A New Era of Responsibility

...A book which has come across my desk has this title. Which reminded me that I haven't posted on this blog since I was 7.5 months pregnant. Well, now our daughter is almost 15 months, I'm working a little bit again, and for the love of God, surely I can get myself back into the world of blogging about organizing information. Right?
So, in that vein, I want to write some about a project I was recently involved with. Since I am not working full time any longer, I took on a side project, archiving the personal papers of a successful businessman here in town. His dad was very famous as a businessman, as well, and some of his papers were also included in this job. The total amount was probably 20 linear feet or so.

The interesting thing about this project was how basically different it FELT than the professional archivist jobs I've had. I went to their (very large and well-appointed) home once a week, and worked out of their dining room. His wife would periodically come in, not to check on me, but to relate some historical factoid, or to show me something that she found, or to ask if she framed something correctly. Your own personal archivist! And, I found I did not have the same kind of mental freedom that I had while working in an institution. If I found something in a collection that I knew was superfluous and common, like, say, an envelope with no letter and no address, I could put it in a stack of things to get rid of. Not so with these papers, because the owner was working in his office down the hall, and he was a pack rat, and when I showed it to him, he'd say "we should keep it, I suppose."

It's interesting to be able to go to the creator and say "what is this? what were you doing at this time?" instead of just having to guess and research.

The Best (Worst?) Meeting Ever

I just came back from a meeting about how to implement PREMIS in our institutional repository. We've been working on how to implement PREMIS for months. The result of this meeting was: we don't need PREMIS.

So was this the best or worst meeting in history?

The case for "best meeting":
We came to the conclusion that while PREMIS is probably very good for some things, in this case it wouldn't be capturing anything that we aren't already capturing in some other way. Thus, we don't need to add work for ourselves just for the sake of a standard. Verdict: SUPER productive meeting where we didn't make unnecessary work.

The case for "worst meeting":
We started out the meeting not using PREMIS, and we ended the same meeting, 1.5 hours later, still not using PREMIS. It took us 90 minutes to decide that we should keep doing what we're doing. Verdict: Ridiculous that we took that long to hash this out.

JHOVE again

So luckily, we have an awesome IT guy here who can work Java magic, and who installed JHOVE for me. Of course, the user interface is, well, not that great, but it does the job if you can work around the fact that it's not intuitive at all and gives you no instruction or prompting. But I digress.
I ran a tiff file through JHOVE, and it pulled out all kinds of preservation metadata. Like, it pulled out the number of pixels per line of the image, and listed it all for me in the xml document. EVERY LINE. Sound crazy? I thought so too. However, I will say: Job well done, JHOVE people. This program is the most thorough I've ever seen for extracting preservation metadata. It just takes an expert to install.

JHOVE

Okay, I have to say this...we're looking at preservation tools here, to automatically identify formats and spit out metadata about the size of the files, etc. And one of the tools we're looking at is JHOVE. And I quote: "JHOVE provides functions to perform format-specific identification, validation, and characterization of digital objects."
Which is right up our alley in terms of what we need. So I download it, and start to read the installation instructions when I click on the file and nothing happens. And guess what? JHOVE doesn't have an automatic installer?! You have to go into the config file, and the home directory, and change lines to get it to work.
Um....hello? It's 2008. I don't mind doing this to set up a piece of software, but if you want people to use your system (especially in libraries), you might want to make it just a TAD easier to use.
Did I mention that you can use the command line to use this product? They have a GUI, too, but come on...any system that says "you can use command line!" is not going to have a great GUI. It's just a gut feeling. This reminds me of early Greenstone software, where you had to know PERL just to make it work at all. The GUI was a joke.

Listservs

I'm on quite a few listservs. The bulk of my email every day comes from listservs. I like them, in fact. They're like little snippets of the world outside of my office. But I have to say, I'm getting kind of tired of the archivists' listservs.
How many times can we rehash the same old argument about how digitizing something does not count as "preservation"? I mean, come ON. It happens like every other week--someone writes something about using digitization as a preservation method, and then 10 people jump on that person and tell them that it's not a viable preservation strategy.
I have two problems with the above scenario. One, the person who still thinks that digitization is going to solve their crumbling paper problem. Sit down and read something, anything, about preservation that was written in the past 3 years and you will read that digitization is not a miracle cure. In fact, it's more like giving up the common cold in favor of getting tuberculosis. Sure, your stuffy sinuses will clear up, but you'll have a hacking cough for the next 10 years, and end up in a sanitarium in Colorado.
The other problem I have is the 10 other people. Seriously, one person's response is enough. Do we all need to jump on the bandwagon and let everyone else know that we know what we are doing? As some very smart person said, "Don't ever miss an opportunity to keep your mouth shut." I don't want those 10 self-congratulatory emails in my inbox. I don't really need even one of those emails, but I suppose someone has to tell the person who is considering contracting TB that they're about to get really sick.

Metadata for Manuscripts

There are lots of different kinds of metadata out there for library and archival materials. Some might say, too many kinds. There are different metadata schemes for every kind of material. There is Dublin Core, METS, MODS, even Marc for XML. All these metadatas are trying to solve an age-old problem with archival materials: they're too unique to have a standard applied to them. Books are easy; they all have title pages and authors and they're all wrapped up in neat packages that lend themselves to cataloging. Archival material, on the other hand, can be anything--and usually are. Paintings, bills of sale, letters, buttons, book manuscripts, musical instruments. The list goes on and on. And, especially with paper things like letters and bills, there is the problem of having so much paper on your hands that you cannot simply describe every single piece of paper as a single entity. So we group things, and then we catalog the groups. More or less. It's an inexact science.
At least, it was until the standards started getting made. Dublin Core and METS and MODS are all designed to help archivists catalog the things that are uncatalog-able. And now there's a new(ish) metadata standard: PREMIS.
PREMIS stands for something fancy, but at core, it is preservation metadata. Yes, now archivists can code not only information about the creator and the date and the content of a piece of paper, but also the physical condition, history of the physical condition, and any repairs that have been made to the paper.
Are we getting over-metadata'ed? Do we really need metadata, encoded into XML, that tells us if something is fragile and old? Can't we go to the paper itself and see what condition its in? Or this strictly for statistical purposes?
I've made myself a copy of the PREMIS manual--all 283 pages of it. So, we'll see what this is supposed to do/be. It can't be for the users of the material (which is generally who I consider metadata to be for), so it's not something that should be displayed to the user, probably. And a lot of archives don't even have the time to go through and process basic information, let alone preservation data. Maybe this is one of those things that is reserved strictly for libraries where everything is already processed and they have lots of extra time on their hands to go through and put in fuller, more complete information on each and every collection. Good on them, I say.

Uniqueness

I like to talk about libraries and archives and how different they are (hello?! They are A LOT different). Of course many of the differences are directly related to the amount of stuff that archivists deal with. We’re talking about millions of pages, manuscripts, letters, objects, and now databases, webpages, emails, IMs, etc. Librarians, on the other hand, put their feet down long ago, and accept only things that are either physically or digitally contained within themselves. Librarians don’t accept anything else. A bunch of letters from George Washington? No thank you! Please publish this first, give it a unique identifier, several subject headings, and a spine label. Then we’ll talk.

I sometimes feel as though archivists took on the responsibility of preserving all the things that museums and libraries simply couldn’t be troubled with. Archives are notoriously hodge-podge; indeed, archivists seem to take a kind of perverse pleasure out of having lots and lots of things in their possession that would make a librarian or a curator throw up their hands in disgust.

The uniqueness of all of these millions of pages of documentation have made it very difficult for archivists to come together on standards. EAD IS a standard, I suppose, although a very cautious one:

“Okay, we’ll standardize what we CALL things, but don’t tell us what goes under each name!” And the result was that while I call a scope and content note one thing, someone else may use the same tag for something different.

Then along came DACS (Describing Archives: A Content Standard), which is very nice and should be wonderful, but there a lot of archivists out there who don’t use it. Show me a librarian who doesn’t use AACRII at least to some degree.

I think it’s funny that while archives have been around in Europe since before the French Revolution, and the US has had archives of sorts since their own Revolution, archivists seem to have missed the boat, letting librarians (a relatively younger profession as we know it today) sail off to take the credit for preserving culture. They’re so much older than librarians in many ways, but librarians dove right into organization theory with a vengeance. While librarians spent the last century perfecting a system of cataloging books, archivists apparently decided that the 20^th century wouldn’t do, and are now beginning the process in the 21^st century. I just never understood why they waited so long.