesn’t have his own computer and comes to the library to check his email where his granddaughter has sent photos from her latest birthday party. He understands those digital photographs that just live in his inbox in a totally different way than the teen understands the photos he texts to his friends. I think I’d like to learn more about that.
Now that I’ve got a more detailed idea of how the People of Auburn project is going to go and I’ve actually seen the physical facilities and gotten to know the library a little bit, I’m even more excited about this project. I have to admit that normally I find genealogy and archives only mildly interesting, but the more Gregg showed us on Saturday, the more interested I got. They’ve got so many unusual and unique resources and technology. I’m also very excited about the team we have assembled for this project!
Back row: Andrea Japzon, Erin Miller Milanese, Gretchen Kolderup, Alaina Ring, Gregg Williamson. Front row: Katie Nakanishi, Eve Grant. Not pictured: Angela Slocum. Photo by EPL's Gretel.
Eckhart Public Library is unusual in that it actually comprises three separate buildings all on the same street. We conducted most of our business on Saturday at the Genealogy Center, but we also visited the main library building and the teen library. Oh yes, EPL has a completely separate building for its teens–and it’s totally awesome. It’s open after school and on the weekends and it’s got comfortable furnishings, really striking light fixtures, computers, and a space for programming and games. Adults are only allowed in for fifteen minutes at a time if they’re not accompanied by a teen. When we walked into the building, the teens sitting at the computers turned around to stare at us; Darcy, the librarian I talked to, said that’s one of the things the teens like best about having their own space, feeling like they belonged and anyone else was an outsider. She did acknowledge that sometimes the people in adult services were too quick to send teens away from the main library building but said that overall, having their own space was great. I was impressed with how current their fiction collection was and how large their non-fiction collection (homework resources and teen-interest stuff like gaming guides and yoga books and things like that) was. I think it’s really important for teens to have their own space in the library–and it’s even better when they can have a space where they aren’t constantly being told to keep their voices down.
The outside of the Third Place, EPL's teen library. Photo by Erin Milanese.
We also visited the main library building, which was built in 1911 and is on the National Register of Historic Places and has a lot of interesting touches. It was originally going to be a Carnegie building, but Charles Eckhart, a local businessman, said he’d build the library on the condition that the contract with Carnegie be severed. The library has a fountain in the yard outside, stained glass windows, and a fireplace. It’s very comfortable and it really feels like a homey place the community can gather.
The fountain outside the main library. Photo by Erin Milanese.
Stained glass and bookshelves in the main library building. Photo by Erin Milanese.
I also took a trip downstairs to check out the children’s area. They have puppets and toys available for checkout and their storytime room is decorated with a Secret Garden theme and has an adjacent room with kid-sized tables for craft time. I was so impressed with the creative touches throughout the whole library. It seems like a really fun place to be able to go!
A tree in the storytime room in the children's department. Photo by Erin Milanese.
EPL has internship opportunities available for SLIS-Indy students. If you’re interested in working in the Genealogy Center processing materials for the digital collection, in the teen library, for information services, or in technical services, email Gregg Williamson. Don’t forget that internship applications are due to Marilyn Irwin in the SLIS office by 15 March for the summer semester and 15 July for the fall semester.
One of the classes that I’m taking this semester is an independent study that’s actually a group project with some other students in the program led by Andrea Japzon (whom I had for my Public Library Management class last semester). We’re going to help a public library in northern Indiana create a community digital repository to show their community pride and have a place to collect their community’s history. I’m focusing on privacy and copyright concerns.
At the beginning of the semester, Andrea had us do some reading on digital repositories and the idea of a community repository and how “memories of me” become “memories of us.” The article I found especially fascinating was “Guarding Against Collective Amnesia? Making Significance Problematic: An Exploration of Issues” by Annemaree Lloyd, which appeared in Library Trends in 2007. In it, Lloyd discusses how the very act of determining what is significant enough to go into an archive is a political act and defines how future people will determine significance. She also talked about how the dominant culture can’t understand the significance to minority cultures of artifacts from those minority cultures, and takes librarians and archivists and historians to task for not examining the lack of objectivity–and the fundamental inability to be objective–in choosing what’s significant. It’s not the kind of thing I usually read in library literature (I’d expect it more from a cultural studies program), but I found it really interesting.
Anyway, my friend and classmate, Erin (who’s also the incredibly hard-working president of ALISS), is Andrea’s GA, so she’s working on the project, too. She’s interested in doing more with digital collections once she graduates and she wrote a post on her blog about the project, including a short argument for the importance of metadata in everyone’s lives:
You’re probably on the verge of clicking the X button and not finishing this blog because you think metadata is something that only applies to us nerds digitizing things and working in libraries…. but you’re wrong. Metadata is EVERYthing. Every time you tag a photo in Facebook or on Flickr…that’s metadata. Everytime you put a title on your blog…metadata. Depending on the search engine, every word you write can be a piece of metadata. When you upload photos from your camera onto your computer, and each file is given a name like 00258_img, and you see things like 154x132px or “taken with sony digital” or “jpg”… that’s all metadata.
The problem is, while metadata is everywhere, its not standardized, often neglected, and can be very subjective (think about all those times you’ve tagged pics on facebook with things like “that crazy guy from across the street”, or “my friend’s cute baby”, or even worse, not tagged anyone and neglected to write a caption, leaving librarians and historians 100 years from now no clue as to who or what is depicted).
In the digital age, information is created so much more rapidly than it ever was before. During our meeting near the beginning of the semester, Andrea said that over 90% of all information created today is only created digitally. And from our readings, we learned that in the past, preservation was something that happened after creation, now preservation happens at creation, because as soon as you take a photo, you’re locked into that file format and that resolution for all time with no guarantee that the digital information that makes up that picture will be readable in the future.
With this project we’re not only planning to help establish this community digital repository, but to design workshops for patrons of the public library to explain how data generation and preservation works in the digital world. We need to make Erin’s argument for the importance of metadata to non-librarians and we need to help people decide how to balance social networking and privacy. That’s what libraries are for: to teach information and technology literacy.
This week we’re all finishing up our initial round of research in our different areas and our identification of best practices. Next weekend we’ll drive up to the library to finalize a timeline for this project and check out what they’ve got in place already. I’ll be writing more about the project as we continue to work on it.
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