archives

Personal Archiving Systems and Interfaces for Institutions: PDA 2011

/ dwakimoto

And, we’re back. This session is about personal archiving systems being used in institutions. Very interesting and relevant topic given how many institutions are using institutional repositories. So without further ado, on to the summaries!

Enriching the Digital Junk Drawer
Birkin James Diana

Talking about Brown Digital Repository (BDR): instituional repository, platform for digitized library collections, departmental projects, and personal digital archiving piece. Built the BDR uploader: upload, describe, and manage access to them. In a perfect world, students and faculty would use it to store class projects, class materials, etc. (university related stuff and not personal stuff).

Worried about the personal digital archiving space becoming a digital junk drawer. Working assumption: A good repository helps user to navigate to their items/easy to upload and then users’ will be more likely to upload good content (and actually use it). Need quality metadata for this to work. But if you require long forms to create metadata, people won’t upload their materials. (Make it simple and people will actually use it) BDR requires a title and a tag in order to upload materials.

How, then, do you get quality metadata?
The best way is via background processes that do not require user mediation. If you have ability for users to optionally edit metadata, you will get even better metadata. What BDR is interested in is an approach that has background processes but requires user interaction,.

Want to test hypothesis that users will be willing to spend nano-blocks of time organizing and describing their materials if it is easy and they see the benefit of it. Mechanism: occasionally shown a single question about: item, importance of item, and about relationships between items. Show real-time benefit display, better navigation, improved utility-assessment, and more relevant scholarly-resources based on their answers to the questions. Evaluation of experiment via a thumbs-up/thumbs-down toggle and a go away button. Result would be understanding the users’ experience and data to modify weighted randomization algorithms for question frequency/type.

Privileging easy deposit of digital objects over metadata, but want metadata because it is necessary. So using easy-to-use ways of getting that metadata without creating a barrier to use. (Very, very cool. I can’t wait to learn a little more when I have time to research it after the conference is over.)

Digital Collections at the NCAR Library and Archives: Archiving in 21st century
Kathleen Legg from National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

NCAR is “devoted to service, research, and education in the atmospheric and related sciences” and is funded by the government. Legg is focusing more on access. She is working on preserving institutional memory documenting the activities of NCAR.

Vision for archives: trusted resource used by a wide-ranging audience, documents the history of NCAR and development of the atmospheric sciences, and provide an optimal user experience. (Love the user-centric approach)

Flagship collection is the Dr. Warren Washington papers. Dr. Washington received National Medal of Science and is a NCAR scientist. His papers document his work as a scientist, mentor, and as an advocate for diversity issues. Many different formats of materials. Using Washington papers to create a digitization model for NCAR.

Need to move away from traditional ways of access in the archives because researchers expect more in the digital research world. Meet expectations by providing a variety of ways to access collections:

  • Archives website (online finding aid, keyword search capability)
    Have EAD finding aids in ARCHON with ability to keyword search the finding aids–great for experienced archival users
  • Warren Washington Digital Exhibit: a way to increase access to materials for those who are not familiar with archives. Targets students as one main user group. Also serves as a jumping off point for other scholars.
  • OpenSky: Institutional Repository. Launched in September 2010–holds all digital assets from the archives, published NCAR research, and grey literature. Great way to increase understanding of context in scientific research via seamless integration.

Nice work NCAR! Love the user-centric view and seamless access to the materials.

Constructing a Digital Identity Compatible with Institutional Archives
Jay Datema (Bookism)

Great article about personal digital archiving: Jeremy Leighton John, “The future of saving our past” in Nature 459 from 11 June 2009

Talking about technological tools for personal digital archiving:
XML, RSS, Atom
Personal Home Page: PHP, WordPress, Drupal

The Egosystem: photos, blog posts, email, publications, activity streams
The id: Does someone want to read what I did in the future? Family, Institutions, and history may be interested.

Datema’s thinking has been influenced by Jacques Derrida: The Post Card and Archive Fever. Also, loved Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone. Sees social network data as postcards: data moving around and connecting different people and things. See media commons: a digital scholarly network. Many ways to capture your data including his creation Bookism.

Take away: Archives are doing some amazing work in the realm of improving digital archiving and increasing the usefulness to users. I love the user-centric viewpoints of these talks.

Makers: DIY Personal Archives at PDA 2011

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Next up, talks on creating DIY personal archives as part of maker culture. Check out Collin’s post on Maker Subculture for a good overview if you haven’t heard about Maker culture.

The Smallest Day: A nerd and his dad set out to digitize the family archives
Stan James (Lijit Networks)

Stan’s dad had begun scanning 35mm slides and his wedding photos. Scanned nearly 20,000 photos at 600 dpi, 68 home movies, and 54 audio reels. They have also tagged the photos with information of people in them. Also scanned World War II newspaper clippings, postcards, and other manuscript materials.

Tools used: Picasa, Audacity, Dragon Naturally Speaking, Live Mesh, mozy, ancestry.com, LogMeIn and Windows. (Much of this software is free)

Google Street View was a huge hit with Stan’s family to see change in the landscape over time. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk for transcription of scanned letters. Face tagging was also a hit.

Problems: Tagging in Picasa is linked to your Gmail contacts so had to write hacks in order to tag photos with relatives’ names who never had email. Dates before 1970 cannot be used on Picasa web.

SmallestDay Project (working on right now)
Open-source, WordPress-style
All media types
Login-agnostic
Scan-to-web
Mechanical Turk transcriptionWiki-style collaboration
Sync’d to individuals
Interested in helping? Contact Stan at stan@wanderingstan.com

This is a great family project and you can take your memories with you on a laptop because it’s on the cloud. Great way to reconnect with family history and to work with your family.

What do we mean by Personal when we consider Personal Digital Archives?
Lori Kendall (University of Illinois)

“Personal” in Personal Digital Archives can make us emphasize the individual over the social. Kendall has been looking at SOKOL: Joseph L. Bobek via an enthnographic study. Bobek was Kendall’s grandfather and the document was created by Kendall’s mother. Created with many scanned documents and other media. Compiled as a PDF document and distributed on a disc with other digitized family documents.

Distribution as another type of archiving. (Interesting thought–makes archiving more social.)

Archivists do not agree on what to emphasize in personal archiving:
Personal archiving as personal (Cox, 2008, pp. 3-4; McKemmish 2001, p. 3; Hobbs, 2010, p. 222)
Emphasizing the social in personal archiving (Harris, 2001; Nesmith, 2006)

Personal archiving occurs in social practices, social contexts, social materials, and social and sociotextual identities. We identify as people through our connections to social groups. Therefore, it is not surprising that personal archiving reflects these social conditions.

Note: Great talk integrating theories and ideas with personal archiving. I really enjoyed the connections, that I saw, with collective memory, collective identities, and photographic theories (especially Susan Sontag’s work).

The Splendiferous Story of Archive Team and the Rapidly Disappearing Digital Heritage
Jason Scott (Archive Team)

Jason Scott is an activist and collector. He wants to share his stuff with people. Runs the website, textfiles.com in order to save and share digital files. Helps preserve data that is in danger of being lost. A lot of computer history is in danger and being deleted.

Created ArchiveTeam.org to save “in danger”digital objects. Duplicated as much of GeoCities as possible when GeoCities was being shutdown. Archive Team collected 900GB of data. Put up GeoCities on Pirate Bay in order to get more attention.

Need ways of empowering people to take charge over their digital data. We need plans *before* the disaster to preserve our data. Archive Team is working on this at the moment (so is Internet Archive).

Take away: Personal digital archiving does not have to be a solitary activity. In fact, it can be a great opportunity for working together and reconnecting with family. There are many ways to archive one’s materials and we’ve seen many idiosyncratic ways and ideas thus far.

Strategies, Tools & Services: PDA 2011

/ dwakimoto

Next up, three talks on personal digital archiving strategies for individuals.

The Lost Curator: Personal Digital Archives and the Death Transition
Evan Carroll (The Digital Beyond)
The Digital Beyond is a website that helps people understand what happens to digital data after they die.

Identity Preservation
Objects are passed to heirs as an act of identity preservation–and often give with family stories. Objects are imbued with meaning via the stories. Now we have a shift to digital objects in the cloud.

Issues with passing on digital content: awareness, access, ownership, preservation, and many more. But we aren’t talking about this today.

Talking about Meaning
How can we design personal archives so that a lifetime of digital content can be accessible and meaningful for future generations?

We have lots of stories that go with digital photos, but we don’t connect the two. And this is a problem and we could potentially lose the contextual meanings.

Need to also think about value and how it changes with time and with who is using the object. “Value is extracted from more than just the content. Sometimes you need the story behind the object to appreciate it.”

How do we transition from creator to new curators? It can be a burden to the survivors because there are so many digital files and not a lot of organization. Need to honor and respect the wishes of the deceased–did they really want you to see their files?

Design Principles
Take a user-centric perspective at the transition between creator and next curator:

  • Ensure awareness and access: not easy to find digital objects, need to have archiving systems that provide easy access.
  • Wishes: need to ensure the wishes of deceased are respected and prevent loss of meanings.
  • Communicate value: need to tell why objects are important, need to get metadata, especially in ways that are passively captured (yay for easy-to-use, behind-the-scenes capture of metadata)
  • Tackle Quantity: “One important object is often as valuable as 10,000 objects.” How do we deal with overwhelming quantity of digital objects? Need ways of appraising massive amounts of data
  • Communal Experience: digital objects move us away from experiencing them together in person. We need ways to capture comments and conversation. Stories are inherently social.

Curating Digital Intellectual Lives: A Discipline-based Approach
Ellysa Stern Cahoy and Scott McDonald (Penn State Library)

Discussing workflow for managing faculty’s digital information/personal information collections. Need to help faculty organize and effectively mine personal information collections. Physical library needs to start thinking about the users’ libraries on their own computers. (Very interesting thought–need to bring this idea back to my library)

Workflow of information for faculty:
Find, store, organize, annotate, cite, archive, reflect: all linked by sharing. Need to think about this workflow is actually a workflow (a continuum). A big problem is that everyone is using different programs and they don’t talk to each other. Faculty are using many different tools for research. Faculty are becoming their own librarian/archivist because less mediation between the faculty and the information.

We need to help faculty with their own digital curation because they are often overwhelmed with the quantity of their research information. (Aren’t we all a bit overwhelmed?)

Krause Innovation Studio at Penn State has been created to help faculty members with curating their digital information and create a useful workflow. Penn State Libraries are working on creating educational program for faculty. The libraries envision themselves working with faculty via data management services, personal library management tools, and storage for scholarly works.

Agile Archiving
Judith Zissman (Independent)

Talking about how individuals can use ideas from agile software product design to personal archiving. What does “good enough” archiving look like? Looking at the Agile Manifesto: individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaborations, and responding to change are what are valued the most.

Need to give tools that will work today for individuals to use. Think about “just in time” versus “just in case” value in tools. Value simplicity. Treasure the things that are valuable and getting rid of non-valuable digital objects make it easier to see the value in the things that are kept (also, it increases the signal to noise ratio in your digital archive which is always a good thing). Need personalized solutions.

Take away: Lots of questions, not a lot of answers, but we are in this problem of digital personal archiving together.

Major Projects in Personal Digital Archiving

/ dwakimoto / 2 Comments

First session of Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference: Major Projects in Personal Digital Archiving. Highlights noted in this post.

Preserving Your Family History Records Digitally (published at familytech.familysearch.org)
by Gary Wright

Wright created a paper to provide information about digital preservation and digital archiving for family history. Good introduction to many archival issues for family historians and those doing genealogy. Highlights are below:

Why should you embrace digital records?
No worry about physical records being too fragile to handle and now more and more records are created digitally.

Digital Preservation: storing digital records with descriptive information, for a very long time in multiple locations, at the highest resolution affordable, and migrating data to new storage media and changing file formats before they become obsolete.

Main challenges:
Storage media decomposes, as all archivists know, so be careful about what media you use. Need to migrate files. Recommendations for file formats: PDF/A, JPEG 2000, AVI and Quicktime. (Luckily file formats have become obsolete at a much slower pace than many thought they would earlier in digital preservation research.)

Tips for personal digital archiving of family history:
Renaming files
Add in metadata/tags
Talks about digital rights/copyright (librarians all over cheer!)
LOCKSS principle (librarians and archivists cheer again!)
Periodically test your digital records, at least annually
Need to educate people about preserving their own history

New web service: LegacyDox allows you to send in your files, they will create an M-DISC (archival CD) and index it for you. Nice, I wonder how much it costs.

Take away: Good introduction for those who are not archivists, but a basic review for those who work in digital preservation and archives. This may be a good paper to give to your researchers and patrons to help them get into digital preservation.

Next talk:
Personal Informatics: Fuzzy Hashes, Virtual Machines and Visual Analytics
Jeremy Leighton John (from the British Library), Curator of Digital Objects

Vision for British Library and released Treasures Mobile app.

New team at British Library, Digital Scholarship, coordinate digital scholarship. Researched and wrote as a team, Digital Lives Study.

What does a modern curator of digital objects do?
eMSS Lab: 2.0 at the British Library looks at:
Digital Forensics
Curatorial Examination
Enhanced Curation
Ancestral Computing
Basically, a lot of really cool stuff and reminds me a bit of the awesome digital preservation unit at the Library of Congress.

More information about enhanced curation: Take photographs of offices/workspaces of artists, writers, and scientists and these become museum objects in their own right. Can then use the photos to create panoramas of their workspaces. Also do video work with the scientists, etc.

Update on Digital Forensics: Looking into portable forensics set up to go to offices and capture data instead of having to do the forensics back at the digital curation labs at the British Library. Also working with emulators to recreate desktops of individuals.

Fuzzy Hashes: Relatedness
Use to find related files. Look at the hashs to see the similarity. Get the hash for a specific file and then scan the rest of the disk to find files that are similar in values. Very cool. Could be useful also in FRBR (has this already been done? I’m not as up on FRBR as I should be).

Lots of other very interesting software programs being used to analyze digital files and people’s data (I’m sorry, I couldn’t catch all the names. Check out the British Library’s website for more information).

Take away: Awesome work and research is being done at the British Library. Check out some of the links above for more information.

Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference: Day One Keynote

/ dwakimoto

At the Personal Digital Archiving 2011 Conference in San Francisco today. It is a bit surreal as we are at the Internet Archive which is housed at an old Christian Science church. I’m sitting on a pew, in the old sanctuary, listening to Brewster Kahle introduce the conference. I’m excited for the conference and hope to get some good information. Now on to the keynote!

Keynote: “people are people and things change”
Cathy Marshall from Microsoft Research (can follow on Twitter: @ccmarshall)

Focusing on what has changed since she has started her research. Talked about her laptop and not backing up her computer. Then talked about Twitter losing her tweets (known issue–happened to me too and it isn’t fun). She doesn’t think of tweets as transient. There are ways of archiving tweets. She hasn’t done that either.

People fail to archive their data. Two-thirds of Americans store personal data in the cloud, 48% of Americans are social networks (Lee Rainie, Pew Internet 2010). “2002 should be considered the beginning of the digital age, first year digitial storage capacity overtook analog; as of 2007 we were 94% digital” (Martin Hilbert USC School of Communication).

Personal archiving has shifted dramatically in the last 6 years. People were experts in certain software programs, but didn’t understand backing up their data. Did a study on lost website recovery study: surprisingly, data loss isn’t due to technology. Now working on social media ownership attitudes.

Benign neglect and side effects. People accumulate stuff: just move over stuff from old computer to new computer. People seem to organize their analog collections much better than their digital collections. People also show ambivalence about the value of their digital files. (I can’t believe this–I would be crushed if I lost my digital files).

Personal digital archiving is not like archiving a personal digital collection. I think we need appraisal and not keep everything! Does digital hoarding really exists? Marshall doesn’t believe that digital hoarding exists; people just accumulate stuff.

People put copies of stuff in different places online and digital safety of data is a side effect. Losing data online is due to many different things: lost account, service/server discontinued, ISP IT policies and practices, hacking, unknown, and only 5% due to hard drive failure. Copies take on a life of their own because people can download them, augment with metadata online, etc.

Ownership of online media is now controversy in many people’s minds. People see it as a slippery slope. People just download photos, videos, etc. without thinking about ownership or copyrights. People don’t read legal agreements on sites about the usage of their data. People see ownership as quite broad and extends it to public material. Removal of material is the controversial action for people. People were uncomfortable about universal access to Twitter archive at the Library of Congress.

Take away message: Everyone feels like it is someone else’s responsibility to archive our data. Digital information only survives if someone takes care of it. So take care of your digital information.

Civility and Tech Redux

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! I hope you are having a lovely day and have a relaxing weekend planned. I’m quite looking forward to the weekend as I’m going to go see cool books and manuscripts. If you are going to be at the Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco on Sunday morning, do stop by the ACRL’s Rare Books and Manuscripts Section table to say hi. But back to the topics at hand. Today I just have a few articles, posts, and bits of information that connect to some of the conversations we’ve been having in the previous couple of weeks’ posts. So let’s get into the good stuff.

Touching back on the post on civility a few week’s ago, check out this interesting post on using airplane mode to silence your phone instead of mute or power. Personally, I don’t care what you do with your cell phone as long as you don’t pull it out every time it goes off while eating dinner with me. I’m probably very old school about this, but one of the most impressive things (and how sad is it that I find this impressive?) is when a person actually puts his/her phone on silent or airplane mode while we’re out to dinner or having coffee. I think it’s a sad comment on society that I was actually told by a colleague that he loved to talk to me because I would stop what I was doing and give him my full attention and he never had to wonder if I was actually listening.

Anyway, off the soapbox and onward to technology news.

This is a very nice article on the digitizing of Vassar’s Special Collections. It’s a concise look at many of the advantages and problems with digitizing special collections and archives. Issues of preservation, access, original v. digitized copy, and even microfilm all make an appearance. It’s a good article to pass on to those who either believe that “everything” is already available online or who complain that the entire archives’ holdings aren’t already online.

Speaking of articles that may be of use to archivists and librarians, take a look at The New York Times article on why some twitter posts catch on, and some don’t. For those archives and libraries using Twitter for access and marketing, this article brings up some points to consider–especially in the realm of hashtags.

Finally in tech news, it seems like there is always something interesting and useful to share about one of Google’s products and today is no different. Take a look at Lifehacker’s seven more easy ways to integrate your google apps. I really enjoy things that make my life easier and these hacks definitely make it easier.

This Friday we’ll end with this fabulous video someone made using Neil Gaiman’s reading of “The Day the Saucers Came.” I love this poem, but I hope, dear readers, that this is not how your upcoming Valentine’s Day ends.

Have a wonderful weekend filled with good books, friends, and fun. And if you feel inspired to bake this weekend, you might want to try Joy the Baker’s recipe for whole wheat chocolate brown sugar sugar cookies. I’ll be back next week with more musing on technology, libraries, archives, and other stuff.

Connections and the Digital World

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Happy Friday! I’m so happy it’s Friday, aren’t you? Today I want to share some links about connections, communication, and digital preservation, among other things. Really, it all made sense in my head when I was planning this blog post. So just bear with me and I’ll explain.

It’s no secret that I really enjoy Seth Godin’s blog posts and his post on Lost in a Digital World is a really great one. It is very easy to get lost in a digital world, being constantly in communication, but not communicating or accomplishing anything of substance. I know I have to consciously pull myself away from my computer (and my beloved Android phone) when I’m really working. I can’t multi-task–really, I’m horrible at it. And I think we need quiet headspace to really focus and accomplish things and be present enough to catch on to those fleeting ideas that just might change everything we are doing in our lives.

And, as we all know, the digital pieces of our lives and our communication streams are very fragile–not just in terms of the possibility of misunderstandings via email, but in the very preservation of the datastreams. Just go ask your friendly archivist about digital preservation and watch him/her twitch and start going on about preservation metadata standards (at which point you should offer to take him/her out of the archives and down the street for a nice cup of tea). So, for those who want to do something about preserving their personal digital data, check out Lifehacker’s article, Future-Proof Your Digital Photos with Better Archiving Techniques. Take a night and fix your photos. The archivist in the future who may receive your “papers” will thank you.

After being at one of the talks about technology trends at ALA Midwinter, I found this post from Gizmodo timely: 12 Technologies on the Verge of Extinction. So what technologies do you think will become extinct? It’s something fun to discuss with the archivist whom you’ve taken to tea (see above paragraph). Archivists love to talk about obsolete technologies and media.

Technology is great if used correctly and it can definitely help facilitate communication if used well, but I sometimes worry about getting lost in the busyness of the digital world and also about how digital communication is affecting relationships, or rather the strength or depth of relationships. (I promise no long philosophical argument; it is Friday.) We need more than simply being in constant digital contact with people; we need people who will support us and really mean it when they say, “I’ve Got Your Back.”

You need to have your core group of friends (and no, hundreds of friends on Facebook whom you don’t really know don’t count) who will be your cheering squad, your sounding board, and the ones who will believe in what you are doing when everyone else is calling your ideas crazy. Your task for the weekend is to figure out who has your back and who you would truly back, no matter what. And yes, if I tell you that I’ve got your back, I mean it.

The last bit of hyperlink fun for today is Neil Gaiman’s Another Year from New Year’s Day. Yes, I’m aware that it’s the 14th of January, but it is still a good read and if you somehow missed it, you should go read it. It will make you feel warm and happy. Bonus points for sharing it with someone.

To end and give you a nice break for work today, check out this wonderful Infommercial for the TARDIS (thanks to Hanna for posting the video on her blog):

Have a wonderful day and relaxing weekend. Read a lot, get outside if the weather is nice, and I’ll be back next week with more library, archives, and tech-related goodies.

Reflections on the Gap Between Archivists and Librarians

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday, dear readers. I hope that you are all having a lovely day, whether it is in sunny SoCal or you are enjoying a snow day like my friends in Boston. I am very happy to be back home after a whirlwind tour of San Diego for both the ALISE and ALA Midwinter Conferences. Because I’m still processing everything I’ve learned or experienced at the conferences, I thought I’d talk about just one issue that was quite striking: the gap between archivists and librarians. This theme came up at both of the conferences and I think it deserves to be explored further.

I’ve written previously on the need for librarians to understand what archivists do, and vice versa, but today I want to discuss the communication, or the lack thereof, between the two fields. Communication is key on moving both professions forward and not duplicating each other’s work. This was driven home for me when I was sitting in a session on Top Tech Trends at Midwinter listening to librarians and library vendors discussing trends, a large part of which revolved around digital curation and preservation. I was excited to hear this in a talk about technology, but thought it was a shame that there were no archivists on the panel. Archivists have been wrestling with issues of digital preservation, curation, preservation, access, and authentication for years and it would have been a much more useful discussion if it was between librarians and archivists and not limited to the librarian world.

Now, I’m not saying that this lack of communication can be blamed wholly on the librarians, archivists are just as guilty of staying in their silos. There was actually a discussion about breaking down the silos among archivists, librarians, and museum curators at ALISE which had some defending, rather vigorously, the necessity of maintaining strict boundaries and not having any of this interdisciplinary stuff. On the whole, I find it rather sad and disappointing to see our wonderful professions worrying more about boundaries than figuring out how to work together on issues such as digital preservation.

The lack of communication seems to be leading to duplication of work by archivists and librarians. We don’t need dozens of metadata standards, some used by archivists and some used by librarians, none of which are completely agreed upon. We don’t need to duplicate projects (and we definitely don’t need to create any more crazy initialisms and acronyms). What we need is to first understand each other’s field, actually talk with one another, and then set out solving these digital preservation and curation issues together. Everyone seems to be chronically underfunded these days, so let’s make our limited funds and grants go further by working together instead of competing with each other. Who knows, we might make some progress. Wouldn’t that be great?

Okay, I’m stepping off my soapbox now. Kudos to those of you who are working to break down the barriers between archivists and librarians and working to build up our collaborations and communications. I have great hope for what the professions can do together in the realm of digital preservation and curation.

Today we will be ending with something fun from Doctor Who for three reasons:

  1. Because, as my awesome friend Hanna said, Who wouldn’t want to be at a wedding with the Doctor?
  2. Because another one of my friends has recently finished watching Series 5 and, like Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, believes that even if there are multiple universes, he will not be dancing in any of them. I’m hoping maybe the Doctor dancing will make him at least consider the possibility he is dancing in at least one of the universes.
  3. It’s Doctor Who, enough said:

Enjoy the rest of your day. We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming in a few days. Allons-y!

Thankfulness in 2010

/ dwakimoto

Happy Wednesday! I know it is a day early for a Thanksgiving Day post, but it is never too early to list the things one is thankful for in life. And also, because in the United States tomorrow is Thanksgiving and I fully intend to stay away from all things online in order to engage with my family and friends in real life, I needed to send out this post today. (And yes, I know, I know I can schedule the post to publish on Thanksgiving Day but I’m hoping that other people too will unplug for the day and so the post is being published today.)

I think having a day with family and friends when you remember what you are thankful for in life is a fantastic basis for a holiday. And, to my dear long-time readers, the fact that I feel this way should not come as a surprise given my love of lists which have produced the last two year’s posts on things and people in libraries (and archives) which I am thankful for: Thanksgiving Day post for 2008: librarians and optimism and Thanksgiving Day post for 2009: Giving Thanks for Libraries and Librarians.

So this year, I just want to name five of library/archives-related things I’m thankful for and then let you go and celebrate Thanksgiving. (I’m still thankful for everything I named in previous years too, but didn’t want to include all of that here…again.)

1. San Jose State Library School Interns
I always have to include our interns in any list about library wonderfulness. I don’t know how we get so lucky, but we get fantastic interns. It is a blast to work with engaged library school students and I always learn something new. Plus they are just awesome people and it is nice to have an excuse to reflect on teaching philosophies and teaching methods with interested people. Plus, one of the interns could identify my limited edition John Green bobblehead in my office which was just awesome. And did I mention one of our interns was part of the winning Book Cart Drill Team at the CLA Conference this year? I didn’t? Well, take a look at the winning performance in the following video. Interns=awesomeness.

2. Amazing friends who also just happen to be fabulous archivists
Friends are just one of life’s wonders that make life worth living. I always feel very thankful and very lucky that a couple of my closest friends also happen to be archivists. It is so nice to be able to talk about work and research with people who get what I’m saying. These are the friends who I can count on to respond within minutes to a panicked message about confusing metadata standards and who will make sure I don’t lose myself in the Hollinger boxes down in the archives too long. They are the people I can geek out over archives and library stuff and then turn to talking about other important issues such as the best way to make English muffins or debating whether Eccleston or Tennant was a better Doctor. Bonding over paper cuts, freezing cold archives, and late nights talking about anything and everything make these people the ones I turn to for support (and support them) because they are always there. That’s what friends are for and having some that actually understand respect de fonds and OAIS are just (amazing) bonuses. (And I have amazing friends who are librarians too, but wanted to give a special shout out to my archivist friends because, really, archivists need to get some of love too.)

3. Amazing friends who aren’t in the field, but believe librarians are pretty cool
Obviously I don’t spend all my time in the archives or library (really it’s true) and not all my friends are in the field, but they still think librarians are pretty nifty people. And it is awesome to hear about their research and work in aviculture and veterinary practice, among other things. What can I say? I am blessed to have people who want to talk about books, can have fun being fangirls at author book signings, and understand the awesome appeal of Nerdfighteria.

4. Librarians and archivists who are actually proud of their work and their profession
Okay, so we all know that the economy pretty much is pathetic right now and it is seriously difficult to get a job. I will totally not deny those facts. I won’t argue either with the point that some universities are accepting way too many students for the number of jobs in our fields. (I will however take issue with the people who say that a specialization in archives will be a “hot” job segment. First archives are related to libraries, not a specialization in libraries, and second archivists have just as difficult time finding work as librarians, if not more.) But none of these points are what I really want to talk about in this list about things I’m thankful for.

I am so eternally grateful to those librarians and archivists who are proud of their work and their profession. Really, thank you. I’m always thrilled when I talk with people who are confident enough in their work and selves that they don’t feel the need to apologize for it. I love people who won’t make excuses for what they do or put down the profession. We do important work and should act like it. So thank you to those of you who are positive, realistic and true professionals. It makes me smile and glad to be a part of the profession.

5. You, dear reader
I am so thankful for you, dear reader, for continuing to read what I write and to converse with me about topics in the library-archives-tech field. It is fantastic. I adore that I’m not just throwing my writing into a black hole of nothingness. You make the time and energy it takes to write this blog worthwhile. So give yourself a pat on the back and know that you are appreciated.

And to end, enjoy this lovely, beautiful, and wonderful Doctor Who video, His Name is “The Doctor,” made by one of the best video creators I’ve seen on YouTube (and no, it has nothing to do with Thanksgiving, other than the fact that I’m thankful that both Eccleston and Tennant were the Doctor):

I hope you have a fantastic, restful, wonderful Thanksgiving. I’ll be back next week with more library and tech fun. Thank you, as always, for reading and conversing with me.

Getting Net Neutrality Right Talk Recap

/ dwakimoto / 1 Comment

Net Neutrality: it’s a hot topic and buzzword phrase in the news right now. But how much do you really know about Net Neutrality? It’s a fascinating, important, and complex issue that deserves careful consideration. Luckily for those of us who live in the Bay Area (and could make it to Berkeley last night), we were treated to a talk on Net Neutrality by Richard Esguerra (staff activitst) from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that works to protect people’s digital civil liberties. It was a great talk, even with some rather crazy technical issues, sponsored by the San Francisco Bay Region Chapter of SLA. So I thought I’d try to share the highlights with you.* (If you just want the bare bones executive summary, skip to the end of the post.)

So without going back to the very beginning of the Internet and making us sit through hours of history lessons, Richard gave us “Internet Architecture Lite.” The most important concept is the “end-to-end principle” which, in simplified terms, means that most of the control, processing, and changes to packets of information (the requests sent over the Internet for data, webpages, etc.) should only occur at the ends of the process. So if you request a website by typing the URL into your browser, there should not be changes made to that request as it is sent through the various nodes as it is routed to the server that can serve up the website page. Control and processing should reside with your computer (one end) and with the server that is fulfilling the request (the other end). Thus the “end-to-end principle.” Net Neutrality could then be seen as the transferring of the “end-to-end principle” into a law or policy requirement, as Richard explained later.

But first we have to talk about a very important Supreme Court Case, National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services. (Trust me, this is important). This ruling decided basically that cable companies were not telecommunication services and therefore not subject to the same regulations. While telecommunication services, such as AT&T, have to let competitors use their infrastructures for reasonable rates, information services do not have to follow this regulation. Brand X, an Internet Service Provider (ISP), wanted to rent infrastructure from Comcast in order to run Internet service over Comcast’s cable infrastructure like other ISPs use different companies telephone lines to provide DSL service. Due to this ruling Comcast did not and does not have to let competitors use their infrastructure which is why if you want cable internet, you pretty much only have one choice of service provider.

After this ruling, the FCC issued a Broadband Policy Statement that had four clauses that became part of the foundation of Net Neutrality. In order to preserve open internet, consumers should have:

  1. access to the lawful internet content of their choice
  2. the ability to run applications and use services of their choice
  3. the ability to connect their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network
  4. the right to competition among network providers.

All of this sounds good, but as Richard pointed out there is a major problem with the FCC issuing a policy out of basically thin air. Who ever gave the FCC the power to make and enforce such a policy? The story gets even more interesting when independent research by the EFF and Associated Press showed in 2007 that despite Comcast’s denials, it was actually throttling BitTorrent (it was denying requests for BitTorrent downloads on its infrastructure). This brings us full-circle back to the “end-to-end principle,” which Comcast wasn’t following as it was filtering and denying requests by users who wanted to use BitTorrent to share files. Now obviously ISPs need to have some ability to manage network traffic, so we get into a gray area of what is “reasonable” network management. The FCC ruled that Comcast needed to stop blocking BitTorrent traffic in 2008 and Comcast challenged the ruling.

Because of this, the court ruled in April 2010 that the FCC cannot enforce broadband policy. This nullified the FCC’s Broadband Policy Statement, which it had just expanded in late 2009. This leaves us in a bit of muddle because there is no clear way forward and no one wants to see an internet that is tiered like the graphic shown below:

Tiered Internet Service

Tiered Internet Service

From CrunchGear

So why is all this history important? Because, as noted before, we are in a quandary over how to proceed. Currently there are four main options put forth as the way to Net Neutrality:

  1. Reclassify broadband as a telecommunication service so it falls under more regulation
  2. Partially classify broadband as a telecommunication service
  3. Genachowski’s Third Way: the FCC would have regulatory control over certain, select bits of broadband
  4. Congress should pass a Net Neutrality law (which would probably give regulatory authority to the FCC

As you can see, there isn’t any clear path and any path to Net Neutrality has potential problems such as: Congress moves slow and has the potential to be swayed by special interest groups, giving the FCC more power might lead to “regulatory capture” where the FCC is eventually steered by the very companies it is supposed to be regulating, etc.

Summary
In short, Net Neutrality is a super-important, pressing issue and the implementation of Net Neutrality is so much more complex than I thought it was before the talk. There are so many areas of grey and lots of issues surrounding free speech, civil liberties, copyright, fair use, creative works, and innovation that I really hadn’t considered. I think, if nothing else, a safe lesson to take away from last night’s awesome talk is that everyone should have a healthy amount of skepticism about any plan about how to implement and regulate Net Neutrality. Stay tuned for further developments and check out the section on the Deeplinks blog about Net Neutrality.

Have a fantastic rest of your week. I’ll be blogging from Internet Librarian this coming week, so don’t be surprised to see many posts about conference talks and cool technology to use in the library.

*Any mistakes or inaccuracies in the history or technical aspects are mine and probably due to my hastily scribbled notes from last night and definitely not attributable to Richard of the EFF.