Archives Flickr Project Launched

Back in February our archives set up a Flickr account and started uploading photos to prepare for Alumni Weekend. We’ve talked for a long time about doing some kind of photo identification project to get names on some of the thousands of pictures we have before they can’t be identified.

When the Library of Congress uploaded photos to Flickr, we decided to follow suit. Since February we uploaded, tagged and described over 700 EKU images. We created sets so users could find images of interest more easily, sorting photos by decade and by topic. There are some mistakes that still need to be corrected, it’s easy to flip a negative and scan it backwards. There are some typos and a couple misidentifications, but those problems are easily corrected. We have a couple Flickr problems; for example, you can add a note to some photos, but not all. It is a global setting, so we can’t figure out why it doesn’t always work.

The test came this past weekend. It was Alumni Weekend and we had three opportunities to showcase the project. We made up cards with a direct link so that anyone interested could go straight to our photostream from home.

Friday night before the Scholarship Dinner we set up three laptops with Flickr slideshows and talked to everyone who stopped. Cards were passed out and most people we talked to seemed really interested.

Saturday we set up at the Alumni Breakfast and talked to alumni for several hours before lunch and again in the archives that afternoon. One of the Pioneer Club inductees was the Milestone photographer for the 57 and 58 yearbooks. He was really excited to see some of his photos on Flickr and promised to make as many IDs as he could. Sunday we showcased the project to Friends of the Library.

Tiring weekend, but we got a lot of great feedback, including identifications on several photos we had posted. Before the weekend, our photostream had been viewed about 1150 times, Monday morning that had jumped to 1246 views.

One of our students spent a couple months adding a series of negatives from the 1950s to our photo database and is now scanning some of the late 1950s images to add to Flickr. We chose these years to concentrate on, since most of the alumni we spoke with were there for their 50^th reunion. Later we’ll add more from other decades and see how it goes.

A Late Earth Day Post

We’re having a real spring this year and everything seems to be staying in bloom forever, because of the cool weather. So to celebrate Earth Day, here are some signs of spring around our farm.

Kittens anyone? We now have 9. The other litter is grays and blacks, with a bobtail orange.

The first time I saw the apple tree in full bloom it took my breath away, it was so beautiful, but the photo of the whole tree didn’t do it justice.

In our family there is nothing that says spring more than having weather nice enough to play with the horses again. Tori got her very own horse for her birthday and is loving it. He just rolled in the pond so he isn’t his usual pretty gray color, more like mud.

Foodwise, spring is great. Lettuce and spinach are ready to eat. The hens are laying three or four eggs a day, so we have more than we can eat right now. And best of all the asparagus is just popping through the ground. This bed was planted last year, so we shouldn’t eat it till next year, but I did steal a few shoots from this plant for a quiche, since they were a really nice size.

The bees were really buzzing around this redbud tree when I was wandering around taking pictures. Minnie and I were talking about the different winters that Kentucky gets each spring. She said that her grandmother always said there were seven different winters, but she couldn’t remember all of them. The first cold spell we got the pears were blooming, but neither of us had ever heard of Pear Winter. The next cold spell coincided with the redbuds blooming, so that was Redbud Winter. This cold spell we’re having right now the dogwoods are blooming, so Dogwood Winter. The others coming up should be Locust Winter and last of all will be Blackberry Winter. Has anyone heard of any others? Neither of us could come up with seven. But in all the years I’ve watched this it holds true almost every year.

Midwest Archives Conference YouTube Presentation

MAC 2008 Racing Headlong into Archives 2.0: Connecting Collections and Communities

Chair: Lara Friedman Shedlow, YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota

Kevin Leonard, Northwestern University

Midwest Archives Conference YouTube Presentation. Very funny. Check the last post to view.

Your audience wants things digital. It is important to maintain communication between archives and patrons and Web 2.0 facilitates this.

Google is gatekeeper between collections and users. To keep archives going, keep Google fed. Users are users regardless of where they are.

Potentials of 2.0 extends web presence beyond static page, allowing communication, public relations, build audience, retain interest. We must keep up with technology, instant access to collections. Makes collections more accessible.

Power of search engines will draw users from our collections if we don't keep up with digitization.

Blogs are simple and offer low cost, easy way to communicate with users. Advertise items posted, so users will find them.

Wiki, materials collected through different users. Could be used in academic setting to study and collect materials on our web site.

Folksonomies: Flickr, Steve Project, these sites allow users to add tags increasing useability.

News aggregator/Feed Reader allows users to immediately have access to new information posted on your pages.

2.0 is about sharing, collaboration and third party recommendations.

Library and Archives content is typically hidden and hard to use. Web 2.0 gives us opportunity to make access to collections better.

Elizabeth Yakel, University of Michigan

Polar Bear Expedition and collections. Digitization began as a preservation measure, due to excessive use.

Big problem of converting to digital was how to redefine archival finding aids to make them more useful.

The project allows social navigation by using user profiles and allowing commenting. Have compiled statistics and user information including where the users come from geographically, how long they stay, what they look at and where they were referred from.

For textual records, seeing things online does not generally entice users into your building.

Their users tend to browse rather than search and users do not use the bookmark feature built into the site. Have adapted features from commercial sites. Comments have been most successful and include information sharing about soldier, family and corrections to information. They update finding aids when they get documented corrections. They have even gotten donations through the site.

Considerations:
Critical Mass created in large part by recency
Need for a Personal connection, commenting is most successful feature

Changed from reconceptualizing finding aids to reconceptualizing large collections.

Her delicious site tracks other archives Web 2.0 initiatives.

Kevin Schlesier, North Carolina State University

Talks about using physical exhibitions to draw non-traditional users, by using community curation.

Archives use physical exhibits to show archival materials. Archives increasingly curating collections and interpreting them or presenting themes.

Benefits include showcasing value, research potential and build support and collections. Attracts new patrons and support. In exhibition the curator speaks for the object or document, but not usually first person.

Institution must define community, present goals, expectations, listen to community for input, let community be advisers and assign tasks, facilitate their research. Use wiki or blog for them to dump content, research findings and ideas. That background info can become part of exhibit, preferably after the exhibit is in place. Use actual quotes for labels. Let community label. Add photos and artifacts for visuality.

How can visitors add comments to physical exhibits? Bulletin board, sticky notes, white board, etc.

Make sure exhibition reflects role of institution, stays on target, but mediate multiple viewpoints. Don't be too narrow and don't forget other views.

MAC 2008 Cleaning Cobwebs: Studies in Archiving Web-Based Records

Presenters:
Rosemary Pleva Flynn, Energy and Environmental Research Center, University of North Dakota
Philip C. Bantin, Indiana University Bloomington
Mark J. Myers, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives

Internet Archiving Tools include:

Archive-It
Web-at-Risk: Collaboration between LOC, California Digital Library, New York University and University of North Carolina
Echo Depository Project (WAW): Collaboration between UIUC and LOC
Web Curator Toolset (WCT): Collaboration between Library of New Zealand and the British Library

Some tools let you select specific content, others select domains or directories. You can set quotas and block hosts or domains. The best strategy is to identify series that have long term value and harvest those. Bulk harvest is too large and costly, item by item too slow.

The way your institution uses your website will determine how often and what to capture. Static pages can be captured less frequently. Most crawlers can be set to capture on a specific schedule.

Generally good to capture one link off the domain name, but this can get costly in terms of size and sites can be blocked if too large.

Items that aren't captured include:

• Java Script
• Streaming Video
• Dynamic Database
• Protected sites
• Form driven sites

The tool must document authenticity by capturing header information and other metadata. Most use a Dublin Core basis which is not designed for records, but more for photographs. Archive-It does not capture metadate as well as WAW and WAS.

The tool must be able to restrict access to copyrighted information. Again Archive-It doesn't do this well, WCT and WAS have better authorization tools.

The search engine must be able to search metadata and full text to be effective.

For preservation purposes the final format must be non-proprietary. The Web Archive file format (WARC) has been proposed as a standard to combine multiple digital resources into an aggregate archival file with metadata. Wayback Machine uses this type of file format.

Whatever service used must be able to migrate information preserved.

Institutions have the option to build a service using existing tool sets or to join a service. Build your own is harder and takes more resources in terms of expertise and server space, but is more flexible to fit your needs.

Mark Myers of KDLA uses pdf as primary file format. Other formats are reformatted to pdf. Pages are captured based on the state retention schedule.

Harvesters available are:

• Wayback Machine
• Grab-a-Site

They did manual harvesting and consultation with other agency offices. Most harvesters have problems with things like drop down menus. Just guessing, but a Flash menu would probably also cause major problems with harvesting layers.

Other problems arising include boundaries of the harvested site, functionality loss because of loss of structure and content management systems.

Rosemary and Mark are co-chairs of the ARMA Task Force on Website Management which will be developing guidelines and best practices for identifying and archiving websites.

The question remains "Are websites records?" and "to what extent?" In my experience there are a lot of records on websites that are permanent, but most of these are also printed. This will continue to change as we see more and more documents born digital and never in print. And even if they are in print the electronic version is much more versatile due to searchability.

MAC 2008 More Than One way to Meet the Challenge

Systematic Approaches to the Capture and Preservation of Complex Digital Artifacts

Steve Burbeck, Rockefeller Archive Center, Collaborative Electronic Records Project (CERP)
Glen McAninch for Kelly Eubank, NC State Archives, Electronic Mail Capture and Preservation Tool (EMCAP)
Mike Smorul, University of Maryland, Archival Prototypes and Lessons Learned

All three panelists were involved in developing tools for archiving email and websites. Often dynamic and a challenge to capture and migrate because of attachments, forwards and replies. Web 2.0 will pose even more challenges.

OAIS Open Archival Information System Reference Model:

• Submission to archives
• Packaged for archiving
• Packaged for dissemination

A system designed to delete electronic documents when retention is met won't work for historic preservation because of the chance for accidental deletion.

The system must also be able to handle a variety of formats partly because there are no email standards and many systems. Also attachments. Security of email in regard to viruses and the volume of email also a challenge.

It was interesting that all three projects came up with applications that worked differently at the archives end, but all started with an XML schema to prepare email for storage.

EMCAP's end result was an hmailserver. Users drag email identified as permanent records to an archive folder on their list. These emails can be accessed, but cannot be deleted or modified after archiving.

MAC 2008 The Useful Ten Words of the Ten Thousand: Describing Photographs in Words

Cynthia R. Miller, Curator of Photography and Prints, The Henry Ford

This session was very basic information. The most interesting thing was the contrast between the MPLP talk the day before and the very time consuming process of researching and identifying individual photographs today. Somewhere there has to be a balance between describing collections enough to provide good access and agonizing over descriptions for every image in out collections.

Main Topic should include details: Who, What, Where, When and Why?

Subject terms will depend on the needs of researchers and the mission and resources of your repository.

She recommended using a controlled vocabulary for consistent search terms. The Library of Congress has subject headings for prints and photographs. The Getty also has an online thesaurus which is better for objects.

The most important thing to keep in mind is what terms the researcher will be searching for. This is the reason that I'm not sure controlled vocabularies are the best method for cataloging. The search term one person might use could be completely different than the search term another researcher might use.