The Quantum Archivist

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 first couple of Harry Potter books, the editions that were offered for sale in the United States were Americanized versions of the original works. What was a “jumper” in the original became a “sweater” in the US version. Lorries became trucks, boots became trunks, etc. Even the title of the first book was changed to suit the American audience. Once the books became a world-wide phenomenon, everyone was presumably familiar with Britishisms and the practice stopped I believe.

This is an interesting and possibly significant issue as we begin to develop our distributed cataloging project for the work of Semyon Fridlyand. Will we need to develop a semantic thesaurus of some kind that will help us bridge the gap between how we think about and name things and how others do? Adding to the dilemma is the fact that we will also be dealing with multiple languages and even multiple alphabets.

At the Web Wise conference last week, I heard Monika Hagendorn-Saupe of Europeana the EU’s aggregator of digital libraries. They are dealing with a huge alphabetic, semantic, and language issue and are developing a semantic search engine that you can test. I think it has promise and I’m hoping to find out more about the project and will report it here.

The concept of the semantic web has been around for a number of years, and for at least 10 years we’ve been hearing how the semantic web would change the way we use the web. The automatic linking of similar ideas, even if those ideas are not specifically indicated in the resource has been something of a holy grail for information professionals since the digital age began and we realized that it would be impossible to maintain metadata about digital content in the way that we did for analog content.

Finding a way out of our semantic/language/alphabet dilemma is going to be a bigger deal than we had originally thought when we come up with this idea.

And then they want it YESTERDAY.

There have been numerous studies related to why or why not Institutional Repositories succeed. Many of them have been gathered by Chris Bailey in his Institutional Repository Bibliography.

Basically, IRs fail because no one has any use for them (in the economic sense of “utility”) and because they are often marketed as preservation solutions and not as something that could benefit the actual users. I had a conversation the other day with some folks who want me to market our digital repository to faculty, get significant buy-in, and then explore how we can expand services for them. Sort of the opposite of “if you build it they will come.”  Now that the age of experimentation in digital libraries is over, and has been for about 5 years, the idea of leading from the front has taken a back seat to leading from behind.  The tagline we hear most often is “user-centered design.”  That is, our systems must reflect what users want and not necessarily what we think they need. Presumably, the user knows what he wants, and it is up to us to give it to him.

I think there is a flaw in this approach. Most users can only imagine what they want within the context of what they already know.  This idea is illustrated in numerous folktales. One of my favorites is “Jaimie O’Rourke and the Big Potato” where Jaimie, after being granted a wish by a leprechaun, wishes, not for a release from poverty or anything like that, but for the biggest potato in the world because that’s the best thing he can think of. While Jaimie ends up all right, he would have done much better if he could have broken free from established conventions.

But how could we have expected him to? Can we really expect users to be able to articulate or even imagine paradigm changing scenarios without being led to them in some way by people who think about this all the time?

I think we should go back to leading from the front, by listening to our users and (at the risk of sounding like Mama Odie here), discerning from them what it is they need, rather than what they want.

Most people don’t know that they need a digital repository, or if you ask them, think that they don’t need one at all (I have backups! I have network drives! I have CDs!). But if you give them something they need, like a platform for open access publishing or a means to deliver content that they couldn’t include in their most recent publication, or a place to keep their grant-funded datasets, THEN they see a value in what you are offering not because it offers permanent durability, but because it meets a need or solves a problem, or just makes their life easier.

Despite what we as archivists know to be the value of digital repositories, for the user, the digital repository is a means, and not a destination in itself. For them it is a means of access to a corpus of content that they need to do their scholarly work that will be there when they need it. For us, it is the other side of the same coin.

Most people just live and do what they do, and only later they might discover that they either did something unique and wonderful, or not. Often, what they think is important at the time isn’t, and what they think isn’t important at the time is the big thing in the long run. That’s what makes the study of history so interesting.

Talking to some of the people who we consider Digital Pioneers, one of the questions I am asking is whether or not they had any idea that they were making history, or if they knew that they were doing something new and unique. While the general response is “yes” to the latter, no one has yet said that they considered themselves as making history.  At best, people were trying to change the face of research or discovery in their particular discipline or project. But there wasn’t a general sense that the work they were doing would ever merit being written about by historians.

That being said, I had a recent conversation with someone who told me that the story of humanities digitization particularly was one that needed to be told, since the humanists were always unjustly overshadowed by the better funded scientists, even though the humanists were often ahead in digital development.

Without taking sides on this one yet, I’ll say that the primary focus of the project is on the humanists. The scientists may need to get someone else to tell their story.

The project is not yet publicly available as we gather a  useful body of content. I’m looking at a preliminary unveiling in the next month or so.

Stay tuned.

I’m attending and speaking at a small conference for members of the Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries called “Digital Repositories, Data Curation, and the Cloud.” The Keynote speaker in the preconference today was Thorny Staples, the “godfather” of Fedora and currently Director of Community Strategy and Alliances and Fedora Project at DuraSpace. In this morning’s talk, Thorny introduced the idea of “durability” as being different from, and preferable to, the idea of simple preservation. As I understand it, durability differs from preservation in that while preservation seeks to maintain the existence of a digital object in a way that enables it to be accessed, durability preserves not only the existence but the meaning or context of the content in a verifiable way.

This strikes me as being absolutely obvious, now that it has been pointed out. The record of humanity now takes place on the web. How do we maintain the connections that are made between and among objects that are combined and recombined in 2.0 tools  even when those objects do not live in the same place, and the tools that are used to create those connections are themselves ephemeral?

The scholarly record, and by the same token the historical record, relies on citations to stable resources that provide verification for the assumptions or assertions made in an argument. How do we verify and persist, i.e. make “durable,” the context of a digital object in all of its contexts? Once we let the object out of a controlled environment that enforces context, how can context be maintained?

These are the kinds of questions that we might address when thinking about durability rather than just preservation.