generation archivist

world gathering of nomadic and transhumant pastoralists

2009-03-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

I wonder if any information professionals are invited and/or going to this on the open days:

GLOBAL GATHERING OF PASTORALISTS IN SPAIN LA GRANJA (SEGOVIA) 08-16.09.2007

The participation of about 300 pastoral representatives from 40 different countries will be an opportunity to exchange information and experiences and to debate different solutions to the problems faced by nomadic and transhumant herders the world over. The fact that this gathering is to be held in Spain will allow the participants to know the historical importance of the rich Iberian pastoral cultures, as well as the legislation that protects since the13th century more than 400,000 hectares of drover roads, with a total length of 125,000 kilometers, guaranteeing the movements of mobile herds across the entire country

MAIN GOALS:

1. To guarantee the rights of the pastoralists to their traditional grazing lands, their customs, their migrations and social structure.

2. The recognition of the important role pastoralists play in preserving the planet’s natural resources, food sovereignty, biological diversity and climatic change.

3. To provide the pastoralists with mobile services that are adapted to their medical, veterinary, training, schooling, commercial and social needs.

4. To guarantee the pastoralists’ access to information as well as participation in governance, development, policies and projects that directly affect them.

5. The resolution of conflicts with sedentary populations via dialogue and cooperation and the easing of trade and the pastoralists’ migratory movements, especially in border regions. [via ed gravy via the irresistible fleet of bicycles]

Brewster Kahle profile...

2009-03-09T19:06:00.001-07:00

In the Economist.

Always forget he's a millionaire.

The relatively short profile includes some information about the Google Book Project as it relates to libraries as well as other institutions. It quotes a "Mr. Courant of the University of Michigan" and a "Ms.Moore of the University of Toronto."

The article concludes:

It may be that a lack of library funds, rather than Google, poses the biggest short-term threat to Mr Kahle’s dream. Google covers the cost of scanning libraries’ books. But to get into Mr Kahle’s archive, libraries must either do their own scanning or pay the archive to do it. And, like everyone else, libraries are feeling the financial squeeze at the moment.

But Mr Kahle is taking a very long-term view. Universal online access to all knowledge may not be “a goal that is going to be finished in our lifetime,” says Mr Kahle. “But if you pick a goal far enough out, people can align to it. I am not interested in building an empire. Our idea is to build the future.”

The Illusion of Balance

2009-03-01T18:17:00.000-08:00

Working on my talk for ~~Archives & Friends~~ Alumni & Friends day in Knoxville. It's hard for me to get in all that I'd like to -- I have, admittedly, chosen an incredibly huge topic. I'll post my talk next week, but for now I'll say that the talk is an argument that archivists set larger goals for itself. Both the goal and the topic could be so large that I might not be able to communicate that in the end it means much at all, but I feel satisfied that I've buttressed it up against nothingness, even if only with reasoning and powerpoint.

So if the talk doesn't collapse in on itself (and if it does, that's okay, really -- I've finally gotten to the age where it's a relief to find out if you're heading in the wrong direction) I think I might have something larger to work on. At this point, it's not really research, though. I wouldn't mind doing research for it, historical research.

At least in our normal conception of it, history is fixed in place. In reality it might move around as much as the present; but it doesn't move as fast. I feel like every time I look to the web to re-scout the digitizing archives or information-use landscape, I discover more and more projects. And not necessarily because they were just conceived. I suppose one could start with a simple map of all the projects out there...well, I bet someone already has.

Is it human nature that I want information to stop freaking moving and growing and changing? I want a fixed version, and the illusion of control. But that's silly; a fixed version is a dated version. The mind and its knowledge of the world can never settle.

That reminds me of an article I read in Archivaria by Koltun. And, uh, it also reminds me that I'm reading Dahlgren.
(Which in turn reminds me, I really need to call my friend Ambrose.) Any other archivists/information professionals out there Delany fans? This is the first time I've read him, but I'm enjoying it. (Thanks, Ambrose.)

A little help from our neighbors

2009-02-27T07:15:00.000-08:00

I found this local news item via The Prosperity Project, an excellent blog out of my soon-to-be-home state of Tennessee. A retired Canadian couple are touring through the state, helping to prepare local records for microfilming. "A little help from our neighbors to the North" is the title, although one does not need to read very far to guess that the "north" in the title should really apply to Utah, not Canada. (Okay, northwest).

This is the kind of service that the Church of Latter Day Saints -- which believes sinners can be redeemed even after death, and thus uses historical records to accomplish this goal -- has provided libraries, archivists and genealogists for a very long time. I like to think of the Church as the proto-Google. Or a proto-Google: Like our infinitely helpful and flexible friend GOOG, Mormons help strangers maintain access to data out of reasons dear to their mission. It would be overstating the case to say the only difference is that Google is positioning itself to be an omniscient and omnipresent force in this life,and Mormons in the next.

I find the parallels between the two mega data-miners incredibly fascinating, but even without it, the story about the couple passing across Tennessee after selling their cows and their B&B is a behind-the-scenes look non-archivists don't often get to take. It also positions archival work as something akin to holy work, really, as the Canadian couple are on what is explicitly referred to as a mission.

Open Access Work

2009-02-24T06:25:00.001-08:00

Catching up on David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous blog. He notes that while BU is going toward making the scholarly work of its faculty and staff accessible to all, House Representative John Conyers (D-MI) is re-introducing a bill that will place many obstacles in the way such efforts. Who exactly benefits when scholarly research is hidden behind a pay-per-access wall? Certainly not scholars.

Of Fishermen

2009-02-23T17:31:00.000-08:00

It would not be a surprise to anyone that the overwhelming majority of efforts to mine sources of information are being undertaken by for-profit start-ups (or projects heavily courted by those major, moneyed players.) But once companies grow to a certain size, do they become so complacent with their strategy and their market-share that they're hesitant to keep moving forward? The New York Times has an article today that touches in part on what some perceive to be Google's dilemma, between the comfort its users have with its current search structure, and evolving into a "deeper" search format.

There are plenty of issues to consider here, but I'd like to use this as an opportunity to compare Google to archives, if only because the realities of vastly accelerating technology have made Google appear, in some lights, a little old and stodgy, a little stuck in their ways. To say that archives face a similar problem would be to ignore the vast differences in resources between the average archival repository and a gigantic beast like Google. We're set in our ways even though we don't enjoy anything close to a comfy market-share. We're set in our ways because we don't have much of one. Does that mean we're stuck in the past, as everyone has been predicting?

And so what happens? What do we do? Adopt a for-profit model? I had a dream about that once -- behind the desk in the reading room a small team of workers in matching polo shirts -- customer service specialists--negotiated between client and database. I doubt that would ever happen, of course; staffing reading rooms even with part-time paraprofessionals doesn't seem the most cost-effective model, when everything can be dumped online. More likely that polo-shirted team will be making sure the automatic page-shuffling-scanner behaves, or working piecemeal to edit OCR'd documents or tables of metadata.

I suppose my point is, are companies' reluctance to lose their stranglehold on the market a possible thorn in their side, and if so, is it one that organizations not motivated by profit can exploit? How else can we possibly compete against the giants with the means to seize and negotiate great numbers of great vats of information, without any real responsibility to the people to whom it belongs? The fact that these are corporations whose goals are short-sighted should work in some way for us, because only long-standing organizations with longer-term investments can effectively and honestly represent themselves as able custodians of information. Archives and libraries seem especially well-posed to adopt this role. We have a proven track record and a proven interest in preserving information and providing access. But we have to work together, of course. Seriously. And with the joint and ultimate goal of preserving the stuff of democracy for the future. Concentrating solely on the present is to stay still and be completely pounded by the enormous waves of the Googles of the world.

The Legal Frontier

2009-02-22T16:03:00.000-08:00

An interesting story in the New York Times pits the concepts of freedom of information and visions of what the “operating system for democracy" should look like against the old-timey protections of "cash and kludge," bloat and cumbersomeness that have traditionally kept legal documents safe.

Too Special?

2009-02-22T15:49:00.000-08:00

In an article for the very promising library blog In the Library with the Lead Pipe, Lisa Carter has written an article entitled It's the Collections that are Special. Her argument is that special collections (and by extension, perhaps, the holdings of archival institutions) are hidden and thus endangered because they are considered so "special." I find it an interesting post, and I think all archivists want to provide greater access. However, I don't know how this would work, exactly:

If we could combine the transformation that is taking place in our cataloging departments with the transition in archival practice, libraries could create a revolution in access. The result will be an explosion of unique descriptive information that could be used to discover distinctive collections worldwide. The original cataloging skills (analytical and descriptive) that catalogers have honed on circulating library materials can be redeployed (with minimal retraining) to assist with the arrangement and description of significant amounts of unprocessed collections. Aptitude for manipulating, managing and reusing structured metadata can unlock the unrealized potential of our Encoded Archival Description finding aids. Catalogers’ understanding of data normalization and metadata mapping can pull data out of home-grown archival description tools and deposit it in places where it can be manipulable and discoverable in user-friendly access systems. By reenvisioning the work in cataloging and in archives, libraries will be able to offer greater discoverability for their most precious resources.

I'd really like to see an example of how this could work.

Google Watch

2009-02-22T15:17:00.000-08:00

Archivists should be paying attention to the Google Books Settlement, and not just because we're also invested as authors, readers and citizens who must remain wary of who holds large chunks of information:

ALA's super simple summary

ALA's Guide for the Perplexed, more detailed than the 2-page summary.

Beyond Competition: Preparing for a Google Book Search Monopoly (by Frank Pasquale)