Posts

Reading w/Dan: The Final Report of the Lighting the Way Project

by at

This past November the Final Report of the Lighting the Way Project “Facilitating and Illuminating Emergent Futures for Archival Discovery and Delivery” was published.

Abstract

“Between September 2019 and August 2021, Stanford University Libraries facilitated Lighting the Way: illuminating the future of discovery and delivery for archives, with support from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The project focused on exploring how networks of people and technology impact archival discovery and delivery (how people find, access, and use material from archives and special collections). The project focused on engaging directly with practitioners – archives, library, and technology workers – involved in this work, across roles, job functions, areas of expertise, and levels of positional power. The project’s goals included mapping the ecosystem of archival discovery and delivery; developing conceptual and actionable recommendations for technical, ethical, and practical concerns; building a shared understanding between practitioners responsible for this work; and activating a diverse group of project participants to adopt the recommendations and findings developed during the project.”

Analysis of document

As I read this document, I felt that there is a lot we could take away from their findings and recommendations, not just in relation to archival discovery and delivery, but throughout our library practices and culture, such as utilizing “liberating structures” and “strategy knotwork” for engaging in collaborative discussions and planning.  Below are some key take-aways from the report, but I encourage y’all to read it, too.

Discoveries

  1. Viewing archival discovery as an ecosystem of systems and people
  2. The interconnection between collaboration, power, and organizational positioning of this work
  3. The value of care-focused, generative facilitation methods to strategic planning for archival programs
  4. The importance of early-stage collaboration and communities of practice to support similar efforts.

Recommendations

  1. Develop new communities of practice that work in alignment with existing ones
  2. Prioritize collaborative opportunities for strategy that explore new working relationship
  3. Adopt and apply generative and care-focused facilitation methods to inform strategic planning
  4. Understand the resourcing required and value the labor necessary to undertake strategic opportunities.

Key Concepts

“This work is necessarily performed by people in a variety of roles – not just archives workers, but library workers, technology workers, and others with varying skill sets, areas of expertise, levels of responsibility, and positional power within their institutions.”

“Integration is the use of processes or tools to join systems to work together as a coordinated whole, which provides a “functional coupling” between systems.”

  • There are a wide variety of systems that support archival discovery and delivery, and they are deeply interconnected even when not well-integrated
  • While accurately understood as technical work, systems integration for archival discovery and delivery is impacted by non-technical factors
  • Most archives workers are only familiar with the systems that they use individually, making broader strategic discussions more challenging
  • While archival discovery and delivery is rarely perfect or complete at any institution or repository, archives workers usually only report about work when given phases are complete
Light tHe Way Table 1

Table 1. Applying strategy knotworking to Working Meeting activities

Resources

Reading w/Dan: Partners for Preservation

by at

“Reading w/Dan” Announcement

This year as part of an informal personal goal, I am trying to get a handle on and tackle my reading backlog of articles, technical reports, books, etc. With readings I finish I have decided to share interesting tidbits and recommendations with University Libraries colleagues. I had been approaching this by sharing via the Libraries’ Special Collection Forum and All-IT listservs.  Beth Snapp has suggested I use the Libraries’ IT blog as a means of wider dissemination and I concur that is a great idea. To that end I will repackage my existing shares/reviews from earlier this year over the next couple of weeks, and then any new ones will be posted both here and on the University Libraries’ Information Technology blog (https://library.osu.edu/site/it/).

Partners for Preservation

I recently completed reading the book, Partners for Preservation: Advancing Digital Preservation through Cross-Community Collaboration edited by Jeanne Kramer-Smyth © 2019.

It is a series of 10 essays split into 3 parts with an introduction and follow-up by the editor. I have bolded and italicized my three favorite essays that I feel also deliver the most useful information.

  • Memory, privacy and transparency
    • The inheritance of digital media by Edina Harbinja: When users of social media and other online resources pass, who has the rights to access/own/maintain the data?
    • Curbing the online assimilation of personal information by Paulan Korenhof: “The RTBF [Right To Be Forgotten] is meant to aid individuals in moving beyond their past in the current information age by erasing information that ‘with the passing of time becomes decontextualized, distorted, outdated, no longer truthful (but not necessarily false)”
    • The rise of computer-assisted reporting: challenges and successes by Brant Houston: “The rise in the number of journalists analysing data with the use of computers and software began in the mid-1980s. Widely known as computer-assisted reporting, the practice started in the USA with a handful of journalists in the late 1970s, grew significantly in the 1980s, spread to western Europe in the 1990s, and then to the rest of the world in the early 21st century. During its rise, the name for the practice has varied, with some researchers seeing an evolution of the practice with a different name for each era.”
    • Link rot, reference rot and the thorny problems of legal citation by Ellie Margolis: Explores the need for accurate legal citations as provenance for laws. Ironically, one of the legally resources cited had moved and the link provided had died of “link rot.”
  • The physical world: objects, art and architecture
    • The Internet of Things: the risks and impacts of ubiquitous computing by Éireann Leverett: “At its core, the Internet of Things is ‘ubiquitous computing’, tiny computers everywhere – outdoors, at work in the countryside, at use in the city, floating on the sea, or in the sky – for all kinds of real world purposes…All of these purposes initially seem logical, and even business critical to the users, yet each of them involves decisions about security and privacy with incredibly long lasting and far-reaching implications.” “The Internet of Things often rejects standard business models Entirely…But with the Internet of Things, a variation of the freemium model applies. We expect services for free (or at least as cheap as Internet of Things devices). The companies make money from the data we generate”
    • Accurate digital colour reproduction on  displays: from hardware design to software features by Abhijit Sarkar: Provides a concise explanation of color spaces and why color management is important in the GLAM communities
    • Historical BIM+: sharing, preserving and reusing architectural design data by Ju Hyun Lee and Ning Gu: Explores the complexity of architectural design in the virtual environment
  • Data and programming
    • Preparing and releasing official statistical data by Natalie Shlomo
    • Sharing research data, data standards and improving opportunities for creating visualisations by Vetria Byrd: A good primer on the steps that go into data visualization
    • Open source, version control and software sustainability by Ildikó Vancsa: An excellent summation of the open source software development process.

Partners for Preservation is an e-book available from The Ohio State University Libraries (https://library.ohio-state.edu/search/t?SEARCH=Partners+for+Preservation+&searchscope=7) for students, staff, faculty and alumni.

University Libraries Digital Preservation Ethos Framework Published

by at

Over the past two years, my former intern Matt McShane and I in collaboration with the Digital Preservation and Access (DP&A) Workgroup conducted a review and update of University Libraries’ 2013 Digital Preservation Policy Framework and created the newly adopted Digital Preservation Ethos Framework. University Libraries’ mission, vision and values have evolved since 2013, and it was time for a refresh.

Digital preservation is not a state that is achieved; rather, it is an ongoing set of activities providing continued access to digital objects beyond the limits of media failure or technological change. This work is highly collaborative across University Libraries. Therefore, it is more appropriate to consider the framework for this collective work as an ethos: the characteristic spirit of a people, community, culture or organization as manifested in its attitudes and aspirations. This is not a policy, a “how to” document or set of rules to follow. Instead, it is a statement of purpose and commitment to the ongoing work of preserving our digital cultural heritage.

In creating this document, we benchmarked the 2013 framework with our peers in the Big Ten Academic Alliance and reviewed other related documentation. The result is a document that has been simplified, dejargonized and rearranged to flow in a more engaging manner. It describes our commitment to digital preservation and lays out its connection to our mission, values and strategic directions. It identifies high-level requisites for digital preservation and articulates the objectives, scope, principles and standards, responsibilities, implementation aspirations and our commitment to collaboration and cooperation for digital preservation.

Please review the Digital Preservation Ethos Framework.

NDSA has released Levels of Digital Preservation v2.0

by at

Originally minted in 2013 (original Matrix at NDSA’s OSF site), the Levels of Digital Preservation provide a matrix by which to assess and guide one’s digital preservation program from a technological point of view. In early 2018, the NDSA sent out a call to the larger digital preservation community asking for interest in updating the Levels of Preservation.  Response was high – 125 individuals responded from across North America and beyond! NDSA then convened the Levels of Preservation Working group, which divided up into subgroups to tackle the many areas the community wanted to see addressed in a Levels Reboot. These subgroups included:

  • Revisions: charged with updating the Levels Matrix, including the normalization of language across the functional areas and levels.
  • Implementation: surveyed the community to see how the Levels had been used in the past and what people did and did not liked about its structure and content.  This information (survey results at NDSA’s OSF site) was one of the sources used to assist with the revisions.  This subgroup collaborated with the Revisions subgroup on an implementation guide Using the Levels of Digital Preservation: an overview for V2.0.
  • Assessment: explored how the Levels had been used to assess digital preservation efforts (report at NDSA’s OSF site), and have developed an Assessment Tool based on the updated Levels Matrix.
  • Curatorial: charged with identifying and crafting the basis of a series of discussion and decision points around how collections materials can be mapped to the Levels and other elements within an organizations’ preservation strategy.

The next steps will be to create a subgroup to address the development of strategy and additional materials to support the Levels of Digital Preservation v2.0 educational and advocacy efforts. Please contact Bradley Daigle at ndsa.digipres [at] gmail [dot] com if you are interested in working on this or being added to the Levels of Preservation Google Group.

New EDUCAUSE Publication: Research Data Curation

by at

Now Available
Research Data Curation: A Framework for an Institution-Wide Services Approach

An EDUCAUSE Working Group Paper
https://library.educause.edu/resources/2018/5/research-data-curation-a-framework-for-an-institution-wide-services-approach

Universities and colleges should consider an institution-wide approach to developing services for managing and curating research data. This paper identifies service areas and includes a framework for institutions to document current research data curation services and responsibilities. This timely, informative paper can also be found in the EDUCAUSE library and on the EDUCAUSE Working Groups website: www.educause.edu/ecar/ecar-working-groups

The publication is available to all EDUCAUSE members for one year, following which it made public. A full list of member institutions can be found at: https://members.educause.edu/. For more information about this paper and EDUCAUSE Working Groups, contact WG@educause.edu

JAO Technology Matters in Archives – “Email: An Appraisal Approach”

by at

The second “Technology Matters in Archives” column has been published, “Email: An Appraisal Approach.”

“For nearly a half-century, we in the archives, records, and information management professions have either taught our institutions and organizations, or been taught, that a record is a record, no matter the media or manner in which it is created. It is the informational value contained within the item that determines whether it is a record. If it is a record, we then need to identify the temporal value of that information to determine its lifecycle, that is how long it should be maintained and its final disposition, either destruction or accessioning to an archive. However, there still is significant pushback from our institutions’ desires to treat electronic or born digital records as something different from those that are paper-based and/or analog-born, and subsequently want to monolithically manage electronic/digital records’ lifecycles as a single record type…This problem exists throughout our organizations from our enterprise systems that manage human resources and financial data, to our shared drives, to the darkest and dankest quagmire of all, our email systems. Had Dante Alighieri been a records or information management professional in the twenty-first century, he may have assigned one level of his hell solely to email.” Join me as I discuss potential solutions for applying sound records management to email.

Visit my “Scholarship” page for additional links to publications and presentations.

“The Person in the Middle” Episode 8 of “An Archivist’s Tale” Podcast

by at

While on a trip to New York City, recently to teach a workshop for the Society of American Archivists, I also had the great pleasure to be interviewed for  “An Archivist’s Tale” podcast (https://www.spreaker.com/show/an-archivists-tale). The podcast entails archivists in conversation with archivists, discussing their work and passions and how they care for the historical record and present the storied past. It is hosted by husband and wife team Karen Trivette and Geof Huth.

Presentation “Balancing the Ideal vs. Real”

by at

I recently participated in a lightning round panel, When the Rubber Hits the Road: Real-World Digital Preservation, at the annual meeting of the Midwest Archives Conference. My presentation, “Balancing the Ideal vs. Real,” examined the challenges we have encountered in implementing digital preservation environment, the Digital Collections system, here at OSU. My fellow panelists included, Laura Alagna, Northwestern University; Nat Wilson, Carleton College; Sarah Dorpinghaus and Doug Boyd, University of Kentucky, Michael Shallcross, University of Michigan; an Cinda
May, Indiana State University.

New column “Technology matters in archives” in the Journal of Archival Organization

by at

The Journal of Archival Organization has been relaunched. I am editing and authoring a new column, “Technology Matter in archives.” New to the Journal of Archival Organization, the column examines how technology affects archives and archivists. The inaugural column explains the nature of the column and sets the stage for topics and issues that it will address. It examines the meaning of the term technology. Further, the column explores the notion of technological dependence—not just dependence on digital or electronic systems—as a lens in which to examine the archival enterprise in grappling with twenty-first century issues. Concluding with the suggestion that technology can be considered from three categorical points of view: soft (philosophical approaches and practices), medium (codified processes, guidelines and standards) and hard technology (hardware and software). I am seeking contributors, so feel free to contact me.