Or at least help make it a better place? The Archives and Special Collections at UConn is at the center of both the development of the digital repository and of the documentation of Human Rights.  We are looking for a Curator of Human Rights Collections who has a strong interest in Human Rights as well as experience working with digital content and archives. If you are interested in working in an environment where innovation is the rule and challenging intellectual endeavors are commonplace, think about applying to join our group!
Minimum Qualifications include:

• A graduate degree in Library or Information Science from a program accredited by the American Library Association.
• Understanding of issues and challenges relating to human rights documentation.
• Three years experience in an academic library, archives, or related institution.
• Two years experience working with digital content in a repository or archival setting.
• Ability to work independently, identifying problems, implementing revisions and changes to policies and creating and implementing new policies.

With additional preferred qualifications including:

• Experience with digital content management and digital curation.
• Demonstrated work or field experience in human rights documentation.
• Experience working with archiving web and/or social media resources.

For a complete description and application instructions please visit HuskyHire at: http://www.jobs.uconn.edu

0r follow this link:

http://s.uconn.edu/humrightscurator

then choose “Advanced Search”  and enter  2012498 in “Job Opening ID”

As I entered the conference this morning, I realized that, contrary to most conferences I attend, here was a group of a few hundred people, and I knew virtually none of them besides the contingent from UConn who were also attending. These folks spend much of their time thinking about how to describe and make available materials of all types and in all formats and I briefly wondered how they would take to an archivist talking to them about organizing and managing a digital repository. I found to my pleasure, but not my surprise, that this group was talking and thinking about many of the same things as I was, and were keenly interested in what we had to say about modeling content objects in a digital repository, and even better, had interesting ideas on how to do that.

Patrick and I are separately building Fedora repositories at our respective institutions and building the teams we need to make these repositories realities. We both know and understand the value of metadata and metadata librarians who think broadly about resource management and description, and how metadata extends well beyond descriptive cataloging.

The takeaway that I’m getting from the conference so far-which continues as I write this during the lunch break- is that the important metadata work for us in the digital repository domain is to focus on developing and modeling the relationships among our digital repository objects so that they are flexible enough to exist in multiple domains and in multiple discovery systems

So, while we are working at UConn to develop a technical system to leverage a common repository of heterogeneous content, we also know that any technical system is only as good as the data (and the data models) that reside in it.

The Wired Campus reporter felt it noteworthy to mention that Howard “spoke at the conference wearing an Occupy Wall Street T-shirt that he had made by hand” which would not have been a surprise to any archivists who have ever seen Howard at any public event.

Nevertheless the questions for archivists presented by the Occupy movement, and other protest movements in the social media age are complex and daunting for archivists. The Chronicle article goes on to explain how Howard and other archivists are attempting to create some systematic means of appraising and collecting the records of social movements. Failing that, they are at least interested in developing some standard approach for archivists to take when attempting to document these movements, because as Howard is quoted in the article as saying, ““The old way of doing things doesn’t scale.  …We have to find new ways of doing the selection and doing the metadata.”

Howard was joined in the panel by David Millman of NYU, and Sharon Leon of the Center for History and New Media.

Thanks to all three for raising the questions and the public awareness of the archival craft!

Digital Repositories, 2012 edition

I just finished teaching a workshop for SAA, with my wife Jessica,  on building and maintaining digital repositories.  We’ve been teaching this workshop in some form or another for more than 10 years. When we were creating the latest version we noticed, not surprisingly, that a lot had changed since we started doing this. In fact, there were only a few slides that persisted in essentially their original form from the beginning. One of them introduces the “Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections.” Although the slide has not changed the Framework itself is now in its third edition.  That leaves just the slide that quotes from Paul Conway’s 2000 article in the NEDCC’s “Handbook for Digital Projects” where he says that “preservation is the creation of digital products worth maintaining over time.” We use that slide to illustrate how digital objects, even ones that are surrogates of analog documents, are information objects themselves and have a value that need to be understood and appraised. I also see this slide as the precursor to the field of digital curation and the idea of the digital curation lifecycle, that requires us to continually appraise and reappraise digital content.

So much else about digital object creation, management, and preservation has changed tsince the beginning that the details of workshop would probably be incomprehensible to the average archivist of 2001 (cloud storage? data visualization?), except for the basic fundamentals of the profession: collect, maintain, preserve, make available. There is some amount of comfort in knowing that, at least for us, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

WebWise2012, a new world view quietly arrives

Following up on my last post about the DPLA and WebWise2012, my takeaway from the conference was that we have now completely crossed the divide in the digital world from being concerned with creating digital content to figuring out how to manipulate, combine, and visualize the body of digital content that now exists. I know that for many people this divide was crossed some time ago, but the reason I know we really have moved to a new world-view was that nobody was talking about it at WebWise. It didn’t have to be talked about because it was just an assumption of most everyone that there was a body of digital content out there to manipulate, aggregate, and visualize.

Update March 16: John Palfrey’s WebWise presentation on the DPLA, learning environments, and his vision for a interconnected digital information infrastructure, is now available. It is worth the listen

Speaking of WebWise, the IMLS put on another great show, with the whole gamut of people involved in what might be very loosely called “digital humanities.” From Punk rocker Ian Mackaye, to LeVar Burton (yes THAT LeVar Burton), to Story Corps’ Dave Isay all participating in two days of discussion and imagining about the future of digital technology. It was enough to get me back to the blogosphere.

Enjoy!

http://gavialib.com/2011/12/the-c-word/

Honestly, I’m rooting for it. This is potentially the most transformative thing to come along since the printing press- no hyperbole there.

I’m here at the first open plenary meeting at the National Archives listening to presentations by the leaders and commentary by the audience.

What does this mean for archivists? If then DPLA actually succeeds, the our task in the future will be to make sure that our collections can become a part of this enormous resource. The DPLA is still in its infancy, and the meeting today is moving so fast it is hard to digest it all, but I can say that this is a project to watch.

More to come on this when I have a chance to think. You can go to the DPLA Web site, mentioned above, and see the live feed of the meeting, or watch the whole thing later. It is worth the time.

We begin with the list and follow with a bit of exposition and expansion of the items in the list. Right now there are five principles on the list, maybe the list will grow, maybe it will shrink. We’ll see…

Five Principles of the Second Generation

1. All digital content is data
2. All data that has value should be managed
3. The package is the smallest unit of management
4. All pointers refer to the “original” resource
5. Digital curation preserves access not objects

What is data?

Data can be defined as any information suitable for manipulation, use, or reuse in an electronic environment.  This includes metadata, which is the “sum total of anything we know about an object” as well as the digital content files (electronic records, primary content objects, etc.) themselves, which, by their binary nature are inherently data.

What is a digital asset?

A digital asset is a set of data elements (metadata of all types, primary content objects, associative information, system information) combined into a “package” that is internally coherent and can be managed in an electronic environment by applications and processes.

We acquire digital assets through analog to digital conversion, born digital acquisition, and metadata creation in associated systems.

Managed data and packages

Managed data is data combined into a digital asset (or digital information) package that exists in an application that allows managers (and end users) to perform operations on the digital asset including CRUD (create, read, update, delete), and preservation activities (from checksums to migration) based on rules and authorization.

While digital asset packages should be able to exist outside of a management application, they would no longer be managed. Only managed data meets the standards of archival quality.

While a digital asset package is the smallest unit of management, the size and nature of a package can vary from package to package. In archival information systems, we make choices about the content and nature of the lowest level of managed data. For example, a set of page images of a book may exist as a single package with structural metadata that arranges them in order, or they could exist as a set of individual packages that have associated metadata that organizes them into their proper order. Either way, the end user sees a book with its pages in order.  This “lumper vs. splitter” decision is a choice we make at the institutional or even collection level.

Originals and derivatives

As mentioned above, a digital asset package may contain any number of content and metadata objects. These objects can be both archival master files (what we tend to think of as the “originals”) as well as derivatives that support access and manipulation.  In every case, derivatives are merely representations or transformations of the original object—whatever that may be—and any reference to the object refers to the original and NOT to the representation. For example, if a user interacts with a jp2000 version of a DNG image file and would like to cite that image in a scholarly work, the citation should refer to a unique identifier of that resource and not the URL of the jp2000 representation. The jp2000 version the user interacts with today is only a convenience of access in a particular time and place, and is likely to be replaced with some other access derivative in the future. This question gets a lot more complicated when analog to digital conversion is involved, and in the case of born digital text documents. Repositories must make policy decisions about what is considered the original.

Preservation, Access, and Curation

As Paul Conway said some years ago, “preservation is the action and access is the thing.” Digital preservation is the activity of insuring access to digital content over time. This opens any number of possibilities and questions, especially in the born digital world. What is an original? What do we preserve—content or format? Or are there different answers at different times and in different situations?

However we answer policy questions like the ones above, the one answer that is always right is that good digital objects are never isolated or alone, but should always exist within the context of a package that is internally coherent, and self describing. As I like to say, if you found this digital object on the floor, you could pick it up and know all you needed to know about it just by looking inside.

In Kate’s definition, a participatory archives is one where “people other than the archives professionals contribute knowledge or resources resulting in increased understanding about archival materials, usually in an online environment.” I really like this idea and would expand upon it to say that I think participatory archives is the only way we will be able to continue to provide the kind of artisanal description of highly granular pieces of our collections.

It ties into another theme of the conference that I mentioned in my last post, mass digitization and metadata creation. Can we move toward getting lots of stuff out there and rely on the wisdom of the participants to add additional value? This question has really been answered in the affirmative already. I think the next question is “how do we make this available in ways that make it possible to people to effectively participate?”

Participatory archives assumes access to collection material, but at what level can we make this available and useful for participatory archives? Most participatory projects begin with essentially item-level access to digital content. Yet mass-digitization/rapid capture projects often look to folder level, or larger groupings.

Is there a common ground for these two trends that makes them mutually supportive rather than mutually exclusive?