Foldering

I inadvertently discovered a way this week to find out if a student worker has the aptitude for processing simple archival collections: ask her to clean and rearrange your supplies cabinet.

We recently re-purposed a cabinet that was designed to hold audio cassette tapes in shallow drawers to be our office supply cabinet. When I saw the job that our student worker had done moving the supplies into it, I knew she was a natural-born processor:

• Most drawers were organized by form or function (e.g., writing implements in one drawer; tape, staples and paper clips in another)
• A few drawers were organized by provenance (e.g., all the stuff from the disaster kit together)
• They were all given concise, descriptive labels

Sign that young woman up! She’s passed the office supply test, and she’s ready for historical records!

Foldering.com will be on hiatus for another week or two as I settle into a new job, town, etc.  Thanks for your patience, and please come back for more news from an archivitst’s perspective.

If you’re a regular reader of Foldering.com, you knew about the NASA Space Tapes SNAFU way back on July 31. The story has gotten so much buzz since then that NASA has announced it is launching an “official search” for more than 13,000 tapes from its “glory days,” according to an AP Story picked up by BoingBoing.

NASA released an official update on the search yesterday:

NASA personnel continue to sift through 37-year-old records in their attempt to locate the magnetic tapes that recorded the original Apollo 11 video in 1969. The original tapes may be at the Goddard Space Flight Center, which requested their return from the National Archives in the 1970s, or at another location within the NASA archiving system. Despite the challenges of the search, NASA does not consider the tapes to be lost.

The tapes were sent from Goddard to a storage facility of the National Archives in late 1969. This kind of transfer is standard for government records . . .

They also posted some pretty nifty pictures of vintage computer equipment, and what the labels on the boxes that “likely contain” the tapes should look like.

Today’s Clever Archivist Trick award goes to Brian Willliams (more recent picture/duties here) of the Bentley Historical Library for the brilliant idea of using old (or new) acid-free folders to make signs for exhibits:

1. Cut folder into 8-1/2″x11″ size
2. Lay out sign using computer application of your choice
3. Print sign onto newly-resized folder
4. Trim sign to size needed for exhibit

The folders are lightweight enough that most printers can handle them, but they’re heavy enough that the resulting signs look nice, and can be made into tents or easels for standing upright. Plus, they’re acid free and you probably already have the supplies.

Hear of a good Clever Archivist Trick? Send it to me at [mail AT foldering DOT com] and be sure to include “Clever Archivist Trick” in the Subject Line.

A federal judge has ordered the online auction of the 22,000 page journal of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, with the proceeds to go towards victim restitution, according to a Reuters news story. The papers, along with other items to be auctioned, were seized from Kaczynski’s cabin at the time of his arrest, and have been in the hands of law enforcement officials ever since.

Had the journal been returned to Kaczynski as he requested in 2003, it probably would have joined the Ted Kaczynski papers and several related items in the Labadie Collection at University of Michigan Special Collections.

A 2000 San Francisco Chronicle article took a fairly negative and sarcastic view of the academic study of Kaczynski’s writings, but did an acceptable job of explaining how the papers (in particular, the 22,000-page journal) relate to UM’s other holdings and includes a quote from curator Julie Herrada. However, the article also quotes Assistant U. S. Attorney R. Steven Lapham, who worked on the Kaczynski prosecution team, as saying, “This is all hogwash . . . The guy’s nothing but a serial murderer, and I don’t know why we’re giving him the time of day.”

Then-SAA President Randall Jimerson explained in 2004 exactly why archivists are ‘giving him (Kaczynski) the time of day’:

“For archivists the fundamental issue at stake in this case is the necessity of preserving an accurate record of the past to guide our future actions and decisions. The perspectives of terrorists and criminals are as important to understand as those of public officials and intellectual leaders as we respond to the challenges in our country and throughout the world today. Archivists make daily decisions about which documents and records of contemporary society will be preserved for future reference and use. This is essential to ensure accurate societal memory of the past. Armed with this knowledge, public citizens and leaders alike can address these issues squarely and confidently.”

This quote came from a press release about an amicus brief filed by the ACLU of Northern California on behalf of the ALA and SAA’s Freedom to Read Foundation. At the time, the government was attempting to block public access to the journals. According to the ACLU release:

The Freedom to Read Foundation, founded by the American Library Association, and the Society of American Archivists, appearing as friends of the court, contend “that the original documents should be preserved and made accessible to scholars, researchers, and the general public, and that the First Amendment precludes irrational and arbitrary government action that could needlessly result in the destruction or deterioration of the papers and denial of public access.”

They further argue that the public has a “First Amendment right of access to culturally and historically significant original documents” and that the “reprehensible nature of a person’s crimes does not justify a conclusion that scholars and the public should be denied a chance to study his original papers.”

Now, in 2006, the journal has been declared fit for public research, but rather than being returned to Kaczynski or donated to the archival repository of his choice, it is going up for public auction. We can only hope that, as in the recent case of the MLK papers, an institution steps forward to purchase the papers with the twin archival goals of preservation and public access.

The Ten Thousand Year Blog noted on Monday that

Finally, OCLC has opened the entire WorldCat database to the world: “1.3 billion items in more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.”

Those ‘libraries,’ of course, include a lot of archives. And until now, researchers who were unaffiliated with a subscribing library were unable to use WorldCat to search for materials in them. Now, anyone can search WorldCat for free using its new minimalist interface.

I have some background on this subject because last summer, I conducted usability testing on WorldCat and other online archival interfaces while working for Beth Yakel. I’m not going to go into details about her research or the results, but suffice it to say that I became very, very familiar with some of WorldCat’s more egregious interface ‘quirks.’

So, it was really interesting for me to look at the WorldCat Beta version for the Web, which has fixed some problems and (of course) created new ones.

• The new interface will probably feel more ‘natural’ to people who use the Web regularly, especially anyone familiar with blogs or other genres that post series of different categories of links along the side columns.
• The search interface is extremely streamlined, which will appeal to people who only do searches on Google. However, anyone who has worked with the ‘regular’ interface enough to be able to use it might not perceive the streamlined version to be as powerful. In fact, I’m pretty sure you can do everything with this interface that you can with the ‘regular’ one, by clicking on links on the left to limit your search once it’s been run. This has the advantage that you know in advance how many results you’re going to get in each category, but also requires additional steps if, for example, you know you only want archival materials. It also seems to handle Boolean operators.
• Search results return only the Title and Author, which makes perfect sense if you’re looking for a book that’s owned by over a thousand libraries, but doesn’t work so well if you’re trying to find a particular archival collection held in a specific library. Especially if the collections have standard names like “Papers.”
• There are some major linking issues between the WorldCat entries and the home-institution catalogs. For example, WorldCat records for archival collections held by the Bentley Historical Library (where I currently work) link to a blank search box on the Univeristy of Michigan’s library catalog system, instead of to a specific MARC record or, better yet, an EAD file. Clicking around on other collections found similar issues with other institutions’ records, also.
• Most radically different from the traditional WorldCat interface is that this Beta version incorporates some Web 2.0 features like the ability for users to write reviews, add notes and upload tables of contents.
• Finally, it must be noted that WorldCat.org includes an Amazon.com “Ready to Buy?” box in the right column of individual record displays. I’m not sure what kind of deal got the box there, but it’s really amusing when it asks you if you’re ready to buy a unique archival collection (”Ready to Buy? Search for George W. Romney papers, 1939-1973. from Amazon.com”).

All in all, I am excited by the possibilities posed by WorldCat.org Beta. Now we just need to make sure researchers know it exists and see what happens.

You know your career field has hit the big time when you have a video explaining what you do on YouTube. The video is short (1 minute 28 seconds), but it’s pretty amusing to see your career explained in a Today-Show-like cadence. My favorite line:

Although usually comfortably quiet, the workspace can be crowded with stored materials.

At first I thought the video had been pirated from some Academy of Certified Archivists promotional material, based on the line at the end that being certified by the ACA “can give you an edge.” However, a quick look at the poster’s other videos reveals that s/he seems to specialize in career videos (don’t miss the one on Self-Enrichment Education Teachers if you’re looking for a career change), so I’m backing off the ACA theory.

Thanks to the Informologist for turning me on to this video.

NPR ran a story on the MLK papers’ new home in Atlanta this morning. For those who have not been following the saga, here’s how NPR summarized it:

The city’s mayor rounded up donors to pay $32 million to avoid a public auction of the papers. Instead, the collection will end up at the library for all the historically black colleges and universities in the area — the Woodruff Library.

Of course, this left out everything that led up to the auction threat, but I guess that’s background for another story.

This morning’s story featured clips from an interview with Karen Jefferson, Head of Archives and Special Collections at the Woodruff Library, who was named an SAA Fellow in 2004. In the first part of the story, she discussed how the MLK papers fit in with the existing collections of the Woodruff Library. Later, she talked about what the papers mean to those who might use them.

Note: while the text on the NPR site summarizes the story, it edits down a lot of the discussion, so those who are interested might want to listen to the whole thing (when it becomes available around 10 a.m.).

Judging by the number of laptops present, the SAA2006 blogosphere should feature plenty of discussion about today’s Session 403: Developing an Open-Source and Standards-Compliant Descriptive Tool for Lone Arrangers. After attending the session, I became curious about how the subject software, Archon, relates to The Archivists’ Toolkit, a similar open-source software system in development.

What I’m posting below is just what I could glean from presentation materials available on the AT website (particularly the August 2005 SAA Presentation in PDF and the April 2006 Digital Libraries Forum Presentation in PPT) and what I learned this morning at the Archon session, so I’d be interested in getting more insight from people who have worked with either/both systems.

First, what the two systems have in common:

• Both provide internal/administrative and external/user interfaces for MySQL databases used to manage information on archival collections
• Both aim to allow importing and exporting EAD records
• Both are/will be open source (though, as discussed below, they use different types of open source licenses)
• Both facilitate creating authority files
• Both integrate a number of different but related archival functions into a single interface (e.g., accession, description, and location)
• Both allow for linking to / management of digital material

Now, for some of the differences:

• Archon is available for download now and is currently in use at the University of Illinois; AT is just about to go into Beta testing, and general distribution is still some time off
• Archon is explicitly designed for users with little to no technological knowledge about the systems behind it; while this may also be a goal of AT, it was not identified as such in any of the documents I reviewed
• Archon apparently allows import of records in a broad variety of formats; again, while AT may also do this, according to the documents I reviewed, the emphasis is on importing EAD, not MARC or non-SQL legacy databases
• Archon has a PHP-based user interface; AT has a Java-based desktop client
• Archon’s creators have released it free of charge to non-profit organizations under an Academic and Research Use License (link downloads a PDF); AT will be released under a GNU Public License on SourceForge, and its creators explicitly hope to foster a developer community

I’m not confident that I have captured all of the differences above, nor am I certain what the significance of the differences are. Both systems seem to have a lot of potential and are really exciting. I’m curious what others’ thoughts are.

I went to Leith Johnson’s entertaining “homage to the archives in the movies” tonight, 25 clips of archives and archivists in movies (not counting the 26 additional clips in the grand finale) interspersed with his archives-insider commentary.

This is a public request to L.J. on behalf of myself and all other SAA-member cinemaphiles to please post his presentation on YouTube or another site, or (in the current Copyright climate) at least to post a list of the movies he excerpted along with his commentary somewhere Google will find it. Don’t make us go another three years before we get to see it again!