Since I last posted…

So, as I posted more than a few months ago, I took a position as the Project Archivist for Athletics and Recreation at the University of Denver in September 2007. I accepted the position because I could instinctively tell that I would be working with one of the most knowledgeable and enthusiastic archivists in the biz, Greg Colati, as well as a senior administrator in the Division of Athletics and Recreation who was passionately committed to the success of the project. I have to say, my experience with the job has been everything I hoped for and then some. The only real issue with the job was that it was a year-long position.

I’m happy to announce that, between my hiring as project archivist and now, I’ve been appointed Interim Archives Processing Librarian. The gist of this is that I have a chance, between now and when a national search is completed, to supervise all of special collections processing for the University of Denver. In addition to being a fantastic opportunity, I also get to participate in what I believe to be a pretty revolutionary re-structuring…archives processing will move underneath the administrative umbrella of the library’s Technical Services unit.

I’ve been “on the job” for about a week and a half now, so I don’t really have a lot to report on yet, but I hope to soon…and I hope to do so a lot more regularly than I have been for the past year!

 

The SAA wiki is up!

It’s brand-new and needs some serious populating, so have at it!

Link to SAA wiki

 

SAA 2007 Synopsis - Full Report Later

First and foremost, Studs Terkel is amazing and a legend and he really, really likes to talk.

Second, only Studs Terkel’s talk running late could have prevented me from attending the Blogger Get-Together that happened this Thursday. I did get to meet with Sally Jacobs, the lovely author of The Practical Archivist, that night, which was a treat and a half…I couldn’t have asked for a more ebullient fellow blogger.

Anyway, to the business at hand:

Workshops and sessions I attended and will be blogging about in further detail:

Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Managing the Digital University Desktop

Advanced Electronic Records Management

Digitization Matters Symposium

New Member/First Timer Breakfast and Orientation

Free Speech, Free Spirit: The Studs Terkel Center for Oral History (in addition to Studs, Michael Gorman spoke…which I thought was more than a little odd)

When Good Photo Collections Go Bad: Critical Concepts for Understanding and Managing Photo Collections

Reference Service and Minimal Processing: Challenges and Opportunities

MPLP Comes Home to Roost: Applying the Greene-Meissner Recommendations Broadly Across an Institution

Archival Education for the Digital Age

The Dynamics in the Aggregate: Shareable Metadata and Next-Generation Access Systems

If anyone has any specific questions about these, just leave me a comment and I’ll get back to you; I took copious notes, but given the ridiculous price of wireless internet at the Fairmont (don’t even get me started on that) and the fact that most of the discussion rooms were chairs-only (no tables on which to set my laptop), a lot of those notes are hand-written, so actually getting a handle on them might take awhile….not to mention that tomorrow I will be flying to Colorado and beginning to unpack all of my things, and so I’ll be pretty busy (to say the least). However, I do think it’s valuable to have some information on these sessions out there, so I will be blogging about it…it just might take awhile.

To everyone who is currently in Chicago, I hope to see you at the All-Attendee Reception at the Millenium Park Rooftop Terrace. I’m tall anyway and I’m wearing wedge heels, so if you see me (that is, if you recognize me from my pic on the SAA wiki profile), say hi!

 

MacBook and iPod Lust - Requited! Also - I’m Leaving for Chicago Tomorrow!

Lots of things have happened in the past few weeks:

• I got my first professional archivist job in Colorado (see below post)
• I found a house in Colorado (see Flickr pics…and picture it without the rasta flag and other college paraphernalia)
• I had my last day at the office where I have worked (in a non-archival capacity) since 2003

But, the most momentous of all….

I am finally the proud owner of both a 15″MacBook Pro and an iPod nano! I have to confess, there was a subsidy in the case of the MacBook, but my PC was starting to make me a little nervous (I got the blue screen of death a few times) and I was really sick of being yoked to my desk at home. The nano, well, I couldn’t resist, and I’m glad I didn’t. My trips to Colorado for both the job interview and the house-hunting were relatively stress-free, and I think it was largely due to the Ella at my fingertips.

I will be traveling to the Society of American Archivists conference tomorrow, where I’ll be attending the DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), Managing the Digital University Desktop, Advanced Electronic Records Management, and Digitization Matters workshops, in addition to the annual meeting. I am pretty darn psyched.

Also, as far as I can tell, the “Blogger Get-Together” (which, incidentally, is not just for the bloggers, but for anyone involved in making the annual meeting more “2.0″…Flickr taggers, wiki creators, etc.) will be held on Thursday at lunch, exact times and locations TBA. This is probably one of the only chances I’ll get to meet some of the other archival bloggers/wiki-creators, etc. out there, so I hope everyone who’s there and who even sort of fits this description will come.

Be forewarned, I’ll probably take pictures.

 

Tagmash on LibraryThing - Baby Steps Toward More User-Friendly Subject Headings?

LibraryThing has just introduced a feature called “tagmash” that is, as David Weinberger puts it, “creating subject headings from the bottom up.”

I don’t know that I would go so far as to call them subject headings…the experiment is still too new to know how this will all shake out.  However, these tagmashes have a great deal of potential, when enough have been generated, to provide a far more useful search tool than (in my opinion) LCSH does. Tagmashing is a chance to combine a lot of what makes tagging great (user-friendly, current language, allowing for multiple perspectives, users decide what is meaningful/interesting) with what makes subject searching great (potential for less ambiguity, combining frequently searched/related terms).   

How it works:

When users search for two or more tags, LibraryThing creates a persistent URL for that “tagmash” (for example, this page of the tagmash for ‘France’ and ‘WWII’). This is a bit different from Flickr’s clusters, which are (at least from what I understand) fully automated, as these are the aggregated results of user searches.

Why it’s not not a silver bullet (yet):

One of the commenters on Weinberger’s blog post made an excellent point: at the moment, at least, this process has the potential to even increase ambiguity, depending on the subject: “philosophy, history” can be about the philosophy of history (historiography, etc.), “older” philosphy (Plato’s ‘The Republic’), or a history of the discipline of philosophy.

How I think this would (ideally) impact the archival world:

This is an especially interesting development to me, as my first thought after reading about tagmashing was of Elizabeth Yakel (and co-authors’) D-Lib article “Creating The Next Generation of Archival Finding Aids” was how wonderful it would be if the next-generation finding aids that Yakel discusses could incorporate this feature.* Having created EAD finding aids, I found myself wondering about what other possibilities these types of finding aids had for users, especially in terms of subject headings (the finding aids I created used LCSH) that, as far as I could tell, were not often a good fit for very regionally or subject-specific collections, especially those with creators who were not well-known.

One problem I can see right off the bat is that these types of collections tend to be (relative to the types of materials on LibraryThing) low-usage, and so the statistically less useful user-generated tags (”my aunt Alice and her brother”) would not necessarily be knocked out of place by the potentially more-useful tags/tagmashes.

The way I choose to believe that problem would be solved, should archival tagmashing actually arise, is that one would just market the heck out of your collection and make it the “it” place to be online.

*Yakel points out multiple other possibilities for online finding aids in the article…which is fantastic and thought-provoking, and the Polar Bear Digital Collections project, on which the article is based, are fascinating. Read the article and visit the collections now, if not sooner.

 

Windy City, Here I Come! (In Two Months)

My SAA conference registration is done, my hotel and flight are booked, and I am psyched! I will be there from Saturday, August 25 through Saturday, September 1st…from the first of the pre-conference workshops, through the not-at-all-bitter end.

I’ve done some checking around the unofficial SAA 2007 wiki, and added my info to it, and, as I familiarize myself with the wiki format and the wiki-specific netiquette, I’ll probably be playing with it a bit more.

If anyone that happens to be reading this blog will be at the conference, shoot me a comment and I will hopefully see you there!

 

Archival Access Issues Symposium

Tomorrow (May 24th) I will be attending the “Archival Access Issues Symposium,” which is being co-sponsored by the organization of which I am Education Co-Chair, Kansas City Area Archivists, and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, which is also hosting the symposium.

 Never can get too much professional development! See, even…oh, a week and a half after the official end of my library school education, I’m already beginning my lifelong learning!

 Never too late? How about never too early?

The symposium pamphlet can be downloaded here, if anyone is curious.

 

Everything is Miscellaneous…Metacrap?

No, everything isn’t miscellaneous metacrap.

My title is a mash-up (look at me, using trendy tech terms!) of works by Cory Doctorow (author of “Metacrap“) and David Weinberger, (author of “Everything is Miscellaneous“) respectively. 

I mashed them up because Weinberger is doing a series of interviews, co-sponsored by Wired News and the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society (of which Weinberger is a Research Fellow), and the first interview (which is also available as a podcast), features Doctorow and is pretty thought-provoking.

I confess, I haven’t read “Everything is Miscellaneous” yet, but, as soon as I get done with “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web,” I am on it.

 I confess, I’m still having some difficulty with Doctorow’s uses of the phrases “explicit metadata” and “implicit metadata.” Additionally, I’ve noticed, after seeing it brought up in “Information Architecture” that proponents of folksonomies as the new classification panacea tend to utilize the same two examples (Flickr and del.icio.us) over and over, and this article is no exception.

 However, there is one example that I can think of off the top of my head that marries folksonomies to the structured taxonomies prevalent in the library world: PennTags. Turns out, Weinberger has blogged about this too, and I share his view that:

Integrating tagging with the book catalogue (and therefore with the book taxonomy) instantaneously provides the best of both worlds: Structured browsing leads you to nodes with jumping off points into the connections made by others who are putting those nodes into various contexts, and tags lead you back into the structured world organized by experts in structure.

Is this a case of being able to have our librarian-cake (bibliographic control) and eating it too (letting the users tag at will)?

Something else to ponder. Great, like I needed one more thing.

 

Continuing the Open-Source Theme - Archival Software!

I realized yesterday that, in all my excitement about open-source ILSes and open-source text editors/IDEs, I’d completely neglected to mention some of the similarly exciting open source-y things going on in the part of the information profession that I hope to someday be a part of: archives!

These projects are unique in that, not only are they open-source and community-based rather than vendor-based, they’re also some of the first systems to attempt to create something akin to an ILS (managing accessioning, manuscripts processing, description, resource location, etc.) for an archival setting. This isn’t to say that vendor-based products don’t exist, products like PastPerfect and Eloquent Archives are out there as well, but as this is a post about open-source archival management systems, that’s another discussion for another time.

Several open-source projects have been generating some chatter on the SAA Archives and Archivists listserv lately:

• The Archivists’ Toolkit, a Mellon Foundation-funded collaboration between UC-San Diego, New York University Libraries, and Five Colleges, Inc.
• Archon, a project of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
• ICA-AtoM, a product of the International Council on Archives, the impetus of which was the ICA’s work with UNESCO to create a “a searchable, online guide to international archival sources on human rights violations,” which you can read about in greater detail on Peter VanGarderen’s (one of the project consultants) blog post about it. He also has some interesting things to say about open-source archival management software in this post.

I haven’t had a chance to play around with a working version of any of the above projects (though someday, hopefully, someone will pay me to do so…which would be a dream come true), but, as I said earlier, I’ve done enough kvelling about open source projects in general that it seemed silly to have not posted about similar goings-on in my intended profession.

Also, if anybody reading this has had a chance to play with any of the open-source (or even vendor-based) products mentioned, I’d love to hear about it in comments!

 

Tim O’Reilly on “What is Web 2.0?”

As per usual, I’ve found what seems to be a seminal article on a topic I’m very interested in….more than a year after it was actually published. Good going, me.

Tim O’Reilly on “What is Web 2.0?”