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The idea of geo-coding locations for historical documents (especially photographs) has been around for some time.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

With that statement from George Mitchell as a governing principle, I set out  in 1994 to process 1,000 linear feet of papers from the former Senate Majority Leader. They came in a truck like the ones they use to move households. I had never processed anything on the scale of this collection or of this complexity. It challenged me to think differently about processing and access.

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.

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.