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.

In an age where music is so easily copied and accessed, it’s hard to imagine that any valuable recordings could ever be lost. But a new study predicts a grim future for millions of recordings across America.

The National Recording Registry was established ten years ago, following the passing of a congressional bill. The purpose of the NRR is to “maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant, and for other purposes” (Public Law 104-474; H.R. 4846). Recently, the NRR released a 181-page report, The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: a National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age. This report was the first “comprehensive, national-level study of the state of sound recording preservation ever conducted in the U.S.” 130 years since the invention of the phonograph, it’s about time the subject was addressed.

The report found that an estimated forty-six million recordings are held in American libraries, archives, and other institutions. Efforts made nationally in collecting and creating recordings are not matched by efforts to preserve them and this puts recordings of all types at stake. Furthermore, inconsistent local, state, and national laws have caused a “lack of national coordination… in addressing the challenges of preservation, professional education and public access.” The report states that not enough is being done to prevent a “permanent loss of irreplaceable sound recordings in all genres.”

Why does all of this matter? While most commercial recordings are not at stake at being lost, millions of recordings of performances, interviews, and broadcasts are at risk. So while the average Joe doesn’t have to worry about his precious Eagles and Zeppelin records ever being irreplaceably lost or damaged, scholars and historians face losing incredibly valuable resources. Someone conducting a study on race relations, for example, might use recordings of Minstrel shows as to demonstrate the willful acceptance and ignorance of racism in the late 19th century. A researcher for a film, be it a documentary or historical drama, might need to find old radio broadcasts for a project. The need for access to obscure recordings is far-reaching.

A huge part of the sound recording preservation problem is the “restrictive and anachronistic” copyright laws currently in place. Ironically, the copyright laws designed to protect recordings are essentially destroying them, by heavily restricting preservation methods. The report explains, “All US recordings, both commercially released and unpublished, created before February 15, 1972, are protected by a complex network of [copyright] laws.” As a result, any recording made before 1972 will not enter the public domain until 2067—95 years after the bill was passed. So, for example, a recording made in 1900 will not be able to legally be copied without permission until 2067, or 167 years after its creation. There’s no question that a considerable—if not irreparable—amount of decay will happen in that timeframe.

The good news is that copyright laws are not widely enforced, and library and archive facilities have some leeway in preservation and digitization. However, without legal rights to sound recordings, many institutions cannot procure the funding needed to restore and maintain their own collections.

Initiating a nation-wide study on the subject of sound preservation was a good first step on tackling the issue. What should be done next? Change the copyright laws, obviously. And while it would take years or decades to make copyright laws relevant to the digital age, librarians and archivists can take action in the meantime. The study states, “an individual representing one institution has noted that, unless or until instructed to cease and desist certain practices, his organization was compelled to ‘fly under the radar’ to support its mission.”

Awareness of the issue can also be a huge step in fighting loss of sound recordings. Educating record collectors and owners of original recordings on how to maintain and store their collections could go a long way in ensuring a better outlook for sound preservation.

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

A recent question posted on the AMP blog, “Is preservation cost-prohibitive?,” made me think about costs related to archives in general. As a former corporate archivist, I am painfully aware of budgets and bidding out work! Now that my shoe is on the other foot, and I am consulting in the field, the issue is even larger for me. When I was the “client” and was requesting bids for work, I (and my coworkers) were always concerned by the process. We knew many vendors were underbidding to get the work and that could pose a financial risk for them if they got the project. We also were forced to consider those bids because there was quite a bit of paperwork to do if the lowest bid was not selected. In the end, we could often work around it by choosing the firm with the most expertise in an area as long as their bid was not too much higher than the lowest one.

It’s easy for a client to forget about the hidden costs of operations related to projects. There are often random emails with questions, monthly or more frequent conference calls, technology testing or review, on-site meetings or visits, etc. All of these items take up staff time – and not just a little bit of it either – it really adds up. I think many clients might be shocked if they realized exactly how much time. Often a fair amount of this time can be billed back as project management time, but only if the client is willing or that category has been built into the project.

I recently took on some work that was priced out on a per-item basis. This method really made the most sense since there was a huge quantity of digital files to review. As any vendor would, I priced the project as low as I could while still hoping to cover any time required for emails, phone calls, meetings, technology issues, etc. Luckily for me, so far my pricing seems to be working for me and for them.

The project brought up another interesting financial concern though. The quantity of items is so high and the quality isn’t always great, that the client and I started to wonder if there was a better way to upload fewer items so as not to flood their database with useless information. I think I have found a workable solution, but the main issue with trying to cull out the bad items was the time required to do it and the cost associated with that. It’s a pure and simple appraisal issue along the lines of “More Product, Less Process,” although this time it’s “More Process, Less Product!” It’s been a unique budgetary issue for me and my client in that it could easily be cheaper for them to add thousands of images to a database rather than to review the images and pick the best ones – or more importantly, to delete the bad ones.

In the end, I employed some digital photo software that allows quick-ish review and refoldering of files so that I can at least remove the “worst of” images for the client. The system isn’t perfect, but in the end, I needed to present a plan to the client that would save them money. It didn’t make sense to have the project cost more money to give them fewer images even when fewer images was more desirable. Now the project is a mix of hourly review time and per item upload time (engineered never to exceed what the total upload time would have cost if no review was done), but the client is left with better quality images and a slightly cheaper overall cost.

Back to the question at hand: Is preservation cost-prohibitive? I guess it certainly can be – as can any archival procedure, but in the end, that’s what Archives are for – preserving and making available items of historical importance. Let’s just hope that all the holders of the purse strings continue to agree!

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

In a national economy in which double-digit unemployment figures travel in the opposite direction from the signs that things are said to be improving and a local economy that would jangle the nerves of the most fiercely optimistic, I am frequently riddled with doubt as to my decision to return to school for the academic qualifications to do something I truly enjoy. It was easy to buy into the notion of getting paid for doing a job for the sheer happiness it brings. I didn’t anticipate that timing is everything and having the know-how, energy and desire to take on an all new career was only half the battle.

Recently, while enjoying the company of my three granddaughters during their weeklong break from school, I was reminded why I decided to enter library school and select archival administration as my area of study. As usual, the eldest of the girls was shadowing me, eager to help with any little thing I asked her to do. I sent her to the spare room where she was to take a good long look and devise a plan to organize the boxes and boxes of stuff stacked among the cats’ toys, feeding dishes and litter boxes. After a few minutes she returned with her report. “There’s a lot of stuff in there, she said, but I found a box full of CDs.” I immediately wracked my brain in an attempt to remember if I had been remiss in the clutter-reducing organization of the CDs and DVDs I had painstakingly organized into albums.

Anticipating my next request, my granddaughter left the room and quickly returned holding an old milk crate filled with individually boxed audio cassettes. One glance at the plastic crate and I was instantly reminded of the reason I had upset the status quo by leaving behind a reasonably well-paying job and switching my academic focus to continue on in graduate school. “Those aren’t CDs, I said. “They are cassette tapes recorded by your great-grandfather, and they are in need of processing, along with the rest of his collection.” If at that moment my granddaughter didn’t quite understand what I meant, by the time she returned home at the end of the week, not only had she become somewhat acquainted with the great-grandfather who died shortly before she made it to 3 years old, she attained a basic understanding of the important role archivists play in the preservation of history and culture, and she began to comprehend why her Nana always gets a little misty whenever we go through the dozens of boxes, albums and other containers filled with photographs of people she will never actually meet.

To quote my esteemed mentor, “as archivists we wear multiple hats.” Our professional responsibilities require us to step away from the photographic and/or moving images in our personal collections and devote our time and energies to the clients and organizations from which we endeavor to earn a living. When we are presented with a collection, we delight in the discovery of the information contained therein. Our sense of history is sharpened (or dulled) when set upon a path to learn something new and/or review, organize and disseminate what we already knew. As we focus on these bread and butter tasks, the records of our personal histories all too often get short shrift, and containers filled with items in need of organization and care are left to languish and suffer the deterioration that results from the necessity of putting off until later the donning of the hat we wear as preservers of our family histories.

For most of his life, my father was a musician. He played music, wrote music, breathed ate and drank music – all the time. Although he earned a living as a civil servant, he never strayed far from his first love. He had been a music teacher and a choir director, an actor and a playwright, a lay minister, videographer, photographer and a broadcaster. He had also performed in prestigious productions and with some of the most legendary names in the business. But what my father really, really loved to do was sing, and boy could he sing! My earliest and best memories include the velvety sound of Dad’s rich baritone voice singing from one of the many American musicals he counted among his favorites. Contained among the scores of audio cassettes my granddaughter recovered from the spare room closet is a series of lecture concerts on the history of the American musical theater from 1866 to 1970, Dad’s recreation of his doctoral dissertation. Imagine my surprise when making this discovery. To say that the processing of my father’s collection will be both an arduous task and a labor of love seems inadequate upon the realization that Dad’s audiocassettes, photographs and sheet music very likely hold a cultural, historical, academic and possibly commercial value beyond family sentiment and the enormous pleasure I receive from hearing that rich, velvety baritone waft from the speakers of my stereo.

As I embark upon the journey represented by processing my father’s collection – a journey which will doubtless be filled with twists, turns and bumps in the road – I ask myself one question: Which hat do I wear now?

Skill Five: Project Management

Perhaps the most important skill a librarian or archivist must possess for a successful digitization initiative is that of project management. Project management is a complicated endeavor comprised of: planning, budgeting, prioritizing, scheduling, coordinating, communicating, collating, visualizing, selecting, delegating, programming, designing, organizing, overseeing, overhearing, marketing, and sometimes even cheerleading. This list is reminiscent of a song by Bob Dylan or R.E.M., and is very likely incomplete, but each aspect of project management listed above is significant. A good project manager has the ability to see the big picture as clearly as the smallest details of the collection. If this sounds harder than comprehending metadata, rest assured, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) comes through again with excellent advice in A Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections, the guide mentioned in our first installment, Evaluating the Collection. The success or failure of a digital collection is decided by the quality and effectiveness of its project management.

Before scanning that first image or purchasing any software, librarians and archivists should create a plan for the project. The principles behind this first step are similar to developing a business plan. Begin by asking yourself some questions: Why should the collection be digitized? Who will use the collection? How will it be used? After these questions have been answered, it would be useful to develop a mission statement and a vision statement. These will help communicate the importance of the project and the need for support to the parties who control funding and other required resources. They will also serve as a beacon to ensure that the focus is not lost in the work flow.

After establishing why the collection should be created, your plan should formulate how the work can be accomplished. This is like gathering ingredients before beginning to cook. How many people will be needed? Are they readily available? How much space will be needed? Is there equipment to purchase? How much will it cost? How long will it take? How much training is required? What have other institutions done? How did they do it? Are their projects successful? Should their collections be emulated? What should be different? A well-formed plan with a clear vision, realistic goals, and a finite deadline sells the project to the administrators, garners support from your colleagues, and allows marketing the collection to potential users to begin.

The next factor in the project plan is outlining the actual work to be done for creating a digital collection including scanning, editing, and cataloging. At this stage, it is useful to formulate a step-by-step set of instructions for each aspect of the project. For example, there should be instructions for how to create the digital objects and guidelines for adjusting and saving them. Topics such as editing, adjusting color balance, adjusting brightness or contrast, cropping, borders, image resolution, file types, file naming, and more should be clearly outlined in these instructions. Worksheets for recording the data created during this process may be advisable. These worksheets will be helpful when creating the catalog record and metadata for each object. By the way, an instruction manual will be very handy for this step, too. Lastly, tracking the work flow can and should be accomplished via a shared spreadsheet. The spreadsheet allows the project manager and everyone involved to see at a glance what has been done, who did it, and what remains to be done. This saves time, allows for quality control, and minimizes the chances of duplicating efforts.

Accessing the content of a digital collection is deceptively simple – it only takes a few moments, but the time investment and specialized knowledge required for creating that collection is extensive. Developing a useful and usable digital collection depends upon a unique blend of skills possessed by librarians and archivists to accomplish a multi-dimensional task. The skills discussed here and in previous sections include: evaluating the collections needs assessment for the project, knowledge of technologies, metadata standards, and project management. If you are comfortable in some of these areas and are willing to learn along the way, you are ready to begin!