I'm back, to ponder the nature of service in the archival world. Get ready to gaze at those navels, people.
When I left the realm of "pure" archives, almost 7 years ago, most large archival institutions had *some* digital content available online, and had EAD finding aids available in union catalogs or online repositories. They had websites that mostly directed patrons on how to come in to the physical building and do research. It was at this point that I left archives and went into cataloging/library metadata.
For a few years I worked as an original cataloger and maintained the ILS for a small university library. Then I worked as a metadata liaison between an archives, digital library, and cataloging department of a medium-large research library. And then...well, then I came back to archives.
After having worked in places where ensuring usability was always my top priority, it was strange to come back to archives, especially as I remembered it. Archives have not historically been known for their accommodating nature when it comes to user needs. In fact, many archivists prided themselves on how restrictive their use policies were.
However, luckily just as I was returning to the world of archives, I got to see the results of the most recent SAA conference and some of the discussions that are percolating through the community. A small sample of some session titles: "Exploring the User Experience with Digital Primary Sources", "Disruptive Components: Reimagining Archival Access Systems", "Archives without Walls".
While some of this was happening when I was an archival student and young professional archivist, mostly at that time we were just trying to come to grips with the realities of electronic records and digitization. Usability was an afterthought in many ways. But now--! As a person whose career focused exclusively on the user for many years (and I hope this job will allow me to stay focused on the user), I feel so much more comfortable now than I did when I was pondering this move back to archives.
The moral of this blog post is best stated by Socrates (forgive the translation as I assume most people do not read Ancient Greek): "the secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but towards building the new."
I should make a motivational poster.
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Friday, August 30, 2013
The Public Face of an Archives
I've been going around and around in my mind about how I want to present this archive to The World. Since we have no public face yet, I'm pretty open to possibilities. The question that I've been facing over the past couple weeks is one of storage. Where do I want to store our metadata?
Now, for the digital/digitized things, I used CONTENTdm and it works pretty well. It's not perfect, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. I like it well enough, and it seems to like me ok too. The metadata for those items are kept in its brain. But what about the metadata for the collections as a whole? I feel as though I have a couple options in this regard, and I keep going over and over it in my mind, even though I'm not at a point where I can put anything in place anyway.
First option: The Old School
Straight-up MARC cataloging, and paper (well, Excel) accession records. No EAD. Now, this may seem like a dumb strategy, since EAD is what everyone uses, etc etc, but hear me out. In our library, where this archive is a little lost lamb, no one uses nor has heard of EAD. The catalog runs on MARC and RDA/AACRII, and I could, with relatively little trouble, create some pretty ballin' MARC records for the archival collections. I used to do it for a living, and I felt pretty good about the amount of information I could pack into a MARC record. Of course this leaves Future Archivist in the cold a little bit, because damn, everything's in MARC, but guess what? We'd have to do this work anyway so that it could go into OCLC, and I would have the added benefit of getting to use the power of the library's discovery portal for all my collections. That would be nice.
Second option: Archival Management System
I am going to get myself set up with a test system of Archon and we're gonna play around with it. But given the state of our archives and its newness, I am not confident that we could secure or maintain funding for a pay system, and of course Archon is going the way of the dodo and then we'll have to pay at some point. Plus, this is a TINY archive, do I really need that much computing power at this point or even five years in the future (when there will inevitably be something way better to implement)? Also, the discovery portal that the library is using is not compatible with EAD, so catalog records would still be necessary if I wanted to mingle with the library's holdings.
There are a ton of kinks to work out, but I want to try to create a system that overlaps and interlinks, so that even if I'm using a weird mashup of ILS, website, and CONTENTdm, that the user isn't feeling confused or let down by a poorly thought-out system. I have more thoughts on the user-driven model for archives, too, which I will probably talk about more as time permits. I was so glad to see that the SAA meeting was so devoted to exploring the idea of service, because after having been in libraries for several years, I was pretty disappointed in many ways at the way that archives still serve (or don't serve) their patrons.
More on that later.
Now, for the digital/digitized things, I used CONTENTdm and it works pretty well. It's not perfect, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. I like it well enough, and it seems to like me ok too. The metadata for those items are kept in its brain. But what about the metadata for the collections as a whole? I feel as though I have a couple options in this regard, and I keep going over and over it in my mind, even though I'm not at a point where I can put anything in place anyway.
First option: The Old School
Straight-up MARC cataloging, and paper (well, Excel) accession records. No EAD. Now, this may seem like a dumb strategy, since EAD is what everyone uses, etc etc, but hear me out. In our library, where this archive is a little lost lamb, no one uses nor has heard of EAD. The catalog runs on MARC and RDA/AACRII, and I could, with relatively little trouble, create some pretty ballin' MARC records for the archival collections. I used to do it for a living, and I felt pretty good about the amount of information I could pack into a MARC record. Of course this leaves Future Archivist in the cold a little bit, because damn, everything's in MARC, but guess what? We'd have to do this work anyway so that it could go into OCLC, and I would have the added benefit of getting to use the power of the library's discovery portal for all my collections. That would be nice.
Second option: Archival Management System
I am going to get myself set up with a test system of Archon and we're gonna play around with it. But given the state of our archives and its newness, I am not confident that we could secure or maintain funding for a pay system, and of course Archon is going the way of the dodo and then we'll have to pay at some point. Plus, this is a TINY archive, do I really need that much computing power at this point or even five years in the future (when there will inevitably be something way better to implement)? Also, the discovery portal that the library is using is not compatible with EAD, so catalog records would still be necessary if I wanted to mingle with the library's holdings.
There are a ton of kinks to work out, but I want to try to create a system that overlaps and interlinks, so that even if I'm using a weird mashup of ILS, website, and CONTENTdm, that the user isn't feeling confused or let down by a poorly thought-out system. I have more thoughts on the user-driven model for archives, too, which I will probably talk about more as time permits. I was so glad to see that the SAA meeting was so devoted to exploring the idea of service, because after having been in libraries for several years, I was pretty disappointed in many ways at the way that archives still serve (or don't serve) their patrons.
More on that later.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Pressures
I remember, when I was starting out in archives, getting excited about every new thing that came across my desk. I was a history major at the time, and every scrap of history was a new world, another little piece in the puzzle of "what happened." My curiosity eventually lost its edge. I mean, I didn't lose my love of history or anything quite so dire, but I definitely gave up on the sentimentality of the historical object. When you see enough old newspapers, you kind of stop caring about every article, every advertisement, every photograph. The sheet weight of all that historical material pressing on your time strips some of the romanticism away from the work.
But today, I got sucked back in. A random newspaper article, with a quote from a very famous man who recently passed away. The quote was inflammatory, and not at all flattering to either our university or the city and its population. It made me really hungry for more information about my university and its place in the history of this community.
Normally archivists don't deal with this. Rarely are we the ones who personally investigate history, but in some instances, we have to be. Because no one else is going to investigate.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Back to the Archives
It's been awhile since I last posted, but a lot has happened since I last posted, so I suppose that makes sense. I got a new job, now once again working as a "pure" archivist. It's been quite a few years since that was true, but it feels good to be focusing on archives. Luckily, the intersection between archives, digitization, and metadata is a big one, so I'm still doing what interests me the most.
Richard Pearce-Moses' new blog inspired me, I suppose, to start writing again (although he stole my blog's look-and-feel, so now I have to go change it!). Plus I hope to have lots of things to write about and think over, since the new job is a big one.
My new job involves building an archive from scratch--this university has never had one before, and at the brink of their fortieth anniversary, decided that they really wanted to start caring for their institutional history. So here I am. I'm straddling two realms in this job, both arranging and describing physical papers and objects and also trying to capture and work with born-digital materials and somehow wrangle a coherent whole out of all of it, because their users expect digital delivery even more than most traditional universities. Oh, and also go get collections and materials to fill the archive with. And write policies and procedures. And build a physical space to house all this stuff. And do it all basically alone. It's kind of a daunting task, but I prefer challenging jobs to unchallenging ones.
Richard Pearce-Moses' new blog inspired me, I suppose, to start writing again (although he stole my blog's look-and-feel, so now I have to go change it!). Plus I hope to have lots of things to write about and think over, since the new job is a big one.
My new job involves building an archive from scratch--this university has never had one before, and at the brink of their fortieth anniversary, decided that they really wanted to start caring for their institutional history. So here I am. I'm straddling two realms in this job, both arranging and describing physical papers and objects and also trying to capture and work with born-digital materials and somehow wrangle a coherent whole out of all of it, because their users expect digital delivery even more than most traditional universities. Oh, and also go get collections and materials to fill the archive with. And write policies and procedures. And build a physical space to house all this stuff. And do it all basically alone. It's kind of a daunting task, but I prefer challenging jobs to unchallenging ones.
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