The Quantum Archivist

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The idea of geo-coding locations for historical documents (especially photographs) has been around for some time.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?