Digital Collections and Archives

Another installment from Team Digital Preservation

2009-11-19T14:26:50Z

From the people who brought you Digital Preservation and the Nuclear Disaster, here is Digital Preservation and Aeroplane Disaster!

While the scenario is a little hokey, the basic ideas it presents -- obsolescence and migration -- are critical topics when dealing with digital materials. Nothing make one's heart sink faster than opening a box and finding a stack of 3.5 inch floppies with files of unknown format on them. Can you open the disks? Can you identify the file types? Are converters available for the file types? These are issues archivists deal with, sometimes on a daily basis. At DCA we have been working to create crosswalks that provide original file types with the MIME and format types listed and the corresponding preservation file types. This process has been a challenge, but it has also been really rewarding. We can open our boxes and stare down a stack of floppies without fear. We have a plan!

You need a Masters Degree to be an Archivist?!?

2009-11-13T20:05:16Z

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Want Ads - Grateful Dead Archivist

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Political Humor

Health Care Crisis

Honestly, It's not all that often that archivists come up in a public forum like the Daily Show. I'm not offended. Maybe I should be. But I get the joke because it's not the first time I have heard someone express surprise at the need for a Masters degree to be a librarian or an archivist. In fact, I think most people I meet have no idea what an archivist is, much less what kind of education is needed to land a professional job in the archives. When I told my family years ago that I was going to library school, they had no idea that you needed a masters to be bun wearing, shushing bibliophile.

So why all the education?

The answer is simple. It's really hard to get control over all of the bibliographic knowledge in the world. That's what I learned in library school and this is how I explain it to people wondering why librarians need all that education. I ask them to just think for a moment about every book, article, website, pamphlet, blog, correspondence, photo, and recording in the world, ever, since the beginning of history. Now think about organizing it all so you can find exactly what you're looking for. That's what librarians and archivists do and that's what we're trained to do. Basically we're control freaks with the altruistic goal of making the universe of information available to everyone. And I'm happy as long as I can do my small part as an archivist to get information to the people. Because information is power. Power to the People!

Ok. So, no one wonders why doctors or lawyers need a masters degree. But I'm over it, we don't need that kind of recognition. We're the masked crusaders of information. We're not worried that Jon Stewart doesn't know how we got that way. No, we're used to that. We're thinking about the issue at hand. What would you actually do with traces of drugs found on archival material? Seriously! In the context of the Grateful Dead, this kind of evidence could arguable have some archival research interest. Now don't you feel safer knowing that there are archivists out there thinking about that.

Question: how should we redesign our digital library to make it nice for you?

2009-11-05T18:05:08Z

(Warning: In linking to and quoting from our collection of books from 19th-century London, this post references terminology and attitudes around people with disabilities which we do not consider acceptable any longer. The words are still there, however. Be warned.)

One of my favorite new blogs is NARAtions the blog of the United States National Archives. One thing I love about this blog is that they ask readers for help answering some of the tough questions we all face. For example, their most recent post asks how to efficiently transcribe NARA's billions of pages of handwritten documents.

I'd like to take a page from their book (but not a handwritten page!) and ask you all for help. We are going to start the process of redesigning the user interface of the Tufts Digital Library to make it more useful and user-friendly for our users. Question: What features do you like to see to help you browse digital collections?

Universal design and accessibility have been huge concerns of mine. We've come a long way since 1861, when Henry Mayhew wrote in his London Labour and the London Poor, in the chapter entitled "Of the Probable Means of Reformation: "The blind--the cripple--the maimed-- the very old--the very young--all have generally adopted a street-life, because they could do nothing else." It's a lot less likely than it was 150 years ago for people with disabilities to be cast off from society as they were in Mayhew's London. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), for example, has helped America integrate so those with and without disabilities can live and work alongside one another. In 1994, the Tufts Daily reports, the construction of the Tisch Library took the ADA into account to make a more accessible library for the entire university population. Still, it's not all unicorns and roses. As recently as 1996, another campus publication was complaining that the ADA made the campus less attractive with its requirements for accessibility. More importantly, the employment statistics for the United States population with disabilities are still dismal, and anything that lowers those artificial barriers to success is welcome.

One thing we can do while designing our new website is a focus on the principles of accessibility and universal design. This means not merely testing with adaptive technology and conforming to stable and emerging accessibility standards, but making sure the site provides a rich user experience for all users. Let's not have any more of the attitude we see in another volume of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, when he writes of "Of the Crippled Street Bird-Seller".

The All-Around club

2009-10-22T22:34:42Z

Ever wish there was organization that did everything from parties and dances to food drives and publications? Well, back in the day at Tufts there was.

In 1898, the 75 (!) women of Tufts College elected officers for a club to serve the intellectual and social needs of Tufts women - the All-Around Club. From 1903 on, every woman at Tufts or Jackson was considered a member of the club. The club organized receptions, dances, musical events, and faculty teas like the one pictured here.

The goal of the the club was "to promote unity and loyalty in the college; to further the social, intellectual, and athletic interests of the student body; and to encourage the personal responsibilities of its members." To that end, in addition to organizing social events, the club published Jackson College directories and guides, organized food drives, and provided a representative for the Student Council. But the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a rise in the number of new student organizations, and around that time the All-Around Club disappeared.

Not that the proliferation of clubs and organizations is a bad thing, but to the archivist's ears just having to track a single one-size-fits-all organization sound pretty good!

To learn more about the All-Around Club and see more pictures click here.

Tufts during the Age of Aquarius...

2009-10-22T15:26:16Z

Since the students have returned and we’re well into the fall semester, I thought it would be a good time to share some of my favorite Tom Hart photographs from the Tufts Digital Library.

Tom Hart was a 1968 graduate (B.S. in Biology) who documented life at Tufts while he was and student and after graduation. Though our earliest student photographs are charming reminders of a bygone era, I also enjoy Tom Hart’s photographic perspective in capturing the Tufts campus in the 1960s and 70s.

Wren Hall dorm room, October 1966

Class on breakwater, Cape Cod, spring 1966

Gordon Dobey, David Gold, Oscar Porter, and Peter Wadler pushing a car that was stuck in snow on College Ave, illuminated by headlights, 1976

Wapentacks: Reference books FTW!

2009-10-19T19:37:25Z

(Sorry this blog post is so late! We had a seven-hour power failure last week that derailed lots of inessentials.)

Last week, when Jen and I were fixing some special character problems in the digital library, we came across A Mapp of the County of Lincolne, with its divisions & Hundreds: or Wapontacks."Wapontacks"? Our prior experience told us this was surely a typo, so we enlarged the image to look closely. Sure enough, the map really did say "wapontacks"!

This led us straight to my second favorite reference book, The Oxford English Dictionary. (What's YOUR favorite reference book? Tell us in comments!) The OED told us "A subdivision of certain English shires, corresponding to the ‘hundred’ of other counties.". Huh. Curious, we read the etymology:

[a. ON. vápnatak, f. vápna genit. pl. of vápn WEAPON + tak act of taking (related to taka to TAKE). The late OE. wǽpenᵹetæc shows assimilation of form to native compounds like wǽpenᵹewrixle exchange of blows.

The recorded senses of the word in ON. are: (1) a vote of consent expressed by waving or brandishing weapons; (2) a vote or resolution of a deliberative assembly; (3) in Iceland, the breaking up of the session of the Althingi, when the members resumed their weapons that had been laid aside during the sittings. In English there is no trace of these senses, and the development of the actual sense can only be explained conjecturally. It is noteworthy that ‘wapentakes’, like ‘hundreds’, often received their names from some natural or artificial object (e.g. a barrow or a tree) which afforded a suitable rallying-place for open-air meetings. Assuming that in England wapentake originally meant the act of signifying assent at a public assembly, it seems not improbable that the men of the district whose place of meeting was (e.g.) at Osgod's Cross might be said to belong to ‘the wapentake of Osgod's Cross (Osgoldcross)’; the use of the word to denote a territorial division would thus be sufficiently accounted for.]

Now that's just cool.

Try our Mapp of the West Ridinge of Yorke Shire: With its Wapontakes or Britannia: or a Geographical description of the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, with the Isles and Territories thereto belonging for a small subset of our collection of documents dealing with wapentakes, wapontacks, wapontacks, and hundreds.

Celebrating National Archives Month

2009-10-08T18:46:43Z

October is National Archives Month!

It's a year for special celebration as the National Archives and Records Administration celebrations its 75th anniversary, and the Digital Collections and Archives pushes into its second decade. Here are some images from 1934 and 1999.

Disaster Recovery Workshop

2009-10-02T16:53:39Z

This week, the Tufts Libraries hosted a disaster recovery workshop with Gregor Trinkaus-Randall of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners. It sounds boring, but trust me, sometimes workshops are like playing with crafts in kindergarten. We hosed down piles of old books, records, and newspapers, and then did our best to rescue the (very valuable, of course!) damp materials. There's nothing like destruction in a good cause.

Check out our gallery of photos from the event to see librarians and archivists having fun with water and electricity. Here's a teaser:

Read more...

Why are historic Tufts Dailies cool? Reason #1

2009-09-25T20:41:06Z

Because of the cool advertisements

From the following editions:
March 3, 1981
November 14, 1983
September 29, 1997

DCA at Tufts Technology Fair

2009-09-17T14:56:36Z

Come meet staff from the Digital Collection and Archives and Academic Technology TODAY, September 17th, at the Tufts Technology Fair. The Tufts Technology Fair takes place on the Tisch Library Patio from 11am to 1:30pm, and features representatives from various Tufts IT organizations. DCA and AT staff who work on the Tufts Digital Library will be there to explain and promote this great resource for finding historical photos of Tufts, student scholarship, student publications and more... You can also learn about other technology resources available at Tufts for all students, staff and faculty. We hope to see you there!

A Long Running Debate

2009-09-10T19:21:53Z

On January 15, 1973 Senator Edward Kennedy addressed the Tufts Community and public at large on the topic of health reform. Below is an excerpt from the speech. If you would like to read the full text, please visit the Digital Collections and Archives, Tisch Library Building, ground floor from 9-4 Monday through Friday.

Senator Kennedy with Mr. and Mrs. David Slater, Mrs. Herbert Karol and Mrs. Burton C. Hallowell.

From Senator Edward M. Kennedy's speech, January 15, 1973:

"I am delighted to be here at Tufts and to participate in the development of a new program in community health and the delivery of health services. That this innovative approach to the study of health care issues is being carried out at the undergraduate level is remarkable - it reaffirms Tufts leadership position in the education and training of future health professionals.

Several years ago, Tufts sponsored the Northern New England Student Health Projects. Health Science students from across the country joined together to study the health care problems of Massachusetts communities. Much of what was pioneered by these students at Tufts has now been incorporated into traditional medical school curricula; and the common theme of those summer projects --- that health care is a basic human right --- has now been accepted by the majority of the health establishment.

But the question remains as to how to make that right a reality for all our citizens.

In recent days the news media have been focusing on the epic struggle shaping up between the Congress and the White House. Commentators describe the confrontation in constitutional terms; they ask when the Congress will assert itself in the development of foreign and domestic policy. this is a critical question. It is critical not only because the processes of policy development have been challenged by the President [Nixon], but because the focus of the existing programs would be altered if the White House is successful. And those alternations would be made behind closed doors, shrouded in secrecy, without the restraining influence of public accountability. . . ."

I'm not doing my job as well as you think I am: keep the print!

2009-09-04T17:44:10Z

Like many of my colleagues, I teach in the graduate schools at Simmons College. Unlike them, however, I don't teach in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Instead, I teach a class at the Center for the Study of Children's Literature. My first class of the semester was last night, so you can imagine the children's literature is on my mind. With a local private school closing its library because they claim the future is digital, I've also been thinking a lot about my obligations to society as somebody who is responsible for putting digital materials online.

As an instructor, I know how many of the materials I want my students to read aren't available as electronic books, audio books, or Kindle. And as a digital archivist I feel like the struggling floodgate between the masses of undigitized materials behind me and the tiny puddle of digital materials in front of me. Outside of the archives, I'm not sure how many people realize what a tiny percentage of our material is available via the Internet.

Some of this, of course, is just because there's too much to do. Some, such as our audiotape collections, are too expensive to digitize. And some of the materials that are not online never will be. Copyright law is a strange and complex beast, and digital reproduction rights are hard to obtain. Returning to children's literature, it's unlikely that we will ever be able to make much of the Marc Brown collection's amazing selection of Arthur storyboards, character concepts, and scripts available online.

One of our many fantastic books about the history of London, H. Barton Baker's Stories of the Streets of London, describes the shop of John Newbery, publisher of Goody Two Shoes and popularizer of children's books as a form of entertainment. Our collection guide for the undergraduate honors theses tells me that in the undergraduate honors thesis collection for the Department of Child Development we hold a number of theses discussing children's literature. That's a good example of the kind of material you will lose access to if you believe that everything important is available online. One day, if the resources become available and the permissions issues get worked out, some of the historical scholarship might appear online, but it will only ever be a tiny segment of what exists in print.

A little light beach reading, courtesy of the Tufts Digital Library

2009-08-27T15:25:01Z

One fine day this summer, I was at the beach with my family. Relaxing after a good swim, I had settled down on the beach with Meg Cabot's Big Boned, perfect reading for a sunny New England afternoon. But when I glanced over at family member lying next to me, he was reading Dan Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Now how can you get better than that for beach reading?

After all, we are talking about a book about which the New York Times said:

"For all its clarity and style, "Consciousness Explained" is not easy reading. ... But this book is so good that it's worth studying up for."

Of course this only made me sad that I didn't have a laptop and WiFi at the beach, because it made me want to spend some time with the open access collection of Dan Dennett's papers we have here at the Tufts Digital Library. After all, then we would have been able to have a conversation comparing the ideas in 1991's Consciousness Explained with 2006's "Two Steps Closer on Consciousness" or compare the discussion of qualia in the book with that alluded to in 2001's "The Zombic Hunch: Extinction of of an Intuition?".

...The best part of all this is that I am only half-kidding. We really did end up spending a fair amount of our beach afternoon discussing Dan Dennett's theories of consciousness, and it really did give me enough background to start understanding some of the papers in that open access collection. It was a fabulous way to spend a summer day.

Linguist, teacher, and … world famous alpinist?

2009-08-20T18:30:55Z

Archival reference isn’t always about searching for the sparse facts that cleanly define an event or person in three sentences or less. It offers a microcosmic view of the interconnectedness of life and history - a question leads from one person to another, to an organization, to a piece of artwork and back to a person and then maybe three…on down the line until it relates to something I saw on television last week. Biographical research in particular allows me to study, if only for a brief time, a person long forgotten. But for the hour I spend, they come alive again - at least to me. The vocations and avocations of one individual - their choices and desires are illuminated - and I recall Mary Oliver’s words, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

One such person, whose life seems to have been both wild and precious, was Tufts professor Charles Ernest Fay. The bare bones of his story are that he was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1846 and graduated from Tuft in 1868. Young Charles showed an aptitude for languages and was promptly employed by Tufts as a professor of modern languages, a post he would hold for 60 years. Of course, that’s the kind of information we find everyday - I’m getting to the internationally renowned part…

Fay’s life offers a bewilderingly wide array of organizational involvement. He was one of the founders of the Modern Language Association (MLA); a life member of the American Philological Association; president of the New England Modern Language Association; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fay was also a member of the Boston and Cambridge Shakespeare Clubs; the Boston Browning Society; the American Folk Lore Society; the Metropolitan Improvement League of Boston; and the Massachusetts Forestry Association.

But what might be the most bizarre, and to my mind interesting, aspect of Fay’s life is his international reputation as an alpinist. A dedicated lover of the outdoors since his youth, Fay, prior to the age of 50, had already climbed the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Adirondacks, the Rockies, and the Sierra Madre. He had made 19 visits to the Selkirk Range of the Canadian Rockies by 1921, and was still climbing there at the age of 76. He climbed with and/or led many international groups, especially throughout the Canadian Rockies. Fay made two ascents of the peak known as "No. 1" in a chain known as the "Ten Peaks" of the Bow Range near Alberta. This peak, at 10,612 ft, was the second highest of the Ten Peaks and was named Mount Fay in 1904, in Fay's honor. At more than 80 years of age, Fay attended the camp of the Canadian Alpine Club - he hiked the 14 miles from the railway station to the camp and still had energy left over to attend the evening’s festivities. Fay's ascents often involved snowy peaks and treacherous ice fields, however, during his years as a mountain climber the only injury he sustained was a sprained ankle - a testament to his skill.

Fay was a charter member of the Appalachian Mountain Club and served as its president four times, and editing its journal “Appalachia” for 44 years. He remained heavily involved with the American Alpine Club (he was one of the founders), serving as president and journal editor. Fay was also in demand as a lecturer, including a series given in Washington DC and sponsored by National Geographic. He was also a prolific writer - the author of hundreds of articles. His activities brought him numerous honors, including membership in the English, French, and Italian Mountain Clubs, as well as Centro Excursionista de Catalune in Spain. While serving as a delegate to the International Congress of Alpine Clubs in 1920, Fay was knighted and made an officer of the Order of St. Charles by Prince Albert of Monaco. Fay completed his final climb just 6 months before his death in 1931 at the age of 84.

There’s more information to be found about Charles Fay and all the other remarkable, yet sometimes unknown, Tufts people at the Digital Collections and Archives.

Metadata and the fun of image cataloging

2009-08-13T16:28:50Z

Before images can be put into the Tufts Digital Library they must be described. Without a title, a date, and lots of other metadata, images would not be usable or retrievable. There are at least 14,000 images in the TDL. Each of them has been described by someone like me who has the assigned task of image cataloging. This could sound like a great way to spend your work day or like some exotic form of torture depending on your disposition. I would not be very well suited to my job if I did not fit into the former category. Other than the joys inherent in assigning metadata (which are many, I assure you), image cataloging is fun because you get to see a lot of cool pictures. Which brings me to the real point of this post.

While cataloging images for Robert Wilkinson's Londina illustrata (c. 1825) I started noticing amusing details in the large engravings in this book of "graphic and historic memorials." For example, this engraving of St. Peter on Cornhill seems plain enough.

Until you take a closer look at the gravediggers in the church yard. If they are in fact digging a grave, why are there two skulls? If they are graverobbers, should they really be doing that while a woman and child walk by?

Or how about this image of the London Street Dockhead.

On closer examination I am worried about the people who are hanging out at the docks. I'll say no more.