Building participatory archives

Friends, followers, taggers, fans, writers, editors, commenters, volunteers, collectors, scanners, sharers, transcribers, researchers, historians, students, users, collaborators, partners, re-users, re-mixers, masher-uppers, citizen archivists, enthusiasts, passionate amateurs, crowdsourcers, nerdsourcers–all are welcome in the participatory archives.

What I’m working on now is exploring ideas about what it means to build “participatory archives.” Read more »

Winners: Most Innovative Archives on the Web

And lastly, we focus on the winners of the Most Innovative Archives on the Web category of the Best Archives on the Web awards.

Winner: The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, Rich Media: Conservation History Association of Texas, Texas Legacy Project Records

“It is innovative on all kinds of fronts– pulling together all these descriptive tools into one interface; embedding the Google Earth mash-up; using the creativity and tech savvy of students to build the tool; and last but not least, giving primacy to the voice and body language and not just the transcript, something not all archives do with oral history but I feel is very important.”

“This is a great use of technology to bring two resources together and provide access and searchability, the latter of which seems like an especially useful feature.”

“They should be applauded for their interface design, including its use of maps, time-coded transcripts, and other features.”

So said the judges in evaluating the Briscoe Center’s impressive multimedia site. Here’s a description of the project in the nominator’s own words: “Previous to undertaking the project of turning the Texas Legacy interviews into rich media, the Conservation History Association of Texas had created interview transcripts and time codes for each of the 150 Texas Legacy project interview videos. While these resources are substantial, they stood segregated from the video content itself, and the potential within them remained dormant.

Using a software called Glifos: Social Media, students from the University of Texas’ School of Information re-purposed the existing transcripts and time codes, and created three distinct research tools: 1) transcripts synchronized to the video content, 2) tables of contents and other indices, and 3) maps which display geographical information. All three of these tools were derived from the transcript-as-descriptive-data.

The first tool, the synchronized transcripts, brings together the source video and its transcript for the first time. Besides following the words of the interviewee as they watch the video, users have the ability to conduct keyword searches of the transcripts for topics of interest to them. Once a keyword is located, users can go directly to that location within the video. Users can search within a single video, or throughout the entire Texas Legacy Records collection.

The second tool allowed the School of Information students to create subject-based, non-linear indices of the videos’ contents. These indices, too, can be searched and are synchronized to the video content.

Additionally, students derived geographical information from the transcripts and created maps that display the locations which a given interviewee discussed. In these cases, students used Google Earth software in addition to Glifos: Social Media. The results give users an exact idea (plotted by latitude and longitude) of places mentioned in the transcripts, and, again, the places are synchronized to the point in the interview where it was mentioned.

An interview with H.C. Clark which features all three of these research tools can be found here.”

One of the aspects of this project that most impressed the judges was the degree of collaboration between the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History and the University of Texas School of Information. It appears that the participants succeeded in capitalizing on all their available resources, including people, materials, and software. Congratulations to everyone involved!

Honorable Mention: HerStory 360, The HerStory Scrapbook

The judges also wanted to recognize an unusual site from outside the traditional world of archives. While it had some shortcomings, the judges thought the HerStory Scrapbook:

“. . . was able to provide an alternative browse interface to New York Times stories related to women’s suffrage, and the creator of the site used a number of social marketing tools to make the content available, including Twitter and Facebook.”

“Interesting and dynamic use of mainly newspaper clippings and repackaging content from another source. Would be better if it drew on multiple types of archival sources for the scrapbook, but good within its limitations.”

Here’s the nominator’s description of the project: “For the first time, The New York Times Archive as been organized by subject matter into an easy-to-use website. From 1917 – 1920, The New York Times published over 3,000 articles, letters, and editorials about the women who were fighting for, and against, suffrage. The HerStory Scrapbook includes more than 900 of the most interesting pieces, as if someone had saved clippings of the original articles from The Times in a scrapbook.

Many of the books, written by the suffragists, about the final stages of the suffrage movement focus on either the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) led by Carrie Chapman Catt, or the National Woman’s Party founded by Alice Paul. The New York Times reported on both women. And, that makes our understanding so much richer.

The HerStory Scrapbook organizes the items from The Times in an easy-to-navigate format. The links to The New York Times open in a new browser window or a new browser tab, if your browser is set up for automatic tabbed browsing. The articles in The Times then open in another browser window or tab. To avoid opening too many windows, the next time you click on a New York Times link, the webpage will appear in the window or tab that is already open, behind the HerStory Scrapbook webpage.

In addition to an easy-to-use format, the HerStory Scrapbook provides a full-text search of the descriptions introducing each article. The advanced features on the search page include word stemming and case sensitive searching. There is also a link which allows searching of the entire New York Times’ archive. (However, full-text searching of articles is not provided by The New York Times.)

To celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, the HerStory 360° Challenge section includes 90 stories, published during the first 90 days of 2010, about 90 women who fought for suffrage. Each story includes links to rare source material to answer the question: “What’s Her Story?”

Congratulations to everyone who helped contribute to both these sites, and to all the winners of the Best Archives on the Web awards! Thanks again to everyone who nominated a site and to judges Christine Di Bella, Cory Nimer, Lance Stuchell, and Chela Weber.

Winners: Best Use of Crowdsourcing for Description

Next, the spot light turns to the winners of the Best Archives on the Web awards in the category Best Use of Crowdsourcing for Description. This is the definition of the category:

Whether through Flickr, wikis, blogs or allowing users to comment on descriptions in their online catalogs, many archives are starting to harness the power of their regular researchers as well as experts around the world to help augment or create descriptions for their collections. This award will recognize crowdsourcing efforts that have resulted in a significant exchange of information for the institution.

The judges selected one winner and singled out one nominee to receive an Honorable Mention. And they are . . .

Winner: Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)

The description of the project from the nomination statement:

“To explore the impact and success criteria of social tagging in the audiovisual heritage domain, a large-scale video labeling pilot, Waisda?, was launched in March 2009. The goal of Waisda? (which translates to “What’s That?”) is to collect user tags that can help bridge the semantic gap, to collect time-related metadata, and to offer people a new way of interacting with television programs, thus creating a connection with the television archive. Waisda? is the world’s first operational video labeling game in the cultural heritage field.

Waisda? invites players to tag what they see and hear. They receive points for a tag if it matches one their opponent has entered within a time frame of ten seconds. The underlying assumption, based on the ‘Games with a Purpose’ by Luis von Ahn, is that tags are most probably valid if there’s mutual agreement. Waisda? introduced three innovations: Using gaming as method to annotate television heritage, actively seeking collaboration with communities connected to the content, and using curated vocabularies as a means to integrate tags with professional annotations.

From the launch in March 2009 to November 2009 (period of the evaluation, the website is still operational, see the WebScience paper by Oomen et al. for more information), over 340,000 tags were added, of which 40.3% consists of matching tags (added by different players within the ten second time frame. In total, 42,068 unique tags have been added.

Waisda? was executed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and KRO Broadcasting (Dutch public broadcasting organization). The Business Web & Media Group of VU University Amsterdam performed additional research on topics such as game play and tag quality. (They carry out research in light of their involvement in the PrestoPRIME European research project.) The software company Q42 built the application.”

Waisada? received a lot of love from the panel of judges: “Looking through the site I just wished that I knew Dutch, so that I could play. In some ways it reminded me of the Google Image Labeler game, but its application to video content was novel. Based on the nomination form and the accompanying papers, it appears that the data gathered through the game has in some cases been very useful to enhance the description of the videos. I also appreciated the work that the project team had gone through to market the site to their desired audience, including their use of social tools such as Twitter.” The rigor of the evaluation and documentation, as well as the sheer fun of the project, were key in helping snag the win for Waisda?. Also, it’s not every nomination that gets this response from a judge: “I also very much enjoyed watching the Dutch reality show about the farmer.”

Resources in English:
- Background on the game and an English summary of the evaluation can be found on the Images for the Future blog.
– Also, two papers on Waisda? were presented at the WebScience conference this year in Raleigh, N.C..

Honorable Mention: PhotosNormandie on Flickr

Longtime readers may remember that I wrote about the PhotosNoramandie Flickr group back in April 2009. Then, as now, the group exists because of the volunteer efforts of two people with the talent and the interest to make it possible–Patrick Peccatte and Michel Le Querrec-and because of the flexible and popular platform that Flickr provides. The purpose of PhotosNormandie is simple–to make archival images of the Allied invasion of Normandy more easily discoverable by more users and to attempt to correct and supplement their existing metadata. The fact that this takes place entirely outside the archival context makes it both more interesting and perhaps more threatening. Patrick and Michel represent no archives, but rather the kind of passionate amateurs who choose to devote their time to advancing knowledge about archival materials. The lack of a connection back to the original archival collections troubled the judges, but they noted that “this project does a lot of things right– in particular harnesses an existing community and tech infrastructure rather than trying to reinvent the wheel or try to get people to a website where they wouldn’t regularly go.”

And so, congratulations to our two notable European examples of using crowdsourcing for description!

Winners: Best Re-Purposing of Descriptive Data

And now to highlight the winners of the Best Archives on the Web awards in the category Best Re-Purposing of Descriptive Data. As stated in the call for nominations:

This award was inspired by the efforts of many archives to liberate their descriptive data and make it available for creative re-use. The winner of this award will be the person or organization who takes descriptive data (whether about collections or people) and does something new with it. This could be a complete creative re-imagining of the data for another purpose or creating a more usable interface for discovery.

And the two nominees who best met those criteria are:

City of Burnaby Archives, Charting Change: An Interactive Atlas of Burnaby’s Heritage

As described in their nomination statement: “Charting Change: An Interactive Atlas of Burnaby’s Heritage , allows users to see how historical events, ranging from First Nations settlement to European exploration, through pioneer land-clearing to the Depression, and through the Great War to post-war population boom have shaped the community of Burnaby [British Columbia, Canada]. These stories are graphically represented online by using existing archival databases in a new, unique manner to illustrate the evolution of the city. Four maps of Burnaby have been created – each representing a significant period in Burnaby’s development – and on each map, points of interest or historical significance have been plotted. Each map and each point of interest includes an historical overview and links to historic photographs and records related to that point or map. These points are all “clickable” and when clicked, they open a panel that contains a brief description/history of the point as well as hyperlinks to related records in our descriptive databases. Behind the scenes, the information shown on each map point is pulled from the existing Inmagic databases currently searchable from the Heritage Burnaby website. Heritage landmarks, historic buildings, and neighbourhoods are plotted and linked to the records for photographs, artifacts, textual records and bylaws. Tools and resources from all of Burnaby’s Heritage partners – the City Archives, the Burnaby Village Museum, the Burnaby Planning Department and the Burnaby Historical Society – are combined to provide a unique perspective of Burnaby. Coincidentally, Google Street Views became available in the Vancouver area the day of the kick off meeting for this project and as a result, we were able to include this new capability so that users can zoom into many of the heritage sites and historic buildings to view them in their present context. Over 1500 photographs from the Burnaby Village Museum collection were scanned and described specifically for this site, which added to an existing inventory of approximately 8000 photographs from the City Archives. Funding for this project was provided in part by the Department of Canadian Heritage through the Canadian Culture Online Program by way of an Archival Community Digitization Program grant.” [Note that in a comment on the previous post, people were advised to visit the Andornot web site to learn more details about the project: http://www.andornot.com/blog/post/Charting-Change.aspx.]

The judges praised Charting Change for “building an engaging, collaborative site celebrating the history of their community” and observed, “Mapping collections is a really powerful way to display and engage users with collections, particularly in a local history collection where patrons are very knowledgeable of and often have a relationship of their own to the location. This site is a great example of how to implement this technology.”

Winner: The Smithsonian Institution, Collections Search Center

As the home page for the Smithsonian Institution’s Collection Search Center states, behind the simple search box are “over 4.6 million records with 445,000 images, video and sound files, electronic journals and other resources from the Smithsonian’s museums, archives & libraries” waiting to be discovered. Everyone knows the Smithsonian is big, but you might not know that it’s comprised of 19 museums, 18 archives, and 20 libraries (not to mention various research centers and the National Zoo). The physical as well as digital assets across the Smithsonian are managed in an appropriately diverse array of systems using various metadata standards.

How did this jungle of systems become accessible through one search tool? I’ll let the nominator take it from here: “To leverage the metadata from this diverse set of databases, the Office of the Chief Information Officer authored custom extraction mechanisms for every system, which maps the data to a common metadata model (inspired by library, archive, museum standards) and allows it to be aggregated into a single database. To accommodate the diverse datasets, the extraction mechanism enables collection stewards to determine the display labels which most accurately represent the content. While all originally contributed data is retained for display, the extraction automatically processes the data to harmonize content for the various user-friendly browsing taxonomies the site offers. The taxonomies are also used for filtering existing search results. For example, a search on “james smithson” (3009 hits) can easily be narrowed down to “Smithson Bequest” (taxonomy: topic) to find documents related to the founding of the Smithsonian Institution in the Archives.
The Collection Search Center website is based on open source software Solr/Lucene. The underlying single database communicates through a set of webservices, which leaves the door open for future innovative services built on top of this data aggregation.”

The judges agreed that as visible (and highly usable) proof that we can break down walls between the “silos” of libraries, archives, and museums, SI’s Collections Search Center deserved to be recognized for greatly increasing the accessibility of descriptive data about archival collections. One judge wrote: “Federated search across disparate collections and collection databases is the “holy grail” for many institutions, and it is really well done here.” Another judge added: “The task of mapping and extracting all the data in this interface from the myriad of systems and schemas had to mind numbing, infuriating, and totally amazing when it actually worked. Beyond that, it sets a wonderful example of pulling data out of our silos and working together with libraries and museums in a way which complements and elevates all collections.”

Congratulations to both the City of Burnaby Archives and the Smithsonian Institution for your excellent work!

“Anthologize” tool released by “One Week, One Tool” program

I’m scrambling like mad to finish up several things before leaving for SAA and so don’t have time to do justice to the release of the Anthologize tool. Essentially, it’s a tool that lets you turn a blog into a book. While it might sound at first to be just a tool for vain bloggers to self-publish, it has far greater potential for archivists than that, both for encouraging professional discussion and for the long-term preservation of blog content. On their “About” page, they suggest the following applications for libraries, archives, and museums:

* Publish research or processing activity on a blog and create the exhibition book from blog posts.
* Pull together blog posts across institutional divisions to create a topically coherent publication.
* Edit the proceedings of a professional workshop or conference to share expertise with new audiences.
* Anthologize a behind-the-scenes blog to offer as a gift to donors.
* Collect and preserve online publications.
* Document social media outreach programs.

Anthologize is the product of the One Week, One Tool program, run by George Mason’s Center for History and New Media and supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The process by which Anthologize was developed is itself interesting and might serve as a model for the rapid development of tools for archives.

Here are some links to more information, please feel free to suggest others in the comments, and I look forward to hearing more about how archives are implementing Anthologize:

“Introducing Anthologize,” Dan Cohen’s Digtial Humanities Blog

Digital Campus podcast, Episode 58 – Anthologize LIVE

“Hello Anthologize,” Edwired

“Lessons from One Week | One Tool – Part 1, Project Management,” Found History blog [this is a three part series of excellent posts about the process]

Digital Humanists Unveil New Blog-to-Book Tool, Chronicle of Higher Education

Announcing the winners of the 2010 Best Archives on the Web Awards

At long last, I’m happy to announce the winners of this year’s Best Archives on the Web Awards.

Best re-purposing of descriptive data

Winner: The Smithsonian Institution, Collections Search Center

Winner: City of Burnaby Archives, Charting Change: An Interactive Atlas of Burnaby’s Heritage

Best use of crowdsourcing for description

Winner: Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid, Waisda?

Honorable Mention: PhotosNormandie on Flickr

Most innovative archives on the Web

Winner: The Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, Rich Media: Conservation History Association of Texas, Texas Legacy Project Records

Honorable Mention: HerStory 360, The HerStory Scrapbook

This week each of the winners in each category will be featured in a new post, so you can learn more about each of these terrific projects. For more information about this year’s categories, see the announcement post.

I’d like to thank everyone who submitted a nomination, as well as this year’s distinguished jury:

Annoucements: Survey for reference, access or outreach archivists & opportunity for Mid-Atlantic archivists to win $$$

I’ve been asked to pass along two announcements:

Did you create a web site or virtual exhibit that promotes the use of archives this year? If you work in the mid-Atlantic region you could be awarded $250 just for doing your job! That’s right. Act fast- submissions must be received by JULY 31, 2010. Check here to see if you qualify for the C. Herbert Finch Award and apply today! It’s free- what do you have to lose?

http://www.marac.info/mc/page.do?sitePageId=93982&orgId=marac

And:

Greetings colleagues,

The Reference, Access, and Outreach Section Steering Committee is developing a resource document that describes the core skills and competencies necessary to be effective as reference, access, or outreach archivists.

To build on the base of knowledge available in archival literature and other related professions, the committee has developed a brief survey for those practicing in any of these three spheres of archival work to share their perspectives and experience.

We appreciate your participation in and your patience with the survey. We are eager to have a rich range of input that isn’t predefined by us. This means we have asked a lot of open-ended questions and haven’t provided a lot of check boxes. To address potential survey fatigue we have set up the survey so that you can complete it over time as long as you use the same computer throughout. Also, it is perfectly reasonable to skip questions. All answers will remain confidential and will be used for the purposes of gathering information to develop this resource document. The survey will be available through October 2010.

Here is the link to the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/referenceaccessoutreachskills

If you have questions/problems related to the survey, please contact Jill Severn at jsevern@uga.edu

Thanks for your participation,

RAO Survey Team

Jill Severn
Jessica Miller

I support the proposed SAA dues increase, but . . .

When I attend the annual SAA business meeting I will be voting for the proposed dues increase, and I hope you will too, should you be lucky enough to be there. To me, even salary-less as I am, the amount of the increase and the phasing-in are reasonable and the rationale provided was convincing. SAA has made every effort to get the word out about the increase and why they think it’s necessary, and I haven’t seen anyone state publicly (or even privately) that they don’t think it’s reasonable.

However, Read more »

How can more members get involved with the SAA Annual Meeting – and involved in general?

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that per the previous post the SAA Annual Meetings are held in locations that are affordable to the largest number of members possible. That still doesn’t mean that the meeting will be engaging for all the members who attend, and there will still be lots of members who can’t attend for one reason or another. [Oh, wait, disclaimer time: Please note that in this and all future blog posts, all the views represented are strictly my own and nothing I say should be interpreted in any way as representing the views of SAA or the SAA Council.]

Two recent conversations on Terry Baxter’s blog inspired this, so I’ll be stealing, I mean referencing ideas liberally from his posts (see here and here). Yes, as Terry points out, this is about diversity, in the broadest sense. The annual meeting is one of the premier products produced by the staff and members of SAA; countless hours of work go into making it as intellectually stimulating and professionally rewarding as possible. Given its importance, it seems odd that SAA has not put more emphasis on making meeting content available to those who cannot attend. Read more »

Excellent article about how SAA decides where to have Annual Meeting, but are assumptions valid?

[This post will be one of a planned series about some SAA issues, including a discussion of other issues related to the Annual Meeting and one about issues related to the proposed dues increase. Please note that in this and all future blog posts, all the views represented are strictly my own and nothing I say should be interpreted in any way as representing the views of SAA or the SAA Council.]

The Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Archival Outlook contains an excellent article by SAA Executive Director, Nancy Beaumont, describing the process by which SAA determines its site selection for the annual meeting. The first thing I’d like to say is that this article offers terrific insight into a complicated process, and I applaud Nancy for providing this kind of transparency into a decision-making process that is, I know, always subject to criticism and second-guessing. I think SAA can truly benefit from more transparency of this kind, on every level.

In earlier discussions on this blog and elsewhere, people have complained that the annual meeting almost always takes place in very large cities which dictate very high room rates for the conference hotel (and for most hotels nearby as well). For many people, the cost of the hotel room is the biggest chunk of their expenses for attending the annual meeting. Why, they ask, can’t we meet in places like Portland, Pittsburgh, Nashville, Minneapolis, Cleveland . . .

Why not, indeed?

Read more »