hangingtogether.org

John R. Stokes passed away this weekend. This caused me to reflect on both his career and mine.

When I started at the Library of Congress in 1985, I was an early entrant into the library imaging scene, but John Stokes was already there. He captured some of LC’s huge photo collections, at that time putting them on videodisk, as part of the Library’s Optical Disk Pilot Project. Anticipating that LC would ultimately want digital images, he saved the digital intermediates. As CD-ROMs became the preferred medium, he was able to deliver those digital images to LC for a tiny fraction of the cost of recapturing them. He didn’t shy away from any original formats, whether slides, large glass plate negatives, or ungainly panoramic photos (for which he built an amazing transport system that captured and stitched together 8 foot long panoramas).

When I came to RLG in 1986 1995, John was already at work there, too, on the Digital Image Access project [19.1 MB PDF file] — where he was helping RLG members with the human side of imaging. He developed software to manage description of images and to provide access to them. He’s done work for NYPL, National Geographic, The Smithsonian, National Library of Medicine, and other museums, universities, historical societies, and cultural heritage organizations.

In the last couple of years, he and I talked many times about ways to increase the scale of digitization of special collections. I wondered if devices could be made to increase throughput for special formats in the way that the Internet Archive and Google had increased throughput for books. Once again, John was already most the way there. He had developed a capture station that could be used with a variety of robotic materials handling devices [PDF] for various formats: manuscripts, large reflective materials, transparent materials of all sizes (including film reels), post cards, and so forth.

His physics background and in-depth knowledge of color, lighting, and photographic processes allowed him to push the envelope in designing capture equipment. As happened with high-end digital cameras, if it didn’t exist and he couldn’t build or adapt it, he’d go to the manufacturer and get them to improve their equipment until it met his high standards. He devoted a lot of attention to the process, too. Software to keep track of the workflow, allow metadata input, perform image correction, facilitate quality control, and track technical data were a key part of any system he put together. He knew that while he could automate the capture, the workflow software would help to improve the human factor.

John’s concession to my plea for faster production of access images was to make the process quickly down-sample images to derive smaller images for web access, while making it possible to save an archival-quality image to storage. He learned long ago that while people may ask for a quick access-quality image, eventually they’ll want more.

John was open and honest with his customers, admitting when he was out of his depth (not often) and pointing out ever so gently when the customer was out of their depth (in my case, more often than I like to admit). His innovative approach and his commitment to quality put him squarely at the top of my list when I was asked for advice on imaging equipment or for a service provider. He was also a kind, genuine, and gentle man, always happy to talk, whether it was about “bidness” or his and his wife Bettye’s latest adventure.

I make it sound as if John ran a one-man show. He had the support of many others over the years, including several of his family members. His good work will be continued by them and other good people at JJT, Inc. under the expert eye of his son, John T. Stokes. Already they reassure us that, within a couple of months, the Stokes Imaging System for special formats will be in place for pilots at two RLG partner institutions.

I’ve slipped the draft of my survey of user studies into a drawer, walked away from my desk, and crossed the Bay to CODEX, a veritable orgy of international arts of the book.

This morning at the Berkeley Art Museum Emily McVarish shared her latest book, The Square, with over 250 artists, collectors, museum curators and librarians. She described the square as a public space riddled with hand-held technology. Has the city square - the grid of daily life - been replaced by the screen? Figures - derived from video clips of people walking streets talking on cellphones - move through the pages (squarish) of McVarish’s new book.

Are both the book and the city commons “breaking down into heterogeneous intangibles?” she wondered.

I was in the audience with a clump of RLG colleagues from Yale, Stanford and LC. They teased me, “Did they let you out?” I asked, “Aren’t artists’ books at the nexus of libraries, manuscripts and museums?” Librarians, archivists, collectors, curators and creators all recognize this paradox, since they collect the same stuff for difference contexts.

Thinking about McVarish’s work, I hesitate to present here a crude SAT-test syllogism: the synthesis of book and art is analogous to the relationship of page and screen. Earl Collier, on the CODEX board, silently waved his notebook, pencil, and PDA phone. “I like ‘em both,” he said.

The CODEX bookfair, afternoons during the symposium, is astounding. This beauty, creativity and global material culture can embody antithesis to LAM silos. At least until you start cataloging…

The Flickr Commons is a remarkable project in many ways, and we’ve certainly followed its birth and progress closely on hangingtogether (see here, here, here, here and here.) Just in case you need a reminder of why the Commons is remarkable, I ask you to consider the following numbers from the LC Flickr Pilot Project report [pdf], where you can find even more compelling statistics.

As of October 23, 2008, there have been 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).

Over 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.

67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.

4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.

Average monthly visits to all PPOC [Prints & Photographs Online Catalog] Web pages rose 20% over the five month period of January-May 2008, compared to the same period in 2007.

The report recommended that “this experiment in Web 2.0 cease to be characterized as a pilot and evolve to an expanded involvement in this growing community.” That was October 30th 2008. In December, Yahoo and Flickr laid off George Oates, the heart and soul of the Commons. In all of my interactions with Commons participants, it has always been quite clear to me how much they cherish their relationship with George, and what a pivotal role she has played in making the Commons a success. For a moment there, I feared that one of my favorite projects of 2008 might grind to a premature and unfortunate halt.

And then another remarkable thing happened. Within days of the news that George wouldn’t be around to steer the Commons anymore, the Flickr community decided to highlight the importance of the Commons to them and their interests through the creation of a Flickr Commons Group. I didn’t find any reference to George’s departure in my cursory reading of posts on the group page – maybe I am embuing its arrival with a meaning that didn’t exist to its founders, but even as a coincidence, the way the community is now claiming and celebrating these collections is remarkable.

My colleague Eric Childress just pointed out that there is now also a blog called Indicommons, which intentionally extends the Flickr group’s ability to sift through the amazing treasure-trove of Commons images, and comment on them. For a timely example, look at the entry which brings together all the inauguration-related images from the Commons.

The Flickr Commons group and Indicommons was created by individuals outside of contributing institutions, but all of the contributors have been invited to use these venues as a platform to communicate with their most fervent users, and they all seem to have joined in. Some of the folks on Indicommons have even partnered with Commons institutions to create additional tools for the Flickr Commons (see the batch date changer for contributors, and these Power Feeds for Commons aficionados.)

I guess it’s a brand-new day. This certainly isn’t your mother’s cultural heritage community anymore. And this isn’t your mother’s audience anymore, either. If you’d like to hear an interview on BBC with Anna Graf, one of the movers-and-shakers behind the Group and Indicommons, check here [mp3]. As much as George was the heart and soul of the Commons, the greatest tribute to her achievement may be that the future of the Commons rests with the People, and the People are doing their part to carry it forward.

Kudos to all of those who took the initiative to create the Group and Indicommons!

The National Library of New Zealand (Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa in Maori and an RLG Partner) has obviously been busy. Last week they joined the Flickr Commons, and they have already reported some impressive use statistics. But today (well, yesterday in Kiwi time) came an even bigger announcement.

Digital New Zealand, “a nation-wide project to help make New Zealand digital content easier to find, share and use was launched at the National Library of New Zealand on 3 December 2008.” The incredible array of collections made available through this one interface would be news enough for many libraries. But the joy doesn’t stop there.

The project welcomes additional content contributors, and stands ready to provide advice and assistance to help them to do so. Visitors are offered an opportunity to create a tailored search of the site and drop the resulting widget onto any web page they like or use the special search page that is created for them right on the Digital New Zealand site.

If a visitor doesn’t wish to create a tailored web widget, they already have a library of such from which to choose. And for the true technorati, there is the developer section, which provides a simple way for software developers to get a key to be able to use the application programming interface (API) of the site. If all of this isn’t enough to knock your socks off, stay tuned.

The “Memory Maker” is a web-based way to mix and match video clips into your own cinematic production. I kid you not. Try it out. You can add audio or music to add your own special touches. I doubt that any movie miracles will be made here, but the level of interactivity is completely off the charts. To get the full measure of this, you simply must see this movie.

So by now you must think surely I am done singing the praises of Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, but I’m not. There’s still more. Like I said, they’ve obviously been busy. The last thing I want to highlight is their National Digital Heritage Archive. Long in the works through a partnership with ExLibris, this preservation system went live on November 4. “The National Digital Heritage Archive (NDHA),” states the web site, “is the National Library’s technical and business solution to preserve and provide long-term public access to its digital heritage collections.” The NLNZ was the flagship partner with ExLibris, and the product is based on the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model and conforming to trusted digital repository (TDR) requirements (which came out of joint RLG-OCLC work before the two organizations joined).

This is an incredible array of new initiatives by any measure, and a tribute to the leadership of Penny Carnaby, Chief Executive and National Librarian, and John Truesdale, Director National Digital Library, and of course many others who were instrumental in accomplishing all of this work. For my part, it’s hard to believe that it was only a bit more than a year ago when I was talking with Penny and John in a Melbourne bar after participating in a National and State Libraries Australasia strategic planning meeting. They have much to celebrate, as do we, since they have are doing much from which we can learn. I simply can’t wait to see what comes next.

Google is digitizing 10 Million photographs from the LIFE photo archive. 2 Million are already available, and the complete set will be accessible from Google Image Search as well as this dedicated site within 3 months.

Quoth the Official Google Blog:

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time.

I find this notable for a number of reasons:

1. I wonder about the nature of the partnership Google struck with LIFE. It sounds like Google did the digitizing, and it looks like LIFE got a “Purchase Image Merchandise” link with their logo above it. (And who wouldn’t want to have a framed print of Krushchev oogling Jackie Kennedy “as her mother-in-law Rose Kennedy looks on proudly”?)

2. I wonder whether we will come to look at this as Google throwing down the gauntlet to challenge the Flickr Commons, or whether this partnership was merely an opportunistic enterprise.

3. Along those lines, I wonder whether Google will aim to strike public/private partnerships to digitize photographic archives from the cultural heritage community. (Flickr so far has only provided a platform to present images, yet no financing to get collections digitized.)

4. I wonder how long it took to digitize the photographs “in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints,” and whether Google created a proprietary scanning station for these materials as they did for books. Mass digitization for photographs, anyone?

The Chicago Tribune has this short story on this development with a quote from LIFE president Andrew Blau:

“We don’t think we’re giving away the store,” Blau says. “We have 10 million images, some of the most important in world history, and they’re not being seen. To have the entire collection in a warehouse in Jersey City is not to the benefit of the photography.”

It looks like LIFE is also planning to make these images available in its new incarnation as a website at Life.com.

Today is Armistice Day, and the 90th anniversary of the end of the ‘War to end all Wars’. It is not surprising any longer that commemoration by the public of events of significance are now happening naturally on the web. Oxford University has launched its Great War Archive, originally funded with the assistance of JISC, which has encouraged submissions from members of the public. Other major sites have also created digital archives on the subject, including the BBC, which includes a powerful ‘audio slideshow’, with historians and journalists providing commentary, and BBC archive material selected for it. The Imperial War Museum also has a number of exhibitions and displays. It is interesting to contrast those exhibitions which have been curated with what flickr can offer. The Oxford project has now come to an end, but members of the public were encouraged to go on sending in their images to a flickr group set up around the Great War. Among those who have done so are some libraries (including the National Library of Scotland), whose selected images sit side-by-side with those of interested members of the public. From the latter, there are some poignant contributions, such as the embroidered postcard from his great-grandfather to one contributor’s grandmother, in Ayrshire, a treasured token of love for his daughter.

The contributor’s metadata is full enough for an image like this one, and many of the others here, to be appraised by curators and archivists for addition to professionally assembled collections and exhibitions such as those discussed above. With contributed images, as with contributed annotations to items in the flickr Commons, we need new tools which permit appraisal, or at least the identification of items which merit the attention of a professional eye. Flickr is in this sense something of a worldwide metal detector, and it is bound to throw up many valuable items which we in our communities are as yet not ready to process. What makes it even more impressive is the high quality display tools it affords - so that the Great War Archive slideshow, with the ‘Information’ (user metadata) turned on, provides an effective museum-like experience even of an uncurated collection. Some professionally curated collections on the web could do worse than follow suit.

In the context of John MacColl’s guest blog on Karen Calhoun’s Metalogue, I was reminded of the stats from the LC-Flickr project pertaining to changes LC made in their own catalog prompted by insightful Flickr comments.

When I last updated my Flickr slides for a class at Syracuse University, I found 174 records containing the word “flickr” in an all text field search of LC’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog. The records in that set usually contain a credit such as “Source: Flickr Commons project” for information which has been added, like in this instance.

The same search today yields a whopping 4,256 records - which is quite close to the entire set of images LC has on Flickr (4,615 as of today). Upon closer inspection, I found that many of these records don’t contain a change to the substance of the record - however, they now do have a useful pointer to a discussion about the photograph on the Flickr site, and that’s why my search retrieved them. For an example, see this record which includes the following language: “Additional information about this photograph might be available through the Flickr Commons project at http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2369119062“. On Flickr, one can then follow a playful discussion about dating the photograph.

Interestingly enough, these links to Flickr aren’t programmatic – an item which doesn’t have comments on Flickr doesn’t seem to receive the link. See for yourself – the LC equivalent of this Flickr image does not contain the pointer in the LC record, since there was no comment on the image in Flickr.

It looks like LC continues to update its records based on Flickr user feedback, and they’re also creating links so people searching the LC catalog exclusively don’t miss out on the oftentimes rich discussion on Flickr. A search for “Source: Flickr Commons” yields 509 exact phrase hits, which is the portion which most likely represents actual updates to the catalog.

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…

On the VRA listserv, Christine Sundt pointed to a brief article about a new policy at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (V&A) - our friends in the UK have decided, so the headline of the article, to “scrap academic reproduction fees” for their images early next year. Alan Seal, Head of Records and Collections Services, talked briefly about this move during MCN, commenting that the V&A is poised to put upwards of 30k digital images in high resolution online very soon. It looks as though the V&A will use OAI and CDWA Lite to make the images available - Alan has been participating in the monthly conference calls of our Museum Collections Sharing Working Group, and seems well poised to become a major implementer of this suite of standards.

I recently guest-spoke in the JFK University Museum Studies Program, and it never fails to amaze me how alive & well expectations of significant revenue through reproduction still are. I had two quotes from Simon Tanner’s study for them, which I think made some of the students reconsider:

“Museums do not carry out image creation or rights and reproduction activity because of its profitability.”
“Everyone interviewed wants to recoup costs but almost none claimed to actually achieve or expected to achieve this.”

I’m thrilled to hear that the V&A has made the gutsy move to value the increased circulation of their materials higher than the (comparatively small) revenue stream they have achieved by licensing it!

I live in San Francisco’s Mission district, a neighborhood teeming with Mexican and Latin American immigrants, where Dia de Los Muertos gets honored with a fantastic parade and exhibit of altars in Garfield Park. During a pre-parade party at a friends house last night, I met a woman who teaches studio art as an adjunct at Stanford and UC Santa Cruz. We had a lively conversation, which quickly turned to the use of digital images in the classroom (don’t all cocktail conversations?)… and her frustration with said topic. Since she mainly teaches contemporary sculpture, she finds it extremely difficult to get her hands on anything worth projecting in digital form. She tried ARTstor at Stanford, but claims that the interface confused her to a degree that she just gave up. I oracled that I was certain her local art librarian would be delighted to show her the ropes, and she acknowledged how wonderful librarians are once you take the time to talk to them. More frustration: even if she can find an image of a sculpture, it usually doesn’t quite show the angle of the piece bringing out the particular feature she’d like to discuss. She also mentioned that a slide projector on eBay was about $40, and she just bought one. I’d claim this is a user we should strive to serve better!

All of this caused flashbacks of the conversations me and some of my program colleagues had with faculty at Stanford, UC Berkeley and University of Southern California a couple of years ago, and it also reminded me that there are two brand-new studies in this area which I still haven’t gotten around to digesting yet. A CLIR/Rice University report on Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age states as its number 1 recommendation:

Organize a campaign to break down barriers to access and distribution of images, in all media and at affordable prices, for scholarly research and publication.

While this recommendation speaks to the availability of digital images, a report commissioned by NITLE and Wesleyan University (based on four hundred survey responses plus three hundred individual interviews with faculty / staff at 33 colleges and universities), authored by David Green, makes its number 1 recommendation faculty tools for enhanced management and sharing of the images:

Develop and share tools and services to assist faculty in organizing, cataloging and managing their personal digital collections, in a user-centered content model.

The little I have read of both reports makes me want to read more (and I hope I managed to wet your appetite as well), and it gives me hope that at another cocktail party in the not-too-distant future, I’ll find the faculty members present more impressed with the image resources available to them.