Day of Digital Archives: Artist's Collections

Well, this year's Day of Digital Archives ha been much more successful for me than last year (I broke my elbow in a cycling accident that day and spent much of it loopy because of the pain pills. I did type out a one-handed blog post but I don't think it ended up being coherent.) This year I want to talk about an artist's collection we've been working on for a bit at UO.

The Tee A. Corinne papers are one of the many hybrid collections we have in Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Oregon. Tee Corinne was a lesbian visual artist, writer, and activist who explored female sexuality in her visual and written works. Upon her death in 2006 she left her entire estate, including the rights to her literary and artistic works, to the University of Oregon Libraries. Owning the rights is nice because, once we've done our initial processing and preservation work on the files, we don't have to worry about any rights issues when providing access to the digital objects.

However, before we can even start worrying about access to the materials we've had to devise a plan for working with the digital records. When UO received Tee's collection in 2006, it included a laptop and a desktop computer as well as removable media containing various works and papers. At that time, the UO did not have well-developed procedures of workflows in place for ingesting or otherwise processing digital objects. The files were pulled off Tee's computers and the various media and moved over to library servers, but nothing else happened to them for a number of years. In the meantime, there was a gap of more than a year between the time my predecessor (the first e-records archivist at UO) left and the time I was hired. The Tee Corinne e-records were left on the servers and until now I haven't been able to work with them at all.

When I started my initial assessment of the digital portion of Tee's papers, my first task was to try to gather all the digital objects from the collection into one place on the server. Because of the lack of workflows when the collection was taken in, the digital objects ended up in a number of different places on the server. Although I think I've managed to round up most of them now, I still run across stray files that have to be added in with the others. When we started the project this summer, we identified 65,328 digital files we knew came from Tee's computers or from the removable media in her collection. Although I would love to be able to declare that all those files in fact belong in Tee's collection, she shared her computers with Beverly Brown, her lover, whose collection the UO also owns. In addition, Bev Brown was the founder of and was heavily involved with the Jefferson Center, an organization whose records the UO holds as well. Once we started looking at the files from Tee's computers, we realized that her files, Bev's files, and files from the Jefferson Center were all mixed together. The organic file structure the women were using did not clearly distinguish among these three separate groups. Often a single directory will contain files from all three collections. This has slowed down our processing: we're trying to develop some content-based filters so we can do some batch sorting of the files. Most of the textual documents were created in version of WordPerfect, so we're also working on batch converting those files. In addition, of course, we're having to do a lot of renaming so that the file names of the preservation copies don't have any of the potential trip-ups you see in organically-named files.

The most interesting challenge in dealing with this collection, however, has been the photographs. Photography was one of the many media in which Tee worked, and she made extensive use of Photoshop. Sometimes she created prints of several digitally-altered versions of a single photograph; we are often able to match physical prints with digital files, but in some cases we have digital photographs for which no physical print exists or vice versa. Tee also tended to revise her photographic series depending on the context in which she was exhibiting or publishing them. This means we sometimes have several different series of a single image or group of images. The series may or may not be consistent; that is, sometimes a series of images was published in one form in on place and in a different form somewhere else. In the digital files, this means that in some cases we have many duplicate copies of a single image (if Tee organized the files based on the various publications) as well as multiple different versions of an image. We would prefer not to transfer multiple copies of a single image onto our preservation servers, but we do want to preserve the different versions of the images because we feel these are an important artistic statement. Sorting out the files themselves has proved to be an enormous challenge, however. Luckily I have a team of graduate students and volunteers who are working hard on this (as well as other) projects.

What have I learned from my work with this collection so far? Obviously, documentation is a hugely important factor when you're talking about a born-digital collection. One of my main problems right now is the lack of documentation from previous work that occurred with this collection (however cursory that work might have been). I'm trying to document every step I take with these records so that my successors have a clear picture of what has and hasn't been done with the materials. It's also important for the digital archivist to be involved in the donation process if at all possible; this helps lessen the amount of triage work you have to do when the born-digital records arrive on your doorstep.

Taking the web archive off the virtual shelf - archived websites in a library exhibition

In my post for Day of Digital Archives last year I wrote about our efforts at the State Library of Queensland to archive websites related to our state's 2010/11 summer of natural disasters. 

This year, State Library launched Floodlines: a living memory – a library exhibition paying tribute to the resilience and community spirit of Queenslanders in the face of these disastrous weather events.  It was in this unique, digitally-immersive exhibition that our archived websites were featured.

Floodlines exhibtion space

To find out more about the exhibition and how archived websites were included, see my full blog post on Australia’s Web Archives blog

Maxine Fisher
Digital Content Coordinator
State Library of Queensland
Australia

A Digital Dark Age?

Was just reading this article about a 700 year old manuscript found here in our stacks at the University of Virginia's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Listen to this quote:

In his essay, Greenia describes how rare it is to find medieval documents. He estimates that for every volume that survived during the Middle Ages, nine more were lost. Archivists have documented the disappearance of parchments from the 13th and 14th centuries, “some perhaps rolled into tubes to make fireworks.”

During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the contents of city archives were sometimes stuffed into the barricades. Since they didn’t have sandbags, said Greenia, books were used instead.

And before the municipal archives were transferred to Madrid in the late 1970s, they “were still being kept in a top floor space subject to damp air and, when it rained, dripping water.”

Now think about digital documents in our current age. How many have you lost to a hard drive crash? To the damage done when you dropped your iPhone or laptop? How many of them have you forgotten were on your computer at all? How many will you back up or move to your next computer?

Some have said we might be living in a digital dark age if we don't come up with better ways to manage our digital content, and fast. What do you think?

Creating an Online Collection with Born-Digital Content at Ball State University Libraries

Hello all, and happy Day of Digital Archives! My name is Amanda Hurford and I am Metadata and Digital Collections Developer at Ball State University Libraries in Muncie, Indiana. I work closely with archivists developing and uploading content to the Libraries’ Digital Media Repository (DMR), which we use to provide online access to digitized versions of various primary source materials (photos, manuscripts, audio/video recordings, etc.). As of Oct. 1, we’ve created 113 digital collections, consisting of 115,837 assets and 343,011 individual digital files.

More and more, the source materials that arrive in our department are born-digital. To provide a glimpse into the life of a digital initiatives librarian (me), I’ve broken down one particular project that has been a big part of my day-to-day work for the last several months: the Roger Conatser Aerial Photographs Collection. The collection currently includes over 1,500 digital aerial photographs of Muncie and Delaware County, Indiana, taken by Muncie resident Roger Conatser in 2005. It recently went “live” at the end of July, but work continues on this ongoing project.

My share of working with this digital archive (and others) has consisted of several steps:

· Organization of the files: The digital photographs came to us on several CDs, and have since been copied to a backed-up server where our staff can easily access the files while we work with them. We also renamed the files. While keeping a log of the changes we made, we altered the file names from generic numbers to a naming schema that falls in line with our other digital projects. Each file now has a unique identifier which includes the archival number that was assigned to the collection.

· Upload into the content management system: Our team inputs the files into the DMR using CONTENTdm’s Project Client. This process includes auto-populating the “Digital Identifier” field with the file name, making it possible to track the master image down from the online version.

· Create and edit metadata: We spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of information would be useful in searching and browsing these images, and ended up with the following fields, among others. Many thanks go out to our local team of Delaware County experts for creating such amazing, useful records!

o Landmarks

o Identified Streets

o Thesaurus for Graphic Materials Subjects

o Area Type

o Date

· Maintain controlled vocabularies: All of the landmarks and streets our team identified contributed to the development of a hefty local controlled vocabulary that is frequently being tweaked.

· Add other materials: This is the step we are currently working on. In addition to the large archive of digital images, the collection consists of around 200 slides, over a thousand negatives of varying size, and countless prints. The slides and negatives have been digitized and are currently being described in CONTENTdm.

· Finalize the collection for archiving: Once we finish the remainder of the collection, all the master files, access files, and documentation (including an export of the metadata from the DMR) will be nicely packaged for long-term archiving. Next the collection gets passed to our technology team, who will redundantly archive the collection off-line.

This has been an interesting collection to work with, and an introduction to the inevitable evolution of the role of a digital initiatives librarian. As more born-digital materials need to be made available online, some of the more traditional aspects of my work will taper off (no sense scanning a print of a photograph if the original digital file is available). I will however, need to keep up-to-date with new digital formats and learn how to best work with them.

Amanda Hurford

Metadata and Digital Collections Developer

Ball State University Libraries... A destination for research, learning, and friends

AAHurford@bsu.edu

The To-Do List of a Digital Archivist

It's immensely gratifying to see today coming together. I hope that everyone who is reading is enjoying the blog and learning a lot. While this project wasn't an incredible amount of overhead to put together ("Hi, my name is Gretchen. Could you write a blog on October 6th? Thanks!" ...okay maybe a bit more swearing at Blogger was involved...), I haven't been able to do a lot of thinking about what I would write today. But since the point is to capture a "slice of life" in the world of digital archives, I thought the best illustration for me would be to post my (annotated) To-Do List. So, in all it's glory, here it is:

• start to draft blog for D0DA
  (woo-hoo! it doesn't say "finish blog" so I can check this one off!)
• check on saturday shift
  (As a member of the Special Collections staff I am still required to work on the reference desk each week and one Saturday each month. Although I don't consider myself "a people person" and working on the desk slightly stresses me out, I'm generally happy to do this. It helps me to understand how people use our collection, which in turn helps me design better interfaces and tools. It also helps me to learn about what's in the collection. However, I just started here in May and some things that are specific to our department are still a mystery to me. This task is related to my shift this coming Saturdy. The schedule says that my shift this Saturday is only from 1-5, but I know the building is open all day. I need to figure out what's going on...before Saturday.)
• correct Warner EAD
  (this item and the next one are all related to the AIMS grant project. I started here at UVa in May to replace the former Digital Archivist on the project, which is exploring the management of hybrid collections — those containing both digital and analog materials. One of the collections that was to be processed for the grant was the Papers of Senator John Warner. The collection included 35 CDs of scanned correspondence. There ended up being far too many issues surrounding copyright and to be able to do much with this collection at this point other than to image the discs and put the content into our long-term storage space. This fulfills part of our mandate to steward these materials because they will be "preserved" in this way, but we still need to process them to some level (i.e. track what's actually ON the disks...maybe) and make them accessible.
  [As an aside, the idea for the D0DA project came out of an unconference held by the AIMS team. You can read all about it on our AIMS blog if you are interested.])