A Day in the (Digital) Life

Last year I chose to use my DoDA post to broadcast my former institution’s ideas about communicating what digital archives are to the public. This year, I have a new job at Penn State as Digital Records Archivist. This job didn’t exist before, and we’re still trying to figure out what it’s going to be. But we have a lot of irons in the fire here, so I’ll stick to the theme of talking about what my ‘day of digital archives’ looks like.

I think it surprises some people to hear that I find my average day to be distinctly non-technical, but it shouldn’t. And I’m okay with that. I’ve found that what interests me most about the work is the challenge of figuring out how it all fits together, how it blends with the other work of archives, and how the overall work of the institution can be reimagined and modernized.

A lot of what I am doing at my current institution is capacity building: forming policy, trying to locate and implement best practices (which can and should be institution-specific), researching and reading work being done by others, experimenting with free tools, and just dialoguing with other staff about challenges and issues. A significant and persistent challenge is trying to align a developing electronic/born-digital records practice with our institution’s established practices, which includes trying to both mold digital practice to legacy practice and recommending ways in which legacy practice might be modified to suit new digital realities.

For example, this morning I have spent a little time working on my long-fermenting ingest workflow for electronic records. This workflow needs to address not only the particulars of what we might call ‘digital processing’—how we transfer material from some kind of external digital media to network ‘dark archive’ storage, how we store that transfer (discreet files or disk images or both), what metadata/manifest information we attempt to extract, and how we document this activity—but also how the media flows to the digital archivist in the first place, and what becomes of it afterward. We have to setup policies and practices that govern the separation of media from collections, how the media and the work we do with it is documented in Archivists Toolkit (as well as how it is documented there after ingest), and ultimately how it is incorporated into arrangement and description activities. Perhaps the biggest challenge I face right now is figuring out just how to provide access to the material should a researcher stumble across some record of it in the library catalog or finding aid platform. Actually, this thing is pretty much done, but I keep tinkering.

A lot of what I am doing is just traditional archival work cast in a different light. The next task on my list this morning is, well, appraisal. Penn State recently contracted the services of Archive-IT, and we’ll soon be using their crawling services to strategically capture university websites. Despite being published and disseminated through web technologies and platforms, Penn State University websites are subject to the same considerations as other university records. They exist within record groups and are potentially subject to retention schedules.

In preparation for this project, we secured a list of sub-domains on PSU.edu from central IT, and have been visiting the websites on this list to determine an originating department (provenance), look for sites from departments that fit the collecting priorities of the university archivist, try to determine how frequently the site updates (an ongoing process), and record some descriptive information about the sites in advance. Our initial collecting priorities will focus on sites related to the administrative units, colleges, and commonwealth campuses, but future phases of collecting will seek broader documentation of university work, culture, and life. As Mike Shallcross stated in his excellent case study on archiving the University of Michigan’s websites:

While reviewing Michigan‘s online resources, archivists were keenly aware of the extent to which websites help confer credentials (from the recruitment of students through their graduation), convey knowledge, foster socialization, conduct research, sustain the institution, provide public services, and promote a distinctive culture.

Increasingly, the kind of content Mike refers to above is being delivered through multimedia (primarily video), social websites, and cloud-based services (universities are increasingly using YouTube, Flickr, etc. to host content). Future appraisal and planning won’t necessarily be more complex; we’ll just have a larger landscape of material to examine. It won’t necessarily require special training or technical skills; it just requires an awareness of institutional uses of technology and methods for delivering content that should be collected by the repository.

Finally, I’ll take a little time later today to start preparing for a talk I’ll be giving at this year’s Digital Library Federation Forum in Denver. My position as Digital Records Archivist was written into a Mellon personal scholarly archiving grant that was awarded before I started at Penn State this past May.  The project is “an ethnographic study of faculty behaviors and articulated needs central to robust scholarly creation and successful navigation of the personal archiving and information management process.” From an archival point of view, the study should provide some insight into the personal digital habits of faculty and the technologies used to support and share their research. We’ll be collecting data through surveys, interviews, an on-site observation, and hopefully, for my part, I’ll be able to identify patterns that can help inform acquisition and management approaches to born-digital material (see the post earlier today, "What's in a File Name?"). This has been an interesting collaboration between various information professionals—I will be presenting with the lead investigator, an Educational and Behavioral Services Librarian, as well as an ethnographic researcher—and I think it speaks to the ways in which archival work in the digital age is inevitably going to be cross-disciplinary.

And by the way, thank you, Gretchen, for putting this together again!

-- Ben Goldman, Penn State University

The Intersections of Oral Tradition and Digital Archives

The Intersections of Oral Tradition and Digital Archives. (Happy Day of Digital Archives, Oct 12 2012)

Older ways of representing information, especially in the everyday library setting, are often rule-based, linear, and resistant to change. Digital repositories/ digital archives, in contrast, provide alternatives to linear, monolithic descriptions for sharing knowledge.

Digital repositories, with their array of metadata schemas are elusive like the spoken word. While the backend of repositories, like the structure of language, preserves and exports in a standardized form (usually METS XML), digital collections similar to oral cultures are mediated and exhibited in a wide variety of ways. Although direction is maintained, both traditions allow for multiple visits, varied connections, and a lot of variation within limits.

Perhaps the digital archive, as a repository, is the culmination of archival theory itself: collections connected in an interoperable and emergent manner. Digital archives, as archival theory, has long promoted itself as the vestibule of different kinds of exchanges, scholarship, and uses. The material is free from the linear and isolating confines of the academy; instead the material is presented in a distributed and interrelated manner.

In my social circle, there are those who lament the ubiquitous presence of popular culture, the lack of physicality in the electronic book, and the missing discipline and linear hierarchy offered by Wikipedia. My information-professional colleagues offer discipline-specific, but similar protests: a fear of new metadata schemas, which disrupt centralized cataloging and dismay over the potential lack of unity with digital collections.

I offer a different hypothesis, as a former student of anthropology who often reflects on the cultural aspects of digital archives development, Walter J. Ong’s research is informative. He notes that oral cyclic thought is characteristic of primary oral cultures, whereas linear thought depends on writing. Although unreasonable to some, I posit that humans’ oldest form of communication and one of the newest forms of technologies are fundamentally the same. Oral tradition and digital object description share the following:

•Navigating through networks or collections, which are not fixed entities and exist more as a “knowledge constellation.”

•Time and text are not linear. Both oral tradition and digital archives are participatory.

•Digital archives and oral traditions seem to parallel the way we think and seek knowledge.

In the information discipline, specifically libraries, we still rely on a linear fixed bibliographic record (MARC and a small step forward with RDA) and are only beginning to experiment with the potential of the multiple fluencies of digital repositories. This type of cataloging lacks the ability to reflect how current information users search for knowledge. MARC, although “machine-readable,” is an extension of the card catalog and is simultaneously an ill-fitted way to describe digital collections. RDA, in contrast, is preparation for linked data approach for cataloging. Unfortunately, RDA still relies on legacy standards designed for the card catalog world, such as creating uniform titles for grouping items, highly structured format descriptions, and emphasis on textual "citation-like" notes fields. Legacy practices (the afore mentioned) ignore the reality of the digital world, where identity is rarely expressed in a static or textual manner. Using persistent identifiers as part of the metadata like Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) works much better.

Information users seek and use different non-linear ways of access, such as, multiple exchanges, translations, links, multiple objects, and commentary. Patrons of digital technologies are fluent in various means of “information languages” and their research needs are similar. For example, they do not necessarily need to be forced to search in a monolithic system.

The range of metadata schemas like VRA Core, MODS, Darwin Core, etcetera, with a standardized data schema on the backend, represent a shared identity of an object. The identity is less about the object itself; instead, the importance lies in the relationships between objects. Arguably, this is they way humans naturally think and search, which stands in sharp contrast to the highly structured nature of linear descriptions. Indeed, more aligned with textual dominance, older static schemas and descriptions are not ideal for digital collection building and do not reflect the way we think, lacking different kinds of uses and scholarship opportunities.

Digital archives/ repositories provide direct access to the primary object, as part of an interrelated “knowledge constellation.” This results in immediate use in classrooms, Web sites, museum exhibitions, blog posts, and e-publications. One might argue that this form of of-the-moment access lacks the central authority and is untraditional. Although true, this criticism only reveals a partial picture. Similar to griots or other keepers of oral histories, the stories or digital objects in a digital repository are accessed and passed along in different forms. In other words, they are repurposed as bounded aggregations of a whole and they are shared. By forging semantic links in repositories, it keeps those links active and dynamic, allowing for new scholarship and forging new connections. Recently, digital archivists and other information professionals have been discussing the social graph, which shows social relationships on the web based on Facebook and Twitter. The linked data element of an institutional repository might produce a similar graph. Interestingly, what these graphs and the constellation of data behind them dynamically demonstrate is not so different from our human ancestors’ shared stories and their networks of knowledge.

Jessika, Digital Resources Archivist and Records Manager at Williams College Libraries

Analog-to-digital video preservation and a site visit to a repair facility at the NASA Ames Research Center

Hello everyone, happy day of digital archives! I'm Lauren Sorensen, Preservation Specialist working at Bay Area Video Coalition, a technology non-profit devoted to inspiring social change by enabling the sharing of diverse stories through art, education and technology. Our preservation department specifically works to preserve and provide support to archives with film, video, and moving image and audio material in their collections. We are one of the only non-profit vendors for high-quality preservation of video and audio in the country.

My blog entry can be found on our home site blog here, and involves a site visit from earlier this year, when I met in person for the first time Ken Zin, who works on the NASA Ames Research Center campus (at the site of a former MacDonald's there!) repairing obsolete reel-to-reel videotape machines. His work is essential to us because he is one of the only experts left in the country doing this specialized type of work. Because these decks feature heads (the part of the machine that reads the magnetic waveforms on the tape) that are proprietary to the companies that made them in the 1970s and 1980s, it is a real challenge keeping them in proper working order for high quality preservation. Realignment and regular maintenance is important in maintaining a facility that is appropriate for preservation services; we maintain these decks as we would museum artifacts because they are some of the last working machinery that is available to transfer 1/2" open-reel machines; after these decks are no longer operational, any magnetic recordings held in archival collections will be lost.

Please enjoy the photos!

McLuhan's Understanding Media: "The [digital] medium is [no longer] the [only] message."

Happy Day of Digital Archives

David Kay, nydawg [New York Digital Archivists Working Group]
October 6, 2011
McLuhan: “The Medium Is the Message?” or “The [digital] medium is [no longer] the [only] message.”

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the birth of “the new spokesman of the electronic age”, Marshall (Understanding Media) McLuhan, and digital archivists should take a moment to think about how media, digital and analog, hot and cool, and in many different formats change our jobs, lives and responsibilities. With threats of technological obsolescence, vendor lock-in, hardware failure, bit rot and link rot, non-backwards compatible software, and format and media obsolescence, digital archivists need a system to accurately describe digital objects and assets in their form and function, content, subject, object and context. If we miss key details, we run the risk of restricting access in the future because, for example, data may not be migrated or media refreshed as needed. By studying and understanding media, digital archivists can propose a realistic and trustworthy digital strategy and implement better and best practices to guarantee more efficiency from capture (and digitization or ingest) and appraisal (selection and description), to preservation (storage) and access (distribution).

Over the last ten, forty, one hundred and twenty thousand years, we have crossed many thresholds and lived through many profound media changes-- from oral culture to hieroglyphic communications to the alphabet and the written word, and from scrolls to books, and most recently transiting from the Atomic Age (age of atoms) to the Information Age (era of bits). While all changes were not paradigm shifts, many helped shift currencies of trust and convenience to establish new brand loyalties built on threats of imminent obsolescence and vendor lock-in. As digital archivists, we stand at the line separating data from digital assets, so we need to ensure that we are archiving and preserving the assets and describing the content, technical and contextual metadata as needed.

Want to read the rest? Check out the New York Digital Archivists Working Group [#nydawg] wordpress blog. Thanks for your interest in #DigitalArchivesDay #DoDA.

First steps: mapping out a new territory

by Meg Tuomala

I started as digital archivist at Washington University in St. Louis’ University Archives in August. So I guess you could say I’m a digital archives newbie. And today, on this first Day of Digital Archives I thought I’d write about my first digital archives project in this position. So here goes--

Like I said, I started as digital archivist at Washington University in St. Louis’ University Archives in August. In this new position (for both me and the Archives) my first task was to assess the amount, types, and provenance of the digital objects and materials we already have in our collection. Born digital stuff, digital surrogates of traditional archival materials… A way to get a handle on the lay of the digital land. A survey of things as they are now, in order to map out how we see them (would like to see them?!) existing in the future.

So I poked around files, dug into directories, and explored the larger digital landscape of the libraries and the university. I didn’t look through the stacks for those disks hidden in boxes… yet (that’s another project) but I did do some serious surveying in places where I know digital assets do, should, and well, maybe-or-maybe-not live.

Of course I found a lot of great stuff we already have--recordings of campus lecture series, a huge amount of scanned images from the Archives, born digital administrative files...

But after taking a better look at what we do have, what I really started to think about what we do not yet have, what we’d like to have (digital University publications would be just one thing that tops that list). Because chances are if it’s not in the Archives, it’s probably not being properly cared for. And this is especially true for digital materials.

I believe that my preliminary survey of the digital assets we have will be useful. First of all, it introduced me to what I’ll be working with right off the bat. Secondly, it highlighted unexplored territories and places that need more work. And finally, it can and will help us make a case for resources that we’ll need to get in order to begin responsibly managing and preserving what we already have, and what we hope to have in the future. Exciting!

So if you’re just looking for a place to start I’d suggest doing your own survey. It’s a small step, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Seeing the Forest for/and the Trees, or a Day in the life of a Digital Archivist

Greetings all, Sam Meister here to share my tale....

On this Day of Digital Archives I’m going to use a metaphor that seems appropriate to the new regional and geographical context to which I have recently migrated. I’m just starting month number three as Digital Archivist in the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana, a new position that did not exist before my arrival. After two months, there is still some definition of roles and responsibilities occurring, but more and more a clear path is being drawn.

Today I will be continuing the work I have been doing most recently: Project Planning. One of my main responsibilities is developing and implementing a workflow to collect, manage, and provide access to born-digital materials. At the moment, we are in the midst of creating the plan and structure which will frame the process of developing this workflow.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johanroed/3163039837

This current mode is a bit like standing at the top of a mountain ski slope, getting ready to take the plunge down to the bottom. Before I take the plunge (or I should say we because there are definitely a number of others involved) I’m attempting to look down the mountain and chart the course. There are some obvious obstacles (Risks) that should be avoided if possible, (think large rocks, cliffs, giant trees, avalanche zones) but the perfect path is not entirely clear. I’m sure that once we start the descent there will be a number of switchbacks, diversions, and course corrections that will occur over time. We will likely need to stop at various points down the path and reflect on how far we’ve come and learn from any mistakes we’ve made.


At this point I have an idea of the type of skis (Tools: Archivematica, Curator’s Workbench) to choose from but haven’t tested too many of them out. Some might be good for certain areas of the mountain, such as the Accession Forest, while others may be better for other areas like the Meadow of Discovery and Access. Luckily, there are a number of tracks from those that have navigated down this slope before (AIMS Project) that I can utilize when negotiating the difficult and unpredictable terrain. There are a few hand-painted signs marking danger zones which others have left to warn those that would follow. I will do well to heed their warnings and avoid where others have fallen.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/82995349@N00/111054536/

For now, I am standing at the top of the mountain, charting the course that will hopefully lead to a successful journey to the Valley of Sustainable Stewardship.

At the same time we are drawing the map to ski the Born-Digital Descent, we are also charting the course to navigate the rapids of Institutional Repository River, explore the Cave of Web Archives, and scale the massive cliffs of Sustainable Digital Preservation Strategy. As Digital Archivist I am directly involved in all of these adventures, and am tasked with integrating all efforts into a cohesive Map of Managing Digital Content. The beginnings of this map are starting to surface on my wall, growing more and more as each day goes by…

Planning for the future, now, is a key aspect of working in the realm of digital archives. Being able to balance the big picture with the granular details of testing tools and understanding the risks of technical file format details is a important skill set to master. It’s an exciting time to be doing this work, because while the solutions are still unclear, there are more and more passionate individuals and organizations who are engaged and collaborating to develop the latest attempt to manage, preserve, and provide access to the huge amounts of digital content being created in our contemporary society.

If all else fails I can always start my new career as a creative writer (see above for potential as huge success)....

Day of Digital Archives

I have written a piece about the personal journey I have taken in the last two years and placed it on the AIMS blog - I hope people find it interesting

Simon Wilson
Senior Archivist (formerly Digital Archivist - AIMS Project)
Hull University Archives

Playing hide & seek with digital collections

Happy Day of Digital Archives, everyone!

My name is Gwen Glazer, and I was a Google Policy Fellow with the American Library Association in 2010. While at ALA, I worked on a paper about digitizing hidden collections in small and medium-sized public libraries.

Now, we’re talking about not only how to help libraries get their materials online, but how the resulting digital collections might be linked together so they can be accessed by the greatest number of people.

What are hidden collections?

They’re materials in public libraries that are hard to access, for many reasons: the limitations of their physical locations, backlogs in cataloging and processing, vulnerability to accidents, theft, and neglect, and many more.

Hidden collections are attracting more and more attention; in the age of global information, libraries need to increase access to locally specific materials that can’t be found anywhere else. These could include business directories and town maps from the 18th century, for example, or photographs and handwritten letters in a library’s physical collection.

Most of these hidden collections’ primary content isn’t born digital, but in an ideal world, some collections would be flexible and user-driven so that people could add relevant content of all kinds. Plus, some of the power of these materials comes from crowdsourcing and the extra information people add online, via Flickr tagging, commenting, and more.

Who uses these hidden collections, and why bother digitizing them?

Public library patrons of all stripes — researchers, students, casual browsers, genealogists, and more.

But if these materials were not only digitized but linked together, that number would grow exponentially. People who might live thousands and thousands of miles outside any given library’s jurisdiction would also have access to them.

Just by being online, these materials gain value. Digital archives are increasingly vital for libraries, and they’re a part of our core mission: bringing previously hidden information to light.

But how can people find digitized hidden collections?

Exactly! One of the biggest challenges facing small and medium-sized public libraries that are trying to digitize their materials — aside from funding, of course — is how to make their collections accessible to the most people.

Smaller organizations may have the greatest digitized collections in the world, but if no one can find them, they may as well not exist.

Discoverability is the key. Libraries and consortia are looking at many different solutions to increase discoverability and link their content together, including:
·      State-level initiatives like Ohio Memory
·      Federal initiatives like the Library of Congress’ National Digital Newspaper Program
·      Nonprofit initiatives like Lyrasis Mass Digitization Collaborative

A lot of people are working on pieces of the puzzle, but no one quite has an answer yet, and that’s part of what we’re trying to figure out now.

ALA is hosting a free webinar on Wednesday, Nov. 2  from 1 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. EDT to discuss this exact question. 

I’ll be hosting the webinar with Jason Kucsma from the Metropolitan New York Library Council. We’ll be talking with digital library project managers and practitioners about the challenges and rewards inherent in managing small and medium-sized digitization projects and sharing success stories, best practices, and the lessons learned to encourage other successful projects.

We’d love to hear what you have to say. Join us and continue the conversation about digital archives; you can sign up for the webinar at this URL -- https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/322790778 -- and you’ll receive a confirmation email with more details after registering.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Gretchen for creating this project!

<i>See this post and more about ALA's digitization work on the District Dispatch blog.</i>

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.]) 

Is This Bit Rot?

The term "bit rot" gets batted around a lot, but isn't so easy to nail down. Wikipedia's bit rot entry is surprisingly short and contains multiple definitions: decay of storage media, decay of data on storage media, and degradation of software programs. The entry is flagged as needing citations to reliable sources.

So maybe I'm not alone in wondering what bit rot looks like in a word processing file. At the Hoover Institution Archives, where I work, one manuscript collection contains hundreds of 5.25-inch floppy disks. The disks present many problems, but today I'm looking at one containing files that open on a PC. They suffer from some malady, as indicated by this sample from a letter dated January 21, 1986:

-------begin sample text------

Thankó verù mucè foò á lovelù luncheoî anä somå splendiä views® Wå 
imaginå yoõ no÷ iî Indiá anä wondeò iæ yoõ arå listeninç tï somå oæ thå 
samå Indianó witè whoí wå talkeä yearó ago® Thå artistó anä economistó 
werå quitå remarkable¬ buô thå politicaì scientistó useä tï talë abouô 
atomiã bombó foò Indiá witè eager¬ burninç eyeó whilå beinç verù carefuì 
noô tï kilì anù insects® (Severaì haä theiò beardó covereä iî whitå 
silk so that no insect would get caught and be stifled there.)

-------end sample text------

The file name, Enid, has no file extension, so it is difficult to determine what software was used to create the file. The sample above is from the rendering in MS Word with Windows character encoding, but no matter what software I open the file in, I get some gibberish. But it isn't all gibberish--the last line is completely legible. You'll see that sometimes a letter displays correctly, like the "n" in "insect," but not in other cases, like the "n" that should end "luncheoî" in the first line. Is this bit rot?

Regardless of the diagnosis, the next question is what to do with it. Because we can infer what many of the corrupted characters should be, we can match them to their actual counterpart, like this sample:

Corrupted version	True character
ë	k
ì	l
í	m
î	n
ï	o
ð	p

Then, we could use the find and replace feature to fix all the corrupted characters. But it is more difficult to infer the correct characters for corrupted numbers. In addition, I assume that matching corrupted to true characters also varies from one file to the next--after all, this decay probably doesn't occur in the same, predictable manner and standard rate. Furthermore, we've got to deal with thousands of corrupted files on hundreds of disks. Lastly, if we did restore all of the files, how can we ensure researchers studying them understand our restoration process and its implications for the authenticity and reliability of the content?

If you can answer my questions, I think Wikipedia needs you to enhance its bit rot entry.

How does the State Library of North Carolina celebrate the Day of Digital Archives?

October 6 is the first annual Day of Digital Archives. It's an "initiative to raise awareness of digital archives. . . What are digital archives? Who uses them? How are they created and managed? Why are they important?" ( more here).

Read more about what the State Library of North Carolina does, why it's important, and what you can do to take some simple steps to save your digital content.

There'll be posts here at the DoDA blog and Tweets (#digitalArchivesDay) by folks from many different organizations throughout the day.

Still need more information about digital preservation? Check out information for burgeoning digital archivists or seasoned preservationistas on the State Library of North Carolina's digital preservation website at http://digitalpreservation.ncdcr.gov/.

We sure know how to party, don't we?