• Weather balloon observations received from Lilongwe, Malawi (Africa) from 1968-1991: all the red on these charts represents data rescued by IEDRO — an increase from only 30% of the data available to over 90%.
• Data rescue statistics from around the world

They do this work for many reasons – to improve understanding of weather patterns to prevent starvation and the spread of disease, to ensure that structures are built to properly withstand likely extremes of weather in the future and to help understand climate change. Since the theme for the day is climate change, I thought I would include a few excerpts from their detailed page on climate change:

“IEDRO’s mandate is to gather as much historic environmental data as possible and provide for its digitization so that researchers, educators and operational professionals can use those data to study climate change and global warming. We believe, as do most scientists, that the greater the amount of data available for study, the greater the accuracy of the final result.

If we do not fully understand the causes of climate change through a lack of detailed historic data evaluation, there is no opportunity for us to understand how humankind can either assist our environment to return to “normal” or at least mitigate its effects. Data is needed from every part of the globe to determine the extent of climate change on regional and local levels as well as globally. Without these data, we continue to guess at its causes in the dark and hope that adverse climate change will simply not happen.”

So, what does this data rescue look like? Take a quick tour through their process – from organizing papers, photographing each page, the transcription of all data and finally upload of this data to NOAA’s central database. These data rescue efforts span the globe and take the dedicated effort of many volunteers along the way. If you would like to volunteer to help, take a look at the IEDRO listings on VolunteerMatch.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Blog Action Day 2009: IEDRO and Climate Change

Each Thursday over the past month I have created a Commons Picks of the Week gallery from the all the images added to the Commons in the prior 7 days.

Here are the galleries from the first month of my experiment. Let me know what you think.

• September 17, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• September 24, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• October 1, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• October 8, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week

Each week I had about 150 new images from which to select my 18 favorites. Since many institutions seem to load their images each week along some thematic lines, sometimes I felt like I had too many of one kind of image. Moving forward I may switch to bi-weekly or monthly to get a larger pool of images from which to pick.

I think there is a lot of room for making fun thematic galleries from images in the Commons. I tried my hand at this too and came up with Bathing Beauties of the Commons.  Of course the fact that all images across Flickr can co-exist in these galleries means that Commons images now have another way to be pulled into the public eye next to other ‘regular’ images.

I have a short wish list of enhancements I would love to see:

• slideshow option for display of the gallery within Flickr
• a way to embed a gallery on an external website as a slideshow
• some way to follow the new galleries created by an individual (RSS feed or subscription option)

If you try your hand creating a gallery of Commons images, please post a link as a comment to this post so we can all take a look.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Flickr Galleries: Fun with Flickr Commons

I have spent much of the past year learning the details of Search Engine Optimization. Usually shortened to SEO, this simply refers to the use of techniques which improve the traffic sent to a website via organic search. Want your webpage to show up at the top of the list for a specific search in Google? You want to work on your SEO.

So when I look at new archives website, I can’t help but keep an eye open for how well the site is optimized for search engines.

I hope that UMBC will forgive me for nitpicking their new site. A lot of their choices are great for SEO,  but they also have room for improvement.

Things Done Well for SEO

• Home Page Title & Description: The site’s home page has a good meta description. This is the text displayed below the link on a search results page – as shown below:
• Unique Page Titles At Collection Level: Each photography collection homepage has a unique page title and a nice block of explanatory text. Google can only read words – so the more unique text on a page, the better the job Google can do in figuring out what your page is about. Example: Ardsley Park Album
• Good anchor text: (also known as link text) The words used in anchor text tells search engines information about the destination page. For example, the blue text below is anchor text.

Areas for SEO Improvement

• Unique Page Titles At Item Level: Individual images and documents all use a generic page title such as ‘UMBC | Digital Archive | Document Viewer’. Document Example: Accidental Death of an Anarchist Image Example: 10 year old Bootblack
• H1 Tags: In the HTML of each page, the dominant heading of the page should use the <h1> tag. This helps Google know the phrase you are targeting with this page. It is your 2nd best place to emphasize your content after the page title. In the case of the item pages, there seems to often be a headline type title at the top of the page – but it currently is not an demarcated with an <h1> tag.
• Think About Search Results and Indexing: Pages displaying results of internal searches on your site are not likely to be useful as indexed pages in Google. The thinking here is that they can dilute the focus on the item and collection level pages on your site if Google also has many search results pages in the index. If UMBC wanted their search pages to be indexed, then those pages’ URLs should be simplified and the search results pages need a page title that somehow includes the search criteria. There are two ways that I know of to disable this indexing – blocking via the site’s robots.txt file or via a robots meta tag in the header of the search results page. Both of these methods tell obliging search engines to not crawl certain parts of your site.

Final Thoughts

There are plenty of other things that UMBC could do to support this new website. They could create an XML sitemap of all their pages and submit it to Google (maybe they already have). They might re-title some of their pages based on using a tool like Google Insight to see what variations of a phrase is searched on most frequently. My goal here was to give you a taste of the sorts of things that catch my eye. Also, SEO is still more of an art than a science – so you will sometimes notice that what one SEO expert recommends is the opposite of what the next expert would tell you.

In many cases changes, such as the Unique Page Title at the Item Level mentioned above, may not even be possible due to software or programmer resource limitations. The trick is to take advantage of every option that is available. There are also trade-offs to be made. UMBC’s site provides some very slick interfaces for viewing the details of a group of documents, such as theater programs and other materials related to a theatrical production. The imlementation elegantly handles the situation of multiple scanned images which relate to a coherent set of documents. Sometimes you can’t have both your innovative UI and perfect SEO. Then it gets down to what your goals are for your website. Are you trying to make a specific community of existing users happy by providing them with tools they can use? Or does your mission focus more on reaching out to a broader audience?

There is no silver bullet to search engine optimization. It just takes knowledge of the available tools and techniques combined with a willingness to keep learning and experimenting. Like the ‘Do-It-Yourself-Woman‘ pictured above in the Nationaal Archief’s photo I found out on the Flickr Commons, you too can learn the basics and do-it-yourself. A great starting point is Google’s free SEO Guide. Also, please remember that the best time to plan your SEO strategy is before you have built your site in the first place!

I would love to do research on how much progress archives websites can make in their organic search traffic after SEO improvements. My thinking is to take a snapshot of a month of analytics (the statistics that tell you how many people are visiting your website) and then apply some SEO inspired changes. After a suitable delay (it takes some time for SEO to do its job) we consider another month of analytics to determine any change in organic traffic.

Do you want me to do a quick review of your archives website to see if there is room for SEO improvement? Please contact me or add a comment to this post. I feel like there is a conference presentation in all this if we can find a good set of websites to optimize.

Finally, thank you to unsuspecting UMBC – your new website really is beautiful.

Image credit: Doe-het-zelf vrouw /Do-it-yourself-woman from Nationaal Archief on Flickr Commons.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SEO Evaluation of an Archival Website: Looking at UMBC’s Digital Collections

How should/can archivists support local archiving activities?

Part of the challenge of online communities is the need to capture the interactions in order to not loose the full picture. The National Listing of Community Archives in the UK’s website states that they “seek to document the history of all manner of local, occupations, ethnic, faith and other diverse communities”.

The UCL’s International Centre for Archives and Records Management Research and User Studies (ICARUS) “brings together researchers in user access and description, community archives and identity, concepts and contexts of records and archives, and information policy”. Flinn is the Principal Investigator on the ICARUS project Community archives and identities which focuses on in depth interviews of 4 institutions which are “documenting and sustaining community heritage”.

These are some example online community sites:

• rukus – black gblt archives
• Moroccan Memories in Britain
• eside community – east side working class community in London

Main Findings

• proceed from a position that ‘knowing your own history’ is beneficial their communities as well as to the public at large
• the quality of the work is done by individual passion and sacrifice, voluntary
• there is ambivalence to/about the mainstream archives sector — keen to work with mainstream archives, but scarred by past bad experiences
• good practices now could lead to partnerships in the future
• these are living archives — not static.. still alive and growing
• these ideas prompt re-evaluation of conventional archives thinking
• lots of access to digital objects – perhaps movement to online existence

We need to understand that these communities evolve and are fluid. They have as broad variety of structures, sizes and methods of working. What are the patterns in participation & ownership?

The site urban 75 has hosted extended discussions about recent UK history. Efforts include identification of places and people in uploaded photos. The site connects people about issues about housing and local services – it is very practical but it also has evolved to include this historical documentation. One example post from the Brixton Forum shows a discussion about an Old shop front revealed on Atlantic Road.

A Short Aside

Next Flinn apologized for taking his talk slightly off script. Setting his papers aside, he spoke to the audience about the eXHulme website which he had discovered the evening before while finishing his presentation. Having lived in Hulme, Manchester himself, he felt a great impact from looking through the site. He spent 4 hours looking at it – including photos such as the travellers living in their buses parked – otteburn close 1996 seen at the bottom of this page. His discovery and exploration of this site gave him a greater personal understanding of the impact of these types of community documentation projects. I felt he would have been happy to keep talking about this site and the directions it had sent his thoughts — but he then got back to his papers and continued.

Building Community Online

Interactions online are the historic record of the community itself. Archives evolve and change as the community builds and edits their online content. These heritage and archive sites work to shift from the idea of visitors to engaging users in interaction — they need users of the website to feel part of the community.

Examples of sites building community online:

• My Brighton and Hove – community history site
• Remembering Olive Collective – “social production of collective knowledge”
• The Newham Story — uses social tagging

How do you successfully encourage participation (rather than large number of passive observers) which is crucial to the success of these types of initiatives? Lurking without contributing is easy – even if joining requires action. The rate of uptake may correspond with the sense of ownership. Heritage projects might encourage and sustain such participation. See Elisa Giaccardi & Leysia Palen’s article  – The Social Production of Heritage through Cross-media Interaction: Making Place for Place-making.

Suggestions

• encourage conversation and treat all stories as having value – value every account
• promote a sense of ownership once a story has been shared
• allow for multiple ways to engage with and share content and memories
• recognize and let users shift from observer to active member

Flinn’s Conclusions

• What are the challenges and perils facing community archives? Lack of resources. People are doing these things in unsustainable ways
• Why should we sustain independent community archives? Benefit to individuals, communities and broader society.
• What can professional archivists do? Support and partnership with groups seeking this sort of partnership.

My Thoughts

The image I included above is from the Library of Congress’s Flickr Commons project. If you read through the comments on this photo you can see a diverse group of individuals come together to document the history of Sylvia Sweets Tea Room. This is just another example of the process of documentation being as interesting as the original image itself.

There is still so much to learn in the arena of building productive online communities. Archivists working through how to archive what online communities create will need to understand how the process of creation is documented via various software tools. As the techniques for encouraging participation evolve – archivists will need to evolve right along with them. I think it is interesting to envision archivists working in this space and supporting these types of communities — becoming as much the champions of the community itself as preservers of a community’s collaborative creations.

Image Credit: Flickr Commons Library of Congress: Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

A History of Our Own, Representing Communities and Identities on the Web (SAA09: Session 202)

Duke University Rare Books, Manuscript & Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) : Lynn Eaton (Reference Archivist)

While I didn’t find my way into this session until the start of the next speaker’s presentation, Lynn was kind enough to share with me her personal printout of her presentation slides. The links below and any associated commentary are based solely on my own interpretation of the various screen-shots included.

• Duke Digital Collections
• RBMSCL Finding Aids
• AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials – this includes interviews with experts, a TV ads quiz and a wide range of TV ads available via iTunes U.
• Duke Yearlook – a set of Flickr collections displaying images from the Duke University Archives, each focused on a decade or theme related to Duke’s history.
• Duke University Libraries YouTube Channel: example Duke Exhibit: “A Century of Sex Appeals”
• Duke Digital Collections on DukeMobile iPhone application – This wasn’t included in the presentation’s slides – but I spotted it on the YouTube Channel. I downloaded the DukeMobile app onto my iTouch and had a great time exploring the Duke Digital Collections included in the images section of the app. I think it was

University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Digital Collections: Tom Sommer (University and Technical Services Archivist)

UNLV has experimented with new technologies as they appear. Tom made a point of saying that when they started seeing others provide a feature on their websites, UNLV would find a way to try it out. A great example of this is the addition of a tag cloud and google map to The Boomtown Years collection listed below.

• Howard Hughes Digital Collection – Images displayed in this online exhibition about Howard Hughes, such as this portrait of Howard Hughes, feature the opportunity both to rate and comment on the image. In addition, they provide an RSS feed for every possible metadata attribute (such as location, subject and media type)
• Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years – in addition to ratings and comments, this collection adds on display of recent comments, tagging and a google map which ties images to locations in southern Nevada.
• UNLV Special Collections Facebook Page – shares news and updates about projects – launched 2 months ago

Marist College Archives and Special Collections: John Ansley (Head, Archives and Special Collections)

Marist first launched their website in 2001 to raise awareness of their collections. They also used listserves and the on-campus newspaper. Utlimately their best tactic was working one-on-one with professors whose interests intersected with their collections. This led to contact with special interest groups. Working with the special interest groups led to new tag and metadata values for their collections.

• Hidden in Plain Sight – online exhibit about fore-edge painting. Includes videos as part of introduction since it is hard to understand through still images. The bibliography receives the most hits.
• Marist Environmental History Project – this ongoing project aims to document who has what information about environmental history. The site includes an extensive list of primary sources as well as a 24 minute oral history:  The Enduring Storm:  The Story of the Storm King Case and the People Who Launched the Modern Environmental Movement (mp3).
• Intercollegiate Rowing Association Poughkeepsie Regatta – timeline used to guide users to who won each race, PDFs of programs, and extensive bibliographies (including an index of 1000+ NYT articles about the regatta).
• Lowell Thomas Travelogues – a household name during the golden age of radio, Lowell Thomas created extensive multimedia travelogues of his travels around the world. He is credited with making T. E. Lawrence famous as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The site was launched as a teaser to the over 1000 linear feet of photos, audio, video & other records which will be available to researchers in October 2009. For a taste of what is coming, check out this Lowell Thomas travelogue video clip – my favorite quote from which is “…come with me on a magic carpet out to the land of history, mystery and romance.”

My Thoughts

The archivists at all three of these educational institutions have tried new things and worked hard to share their materials with people beyond the traditional range of a reading room. The promise of the web, and all the tools and techniques it supports, is still being uncovered. It will be up to innovative archivists to keep discovering ways to push the envelope and welcome new audiences from all the corners of the globe.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dukeyearlook/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Archival Collections Online: Reaching Audiences Beyond The Edge of Campus (SAA09: Session 405)

As I mentioned during our talk – here is the Online Communities Comparison Chart. Please let me know if you have any issues accessing this document and feel free to share it with anyone you like.

If you had questions you were unable to ask during the session – please feel free to post them as comments below or send me a message via my  Contact Form. I will be sure to pass questions along to all the members of our panel. I also plan to update this post with links to everyone’s slides as they appear online.

Slides from our talk:

• Mark’s slides on Slideshare: Online Presence and Participation
• Deborah Wythe’s slides available on SAA’s site: Archives on Flickr Commons (it’s not your mother’s audience anymore). She has also made a full paper available via SAA as well.

SAA has posted video of our presentation on facebook. The one I have linked to is the first of 7 segments. To view each in order, keep clicking ‘previous’ to view the next video.

Blog L’Archivista has a great post about our session.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA09: My Session on Online Communities (Session 101)

What is an ‘unconference’ you ask? It is an attendee organized gathering focused on a common theme – in this case digital humanities. In the days leading up to the camp, attendees will post their ideas for discussion topics – but the final schedule will be sorted out on the ground during the gathering itself.

The original THATCamp event, organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, was a full two day weekend event. THATCamp Austin 2009 will be held on a single evening during the same week that the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists is being held in Austin (and has the blessing of the CHNM).

I had an amazing time at the first THATCamp at CHNM in 2008 and wrote 3 posts about various presentations and discussions. Since I was unable to attend THATCamp 2009 I am especially pleased to be lending a hand in organizing this first regional THATCamp while I will be in Texas for SAA. If you can get yourself to Austin on Tuesday night August 11th and have a passion for the digital humanities — take a look at the what/when/where details over on the THATCamp Austin 2009 About Page.

A few details hijacked from the THATCamp Austin website:

How do I sign up?
Unfortunately, we only have space for 60-70 participants, so we’ll have to do some vetting. To apply for a spot, simply send email to thatcamp.austin.2009@gmail.com., telling us what you’d like to present, and what you think you will get out of the experience. Please don’t send full proposals. We’re talking about an informal note of around 250 words, max.  Please include your T-shirt size and an email address you can check from public places so that we can register you with the University of Texas wi-fi system.

How much?
THATCamp Austin is free to all attendees, but a $25 donation towards T-shirts and pizza will be very much appreciated.

Don’t be afraid to take a step into the less-structured unconference world. What I experienced at the first THATCamp was a group of very enthusiastic individuals who were so pleased to find like minded people with whom to talk – regardless of our very varied backgrounds. Folks have reported coming away from both of the THATCamps at CHNM feeling energized and rededicated to their projects — as well as having found new collaborators and opportunities for cross-polination across all the diverse members of the digital humanities community.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

THATCamp Austin 2009: Now Accepting Applications

Overview: Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.

Session Highlights

Areas of “Amateur” endeavor  have a long history of launching collections, such as:

• cabinet of curiosities
• foundation of astronomical research
• british flora and amateur botanists
• weather observations
• open source software movement

Being an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean being bad at what you do!

Within the realm of self-defined museums some common topics often emerge:

• ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia)
• comics
• technology – especially old tech, there is a surprising trend of being fascinated by technology approximately 10 years older than the collector
• personal and “embarrassing” collections
• genealogy

For these self-defined museums the scope is self-defined – these are self-delineated collections. Virtual museums can document aspects of cultural heritage considered socially taboo or in some way too sensitive to collect. A great example of this is the Museum of Menstruation which claims to have been created 14 years ago and is currently trying to establish a public permenant display for the public.

Platforms have evolved over the life of the web, starting with static html, then blogs and now Flickr images as a mode of presentation.

This is a list of successful amateur collections online:

• Today’s Inspiration – illustration from the 40’s and 50’s
• JonWilliamson.com – advertising 1940s-1960s
• Pulp Fiction Flickr Group – 882 members who provide basic metadata and often label stuff within the image – currently contains 3,385 items.
• Curio Cabinet Flickr Group – 1,206 members and 5,537 items

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a more traditional site created by a cultural heritage institution. It contains 100,000+ images copyright cleared for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK. VADS is a very detailed static source of images with metadata, but provides no interaction.

Amateurs do provide metadata, but it is intuitive metadata. It might not fit into rigid buckets of data, but that doesn’t meant that the metadata available isn’t useful.

What are the boundaries between amateur and professional? Work vs hobby?

Many of these amateur sites get much more traffic than most standard museum sites. More than 50% of museum digitized images are never visited.

Memory institutions are starting to put things into the wider online community:

• Smithsonian: photos in Smithsonian Flickr Commons
• Tate: The How We Are Now project invited the public to contribute photos to the How We Are Flickr Group. The images were streamed to screens within the How We Are: Photographing Britain exhibit and 40 photos were chosen to be included as the last set of photos in the physical exhibit.
• Victoria & Albert Museum: created a Flicrk group of photos taken at the V&A museum along with a long list of other V&A Flickr groups and streams
• Oxford University’s Great War Archive: contains 6,500 items contributed by the public and related to the First World War.
• Facebook and Twitter are being used more often for informing the community about their collections

Much of amateur research has been driven by advances in technology. A great example of this is the advent of affordable metal detectors led to dramatic changes in archaeology. The internet and Web 2.0 technology are arming a whole new generation of enthusists who can find one another and collaborate more easily than might ever have been dreamed of 20 years ago.

Next Steps & Conclusions

Future research will involve looking at the psychology of collection: archives vs collections. For now it is important to realize that institutions are not the only hosts of “worthwhile” digital objects. Pro-am (aka, pro-amateur) are doing better with using web 2.0 & getting more traffic.

What can memory institutions learn from this?

• interact with user communities
• use the ‘grand central stations’ of flickr, twitter, facebook
• usability of flickr is better than what most memory institutions build for themselves

My Thoughts

This session considers the ways cultural memory institution can take advantage of the web by looking at what the successful enthusiasts are achieving. This research-backed approach confirms what I would have expected. Libraries, museums and archives are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to putting their collections online. Sites run by non-professionals are doing an amazing job of drawing in new audiences, keeping people around and then initiating conversation within that audience.

The Flickr Commons is a big step forward, but it isn’t the only option. There are also varying opinions about how successful the crowdsourcing aspect of the Flickr Commons is for memory institutions. A lot of this goes back to to a core question “how do we know if we have succeeded?”. There is much to be said for setting out clear goals when launching online initiatives. Is your goal increased traffic to your site or crowdsourcing of metadata? A great example of an initiative whose goal is clearly collection of crowdsourced metadata is the German Federal Archives who chose to use the Wikimedia Commons for their photo metadata initiative.

If you are trying to extend your mission of providing access to materials to the public, then how do you measure success? Putting your materials in what Melissa called “grand central stations” (or what I have also heard termed “public crosswalks”) definitely increases the chances of serendipitous discovery by new individuals. That said, we can see from the successful blogs mentioned above that tackling a niche with enthusiasm and consistent posting can go a long way to building a following. JonWilliamson.com seems to have only launched back in November of 2008 with a post featuring a Scotch Tape Christmas ad from 1951. The author posted in May of 2009 that his images in Flickr had surpassed 100,000 views.

To conclude this post I leave you with a list of inspirational digitized collections online that were created by various cultural heritage institutions:

• Publishers’ Bindings Online – discussed in SAA2007’s Session: Publishers’ Bindings Online – Digitization, Collaboration, Standardization and Community Building, a multi-institutional project that includes galleries of topical images combined with an essay that gives the images context. Two of my favorites are:
  • From Domestic Goddesses to Suffragists: The Story of Women Told on Bookbindings, 1820-1920
  • Indians, the Frontier, and the West in American Bookbindings
• Calisphere – more than 150,000 digitized items organized for easy use by K-12 teachers. This is especially interesting in that it represents items already available in Online Archive of California, but organized in a way to make them easy to find and use with their target audience in mind.
• Yiddish Books Online – A project by the National Yiddish Book Center that uses the Internet Archive as a platform to host 11,000 digitized out-of-print Yiddish books. This project is a nice cross between a branded custom site and a grand-central station

Have a favorite online collection website? Please share it in the comments below.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mms0131/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

DH2009: Digital Curiosities and Amateur Collections

Digital lives is a joint project of UCL, British Library and University of Bristol

What? We need a better understanding of how people manage digital collections on their laptops, pdas and home computers. This is important due to the transition from paper-based personal collections to digital collections. The hope is to help people manage their digital archives before the content gets to the archives.

How? Talk to people with in-depth narrative interview. Ask people of their very first memories of information technology. When did they first use the computer? Do they have anything from that computer? How did they move the content from that computer? People enjoyed giving this narrative digital history of their lives.

Who? 25 interviewees – both established and emerging people whose works would or might be of interest to repositories of the future.

Findings?

• They created a detailed flowchart of users’ reported process of document manipulation.
• Common patterns in use of email showed that people used email across all these platforms and environments. Preserving email is not just a case of saving one account’s messages:
  • work email
  • Gmail/Yahoo
  • mails via Facebook
  • Twitter
• Documented personal information styles that relate skills dimension to data security dimension.

The one question I caught was from someone who asked if they thought people would stop using folders to organize emails and digital files with the advent of easy search across documents. The speaker answered by mentioning the revelations in the paper Don’t Take My Folders Away!. People like folders.

My Thoughts

This session got me to think again about the SAA2008 session that discussed the challenges that various archivists are facing with hybrid literary collections. Matthew Kirschenbaum also pointed me to MITH’s white paper: Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use.

I am very interested to see how ideas about preserving personal digital records evolve. For example, what happens to the idea of a ‘draft’ in a world that auto-saves and versions documents every few minutes such as Google Documents does?

With born digital photos we run into all sorts of issues. Photos that are simultaneously kept on cameras, hard drives, web based repositories (flickr, smugmug, etc) and off-site backup (like mozy.com). Images are deleted and edited differently across environments as well. A while back I wrote a post considering the impact of digital photography on the idea of photographic negatives as the ‘photographers’ sketchbooks’: Capa’s Found Images and Thoughts on Digital Photographers’ Sketchbooks.

I really liked the approach of this project in that it looked at general patterns of behavior rather than attempting to extrapolate from experiences of archivists with individual collections. This sort of research takes a lot of energy, but I am hopeful that basically creating these general user profiles will lead to best practices for preserving personal digital collections that can be applied easily as needed.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

DH2009: Digital Lives and Personal Digital Archives

For my test I searched for an exact match on “Ticket with portrait of George Washington”. This returns one result – the one image in Flickr with the same name, from The Field Museum in Flickr Commons. If you click on the ‘More Filters’ link, you will see other ways to filter your results – including the option to restrict your results to only include images whose creators permit reuse.

Next I clicked in the ‘Creator allows reuse’ and my one result disappeared! Quite disappointing in my book.

Google is also getting onto the ‘make it easy to search for reusable images’ bandwagon. Search Engine Land reported that Google Images Quietly Adds Creative Commons Filter. That post pointed me to Google  Operating System’s search interface that lets you play with the options that Google has available. After a clicking through to some of the images returned by a Google Image Search for creative commons images of archives, the way the Google model appears to work is to look for creative commons badges or links on the page with the image. I even found Flickr creative commons images, but when I tried to find my Flickr Commons image of the ticket used above for my Yahoo image search experiment it wasn’t returned by Google either.

So if an archives (or museum or library) posts images on a page that indicates that the content is licensed under creative commons, it seems those images will then appear in Google’s image search as reusable. That is good news! Another way to get users to find your public domain images.

The question I am left is how to resolve the gap between Flickr Commons’ ‘no known copyright restrictions  rights statement and both Google and Yahoo’s definition of reusable content.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons