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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At my first Webwise (and the second one overall), I was very pleased to find in my conference bag the conference notebook that had each of the powerpoint presentations printed with notetaking space to the side of each slide and to find at each table place a pad of paper and a pen for me to use to take notes. I dutifully, and frantically took notes in the notebook and  fretted that I was missing something. My “tweets” consisted of handwritten notes in the margins of my notepad passed on only as far as my arm could reach.

This year, at Webwise #11, the conference bag (they still give out one) had the notebook, but no pad or pen. We communicate via twitter, today’s meet and other means with everyone in the room as well as people all over the world who are interested in the proceedings.

I frantically take notes and fret that I’m missing something, except that now I’m missing something from a lot bigger pool of ideas. Nevertheless, I prefer the new paradigm. Through this technology I’ve met, both in person and virtually, a group of people who share my interests and dreams, and we continue to build our networks of information and collaboration. This was the goal of Webwise 10 years ago and it continues to be fulfilled as we grow with our profession and technology.

The half-day workshop covers a range of issues repository managers have to face (I’ve seen the previews) but most importantly, I think the workshop helps repository mangers think about who they are, and their central role in the collection, management, preservation and use of digital content.

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.

Howard Besser says that most new technology is used at first to mimic the old ways in a new form. “The conceptual steps [of technology development] typically include first trying to replicate core activities that functioned in the analog environment.”  So it stands to reason then that before we could invent new forms of access we had to re-invent the paper finding aid in the form of EAD.

However, it seemed that in doing so we raised the finding aid, rather than access to the material itself, to the level of an objective and actually prevented archivists from providing good service in the Internet environment. Before the age of computers and digitization,  there really was no point in providing highly granular content information to users. You still had to come to the repository and interact with the content in ways that did not disrupt the physical order of the boxes and folders. This filing system approach, while efficient and effective in its time and place, was a barrier to use. Everyone understood this, but no one had any real idea of how to do it better or differently. Thus, archivists became the interpreters of collections, a kind of human finding aid.

As with any bureaucratic system (and I mean this in the most positive possible sense), once it was devised, a class of apparatchiks grew up to tend the system and became vested in its perpetuation. The essential conservative nature of archives also contributed to the idea that the finding aid was sacred and that the Archivist as gatekeeper was the best possible way to provide service. I’ll wager that this access method was never satisfactory to the general user, but then, the only “serious” researchers were supposed to use archives anyway.

I don’t want to say that the parents of EAD didn’t do creative work. But they were working within a context of thinking from which they were unable to break free. It would have been surprising if they had, and if they did, perhaps no one would have listened to them anyway.

My own introduction to formal archival education came just before the introduction of EAD, and since I came from a research and teaching background, my idea of what an archives could or should be was based on user-centered ideas (although I didn’t know that term at the time).  I wanted to get to the “stuff” and draw my own conclusions, after all, that’s what I was there for. Most of my work when I was a classroom teacher centered on teaching with primary sources. It was always surprising what a group of students would see in a set of documents that I had never seen.

When I crossed over from researcher/teacher to service provider, I always believed that keeping the researcher as close to the content as possible was the most important thing an archivist could do. Give them the stuff and get out of the way!

Although it is obviously not quite as simple as that, we do have the capability to do this now. The Internet and digitization makes this all possible. But just how will we do it? By constantly trying new ways to present our archival material.

A couple of years ago, I gave a presentation at the SAA meeting in Chicago that I called “Where Have All the Binders Gone?” That introduced an idea that we should try to manage and provide access as close to the content as possible. This later evolved into the theory of quantum archives and is the inspiration for this blog.

George Mitchell web site, 1999

The first thing we did was to think about a productivity approach to processing, although in a very  paper-based way. We used a primitive, but effective, database system to manage the series and folders and, using the “report writer” function planned to create an electronic finding aid on the College’s gopher. (Anyone remember gopher?)

Well the web exploded onto the scene not too long after we started, and to our good fortune but not surprise, we found that with just a little adjustment to our report templates we could export HTML pages from our database. In the true fashion of reinventing the past in a new technology, we created a finding aid for the collection in a few short weeks that looked suspiciously like a paper finding aid in its construction and organization. We didn’t really know what to do with this new thing, but we knew we had to be there. So we

were on the web and we had pictures, and video! Even then we were exploring the potential of the web for organizing and reorganizing information. We  had a photograph “database” that was really just a categorized alphabetical list of digitized photos. We believed in searching and indexing, but didn’t have the tools in place to be able to do it, so we faked it. Similarly, the “menu” system on the left side of the finding aid is not dynamically generated, but is a set of images hard-coded into every page. We could imagine what we wanted to do, but didn’t have the tools or the expertise to do it.

Somewhat to  my astonishment, more than 10 years later, this finding tool is still available on the web as  part of a larger project to document the former Senator’s career. Take a minute to visit the George J. Mitchell Papers at

Bowdoin College for a look at the past envisioned as the future. Good enough for its time, and a beginning of understanding the power of this new thing called the World Wide Web. It is also a story of attempting, but not completely succeeding, to think out of the box. Even though many of the elements of what would become quantum archives were there for us, we just didn’t have enough experience to see it then.

p.s. Another round of thanks to Eliot Wilczek and Calley Gurley who embraced and supported the experiment. Both of them went on to careers in archives in other institutions. You were wonderful people to work with.

The Guide introduced concepts like “lumpers vs. splitters” and “ruthless efficiency and dogged persistence.” as ideas related to archival processing as well as asking more philosophical questions about the role of the archivist in creating knowledge.

Back then the Quickstart Guide was mostly focused on processing paper records. As time went on and I began to use the Quickstart Guide as a teaching tool, I realized that in the born digital age, processing had changed significantly and that the old Guide was a bit out of touch. For example, the original Guide emphasized that good archival description proceeded from the General to the Specific and moved down that continuum as time and resources allowed. Quantum Archival theory turns that idea on its head, and says that good archival description focuses on specifics first and moves to generalities as time allows.

So I went back and revised it for the digital world. The result is the Quick Start Guide 2.1.

The Quick Start Guide, 2.1

The key change was to emphasize that “management is not access.” That is, the way we manage our collections is not necessarily (or even desirably) the way we want users to access our collections. The ability to separate management from access is one of the key values of digitized and born digital archival content.

The Quick Start Guide remains a central statement of what I consider to be “good” archival attitudes. It is the first thing I teach in my classes.

As I have said before, we should let our content float freely and find its own place, at least in the arena of discovery and access. Spending hours or days crafting detailed and exhaustive collection and series descriptions is a waste of time, and perhaps even self-indulgent. If you want to be a historian, then go do that, it is a different activity, and an honorable one.  But if you want to be an archivist, create attributes, metadata, and description at the quantum level. That’s where your true value and service to researchers lies.

Processing in the quantum sense is making content available with attributes and opening up potential connections to other pieces of content. Getting the content out there for people to discover and use is the thing to do. I don’t think I have ever had anyone say to me, “Gee, that collection description was a thing of beauty, I wish it was longer.”  Because, people want what they want, and what they want is content. So spend your time processing content, and not writing prose.

Your value will come and be measured in the number of links to your content from other sources, and the number of times it is used and re-used.

Not to be outdone, two years later the American Council of Learned Societies’ Commission on Cyberinfrastructure produced, “Our Cultural Commonwealth,” the Humanists’s perspective on supporting scholarship in the digital age.

Since then there have been numerous initiatives relating to cyberinfrastructure in both Higher and K-12 Education, Science, and Humanities scholarship. Yet, to my knowledge nothing has been written concerning the impact or use of cyberinfrastructure on archives or the work that archivists do.

Cyberinfrastructure is “more than a tangible network and means of storage in digitized form, and it is not only discipline-specific software applications and project-specific data collections. It is also the more intangible layer of expertise and the best practices, standards, tools, collections and collaborative environments (italics added) that can be broadly shared across communities of inquiry.” (From “Our Cultural Commonwealth”)

At the heart of the cyberinfrastructure vision is the development of a cultural community that supports peer-to-peer collaboration and new modes of education based upon broad and open access to leadership computing; data and information resources; online instruments and observatories; and visualization and collaboration services. Cyberinfrastructure enables distributed knowledge communities that collaborate and communicate across disciplines, distances and cultures. These research and education communities extend beyond traditional brick-and-mortar facilities, becoming virtual organizations that transcend geographic and institutional boundaries. (from the NSF’s “Cyberinfrastructure Vision for the 21st Century” 2007)

In short, cyberinfrastructure is what underlies the modern academic world of collaborative, interdisciplinary research, teaching, and learning. It is the network of associated technology, middleware, and visualization tools and services that enables interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration and supports the development of innovative teaching and research.

Thinking of it this way, I think an important question we must ask ourselves is how can we integrate primary resources under our stewardship into the cyberinfrastructure of our institutions, our regions, and the world? Alternatively, how do we, as archivists, document and manage digital content that lives everywhere and nowhere at the same time?

Again, I’ll come back to a recurring theme, we need to make it possible to de-contextualize our collection objects so that they can be re-contextualized by scholars or anyone who has a use for them. This is not so different from traditional research, as the research function is all about creating new knowledge from primary resources (what “primary” may mean is another topic altogether). Secondly, we need to project those objects to the places where people are. In an academic setting, that means things like courseware tools or other places where students are encountering the building blocks of their work.

We were meeting with the University’s Office of Communications staff, showing them our new “quantum-based” discovery tool for archival content, including thousands of current and historical images of the campus produced by the Office of Communications.  We took great pains in developing this tool to be responsible archivists and present ALL relevant content, including information about content that was not yet digitized.

At the end of the presentation, they had very positive responses to the discovery tool, but wanted to know why in the world we would show them things they couldn’t see or use immediately over the web. For them, working on deadlines and needing instant access to content, the idea of even being bothered to sift through references to analog content was a waste of time.

And they are right, of course. Most, but not all researchers want

FACTS display with "show non-digital" option

what they want, and they want it now. So we changed our interface a bit. Now when you do a search, you are presented first ONLY with content that is available in digital form. And if you want, you can click a box to include non-digital content. We don’t yet have a way to see how many times that box is clicked. I’m sure it would be interesting.