The Quantum Archivist

Miller Library, Colby College

For the past 10 years or so, coffee bars in libraries has been the hot topic, especially in academic libraries. Right now, we are in the design phase of renovating the main library here and the question of where to put the coffee bar is, as you might expect one of the topics that is drawing a lot of interest and scrutiny.

This brings me back to my experience as an undergraduate at Colby College in the late 19..s, well, let’s just say a lot longer ago than I care to remember. At the old Miller Library, right there in the building itself, was what was known simply as “The Spa.” The Spa was a full blown restaurant, run by two brothers, John and Peter Joseph, who extended credit to Colby students, served such marvelous fare as the “Colby 8,”  a cheeseburger dripping with grease and topped with a fried egg. I don’t remember what it cost, what, something like 85 cents?  (Hey any Colby alums out there who can help refresh my memory on this?) Anyway, they were open what seemed like every minute of the day and night, and you didn’t have to put on your shoes, or brave the brutal Mayflower Hill winter cold to take a study break and hang out with some friends and enjoy what we would now call “group study.”  The Spa had been in the library for decades by the time I got there and I never thought it was odd to have coffee, food, and drinks in the Library until I started working at other libraries.

So, now that the craze of putting coffee shops and casual meeting spaces in academic libraries is going full tilt, I warmly remember The Spa, and how it helped create a sense of community and belonging for a kid from New Jersey who had never been away from home before.

P.S. When someone paid their Spa bill, the Josephs would ring a ship’s bell and shout that someone had paid their spa bill and the place would erupt in cheers. Rumor had it that if you didn’t pay your Spa bill, the college would withhold your diploma. I don’t know if that was true, since no one ever cared to test it. It would have been like stealing from your family.

P.P.S. When they renovated the library in the 1980s, they moved the Spa out of the Library. Truly sad. I don’t know if future renovations have restored coffee to the library, I hope so.

It’s been a while since you’ve seen a post from the Quantum Space. I’d like to say it is because great ideas take time to incubate. Well, we’ll see about that. As we head back into another academic year, there will be lots to think and talk about. I’ve got about a dozen half-written posts that are crying out for polishing and completion and I’m hoping to get them out soon. To begin with, I’m starting with a really big idea.

The big idea that has been floating around for the last couple of months in my head is the place of the traditional values of archives and libraries in the new paradigm of scholarship and learning. I’m not a Luddite by any means and in my nearly twenty years as an archivist and technologist, I think I have developed pretty good understanding of how to effectively and efficiently meet the needs of a variety of audiences in their encountering, exploration and use of historical materials. Having been both a scholar and a curator of primary source collections, I understand and enthusiastically support the evolving needs of both the casual learner and the serious scholar in the digital world.

But sometimes I worry that in the rush to technology we may forget the value of tradition.  The library in which I currently work is in the design phase of a major renovation, and as part of that process we have been visiting other libraries to find out what works and what doesn’t in new library theory. It is interesting that no matter how much “technology” they pack into the buildings, most libraries have chosen to build some variant of the “wood paneled room;” the place that evokes the idea of scholarship, permanence, and authority. These places are consistently the most popular places in the new libraries (after the obligatory coffee shop). This opinion is based on only anecdotal evidence. I’m sure someone has done a study on where students like to sit in libraries.

But that is only part of the story. We are now at a stage in information technology development where historical materials that were previously difficult to discover can now be not only discovered, but used, re-used and analyzed by scholars to make new discoveries and create new knowledge while at the same time introducing new generations of learners to historical material in ways that are both personal and relevant. And while we have a great opportunity to make this historical material available, we also have the responsibility to preserve and sustain both the physical and digital assets of our libraries, the Library itself, and the traditions of discovery and scholarship, so that all of these resources can be used by future generations in ways that we cannot now even imagine, let alone prepare for. If, as Aristotle said, knowledge is a constant process of discovery, than it is our duty and responsibility to create the atmosphere and resources that support this process.

A recent post in the AOTUS blog by David Ferriero entitled  “The Future is in the Palm or Our Hands” called for archivists to think about ways to connect archival collections to potential users through mobile devices. Ferriero was speaking specifically about NARA and its collections, but this idea is of course broadly applicable to all archives and collections.

The great opportunity for archives  in connecting to users through mobile devices comes from one special nature of these devices: they can locate themselves in space, that is, they know where they are. And since they know where they are, we can link digital objects in our collections to those locations and have them pop-up on a mobile device and announce their presence, without the user doing practically anything at all except holding up his smartphone.

The idea of geo-coding locations for historical documents (especially photographs) has been around for some time. I was a part of some work in the late 1990s at Tufts University in collaboration with the Perseus Digital Library to overlay historical resources of London and Boston

"Boston Streets" at Tufts University

onto historical maps. These were large-scale, programming intensive projects that used what we would now consider primitive, web-based GIS display tools to visually display and deliver historical information through a web-browser. They certainly were not optimized for mobile devices, because, of course those devices didn’t really exist then. While these tools were good at showing a visual representation of the location of historical information, we didn’t yet have the ability to do what we could imagine, which was to stand in a particular spot on the earth and connect with the historical record of that particular place.

The advent and general adoption of the Google maps API  made it possible to more easily connect content to maps, and the development of smart phones and web-enabled mobile devices makes it possible to deliver historical documentation to people right where the history happened even though the resources that document that history are stored in our repositories.

How great would it be to stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and hear Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech? Or stand on a street in San Francisco and see photos of that street after the 1906 earthquake? Actually, I don’t know that you CAN’T do this right now. The technology exists, I don’t know if anyone has done it yet.

Of course, there are people already doing this sort of thing. For example, if you are in Philadelphia, you can point your iPhone to http://phillyhistory.org/i/ and be shown historic photos of Philadelphia based on your location. North Carolina State has produced WolfWalk (http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/wolfwalk/) which provides information on the history of approximately 60 major sites on the NCSU campus drawn from resources at the University’s Special Collections. In both cases I need to know that Phillyhistory or WolfWalk exists and what the url is.

What would it take for my Google maps app to list, not only restaurants or barber shops, but historical documents, images, and media related to nearby places?  Well, maybe that’s getting a bit too optimistic, but we can still dream can’t we?

In a recent interview for the Digital Pioneers project, Howard Besser called YouTube the “ephemeral material of today” and a “microphone on the water cooler discussions people have at work.”   You can hear these comments for yourself about 4 minutes into the conversation on critical issues facing cultural heritage digitization.

Recent news about the Library of Congress collecting Twitter tweets would seem to confirm that social network material is the new “correspondence” series of personal papers collections if the terms correspondence and personal papers could be said to still have meaning in today’s archival environment. They are becoming the record of personal and casual social and intellectual interaction of the current age.

Is YouTube the kind of “ordinary everyday material produced by ordinary everyday people” that Howard Besser says it is? I guess that depends on your definition of “ordinary.” Certainly YouTube and Twitter are a view into a certain sector of the population, one that is reasonably literate and has a certain level of technological ability. And the technological barrier is certainly a lot lower than it was even a couple of years ago so this form of communication is available to a much larger pool of potential users. By collecting this content centrally, we can have access to a vast amount of material from a huge variety of people, far more than ever would have donated their personal papers to an archive. So in this aspect, I agree with Howard completely.

I’d argue though that documenting the contents of social networking tools only gets us back to where we were in the age of paper, and not much beyond that. Although my evidence is purely anecdotal, I’d bet that the people who create YouTube videos and are on Twitter, are by and large, educated people who are at home with the visual and literary communications methods of today. And although it is now so much easier for anyone from that group to get his or her ideas spread across the globe, I believe that the people who were voiceless in the age of paper have not made similar progress.

It would be interesting to think if Ben Franklin, the Sons of Liberty, and the authors of the Federalist Papers would have been on YouTube and blogs had they existed in those times.  If it had been possible, would John and Abigail Adams have posted messages to each other’s Facebook pages rather than fool with those messy quill pens? And if they had, and we didn’t preserve this highly ephemeral material, what would we know of the early struggles of the American nation? What future counterparts to Abigail and John Adams are posting in blogs, or tweeting, or making YouTube videos of things that inspire or outrage them?

While we HAVE become much better about documenting the formal means of communications of our society in the digital age, I think that we could be at even greater risk of losing not only the ephemera of today’s society, but the personal papers of our entire culture because we blithely rely on organizations beyond our control, who have no interest in our content as historical artifacts, to maintain and preserve our own personal history for us.  (A note of disclosure here: My wife and I run a blog on a hosted web site where we post news and stories about our family for friends and relatives and this blog is hosted by a for-profit service provider.) Yet what choice do we have? As archivists and digital librarians, we have to find ways to solve this dilemma.

… and your enemies closer. Whether this comes from the Godfather, or Napoleon, or an Ancient Chinese philosopher, it may explain what a fervent believer in open source like me is doing giving a presentation at an ILS vendor’s user group meeting here Chicago.

Image from Wikipedia

Like most academic libraries, we use a combination of tools, applications, and resources to collect and deliver our content. In the past few years, we have made an explicit choice to move toward open source software solutions, at least for our presentation layer.

Why did we do this? There are a number of reasons most of them philosophical and operational rather than economical. Although open source is free (like a puppy), there are many costs associated with development and maintenance. I don’t think the economic argument has a lot of value in terms of decision making, since anything big costs a lot of money. Big products from vendors and big software development projects seem to me to be in the same ballpark cost-wise.

I’m not going to go deeply into the whole argument here, and it is possible to argue any of these points. But my opinion is that given a certain level of technical expertise (that not everyone has or can get) I think the advantage of open source is the ability to be nimble in the face of new demands and serve your user base in much more focused way than vendor solutions can offer. The downside of course is that you have to maintain it all yourself and there is no easy phone call to customer support that you can make to say “just fix it please!”

Which brings me back to Chicago, physically and intellectually. I am part of a panel with two colleagues from our library to talk about harvesting and aggregating metadata–including primary source metadata–into a presentation layer that is usable and useful for researchers.

We will of course talk about the vendor-supplied option that we currently use to harvest and aggregate book and primary source metadata, but I’m going to go another step beyond that to talk about the value of standards-based data exchange and demonstrate not only the vendor-based model, but a few open source based applications that we have developed here at the library because my point is that data aggregation is a matter of policy and practice, not applications.

What I am saying is that aggregated metadata can be used in a variety of ways to support discovery, and that open source applications based on standards that can be re-used and re-purposed for different audiences can go a long way toward serving the needs of our local audiences in ways that “one-size-fits-all” vendor products don’t seem to be doing.

We’ll see what sort of reception this gets in a room full of people who presumably (at least in my mind) are here to hear about the latest product from their vendor and why they should buy it.

Penrose Library's new web site

Recently, the Penrose Library launched a brand new “user-centered” web site. I’m not a big fan of the term “user centered” since I think it is often used as an excuse not to be creative. But what we are trying to do is make available to each group of users the things that they are most interested in right up front. Rather than forcing them to learn how the library is organized administratively, we wanted the site to answer the question: “What do I want to do?” based on a second question:  “Who wants to know?”

Some of this approach was informed by a workshop given by Nancy Fried Foster, library anthropologist at the University of Rochester, that some of us attended a year or so ago. She had recently completed an ethnographic study of undergraduate research behavior at the University of Rochester. Her findings were published in 2007 in a book called “Studying Students: The Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester.”

Other parts of the design were informed by our own observations of user behaviors from Faculty, Students (both graduate and undergraduate) and University staff. If you are interested, there is a short “tour” of the new site, narrated by our Instruction Librarian, Carrie Forbes.

My point is really that, in order to be successful, especially in a library that hopes to teach research and scholarship skills as well as provide information, one size does not fit all, and there should be as many different library experiences as there are groups we wish to serve. Our next step is to extend the granularity of experience down to the individual, and provide each person (or at least each person who is affiliated with DU) with a experience that is tailored to his or her own interests and experience. I mean, if Amazon and L.L. Bean can do it, why can’t a library?

Digital Pioneers web site

A few months ago I posted a bit about Digital Pioneers, a project I was involved with that has as it’s aim a project to document a period of time (c.1994 – 2005) and a type of project (i.e. one that transformed analog cultural materials into digital form) that explored the possibilities of digitization of material that was commonly held by libraries, museums, archives, and historical societies in the words of the people who were present at the creation. The original project was organized around a class project at the University of Denver’s Library and Information Science Program. After the class ended, responsibility for Digital Pioneers was transferred to the Digital Initiatives office here at the Penrose Library, where we will continue to develop the project and interview more subjects as time and resources permit.

Our goal is to put a human face on the development of cultural heritage digitization. The story of the content and the technology development is told in the peer-reviewed publications and white papers, but we want to find out what people were actually thinking and attempting to do when they embarked on building the digital future; the challenges they faced, and the insights they developed as agents of change.

For now, there is a somewhat eclectic (but based on specific criteria) gathering of reminiscences, observations, and visions from a small group of people we were able to contact and interview in the time that we had. More interviews are in the pipeline, and many more people have already been identified as potential interview subjects. If you have a suggestion for someone who should be interviewed, please fill out the Suggestion Form on the Digital Pioneers web site. And for now, enjoy hearing the stories from a time and place that is fast becoming only a memory.

In the digital collection building workshops we do for SAA, we always have emphasized the idea that you should never digitize a collection that isn’t already processed. We generally leave the definition of “processed” a bit vague. At the most basic level, we mean that until you have some organized list of the items that you want to digitize, you shouldn’t start slapping random content on the scanner bed.  In practice this meant that you didn’t digitize until you had item-level control of the collection, even if there was only a title without any other descriptive information. The value added descriptive information is something we would advocate adding as part of the digitizing workflow process.

Now I am beginning to wonder if that idea is not quite as valid for born digital content. Perhaps if we just put the stuff out there with the absolute minimum of control, and let the crowd of interested amateur experts fill in the details beyond what we can derive automatically we might be better off, or at least farther ahead.

For most born digital content I can know a few basic things mostly automatically: where it came from, who created it (sometimes), and what it is (document, photograph, moving image, etc) and its file format (jpg, pdf, mp4, mp3, etc.). I can assign it the few required fields in a management system automatically, with something as basic as the title being simply the file name. Could I then  just toss it out there and allow the crowd to fill in the other details?

Even if I assume that there are equal parts “Wisdom of the Masses” and “Madness of the Mob” out there, would I get enough good information to make it worth the work of separating the wheat from the chaff?

One argument on the positive side is that, unless you have a very highly focused collection with a very small temporal span, no one organization or institution can possibly have all the expertise to create high quality, in-depth information about all of its collections. And there are a lot of people out there who may know more about the Ukraine, or about DU in the 1940s than the folks here in Denver in the early part of the 21st century.

Could our role as archivists and repository managers be to view and review, rather than to create and catalog?

I don’t think this really can work, or can it?

S-1 Locomotive (Library of Congress via Wikipedia)

Known as the father of industrial design, Raymond Loewy practically invented the look of “modernism” in industrial and consumer products. The iconic S-1 locomotive with its streamlined design became a model for everything from locomotives to automobiles to toasters in mid-century America.

The point is not that we need streamlined access tools (well we DO, but not in this way), but that maybe we should look to industrial designers as inspiration for the design of our access tools as much as we look at information architecture. This thought was inspired by a conversation I had at the recent IMLS WebWise conference here in Denver a couple of weeks ago. Jodi Allison-Bunnel of the Northwest Digital Archives and I were talking about building user interfaces and how the idea of user-centered design could lead to stagnation unless it was possible to translate users often unarticulated desires into something completely new. At which point I pulled out my iPhone and said something like “If somebody had asked me what I wanted in a handheld communications device I wouldn’t have described this!” Yet the design of my iPhone (and other smartphones) suits the needs of my mobile information seeking activities very well even if I couldn’t have explained it to someone ahead of time.

University of Wyoming Libraries web site

Does this mean we should design all of our discovery portals to mimic the experience of my iPhone? Perhaps, perhaps not. I know that there is an entire academic discipline of Human Computer Interaction, and there are Information Architects galore. But maybe we need to broaden our thinking a bit and reach out to people who are not necessarily in the world of information management but are a part of a world that makes useful things elegant as well as utilitarian.  Should I feel a sense of joy or excitement when I use an archival discovery and delivery system rather than just satisfaction that I discovered something? When we designed our access tools we spent a lot of time thinking about the functionality, and by and large we got that right. Maybe we should have taken a bit more time to think about the elegance of the tool as well. Maybe we will pretty soon.

As archivists, we are always trying to find the best way to connect to our user community to give them what they want in the best way possible. The idea of quantum archives is to connect people to the content in as granular a way as possible while preserving the opportunity for them to contextualize the content in ways that they want.   I was recently involved in a conversation where someone who wouldn’t ever consider himself an Archivist put this idea in the most succinct way.

Thought Equity Motion is a for profit stock footage fulfillment and video asset management service that manages the video libraries of some of the biggest media organizations in the world. They happen to be based in Denver and I’ve had a couple of opportunities  over the past few months to talk with Frank Cardello, the EVP for Corporate Development at TEM. TEM has just launched a joint venture with the NCAA called the “NCAA Vault.” Timed to coincide with the beginning of the annual Men’s basketball tournament, the Vault features “ten years of full games and highlights” of the Sweet 16. As a basketball fan I appreciate this opportunity, as an archivist I am even more impressed with how TEM and the NCAA thought about presenting historical information.

A model for archival access?

While I can watch an entire game, I can also use search terms to limit to particular teams, years, and players. There are also some pre-defined categories like “great shots” or  “great finishes.”  Next, but not finally, you have the opportunity to search (using a text-based search box) through the play-by play track of the video footage for a particular moment or play within a game. You can select this clip and share it in other applications.

Frank said that the idea behind this approach was that people initially don’t want to watch the entire game, they want to “experience the moment” and share that moment with others. It was the purpose of the Vault to allow people to experience the moment.

Although he was talking about entertainment consumers, I thought that this was an interesting way to view all types of historical research. Researchers seldom want everything in a collection or a book, but those “moments” that help them prove their points, support their thesis or just inform themselves. This seems to me to be the essence of quantum archives, to reduce archival material to a collection of “moments” that can be used, shared, and re-used both in ways that we define–the pre-defined “great shots”–and the unexpected ways that result from users making their own moment out of a larger whole.

I’d like to coin a new phrase that I think I’ll add to the next version of the Quickstart Guide. It is “Deliver the Moment.” It simply means that we can manage our content according to traditional principles, but always seek to deliver that content in ways that resonate with our users.

I don’t know how scalable this idea is in terms of delivering real-life archival access. The NCAA Vault, for now, focuses on just one sport (Men’s basketball), in a very short time frame (10 years), and over a very limited scope (the last three rounds of the annual tournament). Given these limited parameters it is relatively easy to craft a satisfying user experience based on the principle of delivering the moment. There are plans to add more sports and a greater time span. I’m rooting for them.