Scaling! Or, why I need a CS degree to do this stuff

When last we spoke, I had just accessioned some materials from the EAD Roundtable which I thought were going to be good test cases for using these tools. Shortly after that, however, I was presented with an even juicier opportunity: the event files of the UWM Chancellor. These files contain event overview forms, some correspondence, some presentations, and other material relevant to the chancellor's activities during the course of a given academic year. The files are likely to be relatively high-use and high-value, which shot them to the front of my testing queue. They were also, by and large, actual document files, which meant not much weeding is necessary to pick the researcher-usable wheat from the supporting-files chaff.

Oh, yes, one more thing about these files: there are 13,000 of them. 10 GB of Chancellory goodness.

I hear the Digital Archivists laughing at my paltry numbers even now. "Ohhh, TEN GIGS," they say. "That's almost the size of the manifest for this huge research data set I'm archiving." Yeah, well, we can't all have integrated TDR software tools, OK guys? Some of us have to hold together their E-records processes with chewing gum and baling wire. 10 GB is far and away the largest accession that the UWM Archives has taken in thus far, so for me it's a challenge, all right? (I am sure that if and when I get this data curation initiative off the ground I will look back fondly on the days when I worried about accessions that were merely 10 GB.)

Anyway. First thing I noticed is that NONE of the tools I've been using scale on their own. From the reading I've done, the reason for this is the same reason that these tools are platform neutral: they run in Java, which means they use virtual memory to extract file metadata/build checksums/whatever. This many files means that virtual memory runs out fast and the process stops (if the program doesn't crash altogether). OK, fine. So I just have to do the analysis in chunks instead. This is annoying, but not undoable. DROID (which I'm going to discuss soon, I promise!) runs fine when I chunk it out by year, although it does give me the following in my SIP metadata folder:

Spot the irony: ".droid" is not listed in PRONOM as a recognized file format. This is what passes for humor in the Archives world, folks. 

Note the "comprehensive breakdown" files-- these are various outputs of DROID's reporting function, which makes the issue of multiple profiles significantly less problematic because I can open all of these profiles and have them vomit their output into a single chart for comparison. So far, so good.

The New Zealand Metadata Harvester, on the other hand... less far, less good. It didn't extract the whole accession, as I expected, so I attempted to chunk it down further. In most cases it did it by year fine; in other cases, I got this result instead:

Specific!

OK. No problem. Presumably by breaking it down even further, I can get it to where the number of files will be small enough that I can chunk it out even further. This works for me for the first few years, though I have to remove the October folder from all of them to make them work, which leads me to believe that the NZMH is tripping over a parse error. This theory is quickly demolished when I get to 2009, at which point *none* of the folders will extract properly. In a fit of optimism, I hit the logs to attempt to determine the file or folder the program is tripping over.

"Your tears are delicious."--New Zealand Metadata Harvester

I have now run into one of the biggest problems to plague Human-Computer Interaction since the UNIVAC days, namely that front line coders are, by and large, AWFUL at writing for laymen. I need to know from the logs:

1. What happened
2. What file it happened to
3. How I, the average user, can fix it so it stops happening

What I have been given instead:

1. What happened
2. WHEN it happened (Seriously? I need to know to the second when my process crapped out?)
3. The specific script violation(s) invoked
4. How someone who is competent with coding can fix it so it stops happening (I think. I honestly don't know, since I don't read code)

The whole point of writing a GUI is so that people like me who aren't comfortable around command lines can use the program and solve problems when they arise. So, of course, when a problem DOES arise... I'm sent back to information that I need facility with the command line to use. Thanks, guys. Honestly, the lack of intelligible documentation for so many of these tools is the single greatest barrier to entry to e-records processing, and until it gets better too many archivists are just going to throw up their hands and give up on this process altogether. 

In the meantime, *I'm* not giving up, though I am leaving huge gaps in the metadata for some of these chunks (as well as seriously considering going back to school for Comp Sci if I am going to continue down the e-recs road... though that would also require time and money that I don't have). I suppose I could go folder by folder to determine which specifically is causing the problem, but that sort of defeats the purpose of automating the process with metadata extraction tools, doesn't it? Oh well. Something is better than nothing, I suppose, though it will be necessary to indicate somehow that the metadata is incomplete (for now I am using the "comment" tag in the NZMH output XML). I haven't even tried the Duke Data Accessioner on a collection this big yet, so that's going to be my next step, though I also want to figure out if I can run it without having to create copies of the files-- one set of this stuff is enough! (Until I create a working copy set for processing, anyway).

I AM pleased to note that the NARA File Analyzer seems to work fine, if sluggishly, for generating a manifest of files with checksums, and was able to get the entire accession in one go. Score one for the Federal Government! As noted in my post about ingest, however, the output is not very pretty, though if we have to use it we have to use it. I think when my fieldworker puts together her procedures list for e-records processing a separate section for large accessions is going to be necessary anyway, so might as well think about which tools might work better and how use of them is going to change.

Next up: heading backwards and talking about DROID, JHOVE, and NZMH in more detail as part two of metadata generation for ingest. Wheee!

A (not-so-)Brief Aside on Metadata and Its Uses

So, you may have noticed the gap in updates for this so-called “series”. This is largely because I have been actually doing the work instead of blogging about it (oh sure, “Productivity”, a likely story. But in this case it’s true!). In addition to this meaning that I will have a better grasp on what these tools can do when I DO get around to writing about them, I am also benefitting from having a fieldworker from SOIS working on this project with me. Her perspective is valuable because she hasn’t been immersing herself in documentation—I am trying to see a) how well I can teach other users to use these tools for our processes; and b) how easy these tools are to use full stop. For the most part, the answers have been "fair to middling" for both.

Part of the problem I’m running into is that separating out the steps like I am in this series is to a certain extent an artificial separation. With e-records, more so than with paper records, ingest is accessioning is appraisal is processing is access. By which I mean that the state of the system or tool in the next step down the road determines what can be done with the tool or tools you’re using in this step. This is most obvious in metadata harvesting,  hence the title of this post.

These tools that I’m using? Collect a LOT of metadata. Which on the one hand is good because it’s usually better to have more information about a file than less. On the other hand, the surfeit of metadata led my fieldworker (and, by extension, me) to ask the obvious question, i.e. “what are we going to do with all of this?” I doubt very much that we want to devote a huge amount of time and effort entering full descriptions for every file into Archivists’ Toolkit, especially for those collections (such as SAA) where I know we won’t be providing online access to all or even most of the files (we don’t need to create DAOs for webpage stylesheets, e.g.).

I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and comparing the various outputs of the tools that I’ve been testing, and I have reached a preliminary conclusion, i.e. that I need to be looking at different metadata outputs to do different things for me. (This is where my digital archivist readers say “Duh!”. Leave me alone, I am learning this stuff on the fly and never took a metadata course in library school). I’m just not going to use every single bit of metadata that is being extracted by the various tools (especially since a lot of it is provided redundantly by a number of them), but I am going to be using a lot of it in various capacities. To wit, I’ve identified four basic categories:

1. Collection Summary metadata. How much data in how many files I have, what types of files are represented, the overall date range of the digital collection, etc. This is the stuff that goes in the general section of the finding aid for extent statement, technical requirements, general scope and content, etc. 
2. Collection Preservation/Manifest metadata. Something human-browsable that is going to indicate paths to files, dates last modified of individual files, any subject metadata, file versioning etc. This is the stuff that will be provided as a spreadsheet or database for patrons if we provide near-line access in that manner. It will also be “packaged” with the data to serve as the preservation description information (including format requirements, fixity measures, etc.)
3. Digital Object Manifest metadata. A specialized manifest for those files we’re going to provide access to through the finding aid (actually a subset of Collection Manifest metadata). These are the file names, paths, document titles (as applicable), relevant date (created or last modified), and basic technical requirements (probably file type only). This stuff will be imported as DAOs into Archivist’s Toolkit or a modified version of our EAD tagging spreadsheet and exported into our finding aids’ contents lists.
4. Individual Object Preservation and Access metadata. This one I figured out from all the programs that spit out XML for individual files rather than one big XML file for the whole collection. A lot of the metadata in this category may actually be covered in the other three, but by creating individual metadata files for each file in the collection, it creates a more complete preservation package and allows for expedited ingest of items into a repository by associating the items with relevant metadata.

It’s worth noting that we DID talk about these distinctions in the SAA Arrangement and Description of Electronic Records workshop that I attended in May. But we definitely didn’t talk about them in these terms, which is why it has taken me the better part of four months to figure out what to do with this stuff—we were basically given the tools, told about what was required for a SIP/AIP, and left to make our own connections. I may just be slow on the uptake, but the relationships between the tools being used and the appropriate use of the metadata being collected in the arrangement and description are not necessarily obvious in my opinion. I’ve made this post (in hopefully-clear English) to clarify to myself which kind of metadata is which and to help my equally-or-less-tech savvy readers (all 3 of you) make the distinction as well.

For the rest of this series (and there WILL be a rest of it!) I am going to try to identify which kind of metadata is being created by which tool (and be ye not fooled, most of the tools I’m looking at ARE for metadata extraction, so there’ll be a lot more discussion of this).  Going back to the ones I’ve already done, the tools at point of ingest are largely in category 2: They create a manifest, with or without checksums, which I can import into a spreadsheet or database to produce a browsable list of the files in the collection, but without distinction between documents and metafiles at this point. We’ll get to categories 1 and 3 during accessioning, using DROID and JHOVE to get that other stuff (and for right now, I AM using JHOVE 1.7 instead of JHOVE2. Why I am doing that will be revealed in the next post).

Oh, and lest I forget—because of redundant information and XML structure, almost none of the metadata I am harvesting with these tools is usable out of the box. If I am lucky, I am able to pick and choose fields from the various tools and paste them into a master spreadsheet that collects all of the information I need. If I am slightly less lucky, the import from XML to spreadsheet is screwy because of the nested structure and I need to figure out a way to flatten it to the point where I can import it into the master (doing folder-by-folder analysis may be the way to go on this). If I am UNLUCKY, I will need to convert the metadata from its existing form into an interoperable standard, such as MODS, METS, or PREMIS (this is an especially fun game because I am not really familiar with any of the three—see bit about not taking a metadata course in library school). I may be saved on the latter by our lack of a TDR for access to born-digital objects—but then, that poses an entirely new problem for our potential digital collection. Stay tuned.

E-records Use Testing: Ingest, Pt. 1 (Or, "In Which I Get Bailed Out By SAA Roundtable leaders"

Most of the existing e-records collections at UWM either predate me or predate the period during which I was concerned about silly things such as "authenticity." We STILL really don't have a separate e-records collection plan, as recommended by the AIMS report, but thanks to said report we are at least talking about these issues at staff meetings. So that's something, I guess? In any case, the transfers I have received since taking on this role have been received with MORE care than we had been doing earlier, but still not optimally from a digital preservation point of view. I was prepared to acknowledge this and move on.

Luckily, Mark Matienzo inadvertently came to my rescue through his capacity as co-chair of the EAD roundtable. As you the reader may already know, UWM serves as the official repository for the Society of American Archivists' own archives, which includes the records of sections and roundtables. This year the EAD roundtable is revamping their website, but wanted to preserve their old EAD Help Pages as a historical record of the development of EAD and support for same. The roundtable was kind enough to turn these pages into static web documents and subsequently zip them off through the ether via Yale's file-share service... so here we are. A chance for a fresh start at ingesting records properly! Stuff of obvious historical value! A chance to use the tools on Chris Prom's submission page! Joy to the wor--

Ah. "Most of [these tools] cannot be implemented without significant work to integrate them into an overall workflow or other applications."


You mean you can't unpack the source code in which these are provided?


Hahahahahahaha No. We're still trying to get an OAIS-compliant repository up and running, and I certainly don't have the expertise to compile code for addons. We are just now starting to even UNDERSTAND what in the world OAIS is even talking about, much less have an OAIS-compliant repository. Not that it's out of reach for us-- again, Chris Prom's site makes the process seem much less daunting--but we're not there yet. Part of that process involves having a seamless submission process to the repository, and I don't have the technical expertise to implement any of the tools on the submission page. Oh well. It's still a cleaner process than what we were doing before.


One thing I DO have the expertise for is creating a rudimentary SIP. Check it out:

That's what I'm talking about, son. (Actually I had no idea what the requirements were even for this before I took the SAA workshop on Arrangement and Description, so please ignore me when I pretend to be an e-records thug.) In any case, you'll notice the folder for metadata, submission agreement (AKA "an email I saved from Thunderbird"), and two content folders-- an originals folder, which is not being touched from here on out, and a working copy, which is where I will practice my mangling of collections. (This collection sort of doesn't lend itself to much rearrangement, so I may choose another one when I get to that step.) I won't open any of the folders right now, especially not the "Metadata" folder, because there's not anything actually in there at the moment. Let's fix that, shall we?

My first go at creating some fixity and context metadata was the Duke Data Accessioner, which I learned about at last year's SAA. The Duke University Libraries developed this tool to move files off physical media and into a repository, copying relevant metadata and comparing file checksums before and after transfer to make sure that authenticity was not compromised. I like the Accessioner because it's a Java tool, meaning it's platform-neutral, and the GUI is (relatively) easy to navigate. There are two main problems: 1) Since it's a migrating tool, I haven't been able to figure out how to generate checksums without duplicating the files, and 2) the output on the machines in the archives looks like this:




Yikes. Not exactly the most human-readable document in the universe, though it could be OK if you have a way to crosswalk metadata. Let's see if we can do better. (This is, obviously, not the XML for the EAD pages.

NARA has developed a File Analyzer and Metadata Extractor, which we demoed in the SAA workshop as a no-frills alternative to generating ingest metadata. You'll notice that the link goes to GitHub, which should scare you if, like me, you are a clueful user but not actually a techie; luckily, the files themselves are mostly compiled and ready to go. Like the Duke Data Accessioner, the NARA tool comes as a java application with a GUI, which is also nice if you're uncomfortable with command lines. This tool outputs to a table which can then be exported to a text file, so let's see what it comes up with:


Muuuuch better. The text file output is tab-delimited so you can easily import it into spreadsheets for even easier reading. The other information in the DDA XML file isn't there, but there is a function to count by type, which gives you more information about the accession as a whole. Unfortunately, the tool is a bit simple, which means you have to run each test separately. Hmm. Still wonder if we can do better.

Another option is Karen's Directory Printer, which is unfortunately Windows-only, but does give you more information about each file in Tab-delimited format. Here's how that looks:

(I was going to show you this in excel format but as it turns out the delimiters are off and it doesn't import correctly. Awkward.)

Lastly, there's Bagger, a GUI for the Library of Congress' Bag-It Data packaging standard. Wrapping content in a Bag allows for easy transfer of materials-- potentially very useful if we ever move to a different repository space. I had to read through the manual for this one to see which components were necessary for the bag to be complete, but I eventually got there, and ended up with the following manifest:

Beautiful. Clean and human-readable, if needed. (Generally NOT needed because if you transfer bags the receiving computer can do the checksums by itself.)

So, which of these is going to go into our workflow? I'm leaning towards Bagger at the moment because it creates fixity checksums AND packages the data for ready transfer. (There's also a functionality there, "Holey Bag", which allows you to pull stuff in from the web-- I'll have to try that one.) NARA File Analyzer might be OK too for simplicity's sake. Of course, neither tool captures the metadata captured by the Duke Data Accessioner... but, as the man says, there's an app for that. Unfortunately, this post has already run long, so those will have to wait until next time.

E-records use testing: Introduction

Howdy, campers! Some of you may be aware from my various ramblings on Twitter etc. that I have volunteered/been enlisted to be the electronic records guy at the UWM Archives. This is not entirely an unwanted position-- I am very interested in this kind of stuff, and it's only going to become more important as the shift from paper goes on-- but it is nonetheless a challenging role because I am sort of making it up as I go along. I didn't take a single course in Library School specifically on any of metadata, databases, electronic records, or digital imaging (to say nothing about programming), and now that I have undertaken an effort to rethink the way we are dealing with e-records, that lack of specific training is obvious (to me, at least... I don't know how much it appears to be so with my colleagues, most of whom are less techie than I am).

Luckily, I am far from the only person in this particular boat. SAA has been very good about getting in front of this issue, most recently through their Digital Archives Specialists certificate program. Said program purports to "provide [its participants] with the information and tools [they] need to manage the demands of born-digital records" through a series of courses at various skill levels and in various domains of practice for electronic records. The full certificate program involves 9 courses and is not cheap, so for right now I'm not focusing on finishing that (although I would like to be able to do so in the future). I was, however, able to take a course from the sequence, Arranging and Describing Electronic Records, which I found very useful in introducing me to tools and topics for getting a better handle on processing these. And so, in light of that course, I thought, "Hey, I bet other people would be interested in what we're doing with these tools and processes here at UWM. (and/or happy to tell me what it is I'm doing wrong)." And so, here we are.

I am going to structure this post series as a chronicle of working with Archives collections through the lens of various tools that I am testing, having been tipped off to the existence of said tools through the ADER workshop and other sources. (Chris Prom's Practical E-Records blog in particular has been invaluable for this.) My intent is to present my experiences and difficulties with these born-digital collections in order through the various stages of Archival Records, to wit Ingest-->Accession-->Arrangement-->Description-->Access-->Preservation. I am also cognizant, however, of the fact that the best laid plans of mice and men oft gang agley, and that not all of the tools I'm going to be looking at fit neatly into one of these categories (e.g. Archivematica and the Duke Data Accessioner). I am, however, going to give my best shot at providing a chronicle of working with these records from beginning to end, whenever "end" might be. (I'm also aware that "end" might not end up so easily defined.) Of course, because this whole process is in fact in process, the beginning is not especially well-defined either-- see next post for details-- but I'm hoping working through it in this form will help fix it for the next accession to come down the road.

So that's going to be this blog for the next few posts. Hope my readers (all 3 of you) find it useful, or at least interesting. Do feel free to comment/point out miscues/heckle/etc., as that will help me figure out where we're going wrong and point at ways to fix it. (Oh boy, I've just given people license to flame on my blog... Asbestos underwear at the ready...)

ARMA, Archivists, and Affordability

God Bless Jimmy McMillan. Helping people make Image Macros since 2010.

First, some context: this post is a response to comments in Maureen Callahan's post on You Ought To Be Ashamed regarding gender equity in hiring and promotion in Archives environments. Things got out of hand, as they tend to do: One person posted about how he didn't see the Glass Elevator as a real thing, another posted about how Supply and Demand would naturally correct the Archives market, and a third dismissed people who were chasing their dreams in the Archives world with "Good luck with that." I, foolishly, observed that most of the people taking issue with part or all of Maureen's post were records managers as opposed to archivists, and notably were records managers working in the private sector. Well, the foolish part was not that observation. The foolish part was my next logical leap, in which I tried to explain why the mindsets might be different:

Although officially I am both an archivist and a records manager at UWM (and am, you know, chair of SAA’s Records Management Roundtable), I feel much more of an affinity towards my archival colleagues largely because of this disconnect. The vast, vast majority of the ARMA programs I’ve attended are really focused towards dealing with records in a private sector environment, with perhaps some mention of government records and records management in a university setting coming in a distant third, if at all. This emphasis is natural on the face of it, since the preponderance of ARMA members are corporate, but dig a little deeper and you see structural issues: $175 for full membership, no gradations? $50+ for downloadable standards? _$1000_ for registration for the annual meeting? I don’t know many archivists/RMs in the public sector who can afford this, much less afford membership in both ARMA and SAA, and so they choose the one that is both cheaper and has a more direct relevance to their professional development. Thus, the divide widens, and groups like RMRT can only do so much to bridge it.

 I even said on Twitter that I was going to be stepping in it with this post, but this is something that has been bothering me for some time and it felt good to get it off my chest. Still, this paragraph didn't go unchallenged. Here's Peter Kurilecz:

so are you suggesting that ARMA should have a progressive dues structure like SAA? ie should they be like AIIM and have a name your price dues structure? How many people drop their SAA membership as they climb the salary ladder because they now have to pay more in dues? I took a look at the membership breakdown for SAA and after some analysis found that if they implemented a standard price ala ARMA (and not ARMA’s price) that SAA would have increased dues receipts. It would also make more sense from an accounting standpoint. I hear way too many folks whining about the cost of membership, but how many of those same folks are buying a Starbucks coffee everyday? Even a plain regular coffee at $2.50 for vente? figure the cost at that amount they’re paying $75 per month or $900 per year. or do it just 15 days per month and they are paying $450 a year. way more than membership.
how about a cell phone? what is the monthly cost? It all comes down to what is important to you. If it is really important you’ll find a way to pay for it.

I stand by my original comment, but this response suggests that I didn't do a wonderful job articulating what I meant. Let me take another whack at it.

Peter is, of course, right, that one's ability to afford membership in any of these professional organizations is a matter of priorities, and that if you want it badly enough you'll find the money. The thing is... I don't think ARMA does a good enough job making archivist/RM hybrids such as myself want it. Yes, there are and continue to be programs sponsored by ARMA and the locals that are interesting to archivists in the public sector, particularly at the government level. ARMA Milwaukee's Spring Seminar this year is on "Information Governance and Records Management in the Federal Government", which is very obviously aimed at public sector archivists-- so I overstated my case on that. Mea Culpa. But I don't think I'm reaching at all to say that most programs that ARMA sponsored are focused towards a very particular organizational culture, the kind where buy-in is achieved at C-level positions and/or direct coordination with legal or audit departments. Corporate or Fiscal environments are very good at this; Government environments less so, but there's still enough to get a semblance of cooperation (Witness the Obama memo on electronic records, which agencies have to at least to pretend to follow).

 My institution, conversely, is very much not like that. Getting the support of the CIO or the Provost does not at all guarantee that staff are going to follow appropriate records management practices, or adhere to taxonomies defined by upper management. Because I am in the Library rather than in Internal Audit or Legal Affairs, my power to enforce records management practices is limited to "soft power"-- going to individual offices and convincing them that establishing and following disposition schedules and records management policies is in their best interest from a legal, administrative, and historical standpoint. It's doable, but it's decentralized, and it can be very difficult, and I often have to operate on a shoestring budget (there's very little, if any, funding for a campus-wide EDMS, for example). Some of the programs and rhetoric at ARMA sessions and webinars acknowledge this difference in institutional culture and offer solutions for dealing with it. Many others do not.

In one sense, I don't blame ARMA or the locals for this focus on centralized culture, since most of their members come from that environment. But that also means that there is often not much incentive for archivists/records managers at institutions like mine to formally join ARMA and get the benefits that membership provides, because a lot of those benefits are just not as relevant as those found in other organizations, and in an era of shrinking personal and professional development budgets, sometimes a choice has to be made. If that choice is not in ARMA's favor, that reinforces ARMA's own incentive to cater to its existing members, program composition is altered, and a vicious cycle ensues.

It didn't get this way overnight, of course, and again, there is a LOT of good stuff to be had from ARMA even for university records managers such as myself. In my *opinion*-- I cannot emphasize enough that it is my opinion, because I have no concrete evidence-- a lot of it comes down to the money issue. To quote Peter again:

as for the cost of standards have you seen what ISO charges?. Should not the university pay for those standards since you depend upon them to do your work? do you not budget for the purchase of standards and other reference materials.
as for the cost of the conference you failed to mention that early bird registration gets a discount. What should the cost of the conference be? $500, $750, $250, free? do you want the conference at a nice venue or down market? price is but one factor

My own library pays for some-- by no means all-- of the ARMA standards. They are generally the ones that are directly relevant to my duties as University Records Officer, and they sort of look askance at me when I order them, because in general the analogous documents on the Archives side of my job are significantly less expensive. Speaking of which, I cannot envision a world in which the UWM Libraries would pay for me to attend the ARMA annual conference. In this world of budget cuts and shrinking travel budgets, their question would probably be the same as mine, to wit "What makes registration for ARMA worth 3x as much as registration for SAA?" I don't have an answer to that, and because I can't afford the registration fee myself without institutional assistance, I likely never will while in this position. (Since it's in Chicago this year I do plan on making it down to the Expo, since the price is right for that.) I cannot imagine that I am the only university archivist to  be in this position, and to me it seems emblematic of ARMA's structural focus issue-- a fee that high suggests to me that the board expects its members to be mostly or entirely comped by their institutions, which is going to happen less and less even for government RMs.

Again, I have nothing against ARMA. I've had a lapsed membership because of the brouhaha in WI affecting my take-home pay, but I'm hoping I can renew it soon because I actually do get a lot out of their publications and seminars. (I don't even necessarily agree with the graphic at the top of this post, though I do think that even token dues levels would be a sign of good faith on reaching out to underemployed or undercompensated RMs.) One day I WOULD like to run for an officer position, as Peter suggests (although I still feel too much like a young'un right now). SAA's Records Management Roundtable, of which I am chair this year, is as we speak working on some plans to reach out to ARMA and local chapters and look for ways that we can collaborate on education and advocacy, etc.

But there are many Archivists with RM portfolios in my position who look at what ARMA has to offer and say "why bother?" As a result, the organization loses those perspectives, and the gulf between the professions is maintained.

23 Things for Archivists: Fair is Fair

Hello, all people who still inexplicably follow this blog after a two year hiatus! I am updating here because I am reviewing the SAA Reference, Access, and Outreach section's 23 Things for Archivists site for an upcoming issue of Archival Issues. This will be my first review in an Archival publication, and it is very exciti--

"Wait a second", you say. "You have been blogging, tweeting, etc. for several years now, if sporadically in some cases. You may or may not know a lot of this stuff already! How in the name of God are you going to review this fairly?" A fair question! And one that I asked myself while starting to go through the site. Is "playing dumb" the solution? No, because I DO know a lot of this stuff as covered, and to a certain extent can't hide that.

Then it occurred to me: I should go through the site as a participant! That way, I can see to what extent the instructions they give regarding use of the various Web 2.0 tools and concepts are useful and meaningful for other archivists. And, on the flip side, I do see not a few things, particularly in the intermediate section that I'm not as familiar with as I probably should be, especially considering I tend to be the techie guy in the UWM Archives. So this will be a good learning experience for me, in addition to being a good framework for the review. (Plus: I can use the posts I create for notes for the review itself, which is nice.)

OK... so let's see... Thing one has you set up a Blog... Uh... awkward. So, yes, OK, a little bit of playing dumb will be needed. Let's go to Wordpress and see if we can't figure something out from there-- I do technically blog there as well, but at least I haven't set one UP over there before. Progress? I think? I will crosspost my findings here, if for no other reason than to breathe some life into this moribund excuse for an Archives blog and maybe get me posting regularly again. Stay tuned.

Archives TCG: Nerdiest thing EVER.

Sooooo, this is supposed to be a wrap-up post on SAA 2010. Which I swear I am still going to do. But first for something a bit sillier. OK, check that, a LOT sillier.

A bit of context: 2011 is SAA's 75th Anniversary Year, which means a lot of ill-conceived nostalgic foolishness. Exhibit A: Archivist Trading Cards. No, really, check that link. This is a true thing that is happening that is being sponsored by SAA. Go ahead. I'll be here when you get back. (Let the record show as well that Student Archivists at Maryland thought of this first.)

Anyway. Have you read the call for archivist trading cards? A little frivolous for a professional organization, you say? A lot of the Archives Twitterati thought so too. In fact, we took it a step further: why just have trading cards when you can have a COLLECTABLE CARD GAME?

@cdibella: I'm sorry, but the prospect of #archives trading cards makes me giddy. Hans Booms, black box, that crazy macroappraisal diagram - I want.

@sheepeeh: @cdibella I may or may not have a set of attribute icons and monster cards in my sketchbook already.

@cdibella: @sheepeeh Omigod - too cool. SAA's example card is pretty darn staid, but there's definitely a lot of potential there.

@sheepeeh: @cdibella As soon as I heard about the trading cards, I started imagining an #ebz like game for archives :P #nerd (never a big Magic player)

@derangedescribe: @sheepeeh @cdibella Archives: The Processing? @herodotusjr could write the rules.

I am sure Ms. Goldman thought she was being funny because Magic: the Gathering is one of the Big Three topics I tweet about, the others being Archives and Politics. Well WHO'S LAUGHING NOW HUH?! I give you the introductory rules for ARCHIVES: THE PROCESSING, the first trading card game where you fight not for universal domination, but for domination of the ARCHIVES WORLD! MUAHAHAHAHAH *cough cough* Sorry.

(Note: These rules are highly influenced by Magic: the Gathering, so all apologies to Richard Garfield, Aaron Forsythe, Mark Rosewater, etc. None of the example cards are balanced at all and are likely to stay that way unless the full set is actually developed, which seems unlikely if it's just me. So in the unlikely event that you are reading this and want to submit cards or card ideas, please feel free. If you are one of my Magic friends who have drifted over here, I am so, so sorry for butchering the game. But the potential for lulz was just too high. Also, I am probably the biggest geek in the history of geekdom for doing this.)

OBJECT
You're an archives manager looking to achieve complete archives domination. Or failing that make those other repositories fall flat on their faces. (We don't go for those namby-pamby consortia here in the world of Archives: the Processing.)

Win the game by either reducing your opponents’ Reputation to 0 (starting from 20; when Reputation = 0 the head of that player's institution no longer sees a point to an archives and discontinues the program) or accumulating 20 Processing Points (starting from 0; when you hit 20 processing points you have cleared out your backlog and are acknowledged as an Archives rock star).

CARD TYPES
Resources: Analogous to lands in MTG, produce Funding instead of Mana. Come in basic and specialized flavors. Basic Resource Types:
· Public Grants: W
· Institutional Support: U
· Shady Sources: B
· Benefactors: R
· Private Grants: G

NHPRC
Resource
T: Add WW to your Funding Pool. This Funding can only be used on Arrangement, Description, or Preservation cards or to pay upkeep on Project Archivists.

Electronic Records Management Initiative
Resource
T: Add an amount of U to your Funding Pool equal to the number of Computer Artifacts you control.

ARCHIVISTS:
Analogous to creatures. Legendary if named (Greene/Meissner, Margaret Cross Norton, Schellenberg, etc.) Instead of power and toughness have Publishing Offence/Defense to put dents in Reputation. Usually require resource upkeep cost.

University Archivist 2U
Archivist
Salary U (During your upkeep, pay U or sacrifice this archivist.)
If you would tap University Archivist to add a processing counter to a University Collection, add two processing counters instead.
T: Draw a Card.
2/2

Tenure-Track Professor 4GG
Archivist
Salary GG (During your upkeep, pay GG or sacrifice this archivist.)
Rhetoric (This archivist may only be blocked by other archivists with Rhetoric.)
Tenure-Track Professor cannot be tapped to add a processing counter to a Collection.
Sacrifice a Student: Add a processing counter to a University collection.
6/4

STRATEGIES: Analogous to enchantments. Have one or more of seven subtypes (preservation, description, arrangement, appraisal, reference, outreach, acquisition). Provide benefits to player who controls them, sometimes include drawbacks. Cannot have more than one of each subtype on board at once.

Collection Policy 1UUU
Strategy—Acquisition Appraisal
As Collection Policy comes into play, name a Collection subtype. Collections of that subtype require 1 fewer Processing counters to Process. This effect can’t reduce the Processing cost below 1.
You may ignore any effects triggered by rejecting a collection.

More Product Less Process 2RR
Strategy—Arrangement Description
At the beginning of your upkeep, put an additional Processing counter on each collection you control.
You may only play one Action, Challenge, or Artifact per turn.

ACTIONS: Analogous to instants. May have one or more of seven subtypes and are usually, but not always, used for defensive or beneficial purposes. Discarded after playing.

Conference Presentation 1G
Action—Outreach
Search your library for a basic Resource and put it into play tapped. Then shuffle your library. You gain 2 Reputation.

Collection Sell-Off B
Action—Acquisition Appraisal
As an additional cost to play Collection Sell-Off, return an unprocessed collection you control to the accessions deck. You may add an amount of B to your Resources pool equal to the number of processing counters on that collection.

CHALLENGES: Analogous to sorceries. May have one or more of seven subtypes and are usually used for offensive purposes. Discarded after playing unless they have Ongoing supertype, in which case only one of each subtype can be put on the field at once.

Mildew 2B
Ongoing Challenge—Preservation
Affect Opponent
Collections affected opponent controls have “At the beginning of your upkeep, sacrifice this collection unless you pay 1.”

Inconsiderate Researcher XRR
Challenge—Reference Preservation Remove X processing counters from target collection. Inconsiderate Researcher does X damage to that collection’s controller.

ARTIFACTS: “Tools of the trade”, usually have a beneficial effect for controller. May be tapped or sacrificed for additional benefit.
Hollinger Box 2
Artifact
Preservation Action or Challenge cards cost 1 less to play.
T: Add U to your resource pool.

Reading Room Reference Collection 5
Artifact
Archivists you control get +1/+1 for each other archivist you control.
At the beginning of your draw phase, draw an additional card.

COLLECTIONS: Free cards revealed from the Accession pile. Have processing point value which shows how much processing they require and how many points they provide once processed. May or may not have additional benefits. Untapped: Unprocessed; Tapped: Processed

Photo Series
Collection—Visual Records
When you complete processing on Photo Series, you gain 3 Reputation. If you also control an artifact named Content Management System, you gain 6 Reputation instead.
If you reject Photo Series, the next time you would gain Reputation, you gain no Reputation instead.
4

Unsolicited Benefactor Papers
Collection—Paper Manuscript
At the beginning of your first main phase, if Unsolicited Benefactor Papers are processed, you may add RR to your funding pool and lose 1 reputation.
If you reject Unsolicited Benefactor Papers, sacrifice a resource and lose 4 reputation.
6


TURN ORDER
· UNTAP
· UPKEEP: All “During your upkeep” things happen. Active Player places one “free” processing counter on an unprocessed collection he controls (representing his/her own processing efforts that turn).
· ACCESSION: Active Player reveals top card of communal collections deck. S/He may choose to accession the collection, in which case it enters play unprocessed under his/her control, or to reject it, in which case it’s put on bottom of deck. There may be consequences for rejecting a collection as noted on the collection card. “Accession” or “Appraisal” Action cards may be played at this time by any player.
· DRAW: Player draws one card from own constructed deck (action, funding, archivist, strategy, challenge, artifact).
· FIRST MAIN: Players may play one Resource Card per turn during this phase. Any number of non-Resource cards may be played. Cards in play may change these limits. Any player may also play Action Cards of any subtype during this phase.
· PROCESS: Active player may tap any number of his archivists to add that many processing counters to his collection. OR he can attack the reputation of an opposing archives (Representing a withering scholarly article published somewhere). Opposing archives may block with any untapped archivists available to prevent damage to the defending player's reputation. If an Archivist takes damage equal to his reputation defense, that archivist is Fired and goes to the discard pile. “Arrangement”, “Description”, or “Preservation” Action cards may be played at this time by any player.
· SECOND MAIN: See First Main for cards which may be played during this phase.
· DEACCESSION: Damage is removed from Archivists and “Until End of Turn” effects end. All Resources remaining in your pool drain and do one damage to your Reputation per resource (Administrators don't like it when you don't spend the money that you have been allocated). Any player may play Action cards at this time.

Summer at the UWM Archives

So it occurs to me that I've sort of written myself into a corner here with this blog. I promised myself that it would be a professional-topic only blog, but the truth is I've been a bit unconcerned with professional issues lately. At least part of the reason for this is that on May 30, I got married to a very lovely and amazing woman (the one who made fun of me for not understanding the concept of Rhetoric), and we've been on honeymoon in Quebec City since May 31. So yeah, kinda busy in personal life, so not a whole lot of leeway to keep up with the professional side of things.

"But Brad, what about the Library of Congress archiving Twitter? I thought you said you were going to blog about that!"

I may have said that, and then I may have forgotten to do so. It happens. Anyway LoC came out with a press release that answered a lot of the questions I posed on my Twitter account shortly after I posed them. I still would like to write an article about this or about appraisal of social networking sites in general. We'll see if it happens.

"But Brad, what about the brouhaha on the A&A list? That's interesting, right?"

Maybe if you're a giant process nerd (which, to be fair, most of the people who read this blog are). I suspect other people would find that IMMENSELY boring and trivial. Suffice to say, it sucks that PK felt like he was being censored, and I think RAIN is an incredibly useful resource, but some of the people who jumped to his defense were perhaps a little too vehement in said defense. (What? Overreaction? That never happens on The List!) That's all I'm going to say about that.

"Well, what about the post title? Are you doing stuff this summer since you're done with all the wedding crap?"

Funny you should ask. Yes, this summer should be a very productive one for the UWM University Archives program (note use of the word "should"; best laid plans of mice and men etc etc.). A lot of good opportunities in particular for electronic records and other alternate formats, because that's the way things have worked out. (It should come as no surprise that Summer is when things get done at University Archives; no more excuses of "Oh, we have to deal with students"). At the risk of overextension, here are a few of the things I'm hoping to get done before the end of August:

• Create a good way to harvest University Communications press releases. This is actually something I've been wanting to do since I got here a few years ago but only now am I getting the actual chance to do so, having finally met with the University Communications staff through the intercession of my boss. They gave us all of their HTML press releases, which I'm having a student convert to PDF for preservation and presentation and then processing via an index. That much is good; getting the stuff from the University Communications CMS is better. Supposedly this is easily accomplished by a harvester program which the tech guy at University Communications can set up. We'll see. In any case, a good e-records case study.
• Talk with Student Activities about harvesting defunct student org files from their new CMS. Student Activities has actually been very good about keeping me in the loop about what they're doing with their records. When they decided they wanted to move their student org files to a CMS, they contacted me to ask about records management and archives specifications, which I was naturally pretty happy about. They picked the system I liked better but I haven't yet seen what the RM/Archiving capabilities are like. This is a good opportunity, though, to get in on the ground floor and make sure that proper RM is being used throughout the life of the system. Another great e-records opportunity!
  
• Properly appraise and (maybe?) digitize historical center tapes. We processed the PAPERS of the founder/director of UWM's Center for 20th Century Studies earlier this year; most of what he gave us, however, were reel-to-reel tapes of lectures given by him and other figures. Some of these are easy to appraise (Buckminster Fuller!); others are not. I'm hopefully working with some people from the Center to identify key topics and speakers and preserve the ones that have some historical value. I don't actually know if digitization is in the future for any of these, but it's a nice dream. In any case we can finally get rid of the tapes that DON'T have value and clear out some space.
• More subject guides! We've put a number of research guides on various UWM History topics, including the history of the school's mascot, Vietnam War protests, and the history of the school's football program. These guides include timelines, photos, and bibliographies for additional resources and are, in my opinion, pretty cool. I'd like to make more of them, both on specific topics and on general things like collections dealing with The Arts at UWM.
• Process the Photo Services collection and make it more accessible. In January, we accessioned probably 120,000 negatives and contact sheets from the campus photo services department. That's good! Unfortunately, most of these are not labeled adequately. That's bad. Happily, we also accessioned the indices that Photo Services was using to access the negatives. That's good! Unfortunately, these indices are all paper, meaning that it is impossible to search them except manually. That's bad. Even worse, the later ones are HANDWRITTEN, which also means we can't OCR them. So we need to figure out a way both to provide initial access to the negatives (which I think we are going to be able to do since a large number of them correspond to the contact sheets we also received) and then to provide detailed, searchable access via the indices (which I suspect is going to involve some outsourcing and/or manual data entry. My students are so lucky....) This might get its own post later this summer.
  
• Maybe get going on a campuswide EDMS initiative? Maybe? We've been stalled for a while on getting EDMS going on campus because of various budgetary concerns, but there are a few things that might get it going again:
  

1. Our interim provost, who is in his day job the dean of the iSchool here and so has some appreciation for RM concerns;
2. The systemwide adoption of the HRS recordkeeping system for Personnel Records, which might get other departments also thinking about how to keep their e-recs (it helps that the CIO here is heavily involved in its implementation);
3. The fact that we're demoing some RM software at the UWROC summer meeting, which, while this campus doesn't like the particular software being demoed, might at least get the UWROC ball rolling on how to implement SOMETHING across the various campuses.

I don't have to tell you, o faithful readers, that getting a bunch of academic departments to do ANYTHING is akin to herding cats. But maybe, just maybe, if we get the infrastructure in place some people will sign on. In the meantime, I think some additional e-recs training is in order. Remember kids, only YOU can prevent the digital dark ages! Speaking of:

• Develop online training for Records Management. This is really neat-- UWM Employee Development met with me the week before I left for my honeymoon and indicated they wanted to work with me to develop some online training modules for records management, including interactive quizzes and possible certificates. Which of course is something I've wanted to do basically since 2008, but it's good that it's finally happening. In particular they validated my argument, ignored during the UWROC webcast process, that the average employee has a 15 minute attention span and so the 50-minute behemoths aren't going to cut it. Very exciting. This WILL have its own blog post as it develops.

So yeah! Good stuff. Also in August I'm going to SAA, so I intend to blog about that as well (hopefully on the Library's dime, because D.C. is expensive, yo.) Stay tuned!

CSI: Archives

As promised, the second post in as many days! (Man... I hope you guys don't think I'm making a habit of this.)


So, Tuesday morning, I am having a meeting with the Library Staff Association here to plan our annual holiday party. At the conclusion of this meeting, my student informs me that while I was in said meeting, someone from the bookstore called looking for information about the school's logo, specifically when the various iterations thereof are adopted. He also mentioned something about police officers, to which I said to myself, "He must have heard wrong. Police Officers don't go to the university archives." I have him look it up in a couple of locations while I'm at lunch, planning to call the bookstore director when I get back.

Returning from lunch, it turns out that my student got the boxes, but apparently did not get the memo that I wanted him to, you know, actually look in them. Sigh. I do the research myself, double check our course catalogs for the appropriate branding, make some photocopies, and call the bookstore director. "Great!" says he. "The officers and I will be right over."

Me: "Wait, what?"

As it turns out, the police officers are real! They are in from Los Angeles investigating a cold case from around 1985. I don't know many of the details, nor am I probably allowed to mention them even if I did, but apparently they recently discovered a portion of a missing person's anatomy in a ditch, wrapped in... wait for it... a University Bookstore bag. They brought pictures to show to me and the director of the bookstore. Ahem: EEEEEW.

The reason they need to talk to me is because the logo appears on one side of the bag, and identifying when said logo was in use is apparently critical to determining the possible range of dates the, um, separation could have happened. What a great opportunity to explain about archives! Sort of! I walk them through the various documents, talk about their provenance and their authenticity, and help them with the interpretation thereof. They seem very interested in what I have to say about the logo while I am trying to not throw up in my mouth a bit, take down my statement and my contact info, make an oblique reference to the possibility that I will have to fly down to LA as an expert witness, and thank me for my time and assistance. I am left more than a little nonplussed.

I have to say, I've seen a lot of weird stuff in my archival career thus far-- for example, the University of Maryland College Park Archives has a portrait of Spiro Agnew made out of feathers-- but I think providing evidence that a bookstore bag is from the appropriate time period based on when the logo was or was not in use is the strangest thing I've yet had to do. They don't really prepare you for this sort of thing in Library School (and as such I hope I'm not doing anything wrong by posting this here! It was just such a surreal experience that I had to share it. Hopefully I'm being vague enough that I'm not contaminating anything).

One does wonder what whoever did this was thinking when they wrapped up said body part in a bag with location-specific branding on it. Clearly the person was not exercising... *puts on sunglasses* Respect des Fonds.

YEEEEAAAAAHHHHH


(If you don't get that, go here. You're welcome.)

Jon Stewart, Archival Education, and Other Things That Are Far Out, Man

We're back, baby! Wow, really haven't posted here since January? Guess this is proof that while lack of content can't keep a good blog down, it CAN keep a mediocre one down. (My discovery of Twitter in March probably didn't help.) Buuuut, this week there are not one, but TWO newsworthy things to talk about! Whee! (The second of which will come tomorrow.)

So, as essential background, last week the University of California-Santa Cruz posted a, shall we say, unique job opportunity on the SAA website. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, you too can smoke pot and drop acid for 30 years and still have a respectable archives career:

The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.

Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.

Full disclosure here: When I saw this posting, I may or may not have proclaimed it the "best job ever posted on the SAA Career Center" on my twitter account. (This is, to be fair, not that hard of a thing to be.)

Naturally, this sort of thing doesn't go unnoticed by people who are not archivists. The posting was picked up by Cory Doctorow on Monday, and of course people on the site saw fit to complain about how silliness like this is why the UC system is over budget all of the time. Uhhh, way to not understand how university finance works at all there, buddy. Of course, the real shitstorm hit when, presumably learning of it from Boingboing, The Daily Show saw fit to mock the posting on its 11/11 show. Let's take a look:



Hot stuff. I can embed video on this thing. Suck it, twitter.

Anyway. FOR SHAME, JON STEWART! You pronounced "Archivist" incorrectly. This is, of course, not what most of the archives twitterati and commenters on the Daily Show website were primarily concerned about. The primary problem was with Stewart's characterization of the Archives profession as overpaid and overqualified for what they do, which is, according to him, determining whether or not to file something alphabetically or numerically. ("What?! Alphanumerically? Slow down, I don’t have a doctorate!") The current thread on the A&A list is 15 posts long, and, as these things do, has quickly escalated from writing him letters to making up videos mocking him from an archives perspective to calling for his head on a platter. (I may have made that last one up, but stay tuned.)

Can we calm down here and put things in perspective before we do anything dumb like having SAA write the Daily Show an official letter of disapproval? (Because he won't mock that on the show or anything.) As I see it, there are two issues at play here: one, the fact that Jon Stewart and the Daily Show writers are underinformed about the nature of the Archives profession (no argument here), and two, that they are using that lack of information to deliberately and maliciously denigrate the profession and the fact that most of the serious jobs require an MA or MLS of some sort. Whoa, Nelly. Let's think about this last one.

First of all, it IS a comedy news program. The Grateful Dead Archivist is sort of inherently a funny concept, but it's not something you can write a whole bit about. I think it likely that the writers of the Daily Show rely on librarians, archivists, and other information professionals to help them research their bits and put together clips and montages, so they're probably not as ignorant about the profession as they let on. Maliciously insulting their in-house info staff seems like a bad decision if they ever want to show videos on the show again, so I suspect that "for the sake of the bit" was invoked here somewhat.

(Though, of course, the need for additional education about what it is an Archivist actually does is always there. My girlfriend, 2 years after we started going out, still says my primary job is "telling people where to put their email". She's only half-joking.)

Second of all, is it possible that part of the reason for this outrage is that Stewart's comments hit a little close to home for people? Two-and-a-half years after leaving library school, I am still not entirely sure what I learned from the archives classes that is immediately useful for my everyday work (though of course the practicums WERE immediately useful). Provenance and Original Order? Do I really need a master's degree for that? Of course there's more to being an Archivist than alphabetizing and categorizing, but I feel like most of what I do at my job I learned from my on-site experiences rather than from the classes themselves. (EAD and MARC? National Geographic Internship. Preservation? Phillips Collection Internship. Reference and Outreach? Working at the UMD Archives.)

I will maybe, MAYBE concede that I got a lot out of my Records Management class, but I didn't really understand how to put it into practice until I got my EOP job and started writing records schedules. Even my appraisal skills, which are by far the most "abstract" of the main Archives/RM functions, I got mostly from my History coursework and evaluating which documents are likely to retain historical value, rather than from Archives coursework.

There's been a lot of talk of late about revamping the state of Archival education in this country to make sure that the knowledge and skills being taught are the ones that will serve future archivists well in their careers. There's been considerably less action on same, as task force after task force has concluded that it's not an immediate concern and that the idea of having ALA or SAA accredit Archives programs is probably an unnecessary expense. Maybe the mockery at the hands of Jon Stewart will get people to reevaluate this stance, at which point I will laugh and laugh. It's bad enough that the Daily Show, as a "fake" news outlet, is already one of the best real news sources out there; if we use him to justify stop putting off reevaluating archival education, it's just further proof that truth is stranger than fiction.

All that said, there is no such thing as bad publicity for Archives and Archivists. Also, that part about finding a Grateful Dead fan with exceptional organizational skills was pretty hilarious.

EDIT: "No one cares about how you pronounce the word "archivist."--Mark Matienzo, via Twitter

EDIT 2: The official Daily Show forum for discussing last night's episode is also good for some lulz. THE DAILY SHOW IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

I'm in ur kongres, openin ur gubmint

Change we can believe in:

The end may finally in sight to the seven-year battle historians and archivists have waged to overturn President Bush’s Executive Order 13233 of November 2001 that restricted access to presidential records. On January 7, 2009, the House of Representatives approved H.R. 35, the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2009,” by an overwhelmingly bi-partisan vote of 359-58. H.R. 35 was chosen by the House leadership as the first piece of substantive legislation passed in 2009 as a symbol of government transparency.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition. For those of you not up with your archival issues, EO 13233 was passed by President Bush in November 2001 and allowed any president to withhold access to the records of any OTHER president "reflecting military, diplomatic, or national security secrets, Presidential communications, legal advice, legal work, or the deliberative processes of the President and the President's advisers, and to do so in a manner consistent with the Supreme Court's decisions in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services, 433 U.S. 425 (1977), and other cases...".

For those of you who were wondering, that just about covers everything that a historian might possibly want to look at from a president's records. It's not up there with, say, EO 9066, but it is nonetheless a pretty odious directive, a pretty obvious subversion of the Presidential Records Act, and an extremely flagrant attempt to protect the legacy of Ronald Reagan, who, conveniently enough, would have had his papers released in 2001.

Welp, saddle up the horses, boys, 'cause it's time to go riding. Here are a few of the provisions of the act:

• Overturn Bush Executive Order 13233. Huzzah, huzzah, we already knew this though. Moving on:
• Establish a Deadline for Review of Records. No more of this 'waiting indefinitely for the president to give his permission' foolishness, which is always a good thing.
  
• Limit the Authority of Former Presidents to Withhold Presidential Records.
  Basically, EO 13233 said that if a former president didn't want his records released, he could tell the incumbent so and said incumbent would have to withhold the records. This was, of course, specifically inserted into the EO so that Democratic presidents could not overturn executive privilege for the papers of some of the, um, more 'ethically dubious' GOP CinCs.
  

  No more! The incumbent MAY withhold the records, but is no longer required to do so. Obama, coincidentally, has promised to support this kind of transparency in government. I'd be sweating if I were Oliver North right now.

• Require the President to Make Privilege Claims Personally. Not that former presidents have to physically go down to their presidential libraries and stop the researcher, but that any privilege claims expire once he does. In other words, Ronald Reagan DOUBLY has no way to withhold his papers now.
• Eliminate Executive Privilege Claims for Vice Presidents. This is a pretty obvious F-U to Vice President Cheney. Not that I'm complaining.

A similar bill actually passed in the House in 2007, but died when President Bush threatened to veto. It is unlikely that President Obama will do the same. Assuming people in the senate are non-stupid, this will be a boon to archivists, historians, and the general public alike. I for one am very excited about HR 35. If you're an information professional, you should be, too.

Happy 2009!

Well, since my girlfriend has updated her own infrequently-updated blog, I figure I should update mine. Happy New Year, folks! 2008 was a pretty darn good year for me, if I do say so myself. Not that you would know it from my posting record, which was... erm... sporadic. Sorry about that. I will attempt to update at least once a week from here on out as a New Years' Resolution. We'll see how that goes.

The first 'real' post of the New Year will probably be some musings on outreach and the difficulties posed by doing such when the records management position is 4 levels into the Library hierarchy. Look for that soon (I hope). Meanwhile, the big news for me personally is that I will be (probably) presenting at a conference in May. Stay tuned for that when I have talked to the program committee people to finalize.

Also, OCLC is really dumb

I admittedly do not have much of a horse in this race, because as an archivist any cataloging I do is by definition unique, but this is still a dumb change:

I took a sometime this morning to read through the proposed changes as well as the FAQs, and essentially OCLC is looking for a way to tell libraries that they don’t own the data that’s in their own catalogs. In essence — this is what this policy comes down to. The policy wraps some very nice changes for non-members into the statement in order to hide some really sucky changes that I don’t believe that they have the ability to ask for or enforce. And OCLC has some real balls here, because starting in Feb., records downloaded from OCLC will potentially include a license statement. Per the FAQ:

Prospectively. As of the effective date of the Policy, every record downloaded from WorldCat will automatically contain field 996 populated with the following:
MARC:

996 $aOCLCWCRUP $iUse and transfer of this record is governed by
the OCLC® Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records.
$uhttp://purl.org/oclc/wcrup

There is no need to add the 996 field to records by hand. OCLC systems will do this for you.

Retrospectively. For records that already exist in your local system, we encourage you to use the 996 field, which should have an explicit note like the examples below:
MARC:

996 $aOCLCWCRUP $iUse and transfer of this record is governed by
the OCLC® Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records.
$uhttp://purl.org/oclc/wcrup

Hott. So, we pay you to give you copies of the records we catalog, and in return you tell us that those records, 95% of each of which is composed of factual information, now belong to you, the distributor, rather than the original cataloger. Oh, and by the way, "Use must not discourage the contribution of bibliographic and holdings data to WorldCat or substantially replicate the function, purpose, and/or size of WorldCat." Smoooth.

So, it appears that OCLC is positioning itself as the RIAA of the Library world in terms of its attitude towards intellectual property. Hey, how's that working out for the RIAA? I'm just askin'.

That said, I think I agree with the Annoyed Librarian that, at least for the short term, OCLC is going to win this fight, because any organization that can get libraries to pay for their service TWICE is pretty obviously much smarter than its clients, and because librarians as a group are not so good at effective advocacy on this kind of stuff. Still, from a PR perspective and from a perspective of using vs. fighting against Web 2.0, I suspect this will come back to bite OCLC in the ass down the road.

Yet another Obama giving up his BlackBerry post

See, now, THIS is how presidents should take care of their email issues:

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

I do admit that it would be awesome for him to be the 'first e-mailing president', but it sounds like his records management team has suggested to him that this would not be a good idea. Which, fair enough, given how presumably the president has better things to do than check his email obsessively. But I do think that this shows that his staff is up on some of the information problems that could occur in a 21st century presidency, which is more than I can say about the incumbent.

Sarah Palin's e-mail chicanery (Warning: Political)

I thought we had enough of this from the CURRENT administration, but no.

Palin routinely uses a private Yahoo e-mail account to conduct state business. Others in the governor's office sometimes use personal e-mail accounts, too.

The practice raises questions about backdoor secrecy in an administration that vowed during the 2006 campaign to be "open and transparent."

[...]

She is allowed to keep e-mails confidential if they fall into certain categories, such as "deliberative process," said her press secretary, Bill McAllister.

[...]

"I don't hear any public clamor for access to internal communications of the governor's office," McAllister said.

No, no, Mr. McAllister, that's not how Public Records Laws work. The question is not whether there IS public clamor for the records; the question is whether there COULD be public clamor, say, I don't know, if she were to run for the Vice Presidency of the United States? Admittedly I have not read the Alaska Public Records Law, but I am reasonably certain that there is not a clause in there that says "unless it would be politically inconvenient." There is a reason these things are in place, you know.

Also, it's pretty clear to me that Gov. Palin and you both know that this is sort of a disingenuous argument at best, seeing as how the whole reason that she would use a Yahoo Account is so her emails wouldn't be trackable by the State of Alaska's email system.

No one in the Palin administration could say if the governor is saving her Yahoo e-mails. If she's emptying her e-mail trash, they are zapped from Yahoo's storage system within days or at the longest, months, Yahoo says.

"If you are asking do we have those e-mails, then the answer is no," said Anand Dubey, director of the state's Enterprise Technology Services. "We don't control Yahoo or Gmail or Hotmail or anything like that."

This to me seems awfully convenient, particularly in the wake of the 1100 emails that WERE on official Alaska servers which were withheld from a FOIA request on the grounds of 'executive privilege.' One has to wonder what is in the emails that aren't technically subject to Alaska public records laws. Except that they are. Unless the Governor's personal attorney says that they aren't. Hmmm.

I don't know. I just think it's very frustrating to give an email seminar in which you instruct people not to send business email from their personal accounts, and then read about a vice-presidential candidate for a major party who specifically instructs HER staff to do just that. It's enough to make a grown records manager cry.

Dean Dawson, state-records manager, is working on an e-mail-archive system for state employees, who tend to want to hang onto e-mail forever, he said. E-mail records should be kept as long as paper records of the same type — for instance, three years for general correspondence, he said. Top executives such as commissioners and the governor often must keep records longer, under state schedules.

Introducing Dean Dawson, ladies and gentlemen! The man with the most thankless job in the state of Alaska. (I would say 'in the United States', except you have to contend also with Missouri's records manager... or Texas's records manager... or the guy at NARA who has to archive the emails of the Bush Administration... Ah, right, this is why I am not working for the U.S. government!)

JOURNALISM! (Or,"Do a little more research before you mouth off")

Oh, for Bob's sake. Alex Heard LOOKS like he is complaining in Slate today about the willy-nilly destruction of records, but in reality he is demonstrating a profound ignorance of how records management works. Some choice quotes:

The letter conjured up images of my file getting scrutinized by furrow-browed NARA scholars who decided that, alas, John R. Poole was not of sufficient historical interest to keep around.

Yeeesss. This would be called 'their job.' Believe it or not, most of what most agencies create IS junk! I know. I was shocked too.

Dismayed, I looked into how the Records Retention Plan works, with help from several generous FOIA experts. What they described sounded more like a Records Destruction Plan, since it allows the FBI to discard roughly 80 percent of its files at any given time. ... Though the NARA experts who helped create the plan tried to come up with a fair, workable system, the bottom line is that the FBI gets to trash mountains of historical source material without adequate oversight.

The oversight thing is a concern, yes, but the fact is that that roughly 80 percent of its files mostly IS junk. In fact, having worked with records for just over 4 years now, I'd venture that 80 percent is generous.

Like many people who make FOIA requests, I'm probably hypersensitive to the potential loss of any one file among millions,

Yep. You are. Look, it sucks that the archival profession can't save everything, but the fact is that archivists are overworked as it is, and our space requirements are never as large as we'd like them to be. If we didn't weed, we'd drown in paper and NONE of our users would be able to find ANYTHING.

The system's fundamentals make sense, I guess—very complicated sense—but to me the disturbing part comes at the end of the line. At some point 25 years after a case closes, a file that isn't marked "permanent" gets pulled and looked at by one or two people inside the FBI. There are no "knowledgeable representatives of the NARA" monitoring this crucial moment. If it's decided internally that the file isn't important, it's gone.

Umm... how are you determining that there are 'no knowledgeable representatives of NARA' within the FBI? You know, there may, in fact, be archivists within the FBI, and they may, in fact, know what they're doing (and, my guess is, they do work closely with NARA to determine what is important). I know that the FBI has a history of destroying files it doesn't want people to see, but you know, not ALL of its destruction is malicious.

Michael Ravnitzky, an FOIA researcher based in the Washington, D.C., area, is no fan of the Records Retention Plan and likens it to an open-ended manual for strip-mining a priceless public record.

Oh, because he's not biased AT ALL or anything.

But isn't the FBI destroying only junk? I doubt it. Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher in California whose particular interest is in far-right groups, sent me a list of "destroyed" responses he's received over the years from FBI headquarters and field offices. There are dozens. We'll never know if they were significant—they don't exist anymore—but they sure look interesting to me. In 1994, for example, the Baltimore field office destroyed a file called "Arab Participation and Influence of Hate Literature in the United States."

See above snark. Also, you REALLY can't judge the value of a folder by its name. For example, we have a ton of folders in our Student Affairs files about student organizations, but for the most part these are just registration forms. Not remotely interesting, but we keep them for evidential value. Based on the signal:noise ratio over most of the records that have been created since the 1950s, my guess is that these were similarly useless.

Even if the Records Retention Plan team had scrutinized every page, I wouldn't trust their ability to decide now what might be significant to someone 100 years down the road.

...I don't even know how to respond to this. Do you think maybe somebody on the team had a background in history? Maybe? And no, that doesn't make their judgment infallible, but it's not a bad start. Also, please keep in mind that given the volume of documentation that's been produced since 1950, and given the volume of it that HAS been saved, the chances are pretty good that we're saving SOMETHING of import to future historians.

There's no general index to the NARA holdings that lists this information using comprehensible subject headings like "John Birch Society" or "Judge Crater."

Look, I'm sure that the NARA folks would LOVE to have a general index of their holdings. I'm sure they're working on it. Their entire job is to provide service and information to the public, for crying out loud. But part of their providing service and information is dealing with people who are whining because they haven't created that index yet, which, you know, takes time.

My final gripe: The volume of the FBI files isn't that mind-boggling.... The half-million cubic feet of FBI documents from 1981 would have fit into about a dozen McMansions, packed floor to ceiling. The stuff was already cataloged and cross-referenced, so a simpler strategy would have been to keep it all together....To protect this priceless collection of FBI material, all it would have taken was shelves, guards, and about 20,000 smoke alarms.

Uhh... I don't think you realize how much material that actually is. A really good archivist can process a cubic foot of material in about 2 hours, if the material is well-organized to begin with. By this measure, the 500,000 c.f. of material will take 1 million man hours to complete, or 125,000 work days of 8 hours each. I REALLY don't think NARA wants to devote that much time to one collection. Also, you do know that shelves, guards, and smoke alarms cost money, right? You know, that thing that NARA doesn't have a ton of?

Gah. I'm no defender of the FBI's penchant for secrecy, but this is a kerfluffle over nothing. Records get destroyed! Sometimes the record you want is a casualty! It happens! It happens a lot LESS now that retention schedules are in place! There's probably SOME malice involved, but I doubt very much that the FBI said "let's cover our tracks by destroying every minor file in our collection, muahahaha." More likely, they said "We're drowning in paper, help us Obi-Wan NARA, you're our only hope."

This is exactly why I think every academic who works in the archives should take a course on appraisal. I mean HONESTLY.

Library School 0, Brad's Girlfriend 1

Early this week, I decided that my current approach to scheduling offices' records-- i.e. "we need to bring you into compliance with State records law"-- wasn't working for me as well as I had hoped, and so chose to tackle the problem wearing my archivist hat instead. Instead of using the stick of compliance to get offices to go along with records scheduling, I would use the carrot of Immortality! (That sounds like a deranged Dungeons and Dragons item. Anyway.) To this end, I sent out emails to several academic departments, indicating that the UWM archives wanted to do an appraisal of those departments' records for addition to our collections and the historical record of UWM.

Amazingly, I actually received replies from a number of the emailed folks. Even more amazingly, the one surveyee thus far has been more than happy to give me subject files, syllabi files, departmental review stuff, and other types of records that I have been trying to get into the archives since I arrived at UWM. Even MORE more amazingly, when I talked about the prospect of writing records schedules for some of the non-archival files, they warmed to the topic! "We haven't known what to do with these," they said. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, it seems. Who knew?

Flash forward 20 minutes from that meeting. I tell my girlfriend, who is a Rhetoric Ph.D. student at UWM, about this epiphany of mine. The following exchange occurs:

Me: Isn't that cool?
Her: Um, Brad?
Me: ...What?
Her: That's called 'rhetoric'. Talking to people to get the desired result.
Me: ...Really?
Her: Yep. So I already knew what you just told me. But I knew you would get there eventually!
Me: ...Epic fail on my part, right?
Her: Pretty much, yeah.

So, yeah. I feel pretty dumb now. On the plus side, I am slowly but surely developing tactics to better cultivate donors. (At first, I thought the acquisition of University Records was going to be easier than manuscript curating because they HAD to give them to me. How naive I was in October.) On the minus side, this really IS the kind of thing they should be teaching us in Library School, rather than Dialog or semantic frames or similar nonsense. I want my money back. (Well, not really, I did learn stuff in my actual archives courses. On the other hand, it WAS a lot of money...)

Speaking of information architecture, I've just read David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous and have some thoughts, but those are for a different post.