Beautiful finding aids

Recently, I was presented with a challenge by a tech librarian. He asked me if I could think of any examples of special collections websites with appealing, user-friendly finding aids in EAD. One comment made: ”Archives seem to be the only places still doing a long narrative, like a printed document, on the web.”

My first response was to mention the Online Archive of California, but after that, I realized that my knowledge of visually appealing finding aid design and special collections websites was very limited.

The OAC is one of the first archival initiatives of its kind, because it attempts to digitally collocate archival resources in the state of California. Finding aids here are not only easily discovered through each repository’s website, but also through Google, ArchiveGrid, and OCLC (including OAIster when appropriate). Of course, the appealing interface doesn’t hurt the possibility of user discovery. The finding aids (here’s an example) have more visual interest through use of color blocks and links on the right side, as well as a sans-serif font. Perhaps the best part about a statewide interface? Consistency in design and usability.

The purpose of the site, however, is clear: to search finding aids (also referred to as collection guides). Digital content is tied to relevant collections with a small eyeball icon. Users can browse from A-Z and view brief collection descriptions. Overall the site has a clean interface with a simple purpose. The OAC’s collections are tied to the UC system’s Calisphere, which is a public- and educator-focused search site for over 150,000 digital objects (it also includes teacher modules for K-12). Both of these projects are powered by the California Digital Library.

Because my colleague was interested in EAD finding aids, I decided to start with SAA’s EAD Roundtable website. The site includes a list of early adopters of EAD, so I took a look at how creative some institutions were with representing their finding aids online.

My favorites so far?

Emory’s Manuscripts and Rare Books Library has a great search and browse interface. From the main page, users are informed that they can browse, search, and also search the catalog for resources. The database includes unprocessed collections, which is a pleasant surprise in the era of “hidden collections”. The finding aids themselves are visually interesting, with linked content, as well as icons for the PDF and printable versions (see the James D. Waddell papers for example).

Columbia University’s Archival Collections Portal searches both finding aids and digital content. I think this type of searching is natural for users, making it easier for users to access resources. The finding aids appear to be in a variety of formats depending on the collection, including HTML and PDF, but each record in the portal includes a descriptive summary and subject terms.

Both of these go against the typical left-side menu browsing of many EAD finding aids. I started to realize with my preferences that EAD was less important than the overall visual appeal and ease of use of the finding aid itself. If we can do a full-text search of any text document, why are we doing complex EAD encoding? Why aren’t we just doing HTML? How about catablogs? The idea is that, like MARC, having standards can help researchers find similar resources.

I’m at the beginning of understanding the many reasons to use EAD, but already I find myself questioning it. Jeanne over at Spellbound Blog talked about the possibilities of simpler EAD finding aids in 2008, through the Utah State Historical Society’s next-generation version of the Susa papers. There’s the Jon Cohen AIDS Research Collection, which is a finding aid and digital collection. Then there is the famous Polar Bear Expedition collection of next-generation finding aids.

There seems to be a lot of overlap between finding aids and digital objects, which I’ve seen at Duke and Eastern Carolina University, among others. Then there’s the movement to push our resources onto Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, etc. If repositories host their own finding aids and digital objects, they can repurpose and collocate them anywhere on the web, right?

I still don’t know if I have a good answer for my colleague. I know I have much to learn. I am curious to know…what’s is your favorite EAD finding aid site? The most beautiful finding aid site?

NCLA Part 1: Politician papers and the new North Carolina Gazetteer

I am back in Winston-Salem, pleasantly surprised by my first experience with a state library conference: NCLA. I was warned that registrations were lower than ever, and while attendance was indeed low, I found that some sessions were more seminars than panels (which is always a better learning environment for me).

I attended the Government Resources Section’s session on politician papers in libraries, with Betty Carter from UNCG and Tim West of UNC Chapel Hill.

UNCG was given permission to acquire the papers of Senator Kay Hagan, and also has the papers of Congressman Howard Coble. While their collection’s strengths lie primarily with performing arts and early 20th century authors, UNCG’s University Archives and Manuscripts department also has political papers. Betty Carter mentioned two important things to consider when acquiring political papers: size and research potential. She also mentioned the usefulness of SAA’s publication entitled Managing Congressional Collections.

 Tim West from the Southern Historical Collection represents a large special collections repository. He mentioned the importance of obtaining special funding for a processing archivist, which the SHC has done successfully by asking for funding from donors. Research value (through archival appraisal) for historians, journalists, community activists, undergraduates, relatives, and constituents is of utmost importance to the SHC. Mr. West mentioned the importance of collecting from individuals and groups of “exceptional impact” such as officeholders who have been influential outside of political activity, people involved in politics who did not hold public office, political journalists, and more.

During the ensuing discussion, the panelists agreed that there is a need for a statewide documentation strategy for political papers. I am concerned with the role of academic special collections departments in making available political papers to the public. Academic libraries focus on students and faculty. What role do public libraries play in this? We recently de-accessioned and donated to the State Archives the papers of a local state representative because we felt they would be researched more frequently there. I had not thought that academic libraries with ties to political figures might also collect these types of work — what about the State Archives as a repository for government documents? Perhaps election materials and personal papers do not fall within their collection development policy? Also, what about elecronic records? Neither have, so far, begun collecting born-digital resources.

Another issue that became highlighted during the panel: the majority of those participating were government documents librarians, most of whom had never dealt with manuscripts. It was interesting to watch librarians and archivists discuss archival concepts — and it made me realize how much further we have to go to understand each other and our methods in dealing with “records.”

Later that afternoon, I helped introduce Michael Hill, supervisor of the Research Division of the NC Office of Archives & History and also coordinator of the North Carolina State Highway Historical Marker Program. His presentation on editing William Powell’s North Carolina Gazetteer was engaging and amusing, exploring some of the origins of unique place names in the state (i.e. Asey Hole, Pig Basket Creek, Whynot). I am really looking forward to the book, which should come out sometime next year and will undoubtedly become another reference must-have.

After archives inventory, then what?

I came to my job as a special collections librarian in an urban public library with grand ideas about interactive finding aids, MARC records linking to HTML or EAD finding aids or maybe a catablog, digitized content in a DAM system or collaborative project, and envisioning our first born-digital acquisitions. What I found: tens of feet of unprocessed manuscripts, rare books, objects, and ephemera without printed finding aids or even donor agreements; uncataloged maps and card catalog-indexed vertical files, uncataloged microform, and a backlog “closet of doom.”

Nearly one year into my first professional position as librarian-archivist, I have some idea of how I would like to proceed with the unique collections of the North Carolina Room. I decided early on to formulate a structure for our existing archival and special collections materials, but first we needed a place for stuff to go. I got an NCPC grant and had a locking cage built where our department would be moving. Then my colleagues and I started moving collections, objects, and rare books into the cage (photographic and audiovisual materials are kept in a temperature-controlled closet).

The North Carolina Room has officially moved to the ground floor of Central Library, where I am now able to deal directly with the materials in our cage, particularly record groups that need finding aids. Our community organization archives (League of Women Voters, Daughters of the American Revolution, as well as StoryLine) can be kept securely in one place, but no one knows about them. My next step? Create an inventory of fonds (as well as objects, scrapbooks, and other unique materials).

After that, I have to admit I am unsure where to go. Ideally I would work with an IT team and administration to purchase and install Archon/AT and start adding finding aids that can be exported into our catalog as MARC and through our website as EAD/HTML. But we don’t have an IT team, our budget is slashed, and our county government programmers are not interested in supporting a database (yet).

I’ve developed an accession numbering system to go through all of the inventoried “collections” and am creating MS Word-based, very preliminary finding aids that I will hand to our cataloger so we can at least get some “placeholder” MARC records in the catalog. Then I am going to create a catablog and/or create HTML finding aids and investigate the possibility of our finding aids becoming part of ArchiveGrid.

In some ways, I have come to prefer “placeholder” MARC records that can be shared on WorldCat to the multitude of complicated, expensive finding aid programs out there. At UCLA (before AT) we would create a MS Word finding aid, an MS Excel container list, then send these files to an EAD coder who would then program the finding aid and send it to the OAC for harvesting. The Brooklyn Historical Society’s catablog, Emma, combines full-text searchable summary entries with links to PDF finding aids — using a free blog interface.

In my mind, and in line with the now overhyped MPLP method, people prefer to know that you have a group of records about someone/something instead of waiting for a precise description of every single item in a group of records. I see rows of unprocessed scrapbooks, slides, maps, artwork, administrative records, etc… and see a lot of information that isn’t being shared. Basically what I am wondering is: are finding aids in the traditional sense worth it?

Here’s to making things available. Feedback/suggestions are welcome!

SAA Research Forum: collaboration for the greater good

My presentation at the 2009 SAA Research Forum was “Sharing for the Greater Good: Outreach and Collaboration from the Perspective of Community-Based Archives,” which was an attempt to bring attention to collaboration between large and small memory institutions. You can read the abstract here.  

Following the initial shock of actually being selected to participate in the forum, I realized that there was much I wanted to say and very little time (10 minutes to be exact) to say it. I attempted to explore the process of creating a successful collaborative partnership, using the Collaboration Continuum created by Gunter Waibel in the now-famous report “Beyond the Silos of the LAMs.” While the OCLC report was meant as a high-level analysis of primarily intra-insititutional collaboration, I felt that the continuum could be applied to many local-level projects and relationships between libraries, archives, and museums.

For example, Digital Forsyth is a county-wide collaborative digitization project bringing together LAMs for a common goal. The technical and grantwriting expertise of Wake Forest University was key to the creation of the project, while Forsyth County Public Library, Old Salem Museum and Gardens, and Winston-Salem State University provided the content depth. All of this was done without the smaller institutions feeling obligated to donate their materials to Wake Forest. As a result, the DF website has become the new archive of visual history of Forsyth County, undefined by physical or institutional boundaries.

I believe that these boundaries can be blurred, indeed erased, by the formation of digital archives/libraries/museums. Through the creation of topical/geographic digital LAMs, we can permit greater access and findability to the researcher/patron/end-user. This carries great significance for community-based archives, who can keep their records in cultural and geographic context. Communities and individuals can re-define their context artificially and create new archives without diminishing or erasing historical/evidential/documentary/cultural value.

By including records and collections in subject-based archives (like the Walt Whitman Archive) or union catalogs/federated searches (like ArchiveGrid or OAIster), multiple points of access — and description — can be conceived. Some archivists ponder the interest of non-archivists in such a project. I think “non-archivists,” particularly those coming from community-based archives, would welcome the opportunity for autonomy and laying claim to their records online.

Problems arise when we consider the lack of physical preservation and digitization resources available to these community-based archives. That’s where larger institutions come into the picture: to collaborate “for the greater good.” I think the state of North Carolina is headed in a very positive direction with the Traveling Archivist program and the NC Digital Heritage Center (see previous post), both of which focus on smaller, community-based memory institutions. Smaller institutions can then take the initiative to make contact with larger institutions and be responsible for their community’s history being represented (if they so choose).

I guess my ramblings demonstrate the largeness of my topic, and the overall squishiness of my argument. I believe collaboration can be much more than a buzzword. Between the large and small repositories I can see convergence, which the Collaboration Continuum notes as the high-investment, high-risk, high-benefit result of a successful partnership. Through it, both actors are responsible for their roles and become intertwined in a mutually-beneficial relationship and at least one “common function.”

I plan to post a paper exploring my topic in a bit more detail for the forum proceedings later this month. I hope to make better sense of all this by then!

Reflections: SAA Austin (Thursday/Friday — North Carolina sessions)

On Thursday I attended Session 109, “Not Another Survey!” about statewide collections inventories and needs assessments. I have often wondered who creates the sometimes long and always investigative surveys of collections and preservation needs. Of course I found the presentation by Hilary Perez, the Project Archivist at NC ECHO the most interesting of all! What is fascinating about NC ECHO’s survey was that it entailed actual site visits, which were done a week at a time and included a 17-page survey. They focused on non-living, permanent, non-local government collections in the state of North Carolina. Here are some of the facts following their 5-year project:

• Over 850 institutions were visited
• 761 institutions responded to the survey
• 16% have no web presence
• 72% have no disaster response plan (including my department)
• 59% describe their storage facilities as inadequate
• 25% are entirely volunteer-run

The resulting institutional directory created by NC ECHO serves as a clearinghouse of information about these statewide cultural heritage institutions. For some, it is their only web presence. Another conclusion made during the presentation: digitization is the fastest, best way to preserve the cultural heritage of the state.

(I also attended Session 202 and Session 210 on Thursday.)

On Friday I attended Session 408 entitled “Advocacy, Education, and Money: How State Historical Records Advisory Boards Can Help.” Sarah Koonts, Head of the Collections Management Branch of the North Carolina State Archives, spoke about our state’s SHRAB and some of its advocacy initiatives. She pointed out in her presentation that while NC ECHO is IMLS-funded, the NC SHRAB does not have any full-time staff.

As part of the SHRAB’s funding from a SNAP (?) grant, the Traveling Archivist Program was developed. By offering best practices, demonstrations, and consultation about preservation, the Traveling Archivist will provide valuable guidance to small cultural heritage institutions in North Carolina. I will be applying for the first round of the program, which is due on September 30, on behalf of my library. It is limited to 40 institutions between the two rounds of the program.

Since this is focused primarily on physical preservation of primary resources, what about digital preservation? NC ECHO’s role appears to have been defined early on as the place for digitization initiatives, but it seems that it has shifted in recent years to help identify institutions and create an information clearinghouse.

Perhaps in relation, UNC-Chapel Hill recently announced this position as part of a new North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, to be housed as part of the North Carolina Collection. The NC Digital Heritage Center will “provide digitization and hosting services for cultural heritage materials held by libraries, archives, historical societies, and other institutions in the state of North Carolina.” That’s right, they are going to be a digitization center for the state!

While at SAA, I spoke briefly with NC archivists and speakers about the possible relationship between the Traveling Archivist Program (physical preservation) and the NC Digital Heritage Center (digital preservation). Some archivists had not heard of either program; others had not seemed to consider the fact that these programs were being developed simultaneously. They are both incredibly valuable programs and demonstrate a renewed focus on archival advocacy and education for community-based repositories.

One question I forgot to ask: do either of these projects have to to with the IMLS statewide planning grant? One was awarded in 2009 to North Carolina entitled “North Carolina Connecting to Collections” as a collaboration between the NC Department of Cultural Resources (which encompasses NC ECHO and the SHRAB), the North Carolina Museums Council, the North Carolina Preservation Consortium, and the Federation of North Carolina Historical Societies to “identify, coordinate, and assess collections preservation and disaster preparedness activities in the state’s cultural heritage community.” Any ideas?

(I also attended Session 411 on Friday.)

In the meantime, I will be following closely the development of these programs since they are near and dear to my librarchivist heart.

Reflections: SAA Austin (Tuesday/Wednesday)

I’ve finally gotten myself and my notebook together in the same place for a little while to post some thoughts on the Society of American Archivists / Council of State Archivists meeting! Thank goodness they’ve started posting session presentations at the meeting site, session audio/video on facebook, and archiving tweets on TwapperKeeper!

The Research Forum was filled with ups and downs, innovations and regurgitations. The day was broken down into topical sessions, and each speaker got 10 minutes to reveal the main idea of his or her research or project. I enjoyed Paul Conway’s presentation on “visualists” and what he calls the “end of image cataloging,” going beyond the search to user navigation. There were a number of speakers who discussed supercomputing and high-level information architecture, which I must admit was over my head and somewhat out of my area of interest.

My favorite part of the day was the poster session. I hope it can be bigger, longer, and perhaps separated topically next year. Among other great posters, I got to speak with a representative from Denver Public Library, whose poster focused on the Alliance Digital Repository, a collaboration of Denver-area libraries. The project was IMLS-funded and started out with an optimistic, “we’re family” vibe. It ended up with a lot of money spent and little in the way of true collaboration, including the absence of any DAM system. His final words of advice: create contracts of understanding and write everything down when collaborating.

I presented near the end of the Research Forum during the session on “Formulating Community Practice.” I will follow up to this post with a fuller description of my presentation. As the only representative from a public or community-based organization, needless to say I was humbled seeing my name alongside representatives from OCLC, UNC-Chapel Hill, and others. I was not sure, given my topic, that I should have been selected to speak. Perhaps it was the relatively small scope of my project, or perhaps it had to do with my ability to explain the challenges of my project. It is my hope that I can speak more intelligently about the process of empowering and collaborating with community-based organizations in future years.

I also got to participate in THATCamp Austin, which I’ll post about shortly.

On Wednesday I took the ACA Certified Archivist exam. I will have more to say about that experience in a few weeks when I find out the results! All I can say right now is that I was the first to finish the exam that morning, which could be a very bad or a very good thing.

ALA Chicago musings

I am still trying to figure out my place in ALA. Perhaps it would help to have an iPhone or laptop to keep in touch with folks doing contemporaneous updates…

My Emerging Leaders group’s final presentation in Chicago went really well. Following a long workshop about leadership, we were given the chance to put together our poster boards and prepare ourselves for the small rush of ALA elites on their way to witness our leadership experiments. I took to calling it a science fair.

After the poster session, I was asked to present my group’s project at an informal gathering of our sponsoring committee, the Joint Committee on Archives, Libraries, and Museums (aka CALM). Our project was defined as “ALA/SAA/AAM Combined Committee on Archives, Libraries and Museums (CALM) is seeking to extend its impact in speaking on broad issues of access, preservation, and advocacy for the value of archives of all types,” which we refined with mentor Christian Dupont. The group was really excited that we updated and simplified the CALM wiki and created a delicious page as a source for convergence literature, both web and print. Best of all, I was able to sit in as a guest during the meeting, where I was able to participate in a rather passionate discussion about Preservation Week, Archives Month, MayDay, and the preservation education needs of community-based archives. I also brought my group’s suggestion that CALM consider future projects for EL’s such as marketing LAM issues through 2.0 technologies (my colleagues suggested creating a podcast with guest speakers). The committee was very appreciative of our work.

Other than that, I was able to attend some great sessions on preservation and special collections. In the Exhibits area I was able to get my copy signed of So You Want To Be a Librarian by my friend and colleague Lauren Pressley. Of course, my first trip would not have been complete without a trip to Millennium Park and the Bean, a meal of Chicago deep-dish pizza pie, and a high-rise view of downtown. Good times!

One library’s trash…

…is another’s stored collection.

My department has a long history of collecting. Our most recent department head was famous for coming to the local history room at least once a month with a bag or two filled with genealogy manuscripts, rare books, and general curiosities — only to have them placed in our storage closet.

This type of acquisition-based system is not new or unfamiliar to many archivists. Nearly every special collections department has its stored collections, its undocumented acquisitions, its “what is that?” The good news is that processing archivists work hard to inventory and create finding aids for these record groups and objects.

Sometime in the last decade, our department acquired the entire contents of Wake Forest University’s vertical file collection. In approximately 14 banker’s boxes, our library suddenly acquired about 40 years worth of newspaper clippings, brochures, and other ephemera, arranged by topic. Our department has its own sizable vertical file collection that is frequently used to supplement research into old issues of the Winston-Salem Journal and other local newspapers (none of which are indexed).

I have to admit, both the WFU and our own vertical files seemed a bit primitive. “You mean…someone had to go through the newspaper and clip these articles out of the newspaper, then file them by topic?” That, along with the fact that our microfilmed newspapers were not indexed (let alone digitized), seemed hard to believe, if not archivally unsound. Both sets of clippings can be found pasted or Scotch-taped to chipboard or construction paper, but some include photocopies of the original clippings. At least they stopped clipping in the early 1990s, when the Journal started getting indexed online.

It was suggested that perhaps we interfile the clippings from Wake Forest with those of our own…but without knowing what already had been clipped, we would be duplicating our work…and with no more filing cabinets to use, expanding our collection by no fewer than a five thousand clippings seemed impossible. My solution? I created an Access database where our library page, my colleagues, and I could index the title, date, topic (as given), publication and page number for each publication — then toss the originals.

So far we have around 500 records in the database. I am not sure if this is the best solution but it is certainly an affordable one. A speaker at ALA Midwinter in Denver accosted a group interested in local history and genealogy about the benefits of going straight to digitization and OCR — and was unyielding in her argument even when a small-town librarian suggested indexing her clipping files.

Of course, digitizing our newspapers and OCR-ing them is my ultimate goal. North Carolina is working to create an historical newspapers program and I am paying careful attention to it. My goal is to learn how to make our database available for searching on our website…at least until we have full-text out there.

Are vertical files useful today? They can be — just ask the woman who came in a few weeks ago and found a photo of herself under “School Integration” in Winston-Salem. Should we strive to digitize and create full-text searching for our newspapers? Absolutely. Let’s begin by getting our collections out of storage, into finding aids and databases, and into the hands of researchers.