In writing, research, lecturing and just plain old working, I see over and over again the need for us not just to educate ourselves about technology, and project management but to remind ourselves that this is “not your Grandfather’s Archive” (with apologies to Oldsmobile aficionados).

In some ways the archives world that I was trained in was more of a warehouse atmosphere. Preservation and scholarship were the goals….and if you get a chance… do a little promotion.

That is a far cry from the reality that television documentaries and technology tools have created today. The archive is the star of more than a few television shows now and the archivist or librarian is the key to the new economy…the world of information.

As gate-keepers of the past, we took that job so seriously (maybe a little too seriously) that we often forgot to have fun with our collections and more importantly our users.

I am happy to report that fun is back in the archives! These technology tools have empowered archivists to be creative with promotion, crowd-sourcing and documentaries.

Many archives realize that the power of these new (often open source) tools have allowed us to creatively reach the masses and show the world how interesting their history is. For many years I have said that “History is not boring, history books are boring!”

The ability to show someone their great-grandmother screaming at a WWI protest march from halfway around the world, or transcribing the price of strawberries in NYC in 1915 (as in NYPL -What’s on the Menu Project) or developing a coalition of the great-grandchildren of a WWII regiment is not connecting people less to history, in fact it is connecting them more to history and to their global cousins with shared interests.

An archivist is supposed to be a good citizen of their community. It is what I and generations of archival professors have taught their students. You must be involved in your community. Today with a global presence potential in every archive, our global audience yearns for connection to our forefathers, our heritage, our hobbies and each other.

This is a really exciting time in the profession but it means some loss of control. Cutter numbers and authority files are going to take a hit in order to engage our communities to our collections. It does not mean that we will not continue to quality check our records but it means more time might be spent on those communication connections with our users. Certainly more time will be spent evaluating community tags than we will spend re-vamping the controlled vocabulary. Some of you might think it is better, some worse, but even in my deepest control freak heart of hearts, I am really enjoying the sense of community that these tools are creating.

Archives are a true part of this global community. Welcome neighbors!

A few weeks ago I was honored to attend the National Digital Stewardship Alliance meeting. The NDSA was planned by the Library of Congress as part of their NDIIP project.  There were more people there than I expected and it was a humbling experience to hear some of the brightest and most creative brains in Digital Preservation speak.

The high volume of information was overwhelming.  I spent more than six hours at the end of the conference compiling a PowerPoint of the important research highlights.   A small sample of this information is included below.

There were many wonderful presentations giving case studies on how institutions used their own creativity to try and enhance the longevity or migratability (new word?) of their digital files.  The amazing work often was done on a shoestring which though unfortunate, also forced a certain level of imagination and invention.

A few examples are:

Jack Brighton, of campus radio station WILL, gave a wonderful presentation on what a small station is doing to make their civil rights collection more accessible.

Kickstarter.com did a great presentation on how they are helping arts projects get funded and we hope that as they branch into community work that digital preservation might fit into that.

The UK Web Archiving project covered some of the complexities and true effort that it takes to try and tackle capturing the online history of its nation.   http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/

- As of December 2010 – 9 million sites with .uk, probably 1M more

- 10,027 websites archived

- Need skills in Linux, Java, Hadoop, and SOL

5 keys processes to web archiving

- Selection

- Harvesting

- Storage

- Preservation

- Access

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/ngram/

So after taking in all this good information, what is it that I have left the conference with?

People just like us are doing some wonderful problem solving out there.  There is some potential being unlocked, but there is so much to do.

As I see it the Action Items are:

1)    Greater broadcasting of the successful case studies for migration and open solutions.

2)    Training classes in how to boil this down for each type of format/issue.  The NDSA Outreach group held a session called “Digital Preservation in a Box”.  This is the beginning of standardizing the tools that we need.

3)    Overarching education to information and production professionals, as well as, the general public about the dangers of digital fragility and the need for migration (at the least).

I have mentioned to my classes for years that future anthropologists, sociologists and historians will have little to sift through from the late 20^th century.

Some of it is being worked on by archivists now but much is gone.  Let’s keep making progress so that the future of our current history is not lost, like the way of silent films.

More informational tidbits from NDSA:

Other Great Projects

—       ThatCamp.org

—       http://www.scola.org/scola/sampledigitalarchive.aspx

NYPL Labs

—     http://search.creativecommons.org/?q=nypl+map+rectifier&sourceid=Mozilla-search

—     http://menus.nypl.org/

Archiving Facebook

Grad student designed Firefox add-on for individual archiving of Fb.

www.Bit.ly/archivefb

Preserving Virtual Worlds

—      www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097

Cool Tools

—  http://www.google.com/landing/historypin/

—  http://blogs.yu.edu/cpa/2011/02/23/open-source-video-platforms-kaltura-vs-entermedia/

Great Quotes

—    JackBrighton”(DAM) is more like an appliance than an Ecosystem.”

—    Michael Nelson “We need to raise the level of user expectations.”

—    Michael Nelson “In all good computer science functions you solve the problem through indirection.”

—    Wheatley and Frieze “The world does not change one person at a time.  It changes as networks of relationships form among people        who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.”

—    Tim O’Reilly(?) “Teach preservation as a mindset.  Bake this into the tools.”

New Phrases

—    Social Curation

—    Metadata Ecologists

There has been much written recently about digital fragility. Researchers and archivists have heard dueling longevity and futuristic projections. In trying to push this dire need without appearing like Chicken Little, I have embarked on serious primary research to expose the sheer volume of the problem. The in-depth article will be coming out in a professional journal within the year. Until then, I felt that I needed to speak up a bit about the need for our activism.

Between my teaching digital archiving courses and my work with clients, this issue has been prevalent in each work day. In fact, while re-processing an archives for a client, a case of 5 ¼” floppy discs were found. No one in-house knew exactly if these were of value, what was on them or even if they were created by the organization. When we offered to open them on a computer with a floppy drive, we were told just to throw them out. This is the fear that archivists are living with. Each time an archivist approaches this obsolete media, the questions come: How many others are out there? How many are being thrown out because it is easier? How many are left? How long do I save them? If I am able to find a player/drive/ etc. will I be open the software that the data is formatted in? Will it even be playable? Are we missing decades of human knowledge? How long will this continue? How can archivists slow down the moving train of media change? Can archivists increase re-formatting awareness? Is reformatting my only option? Where does emulation stand? Who do I call? Who do I write? How do I make a difference in this loss that flies in the face of everything my profession holds dear?

A colleague, Tom Featherstone, once told a class “Archivists get paid for throwing things out.” After the horrific silence, he explained that we cannot save everything. Archivists place value on what is received, appraisal occurs and the kernels of importance are retained.

In today’s Digital Age, few are seeing the kernels, the wheat, and perhaps even the farm!

A recent IDC/UC San Diego study estimated that the average American is taking in 34 gigabytes of information per day. As an archivist, let’s think about the volume of data that is being created and disseminated. If even half of one percent were historically significant, we still have a large preservation problem.

The loss of corporate, academic and personal data from the late 1980s to the current time is tragic for future generations of historians, technologists, anthropologists and sociologists. We are nearing twenty-five years with little implementation of preservation processes. This is not to say that Archivists have not offered plans. This is to say that they are not being followed. In pure sales terms, we have NOT “sold” the crisis to the people. This is not to imply that the issue is not real, it means that the dry facts were not enough to convince people of the crisis. More facts had to be gathered. Now a true implementation plan with typical business practices needs to be created.

Here are the options:

1) Do nothing and continue to sweep up after mass dumps of data. Process what passively comes to us. Complain a little (or a lot) and do the best that we can with the little that we receive

2) Be moderately proactive to educate the general public on the loss of human knowledge. Start education workshops at local archives, issue press releases individually and work at the grassroots level to educate your donors and users.

3) Be passionately proactive and begin a coordinated media campaign aimed at the public and the computer industry to work with archivists, historians, sociologists and anthropologists to stop the destruction of electronic records on all media. Work this campaign hand in hand into a reformatting program that is easy. Much like the environmentalists needed to educate consumers (e.g. “Reduce Reuse Recycle”). Catchy phrases work.

One of the biggest complaints leveled against our largest member associations is that they do not get involved in the issues that are most impactful for our day to day work. There is NOTHING bigger to archives than this, right now. Member associations are built on exactly that, their members. We can choose to have a voice.

How each professional decides to act on this data is an individual choice, but a large percentage of archivists and other professionals impacted by this severe and irreparable data loss would be a dominant force in the media, to donors and to the computer industry.

For twenty five years, archivists have been that little chick crying about disaster. It is time we grew up and became the rooster at the farm, crowing for the populace to wake up.

In years of teaching visual indexing and being called in to create metadata schemas, I have seen some crazy attempts at description.

Sometimes we have been involved from the beginning developing thesauri of specialized terms for a collection, more often we are called in to fix existing records.

As I roll up my sleeves to tackle either project, I often wonder why organizations do not know more about what they want.

I come down to the same answer that permeates our profession as a whole. The majority of people do not understand the work that goes into providing quality. In our current era of fast and cheap; people have lost the quality aspect almost completely. When they can not successfully execute an accurate search in their database, then they call us to fix it. I am absolutely happy to do so, but make no mistake, I wish for that collection to have done it right the first time; rather than to have called us after hundreds of hours of wasted work. Quality becomes a feature of importance often only after a failure rather than as a preventative measure.

As I tell my classes, let’s talk about why doing it right is rarely done:

1) Illusion – “Everyone is digitizing” is akin to what your mother taught you as a child. “If everyone jumped off a bridge would you do it too?” Many Asset Management Companies sell short the highest cost of digitization which is (dun, dun, dun) linking the metadata to the record. The metadata needs to mean something.

I once saw a vendor selling his “automatic indexing” system. I stopped to chat with him. His product, he told me, will negate needing a human to index. As this is one of our services, I thought that I had better pay attention. He proudly told me that the video clips that he was showing me worked off of closed captioning. I was glad to know that I was not out of business. If you have ever viewed closed captioning, it is a fantastic service to those hearing impaired but it is far from error free. Aside from the many spelling errors within this due to the pressure of typing the words as a show airs (for live shows), there is no intellectual analysis of what is being said and how it relates to the visual.

If an actor said about a child, “Her temperature is 105 degrees!” Assuming the spelling was correct, that is all that the search tool would allow for. A professional indexer could include “Fevers, Childhood Illnesses, Sickness, etc”. This extra analysis would allow a successful search. Most user’s would not find that video clip by looking for “temperature” and they might not know it was a child if that is what they wanted. They would have to pull up the clips and view them. If your collection is going to stay very small, maybe this kind of quality will not matter to you.

For some, I worry that when management, tax payers or a municipality sees bulky systems with little relevance in results, they will certainly shudder at writing more checks for the system or archive.

2) Internal Pressure – “Everything needs to be digitized”
We see this pressure to digitize everything without a clear plan for prioritization. A serious needs assessment is required to be done to understand what needs to be digitized, why and what needs to be researched and described.

I have often told my students that I would rather misfile a photo negative in a physical drawer than have misinformation on a digital record. I am more likely to find it again in the drawer than in a large database.

3) Money – “Scanners are cheap, how much could it cost?”
Money is tight and people are even more apt to cut corners now. It is always cheaper and more accurate to plan something out and do it right rather than to try and fix it afterwards.

Building a business case for the step by step process of tracking assets, designing metadata, the costs of hardware/software/maintenance, training, etc. is often looked at as daunting or impossible. It is not. You have to think like a cost accountant to spell out the savings and efficiency gained. There is also often a publicity component to having an organized and highly accessible collection. This is something that needs to be built in to the value.

4) Ignorance of Computational Linguistics/Human Computer Interfaces/ Usability Studies/Search Strategies/Term Linking/(More) – “Just throw some keywords on it.”

Many times I have seen upper management wave their hands in the air as if with a magic wand and say “Just get it done.” Unfortunately, I am too old to believe in the magic wand and hard work is the only way to create a successful search tool. When I say “hard work”, I actually mean really, really hard work. Research, focus groups, linguistic analysis, understanding search tool limitations, etc. all play a part in quality design.

Along these lines, there is an interesting project that was all over the news. IBM has a team from their labs that have designed a computer to compete on Jeopardy. PBS – Nova had a documentary on it and many of the things that the lead researcher, Dr. Ferrucci, mentioned in that documentary is relevant to our field. The primary comment that caught my interest was when he discussed the fact that a computer competing on Jeopardy can be fed thousands of background documents but they have to work very hard to understand the actual question being asked. So they have the answer, they just do not know the question.

The human brain “gets” the context of place and language. Computers have not yet mastered this. Those brilliant connections of slang, historical context, cultural cues, body language, etc. are a tremendous gift that humans have.

I have stated for years that I wished our culture valued the human brain as much as technology. Watson’s project is interesting and what it proved on Jeopardy is just a portion of what it will prove going forward.

Until then, we who aim to direct searchers into exactly the video clip, manuscript or image that they desire need to value our brains and find better ways to sell our skills.

My indexers know that “Picket Fences” have a certain lifestyle context. Automation or even off-shore indexers do not know that and we can do so much better than cutting corners on core concepts.

Let’s use the gifts that technology gives to us. The ability to link, create synonyms, cross-reference records, stream clips, etc. are all exciting tools and work best in conjunction with a well thought out plan designed by a human brain.

Good luck Dr. Ferrucci but I am not sure that it is Watson that is on trial but your brain.

This is a big question for our AMPed Blog. The topic came up in a staff meeting talking about comments we have heard from local archives. When you talk about the costs for archival supplies, HVAC maintenance, staffing, reformatting, yearly examination for any degradation, rotating films, tapes, etc., the budgets can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, easily. Does this add up to one answer, which is pure migration?

The topic also came up roughly on the AMIA listserv early in 2010. Had we as archivists made a horrible error in judgment by focusing on cool storage instead of migration? Though I mentioned that in an earlier blog post, I have to say that the issue has remained on my mind ever since.

When I lecture, I tell my students that I take the responsibility of archiving very seriously. As few as 6% of the silent films ever created still exist. We are the last pass for not only artifact preservation but content preservation. This is akin to the push and pull of access copies and long-term preservation copies.

Can we afford to save everything? No. That has historically been accepted in the profession. Maybe there is a new question now, which is can we afford to save the originals?

Before you think I have jumped overboard to pure technology and left my archival skills behind, look at your budget. Where are your numbers headed? Where do you expect your budget money to be focused in 2011? 2012? Look at what grant money is out there. Is the money trail focused on preservation or digitization? Look again at your originals and think, how many of them need to be preserved as an artifact?

If I can find money to migrate more of those formats that do not have an artifactual value, isn’t that more ethical than keeping it in storage with bare access and a bleak future? As the AMIA listserv discussion mentioned, if we don’t migrate it now, there may be no way in the future to do so. Now or never has never been more real to me.

With budgets tight, can we continue to afford to optimally preserve the originals, migrate periodically and preserve the transitory /digital copies? That is a tall order and one that some archivists do not want to openly discuss.

I am not pushing for throwing originals out, as the original artifacts have historical value, but does a ¾” videotape have the artifactual value of a Victorian diary? Is content migration more important than spending a lot of time on a fragile and low quality original? Some examples of every media need to be saved as artifacts but does each one need the effort that other more important original formats deserve? For instance, if you have a script copy with original notes from a director or a master copy on film or a master ¾” videotape or several b-roll copies with no markings are they all equal? I would argue that those with a historic fingerprint need all the best archival tools for long-term preservation but some of the multimedia archive originals like 5 1/4” floppies and ¾” videotape might be great candidates for content migration and less appropriate for long-term storage.

The other thing that we struggle with is that many of the A/V originals just will not hold over time. The tapes will not make it to their 100th year like black and white film or photographic prints. Let’s face it, we all age. Even if you put me in cold storage, eventually my organs and joints will fail! So the best that you can do is a genetic clone one day, the worst is take an oral history in current technology and plan for the migration of my brain’s content. I am okay with that. Migration of oral histories allow for the “living history” for generations.

I can not make tape last four generations and I certainly can not foresee how to assure operational machines in twenty years, forty years and even ten for some. So the choice to make a stellar digital copy, is not really a choice but a necessity.

I still think that cold storage for the originals is the other side of the issue, but I wonder if our professional reality now, is that the originals are not going to be as big a priority for A/V archivists as migration is.

This is completely counter to what I was taught in graduate school and what I have practiced my entire professional career, but at my core I am a realist. We have to look at where the money comes from and when our equipment, copy media, and original formats will fail.

Can we focus on the content migration for certain formats and still be good practicing archivists? Is this giving up? Should we be fighting harder to change how funding comes to us? Should we work harder as a coalition with manufacturers? Do we even have the money en masse’ to make it financially sound to push for equipment/format stability? Do we need to be realists and move with the technology of the time?

Maybe a list is needed of the media that even if original, have a transitory nature and little intrinsic value. The list might be easier than we think as the two formats that I listed above were treated as transport medium from the beginning, whereas other formats such as film were meant to be the original and were treated better as far as description and care.

I struggle with this and fear the ensuing conversation but I also fear not having this conversation.

Interesting related sites on digital preservation:
Long-term preservation costs – some figures
Digital Preservation Cost Centers Digital Preservation Committee
Comparison of Methods & Costs of Digital Preservation
Keeping research data safe (Phase 1)
When will digital preservation come to an end?
Why Digital Preservation is Important for Everyone
Preservation Assessment and Planning
CARLI Preservation Working Group – Webliography

I have been using for the above phrase for many years. I say it with conviction in my voice while making sure to maintain eye contact. I believe it deep in my bones.

Why is the history business such an important issue for me and thousands of archivists across the country? Part of it is the growth in demand over the last 15 years by cable networks to fill their channel with documentary programming. Some of it is the keen interest I personally have in learning about the human condition and learning from those events. Mix that in with years of licensing negotiation and seeing how amazed producers are with what archivists can provide and I know that this is big business.

History as a hobby is having a surge in popularity as well. TV shows that put you in the historic moment or researching your ancestry are feeding from one of America’s top pastimes: genealogy. According to a Maritz marketing research poll back in 2000, 60% of Americans are interested in their ancestors. In 2002 the Internet genealogy market was estimated to be $200 million and as recently as March of 2010 the estimate of a $1 billion market was cited. When doing research about the history industry I found a title “Who knew the genealogy business would be so cut throat”. Articles and blogs are full of stats and predictions of this marketplace. The sheer volume of the discussion inherently points to the perceived value.

Couple the genealogy market with the thousands of documentaries about historic topics as well as original network programming about finding your ancestors and we have a distribution explosion! This great opportunity is open to advance the exposure of our collections and of history itself.

The caveat is that we have realized that licensing from these opportunities will not be the heaven sent funding that we hoped in the late 1990s. Licensing is more competitive now and budgets are tighter. It will provide funding but not at the Getty level.

What these historic documentaries and stockhouses also provide us is access to the public in ways that we would never have dreamed of 20 years ago.

Yes, the Getty licensed roughly 22 million images last year. Why not your archive?

The simple answer is money makes money. Most archives are not in a position of having excess cash, so the best advice is to work on collaborative venues for licensing, usage and copying your content. Many archives are working together instead of fighting for grant money. Cross-promotion and use of free and open source tools all provide things that only multi-million dollar organizations could afford 10 years ago. If marketing your collection allows generation of revenue for on-going preservation or digitization then this is a treasure you need to promote.

Many archives are even going into co-productions and signing contracts to put their imagery up with the big commercial venues. This leads to a bigger shot at wide distribution without the investment risk. As long as the contract provides for certain protections, this may be a viable option.

You have some real avenues for revenue generation these days, but you do need a niche, IT support, a marketing plan and most importantly legal advice!

More to come on this topic!

Sources:
Grow Your Family Tree in Salt Lake City
Genealogy: A $1B Market? Maybe
ITV, Mormons and Family Trees

As I was working on a workshop about process planning for digitization, I came across this quote by Peter Drucker, ”Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”

No matter how pleasant you are (or you think that you are) the bottom line is that the funding and reputation of your institution rests on success.

There is a reason that business principles exist. There is a reason that companies that fail to follow these principles also fail. Few managers of digitization projects have business backgrounds. The number one failure seems to be a lack of project management skills.

There is not enough in the way of professional literature on this topic. Most is focused on case studies that are presented in ways that are specific to that particular project.

We need to try to develop standards or at the least, guidelines that are portable to most projects. A smart manager follows four important rules:

1. Establish written procedures (aka process manuals)
2. Develop deliverables (aka due dates and accountability)
3. Track production (aka cost accounting)
4. Adjust/improve processes as needed (aka communication and report generation)

In the words of many great politicians, “Let me be perfectly clear, “developing tracking and implementing good project management is not more time consuming than NOT doing it. On the contrary, the risk in not doing it is too great. Why don’t we put the time in to do this deeper structural work? My answer is that most of us do not realize the impact of not doing it.

The number crunching, procedure writing, report generation and pie chart creation is not the most attractive aspect of digitization. Showing the world a digitized version of a little-documented historic event is what pulls us in to this field. Creating tracking forms is NOT why 99% of us enter the profession.

I can’t even count the number of institutions that I have seen go over budget and have to stop in the midst of a digitization project. The lack of ability to manage, project and track costs has stopped some people from even trying. So, I think this is a fair forum to introduce some of these concepts.

Look for a serialized version of “Business Principles for Digitization” to be coming to the blog over the next month.

As always if you have suggestions of what you might like to see, drop me a note!

In teaching multimedia archive,s I think about the future of our content constantly. Like a new mother, I fret for its security, growth and health. What is THE answer for our degrading media, emulsions, for our software obsolescence and our equipment falling down around our ears?

Recent discussions on the AMIA listserv brought new energy to this discussion and I wanted to put my spin on this. The subject line was “What’s Not Cool About Cold?” and it solicited some serious discussion about whether we have made a horrible mistake for a generation of archivists and content.

Jim Lindner argues that the imminent demise of tape players is more important in an archivist’s preservation decision than our focus on the imminent degradation of the media itself. The latter being our big decision to place much of our media in cool or cold storage. The group discussion mentioned the fact that many of our players are no longer supported by their manufacturers and the simple math that the lack of machines and the existing wear on their parts will not even cover the playback of the volume of archival tapes awaiting…migration? This hits a deep reality. Have we lost hundreds of thousands of hours of archival motion under our watch? Maybe even millions or billions of hours?

With the current demand from patrons increasing and the desire to use motion outtakes, news, etc. for historic documentation this is a disappointing state. Motion is powerful, emotional and immediate. It puts patrons in the experience in a way that to the visual human being is dramatic.

This important discussion on the listserv was a strong exchange which took place over several days. Other important points included the argument that the research on degradation and proper handling has made the tape degradation less of an issue and now the issue is playback for migration and access.

Other points included:

1) The need to get these gems a proper venue to be seen (whether due to money or rights issues)

2) The natural evolution of gathering obsolete machines from production facilities and creating some centralized site for archival institutions to use.

3) How to custom make parts so that we can maintain the machines so that we can transfer the content.

4) Wait for a miracle technological innovation to happen in the next 20-30 years so that you can migrate. (Keep them cool until then).

We come back again and again to the complexities of managing archival multimedia. The next generation of archivists will have changed their paradigm and released themselves from the desire to preserve the artifact. I am not condoning refusing to preserve all originals but our focus as far as video tape and digital files will be on content migration.

Other formats still have certain inherent value and that is a different blog posting!

Future archivists will have a much better long-term understanding of what is an artifact and what is intellectual content that needs to be migrated. They will be more adept to the rapid pace of format change and will HAVE to adapt quickly.

Not that I am faulting us. We are the transitory archival generation, the one that bridges the 100 year film format and the thumb drive.

I agree that the great research done in the field has helped us to minimize that problem, but it does seem that we took the eye off the ball a bit on migration. We cite lack of funds, lack of understanding of the urgency by the non-archival world, the frustration with equipment manufacturers, etc. It sounds like we need a development guru to raise funds, awareness and help to join all the key players for a collaboration. Many mention that the creators often do not prioritize preservation as they should. That is true, but our role as professionals is to educate.

Hand-wringing is not allowed! The energy that we have spent on that could have been put forth to an international collaboration with a real potential for migration, managing equipment, and innovation. One manufacturer can not do this alone, everyone needs to get on board and when I say “everyone” I mean:

Archivists
Creators (producers, studios, channels, directors, talent, writers, etc.)
Media
Equipment and Media Manufacturers
Technologists
Professional Associations
Funders

I think all of the above agree that the loss is imminent. The question is can we use our collective economy of scale to work together? Or maybe it is will we?

I spent the last week writing and editing a book chapter on process management for digitization. My head has been trying to process all that I contemplated while doing such an intensive session.

I think that a lot of process management comes down to skills that we often no longer practice. These oldies but goodies are classics that we need some reminding about. The most important is…LISTENING.

We Twitter, we Facebook and we Blog but we are not necessarily listening to each other. Engaging colleagues in the process of digitization or any other information management process makes a huge difference in creating efficiency. More brains are always better than one!

The next skill is one that many of us are skilled at but do not have time for: analysis.

There was a great quote that I read ages ago “If you want to live forever, write something worth reading.” That has stuck in my head and inspired me to continue to write personally. The reason that quote is so powerful is because of its qualification “worth reading.”

How much of the information explosion is worth reading?

One aspect of self-publishing that is great is that anyone can post any wonderful idea for all to see, but it is also the great disadvantage. Who has time to qualify all that is out there? Librarians would love to direct patrons to well-researched blogs, but who has the time to research their accuracy? We fall back to well-known publishers, many of whom have had their own authenticity problems.

We have sites where Librarians assess other sites and compile them so that we can be assured that we have access to high quality tools. In my latest nights, I wonder…how much checking can we really do to ascertain quality? In this world of self-promotion and personal status sites, are we really examining the information? Are we slowing down enough to get this?

Lastly, is the skill of planning.

Many times librarians and archivists (particularly of the solo version) spend so much time feeling overwhelmed that we only react instead of proactively changing our state. After reading hundreds of interviews that my students have done with leaders in the field I see one common thread between success and failure…planning. So that goes back to being proactive, taking a breath and listening to what it is your users and your collection needs.

Listening to the content and the users means that you have a better plan. Maybe it is a stolen hour a week to consider this and shut out the information noise, disseminate the good research and plan how to get where you need to be. Ignoring for just an hour the budget pressures, lack of staff skills, and bureaucratic realities allows you to envision where you can be and as many great business leaders espouse, visualizing your success plays a big part in getting to it.

So in the words of the great Frasier Crane, “I’m listening.”

After teaching so many archival and technology classes, I began to realize the incredible depth and breadth of our loss of data. Over the last three decades billions of discs have been created and sold and presumably used. What has happened to these discs? To the data? If even 5% was worth saving for historical purposes, that is still about one and a half million discs to save and migrate. Has that been done?

We all know that the answer is “no.” So that means that we need to look at what is important and what level of effort is necessary to save it. I know that we can not save everything and I know that we would not want to. As Nik Cubrilovic mentioned in a recent Washington Post article entitled “Letting Data Die a Natural Death”: “Not only is a lot of this data not important, but do we really want to keep it? I certainly would not want a full account of everything I did in my youth sitting on a server somewhere. I am also certain that we do not want the record of our as a society time being documented and discovered by future civilizations based on Twitter messages.”

Yet, how much is lost that we have accepted and are wistful for? Some of my own graduate papers written on 5 1/4” floppies were not salvageable. That is of course, a personal loss that matters to NO ONE else but me.

What about the loss of communication histories in Presidential administrations? It took NARA six years just to process the Clinton presidential emails. (I am not sure how many people they had working on it, but that certainly sounds overwhelming!) Assuming that each succeeding administration will have geometrically more, what effort will it take to separate the diamonds from the coal? Add into that the constant evolution of tools like Instant Messaging, Texting, etc. and where will historians be able to turn to determine how national decisions were really made? Or have we EVER had that, even in a paper driven world of the past? Doesn’t everyone edit trails that reflect badly on them?

In the article “The E-Memory Revolution,” Jim Gemmell and Gordon Bell talk about the new “digital person” that has a “total recall” to their life as it is all in “e-memory.” They talk about patrons asking librarians about helping them to build new connections for them to their content. As an archivist, I ask, “In what format will their 20, 30, 40, or 50 year old history be?” How many of us can access our data from a phone that we had one year ago? These digital tools are wonderful BUT they are transitory.

They are primarily to transmit current records. Whether an email joke to all your friends or a tweet to meet someone at a concert. The problem is that we also have history making decisions ONLY in email form and new marketing ideas only documented on Twitter. So for future researchers, how will they take your 1000 new weekly emails and get the funding to sort through them?

Is it the same way that the 4 billion floppies manufactured by 2003 (according to one site which I can no longer find, how ironic!) and the 200 million Zip discs manufactured in 1999 alone (according to that same site) were handled? My 15 years of experience tells me that only a fraction of a percent might have been migrated. Is that a loss? Maybe we will never know? Because without the data we don’t know what we don’t know. Is everyone comfortable with that?