Society of American Archivists U of M Student Chapter

Keep asking, and gathering bits of information and you will eventually get where you are going.  Thanks to Brian McDonald for knowing that Adobe needed to be reinstalled, Rob Beutner for helping to define where the problem was, and finally Geof Huth, the guru of PDF who gave that workshop a year ago.  I think I have the problem of making email into PDF/A solved.

The quick answer is  to have it printed to PDF and change the print default setting to PDF/A-1b:2005(RGB).  I’m going to be rewriting my procedure and will share it with you when I have kinks worked out.

Great news!  My computer has been upgraded and I can now do 2nd life.  I just tested it yesterday.  It’s a laptop, so I’ll take it home this weekend and see if I can start getting the lay of the land.

We had the good fortune today to talk to Helena Zinkham, Michelle Springer and some additional staff members from the 12 people team at LC which worked on the LC-Flickr project. We were also joined by George Oates, who shepherded the collaboration from the Flickr side. The conversation highlighted a number of interesting facets of the collaboration which I hadn’t fully appreciated yet, and I thought they’d be worth sharing

While at a pace of 50 images per week, the entire photographs of the Bain collection (50k) will take about 20 years to expose on Flickr, I think that piece of math may miss the point: from the conversations I noted a much greater interest in deep engagement with the presented material rather than in comprehensiveness. The evidence suggests that this deep engagement has been achieved - see, for example, the discussion surrounding these two photographs. Those with the desire and need to see all of Bain can always do that on the LC website - Flickr compliments this offering by turning parts of the collection into conversation-starters. LC staff seemed so impressed with the value of the interactions on Flickr that they felt linking back out to the Flickr pages from the catalog was as important as bringing back salient corrections and updates into the catalog.

For LC, Flickr is still a prototype - commitments on a policy level will be discussed after the prototype has been thoroughly evaluated. For Flickr, working with cultural institutions seems to become a way of life. George commented that she has about eight more cultural institutions ready to be launched over the next 8 months, ranging from very large to very small. There will be new and different things to be learned from the next launches - how will the material fare without the boost the LC-Flickr project enjoyed as the goundbreaking initiative? I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation with our LC colleagues, and I’ll be watching out for those next cultural heritage collections on Flickr…

As some on the blogosphere have already discovered, we have not only started a new podcast series, but also a series of webinars. The live webinars are offered for RLG Program partners, but we’re making them available on our website after the fact.

Taken together, the podcasts and webinars are called … PARcasts (PAR = Programs and Research, the OCLC division we are part of). Cute, huh?

The first webinar is titled “Out of the Stacks and onto the Desktop: Rethinking Assumptions about Access and Digitization” and combines reflections on the Good Terms paper (Kaufman and Uboius) and the Shifting Gears (pdf) paper (Erway and Schaffner) together with reflections on how libraries and archives can (and already are) make progress in digitizing collections and making them available to the broadest audiences.

The great thing about the webinar was not only hearing Jen and Ricky present their ideas, but especially the questions and discussion that came after. Here are some of things that can up in discussion:

I must say that I am pretty dubious about the effectiveness of clearinghouses (I’ve seen many well-launched efforts fail for lack of consistent upkeep), but we’re all open to suggestions as to how this could be achieved.

We are also interested in your thoughts and reactions, so please share them here or via email.

I’ve still been struggling with the problem of saving email as PDF/A.  Rob Beutner from IT Services came over to help me out.  He was able to narrow the problem down to Microsoft Outlook not being one of the choices for the Converting to PDF Preferences.

On the Adobe Pro 8.0 drop down menus

Edit

    Preferences

        Covert to PDF

Hmmmmm

Since I'm often required to hit the ground running at $MPOW on projects, I was a little concerned when I roped myself into assisting our photo archives with a Flickr project. The first goal was to get a subset of the photos uploaded, and quickly. Googling and poking around the Cheeseshop led me to Beej's FlickrAPI for Python. Little did I know that it would be dead simple to get this project going. To authenticate:

That was less painful than the PPD test for tuberculosis. Oh, and uploading?

Using this little code plus a few other tidbits, I created an uploader that parses CSV files of image metadata exported from an Access database. And when done, the results look a little something like this.

• Study of public/private mass digitization partnership agreements
• Project to identify efforts to increase the scale of mass digitization in special collections

Digitization

A model for digital archiving of radiographs into a searchable database.
Am J Orthod Dentofacial Orthop. 2007 Dec;132(6):856-9

Digital images are routinely used in orthodontic practices today. Many systems and formats are available for producing, storing, retrieving, viewing, and sharing these images. The digital imaging and communication in medicine (DICOM) standard is designed to ensure that these systems and formats are compatible, so that an image produced in a small private practice today can be viewed next year in a large hospital. The purpose of this article is to describe a method for laser scanning and digitization of analog (film) radiographs that meets DICOM standards and allows for web-based archiving, searching, and retrieval.

PMID: 18068609 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

Digitization

As the largest academic music library in North America, Sibley Music Library holds collections of unusual breadth and depth. Their public domain scores digitization project aims to make some of their riches widely available and easily accessible to musicians around the world. Thus far they have digitized some 2,600 scores and placed PDF files at UR Research (https://urresearch.rochester.edu). For access to these scores find the ESM—Sibley Music Library “community” within UR Research and choose the “Musical Scores” collection. They began counting traffic at this site in February 2005; thus far there have been nearly 1,255,000 score downloads; the figure for the month of March 2008 alone (as of 3/24) is 72,900.

Digitization

RLG Programs has launched a new podcast series called “What Keeps You Awake at Night?” We are interviewing movers and shakers from libraries, archives, and museums and asking them what they find exciting or nerve-wracking. We also ask who is doing good work in advancing or combating the issue. But we don’t want you to toss and turn — we are attempting to keep the interviews short. 15 minutes is an ideal, but we can live with 20 minutes or so.

Our first offering is now up, an interview with Mark Dimunation from the Library of Congress. Those of you who know Mark know how passionate and articulate he is. Mark talks about the value of the physical artifact in an increasingly digital world. He also tells a tale of murder in the library.

When we have a feed up for our podcasts, I’ll let you all know.

• Slashdot | White House Says Hard Drives Were Destroyed Can you say “spoliation?” (tags: archives NARA)
• Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978 (tags: NARA)

I found another reason recently to be excited about the progress of SAA’s online presence. Buried in the ARCHIVES 2008: Archival R/Evolution & Identities Checklist for Presenters is first tidbits of a plan to provide access to PDF versions of conference presentations on the SAA website.

Send an Electronic Copy of Your Presentation to SAA. The conference organizers would like to offer meeting attendees the opportunity to view presentations after the conference on the SAA 2008 Annual Meeting website (www.archivists.org). If you’ll supply a copy of your presentation, we’ll convert it to a PDF and post it. Please note that by sending SAA a copy of your presentation in electronic format, you grant permission for your presentation to be viewed by all SAA 2008 Annual Meeting attendees.

I am so pleased! I have always wanted access to the presentations - both for those sessions I attend and those I cannot. I have often been that person hovering at the edge of the stage after a panel, waiting to request a soft copy of the presentation.

I do wonder what they mean when they say that the presentations will be “viewable by meeting attendees”. In my heart of hearts I hope they go a step further and let the speakers sign off on these presentations being shared with the world (or at least with all of SAA). I haven’t gone through every Session Page on the SAA 2007 Un-Official Wiki, but I believe that not very many presenters took the opportunity to provide links to soft copies of their presentations. I hope that SAA is more successful on this front.

No matter the choices made relating to immediate access - I see this as a big step forward in the commitment to using technology. I think one of the best ways to learn is through getting your hands dirty. Technology is listed as one of SAA’s strategic priorities. Every choice that SAA makes that encourages their membership to become more tech-savvy is a step towards supporting that priority.

• Canadian public TV to try out BitTorrent | Surveillance State - CNET Blogs (tags: bittorrent publicbroadcasting)

ArchivesNext recently discussed Library Journal's annual list of "Movers and Shakers," pondering what a comparable list in the archival profession would look like. For those who don't know, the list recognizes "library advocates, community builders, 2.0 gurus, innovators, marketers, mentors, and problem solvers transforming libraries." After some rumination, ArchivesNext is now calling for nominations to generate a similar list. Do your civic duty and nominate either a project, an individual, or even a situation worthy of this recognition!