Technology

PDA 2012: Day 2 Keynote by Cathy Marshall

/ dwakimoto

Happy Friday! It is Day 2 of Personal Digital Archiving 2012 and first up we have the keynote by Cathy Marshall of Microsoft Research: “Whose Content is it Anyway? User Perspectives on Archiving Social Media.” Let’s see what she has to say on user’s perspective on archiving social media.

Discussing the issues around reuse of images on the Internet. Lots of reuse of materials on the Internet, especially images. Many people don’t even attribute when they use images, even if they can legally use them under Creative Commons (which is bad). Social norms have developed around reuse because people ignore laws, market share, and the architecture around reusing (using Lessig’s “jelly bean” diagram).

So we are left with social norms. Did a study of user behaviors around using and reusing images.

Findings:
“Everyone” believes that you can keep anything you find online. “It’s yours.” [No wonder I have a hard time explaining fair use and copyright to my students.]

People seem to be able to justify any use and reuse of images. Many feel that everything on the web is in the public domain and don’t have any conception of copyright. People feel differently about reusing different types of media. People are very liberal in their reuse of images. People worried more about reusing other people’s reviews versus other people’s photographs.

People worry about manipulating images and reviews in ways that are mean-spirited. Feelings are important to take into account when reusing materials.

Factors that influence social norms: personal experience, media type, perception of misuse or harm done, and mis/understanding of copyright.

Making a case for institutional archives [umm….institutional archives are quite old. Let’s see what she means by this…] She seems to be talking about personal digital archiving instead of institutional archives. Within families, the person interested in archiving and the person interested in technology are often not the same person. People are saving information in many places which makes personal data management more difficult. There is an “overwhelming power of benign neglect” because digital clutter is invisible because “creation is more rewarding than stewardship.”

Therefore, it’s difficult to get people to manage their data. Plus, it is difficult for institutional archives to manage all these digital traces. People aren’t worried about storing social media in institutional archives, they worry about access and reuse. There is a difference between being public in the digital social media landscapes and being archived in public institutional archives.

Looking at people’s perceptions of institutional archives, using the Library of Congress as the prototypical archive. People are okay with immediate access for researchers (researcher was not defined), but people were not okay with immediate public access to social media in institutional archives. People were okay with the general public having access in 50 years.

Implications: people “can’t make a go of it on their own.” Therefore, we need institutional archives to help with preserving social media.

Take Home Message
People are confused (or don’t care) about the correct use and reuse of images they find on the Internet. We need education and also archivists to actually preserve social media. Not really brand new thoughts or findings, but always good to emphasize these issues.

PDA 2012: Systems, Tools, Platforms

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Second afternoon talk: Systems/Tools/Platforms

Putting Personal Archives to Work by Sudheendra Hangal of Stanford University
Personal motivation for creating tools: reading his grandfather’s wonderful diaries which covered 50 years of his life. Thinking about what his grandchildren would read, he thought of emails. Then began creating MUSE in order to browse long-term email archive in a convenient and fun way. The original goal was for personal archival use, even though it is now being used for institutional archives at Stanford.

MUSE runs on user’s own machine, browser-based interface, can get emails from multiple online accounts, and also does data cleaning. Creates cues for users and then users can decide what is interesting and useful for the users. People use MUSE to reminisce about the past, but also to “add color to flashbulb memories,” summarize work progress, identify personal emails in work email accounts, retrieve all attachments, and feel “a renewed sense of confidence.” [Always interesting to see how people find new ways to use tools]

Looking at inline applications for digital archives since many people in the tech world don’t think it’s interesting to look at the past. Working at slanting your search: a search engine per user, populated with domains in their social chatter and search results restricted to these domains. Ran user studies for different search engines. The best results over all were for the email search engine that were personalized for the user from the curated domains. Findings: eliminates spam, good search results. Check out demo of Slanted search here.

Application for consuming textual information to create experience-infused browser. Using your digital archive to customize your browser. Privacy-preserving personalization because all personal data on client (no third party), very rich profile (but unstructured), potentially comprehensive, every site does not have to implement personalization, and no setup needed. People like to discover names of people the know or have discussed, organizations with which they are affiliated, and more. [Hopefully we’ll be able to use this soon]

Personal archives contain detailed experiences and we can mine the archives for the owner’s benefit. Lots of questions and work to still do, but very exciting.

Data Triage and Data Analytics for Personal Digital Collections Kam Woods of UNC Chapel Hill
Working on the BitCurator Project. The project “is an effort to build, test, and analyze systems and software for incorporating digital forensics methods into the workflows of a variety of collecting institutions.”

Why? Because there are many issues in digital preservation and archiving. Issues around the acquisition of personal digital collections in collecting institutions: protecting information, processing collections, and generating metadata–takes time and staff. These issues are long-standing. Need reliable, scalable, and interoperable standards, tools, and techniques.

Building a model for a “forensically enhanced workflow.” Start with a donor device, extract fixed media, acquire raw disk image and forensic packaging, then go to staging area to extract context-senstive identification of private information, acquisition metadata, filesystem metadata, prepare redacted image, permissions overlay, and crosswalks to archival metadata, package for ingest, then to the archives. [Looks complicated]

Looks like it will be useful for collecting institutions once the project is finished and is made user-friendly.

Cowbird by Jonathan Harris
Went from keeping sketchbooks to working on the web and creating websites. You can see his work here. Interesting websites and art that document the world and experiences. You can see Cowbird here. Looking at compression of communication (speeding up), disposability, curating information, and self-promotion. Wants to see revival of deepening, timelessness, creation, and self-reflection in life an online.

Cowbird’s goals are to create place for expression, a new way of journalism, and build a library of life experience. “Deeper form of self-expression.”

Take Home Messages
So many uses for MUSE. Check it out. There are many ways to use personal digital archives to improve searching today, very interesting way to connect archives to daily life. Many ways to communicate and share online. It is what we make of it.

PDA 2012: Social Network Data

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First after-lunch session at PDA 2012 on Social Network Data. Let’s get to it.

Arc-chiving: saving social links for study by Marc A. Smith at Social Media Research Foundation
This is the “what’s new since last year talk.” Trying to build the “Firefox of GraphML” open tools for collecting and visualizing social media data to show patterns of connections. Open tool: NodeXL (works with Excel 2007 and Excel 2010). Creating a platform for sharing data sets: NodeXLGraphGallery.

“2011 was the year of the crowd.” Many, many people gathered in crowds in social media. Through using the NodeXL tools, you can see the social networks and online community connections. [Nice visualizations for doing analyses]

Publishing on taxonomy of social media (lots of work on open scholarship). Lots of stuff still to do. More workshops are coming so keep an eye out for them and new features/tools/etc..

Need to get companies and people to play together in order to truly be able to document social media networks and connections. [I think there are a lot of conversations that need to happen around privacy, social good, connections, research, preservation, etc. in order to move these kind of programs forward.]

Personal Interaction Archiving: Saving our Attitudes, Beliefs, and Interests by Megan Alicia Winget of UT Austin

“Thing” based behavior of looking at archiving things (e.g. objects) versus interaction based behavior (e.g. Foursquare and Yelp). Many options for archiving and preserving their interactions online. Winget is giving a theoretical talk instead of tool-based talk.

Bookmarking as a new type of commonplace book. “Everything old is new again.” Commonplace book= place to store quotes, excerpts, etc. in journal form. Using bookmarking tools is a way of returning to an early way of reading and writing, skipping around and reading many things at once. Remixing, annotating, etc. are very old ideas. People now annotate and highlight through ebook tools and can share them, if they choose to do so. Readers are having “wordless conversations” through their annotations.

Need to think about ownership and representation when looking at uploaded annotations. Need to think about ownership versus licensing in the online and digital world. Need to understand the relationships among people, artifacts, and their interactions.

Take Home Messages
Studying social media is important and you can use NodeXL to study connections and visualize the connections. Very interesting and useful for researchers interested in social media and online social connections. Need to think about things and interactions in order to truly document and preserve the context of our lives and our communities.

PDA 2012: Media Types

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Second morning session: media types. Let’s see what we have to talk about now.

Processing and Delivering Email Archives in Special Collections using MUSE Peter Chan from Stanford University
Email archiving is important, but there are many challenges: copyright and privacy, sensitive information, description, and delivering. So how do you bulk process/archive emails? Description is especially important and difficult because we must include useful metadata and description in order to make the email archives useful for people.

MUSE is a project at Stanford for email archiving and actually do something useful with the emails. Can do sentiment analysis and also group analysis. [I’ve used this before and it is quite fun.] Can also look at image attachments as a slideshow. Lots of very cool improvements on MUSE since the last time I used it. Very cool.

Processing emails with MUSE: edit pre-built lexicon and screen for sensitive information and mark for restriction, group by known projects, conferences, etc. and can use MUSE functions to create usable archives at the institutional level. Deliver metadata about the emails on the web via summary information, sentiment visualizations, etc. In the reading room, can deliver individual emails and attachments. Gaps: sophisticated search, original view via the creator’s email folders/tags, delivery mode for metadata, lexicons, and foreign language support.

parallel-flickr Aaron Straup Cope
Link to information: parallel-flickr appendix

“For all intents and purposes, no one backs up their photos.” Flickr has a lot of trust from users and people just assume that their photos will always be there. But we really need backups because every system fails at some time.

parallel-flickr uses the Flickr API to pull out the photos and photo information. The source files are then fed into the database and then uploaded to the website. Also can pulls in photos you favorite on Flickr. You can use parallel-flickr just for yourself or for sharing with others.

Note: Seems very interesting and important, but I’m just not following this talk. I need to go through his extra information after the conference to get a better handle on this.

Remember the Web? Practical challenges of Bookmarking for Keeps Maciej Ceglowski (Pinboard founder)
Link to talk

Pinboard.in founded in 2009, 9 million archived bookmarks, and 4 TB stored web content. “The search engine does not replace the need for your own bookmarks.” Archive bookmarks because link rot is a large problem. By archiving your bookmarks, you’ll be able to get to what you want (you can sign up for this extra service through Pinboard). Challenges to getting the content: adversarial servers (paywalls/authentication, sessions, streaming content, geoidiocy), desperate advertisers (hyperpagination, interstitials, URL shorteners, IP law), and inner platform effect (dynamic loading, infinite load, #!hashbang URLs, third-party comments, Flash).

Take Home Message
Email archiving is important and MUSE makes these large email archives actually usable (and makes fun visualizations). MUSE is still being developed, but is already cool and useful project. Back up your data and files. Check out Pinboard for archiving your bookmarks.

PDA 2012: Cases and Examples

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First morning session: case studies and examples. Let’s get into it.

How My Family Archives Affected Othersby Stan James (on Twitter @wanderingstan)
Talking about his grandmother and grandfather and how his grandmother burned all her letters after she had let her children read the letters. [Note: Stan spoke at PDA 2011 about his family archiving project] His father is still scanning his materials.

Three points: personal archiving is a hot space; much room for creativity; archiving and relationships

Still working on the family archives and checking out other social media sites to share the images and documents. Used Drupal platform to create own family website (lots more work than he thought it would be). Lots of great features on the website because have tagging metadata. Lots and lots of photos. Began using maps, especially Google Street View, to see how geographical locations have changed since the photos were taken years ago. Also has had many text documents scanned and transcribed via Mechanical Turk. Lots of mashups on the website, like covers from TIME on the website based on the date of the letters written.

Using simple questions and randomly selected photos to get the rest of the metadata entered by the family members (using the website). This project has helped the family members become closer and need to make the interfaces easier to use, especially for those who are not familiar with technology or have mobility issues.

You need to think about privacy concerns of others who are in the photos (but not part of the family) and also geo-location codes for those who don’t want their homes marked online.

The Personal Archive of Sven G. by Sven Goyvaerts
Unfortunately not here

What I’ve learned from gardening my Brain Jerry Michalski, The REXpedition
[Talking now instead of after lunch]

Talking about The Brain and using it for 15 years in one brain space. It’s mind-mapping software. Each link is called “a thought” and links together various thoughts and maps out the connections. Very good if you are a visual thinker and can make your own links to various thoughts. You can drag and drop new links into “the brain” on your desktop. Good way to create context and to make sense out of the world, but you have to rely on organizations like the Internet Archive to be able to find old websites. You can use The Brain instead of bookmarks. Does have a notes field. Doesn’t take a lot of time according to Jerry and helps him improve his memory. Can see his brain at JerrysBrain.com. He isn’t sure what to do with this now because, while it is great for him, he wants to figure out how it could be helpful for others. He wants to do collaborative sense-making.

Unstable Archives: Performing the Franko B Archive by Jo An Morfin-Guerrero (fine art conservator and student at Bristol University)
Part of PhD research on preservation of media and different artistic practices. Franko B is an artist who currently lives in London and does many different types of art including performance art. He started collecting documentation of his artistic work and donated to Live Art Archives at Bristol University. Very controversial to document performance art because you are preserving something that has been created to be ephemeral. [I think this is a very interesting philosophical and theoretical debate] Because the artist himself has collected the documentation and donated to the university in 2009, it is a bit less controversial to archive this collection.

First she just dealt with materiality of the collection because the materials were in very poor containers and not indexed. Then she began worked with the materials and the database records to do media archaeology to see what the materials together mean. Lots of interesting dilemmas for archiving. How do you show moving behaviors through time with static archives? How do you convey the ephemeral nature of the performance art?

Take Home Message
Family archiving is a great way to bring multiple generations of the family together. It is a great way to share memories, but does take a lot of time to create. Check out TheBrain for mind-mapping and contextual bookmarks if you like visual linkages. Performance art in the archives means that we must find new ways of showing context and using the archives to create meaning (and being okay with not always having the answers). Very interesting trio of talks showing the diversity of personal archiving methods and tools.

Personal Digital Archiving 2012: Keynote by Mike Ashenfelder

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Happy Thursday, dear readers! Today is the first day of Personal Digital Archiving Conference at the Internet Archive. I’m excited to hear about lots of cool projects and tools, but not psyched to sit on wooden pews for two days. (The Internet Archive is in an old Christian Science church.) But let’s get into what Mike Ashenfelder has to say about the Library of Congress’ Personal Digital Archive Advice for the General Public.

“Sometimes we complicate things more than they need to be.”

Library of Congress is simplifying by helping people get started with their own personal digital archiving. Goal is to help the general public. Need to simplify our institutional-level digital preservation knowledge and share it with the general public. Basically, you scale down the workflow process for individuals.

Need to get the message out that people need to manage their digital assets because there is no such thing as benign neglect in the digital realm.

“Cells of history”: having people archive their own materials helps the institutional archives because the collections will already be processed when they come to the archives.

Photos are the main concern for most people. Cell phone cameras have exponentially increased the number of photos people take, keep, and want to maintain access to for future use.

Workflow:
Identify: What you want to save
Decide: What is most important
Organize: Keep it all in one place
Save Copies: In different places

Library of Congress can’t make any endorsements of projects, therefore has to point to other resources. Makes terminology more accessible to people. [Great tip: always use clear language. I’m a librarian and archivist and I don’t even appreciate the acronym soup and crazy lingo we seem to come up with to describe what we do.]

Library of Congress has many resources for the general public, including blogs, Facebook, and videos (iTunes and YouTube). [This is great because there is a lot of incorrect information about digital preservation, especially surrounding online materials.] You can check out the information on the Library of Congress’ Personal Archiving site. Also, the LoC has the Personal Archiving Day which coincides with ALA’s Preservation Week. They go to National Book Festival, too, which is the best outreach event for increasing people’s knowledge of preserving their own media. Unsurprisingly, people love to play with obsolete media at these outreach events.

Unsurprisingly, you need to listen to the public to make sure they understand the educational materials and to see what questions they have. Also, simplify all your writing and materials. Think haiku, not free verse.

Everyone needs to do more outreach and marketing to get people aware of digital archiving. Train the trainer in the public libraries and people will get excited to become involved. Community outreach is super-important and gets great collaborations and partnerships formed. You can find a Personal Archiving Day Kit on the Library of Congress’ website.

Take Home Message:
You’ve got to make it easy and not scare people if you want people to organize, tag, and archive their materials. I hope that more people feel that they want to and can preserve their materials so we don’t lose these materials. Maybe I can convince my library that we should hold a personal archiving day to help people start organizing and preserving their materials. Get into the community and get people excited to preserve their materials!

Quick Tech Tips for Friday

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Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you are ready for the weekend and the tailend of your workweek is going well. Today, I just want to share a few cool tech posts that have come through my feeds recently and then send you on your way for the weekend.

Obviously, this post is not going to be one of my long posts about the nature of libraries and archives or thoughts I’ve had recently about teaching. Instead I feel like the kitten in the image below and want to just share a few links before heading out on an adventure (or at least going home to work on my laptop while sitting on the sofa instead of at my desk).

image of a black kitten looking out a window

kitten by My Aloysius via Beautiful Portals Tumblr

Since we are in the process of interviewing for positions at my institution, I’ve been thinking a lot about how people go about promoting themselves and building a reputation. To that end, check out how to promote yourself without being sleazy. There is definitely a line between promoting yourself and being pushy/sleazy/annoying/etc.. Share this with your students to help them as they start to prepare for their careers and to build their networks.

Also, from helpful Lifehacker is the article on the best sites to raise money and get your ideas off the ground. Think of it as inspiration to do something productive this weekend and get some of your ideas launched.

Because we’ve been working on a digitization grant in the archives, I’ve also been thinking a lot about calibrating your monitor. This is a good overview on calibration and tools to help with it. Trust me, calibration is your friend and will make your work much easier.

Finally, is anyone else getting wanderlust? I definitely want to do some traveling this year. If you are looking forward to some travel time, check out the top 10 ways to travel smarter, safer, and cheaper. I especially loved seeing just how much a person can pack in a carry-on bag. I definitely need to up my game for carry-on packing for airplane travel.

And, finally, if you are feeling a bit blue (or need to make something because you might have forgotten that this coming Tuesday is Valentine’s Day), go make some lovely peppermint bark cheesecake truffles. I mean, who can feel poorly when eating one of these?

Have a wonderful rest of your day, a terrific weekend, and I’ll be back next week with some thoughts about libraries and archives. Allons-y!

Traveling, Technology, and Fun

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Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you have a lovely weekend planned and that your week went well. This week has been very busy at my campus with our external reviewer here for the review of our information literacy program and the start of classes. So let’s get ready for the weekend with some tips on traveling, technology, and some fun stuff, too.

I know a lot of librarians are getting ready for the start of conference season, what with ALISE and ALA Midwinter conferences coming up in the next two weeks. (By the way, I’ll be in Dallas next week for ALISE, so if you are there do say hi.) Since conference season is starting, I thought it only appropriate to highlight two great resources from Lifehacker: airline scorecard (check before you decide which airline to fly) and
best tech-friendly airports and airlines (see where you can get wifi, etc.).

Also, check out Lifehacker’s article on the stay on top of the fight against SOPA/PIPA tools. Great to share with your library patrons and great to use to keep yourself informed.

So, did you sign up to learn to code this year with Codecademy? If not there is still time so head on over and start your course. It’s really a fun way to learn to code and you get nifty achievement badges, too (similar to Foursquare badges).

After you’ve planned your travel, learned some JavaScript, and gotten up-to-date with SOPA, take a break to make one of these lovely origami cat bookmarks. I’m going to make one and I’m sure my cat will have fun ripping it out of one of my books this weekend.

Finally, if you haven’t treated yourself to watching this Joy of Books video, you really should. It’s just delightful.

Have a wonderful, relaxing, productive, and fun weekend, dear readers! I’ll be back next week with some thoughts from my time at ALISE and other randomness. Allons-y!

Happy 2012!

/ dwakimoto

Happy 2012, dear readers! I hope you had a lovely holiday and are ready to dig into this new year. I had a nice break and can’t believe that we are already a week into 2012. Where does the time go? I thought to get us started, I’d offer up a few tips and a bit of fun as we make our way into this new year.

But first, I wanted to thank the readers of this blog for last year. The number of hits increased dramatically, which is great. I’m glad that this blog is continuing to be useful and readable for you, dear readers. It is fun to write and always great to receive feedback via comments.

Secondly not to toot my own horn too loudly, but I am excited so I wanted to share that I was selected as this week’s ACRL Member of the Week. So thanks ACRL! It’s fun to share why I enjoy academic librarianship so much.

Okay, now on to the tips and technology.

Lifehacker always does such nice end-of-the-year lists that I had to share another one: Most Popular Repurposing Tricks of 2011. To get you into Lifehacker’s lists for the new year, check out the article on the Best Time to Buy Anything in 2012. Who doesn’t like saving some money? This would be great to share with your patrons who I’m sure wouldn’t mind saving some money, too.

Also in the technology realm, I thought I’d share some information from Lifehacker on how you can Learn to Code with Free Weekly Lessons from Codeacademy this year. Go ahead and sign up, lessons start next week. I signed up and am excited about learning from Codeacademy. It never hurts to expand your tech skills (and help out your library and archives in the process).

Now let’s have a bit of fun before getting back to work!

If the post-holiday, back-to-work grind has gotten you stressed out, check out Lifehacker’s great article on Giving Better Massages. Messages are great for relieving stress and tension, plus the article gives tips at the end on self-massage which is great for when you can’t get someone to give you a massage.

Also, I’m happy to share that two of my very awesome friends (Hanna and Anna) have started a joint blog, the corner of your eye. Go on over, subscribe, and get your twice weekly dose of arts and culture reviews.

Anyone else extremely excited about The Hobbit coming out in December? I might be just a tiny bit excited (understatement of the year, thus far). So for my fellow fans, check out this lovely image from Beautiful Portals Tumblr:

I hope 2012 is going well for you and that you have a fantastic weekend planned. Read a good book, relax with a cup of tea, get a massage, and then get ready to take on this new year. See you next week with more good stuff. Allons-y!

Thoughts at the end of the term

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Happy Friday, dear readers! I hope you are having a lovely day. It is the end of the term here and that always puts me into a reflective mood. So today, I want to share a few reflections with you about this term as well as some end-of-the-year lists before wishing you a very happy holiday, so let’s get on with it.

This has been an incredibly busy fall term. It has been busier than any of my past terms. I made two trips to Southern California for grant-required workshops (although luckily Collin ended up driving, so I only had to navigate-thanks, Collin!), a trip to Monterey for Internet Librarian (fantastic, techie conference which I highly recommend), and a trip to Laguna Niguel for the Women’s Leadership Institute (also a fabulous conference). Oh, and my sister got married. So it was a little busy and I’m looking forward to the holiday break.

On top of the traveling, I was teaching two classes on information literacy for freshmen along with the other usual assortment of librarian duties. To say that I was a bit overwhelmed at times is an understatement. To say that if I didn’t have a couple of synced Google Calenders to my phone I would have been lost on any given day is not an understatement. But, overall, I’d have to say it was a very good term.

I learned from my students, which is always as it should be, and hopefully my evaluations will reflect that my students learned from me. They created amazing online tutorials showcasing their many talents and expertise in everything from playing the guitar to creating origami hearts. It was a great opportunity to combine what they were learning about information literacy in the classroom to further their knowledge and skills on something they already love. This quarter again underscored for me the importance of making everything relevant to my students’ lives outside of the classroom.

This quarter also re-emphasized for me the importance of building in time for reflection in the learning process. This is the second year that I’ve required my students to write weekly reflections about their learning and how they can apply what they’ve learned to their other classes and to their lives. It has been a great success and I feel that the students are engaging with the materials more fully because of this reflection space.

Finally, this quarter has again reinforced that teaching is about being genuinely interested in one’s students and honestly wanting to help them learn. It is exhausting, fun, time-consuming, interesting, and life-changing work and I can’t imagine not teaching. And, if I do a really good job, my students catch some of this excitement for learning too and use it in their coming terms and throughout their lives.

So now, on to the lists. Lifehacker has been posting numerous “best of” lists in the past few days. I highly suggest you check them out and get to some fun over the holidays. I suggest the following to get you started: Most popular top 10s of 2011, Most popular photograph tips, tricks, and hacks of 2011, and Top 10 ways to create a more focused and productive work environment.

Finally, I leave you with one of my favorite short, holiday videos ever featuring the Doctor, naturally:

I wish you a very happy holiday and wonderful new year, dear readers! I will be taking a rest from blogging until the new year. Until then, relax, read some good books, send friends and family members a handwritten note, and bake something lovely to share with someone you love. I’ll be back in 2012 with more library, archives, and tech news and notes. Allons-y!