hangingtogether.org

Ithaka S+R recently published its Faculty Survey 2009: Key Strategic Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies. It considers the way faculty views of the library are changing, and analyses library roles into three key functions:

“The library is a starting point or ’gateway’ for locating information for my research” (which we refer to as the gateway function). “The library pays for resources I need, from academic journals to books to electronic databases” (which we refer to as the buyer function). “The library is a repository of resources – in other words, it archives, preserves, and keeps track of resources” (which we refer to as the archive function).

Ithaka’s analysis shows that the gateway function has declined (its importance rating has dropped from 70%-58%) over the six years in which the biennnial studies have been made, while the buyer function has steadily increased (81%-90%). The archive function has remained relatively static at just over 70%.

Many of the findings in this report are interesting, and relevant to us as we focus - via our Working Group on Research Services - on the specific topic of Support for Research Dissemination. We have chosen the word dissemination with some care. What we will be looking at is researcher behaviours and practices concerning institutional repositories, individual websites, subject archives, virtual research environments, blogs, blog aggregations and other social venues. In other words, every research dissemination venue except the conventional (and still overpoweringly influential) modes of scholarly publishing - the journal, the monograph and the conference paper. We will look at the way researchers use these alternative venues to disseminate their work, and the factors that account for the types and rates of dissemination. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a very clear-headed reflection on the development of the Archivist’s Toolkit in the most recent Code4Lib journal. Challenges in Sustainable Open Source: A Case Study was written by Sibyl Schaefer who worked on the project. She does the kind of brave, objective reflection on the product’s development that isn’t often done in our domain.

It reminded me of the recent post that Lorcan did on the Ithaka report called Sustainability and revenue models for online academic resources PDF where he quotes the report saying

“The absence of focused effort on use, impact, and competition among these types of projects has deep implications for their potential long-term success.”

Lorcan goes on to characterize one of the further sustainability issues

“much project work is supply-driven rather than demand-driven. Project leaders, they suggest, tend to focus on the inherent values of their work rather than on what might be of most importance to their intended users.”

For a comparably brave and objective reflection from a former product manager and current colleague see Ricky Erway’s post on Desperately Seeking Sustainability.

I’m using this blog posting to wrap together a bunch of ideas I’ll be presenting at a meeting tomorrow, Undue Diligence: Seeking Low-risk Strategies for Making Collections of Unpublished Materials More Accessible.

Mark Greene and Dennis Meissner helped to reframe processing modern archival collections in More Product, Less Process. Similarly, Shifting Gears helped to recast digitization from special collections. The purpose of Undue Diligence is to help professionals to look anew at rights issues around unpublished materials, specifically with regard to digitization of those materials, particularly 20th and 21st century collections.

The RLG Partnership exists to identify shared problems spaces, and to reduce pain and effort in those areas. With increasing expectations that our holdings will be made digitally accessible, assessing rights (copyright, along with privacy rights, and potentially sensitive materials) within archival collections is one of those points of pain. The prospect of analyzing items within archival collections is so painful, in fact, that many institutions avoid digitizing collections that were created in the last 70 to 100 years. While this is a very safe practice, it does little to advance broad and democratic access to collections in our care.

The RLG Partnership likewise dodged the copyright bullet in 2007 when we held our forum, Digitization Matters (from which Shifting Gears was born). We ruled copyright out of scope. While reframing the conversation around digitization — from preservation to access, from quality to quantity — did help move the conversation on digitization forward, it did little for those institutions who have major collections relating to … the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf wars, the civil rights movement, the free speech movement… the list goes on and on. This is a small slice of topics that are studied by researchers, taught in classrooms, and of interest to citizens everywhere.

In 2008, we published a short paper called Copyright Investigation Summary Report, which looked at then-current practices around copyright with both published and unpublished materials. Here, we learned that most investigations related to copyright were in relationship to permissions and almost never to digitization. Work was high effort and low return. “We say no a lot,” said one interviewee. Having conducted the interviews, I was pretty depressed by what I heard, which was a tale of professionals paralyzed by potential risks, and of collections shackled.

One of the proposed outcomes of the paper was to “…further explore community practice and issues around unpublished materials held in special collections and archives.” We did so by sponsoring the meeting that lead to the SAA Orphan Works Statement of Best Practices, which was published in 2009. This document provides good guidance for institutions to conduct a “reasonable search,” but does not frame rights assessment in a risk management strategy.

The risk of perceived harm in digitizing a collection is quite variable, based on factors like content, purpose of creation, and date of creation. We believe, in addition to standards for conducting a reasonable search, the community needs to reframe the issues of rights and risks as a community, and also to embrace rights assessment as archivists: at a collection or series level and not at an item level.

We are holding this event, with a star studded cast of presenters, to help set the stage for an important conversation, which is the development of what we are calling a set of “well intentioned practices.” We hope that this will have two effects. The first is that archivists will not need to reinvent the wheel, and can draw from community practices to identify lower risk collections of high research interest. The second is that institutions will digitize collections more freely. Even if institutions consider digitizing two out of ten collections, as opposed to one out of ten collections, access to collections will double!

We will follow up with subsequent blog postings both to report on the content of Undue Diligence and also to report on outcomes.

Many thanks to the advisory group who both helped to shape this event and our program of work in this area.

If you wish to follow the event on Twitter, follow #UndueD. I’ve also set up a Twapper Keeper for the event.

Our paper on obstacles that archivists experience with adopting Encoded Archival Description (and how to get around them) is out!

Over Under Around and Through: Getting Around Barriers to EAD Implementation [pdf].

We are holding a webinar for the RLG Partnership tomorrow and I’ll share the link of the recorded session later.

The paper covers both “social” and “technical” barriers to implementation, and also gives suggestions for how to get around them. This is not a “how to” manual and it is not meant to be read all the way through (although I’m not going to stop you if you want to do that!). The paper is a collection of tips and tricks, and is as much about attitude adjustment as anything else.

Some high level thoughts:

• EAD is 12 years old, but still has not reached the point of industrialization. There are others laboring in the same fields that you are and this paper is chock full of links to existing tools. So many that you should not need to invent your own! Use what’s out there rather than reinventing the wheel (or the stylesheet).
• The paper makes much of consortia, and indeed, these organizations play a vital role in the creation and dissemination of EAD encoded finding aids. Many of these organizations are at risk, or could be at risk. We all are stakeholders in their continued existence.
• I was surprised that I couldn’t find any high level talking points to “sell” EAD. We came up with some. Use them.
• There are many barriers that can be bridged, but the standard is complicated and should be rethought, and fortunately there’s a call for the EAD Working Group to do just that.

Many thanks (and congratulations!) go to my co-authors: Michele Combs, Mark Matienzo, and Lisa Spiro. We look forward to your comments.

Some of us listened in on this morning’s CNI Conversation, in the course of which Cliff Lynch mentioned that the October 16th ARL special collections forum in D.C. was time well spent–with which I agree wholeheartedly. During the Q&A I asked him whether he thinks born-digital collections (e-manuscripts, institutional websites, administrative records, etc.) should be considered “special collections” in terms of custodianship and other aspects of curatorial management. This is a question that began to arise at special collections conferences a couple years ago, and that has sometimes elicited a resounding NO, as in, “That’s unthinkable! We’re all about curation of rare and unique physical artifacts.”

The colleagues whom I’ve heard express this opinion generally seem to have a professional orientation more from the rare books and manuscripts perspective (library based) than institutional archives. (Archivists in the latter context have no issue with born-digital materials being managed as part of traditional archival collections.)

Cliff’s response: he sees no problem considering born-digital materials that comprise unique, distinctive collections to warrant the same type of curatorial oversight that physical special collections receive. His opinion is based at least in part on the special expertise required in areas such as provenance and context, specialized metadata, and a commitment to permanent preservation.

Beyond that, here’s the nugget offered by Cliff that I found particularly useful: Perhaps the tipping point at which a collection should be managed by “special collections” is when an acquiring institution accepts official responsibility for managing (i.e., “owning”) it, such as via an agreement with a donor. In other words, the special collections library is the organization that will provide access, interpret, assist users, understand any intellectual property rights, and assure preservation of that body of digital files and content.

What do you think? Is this a reasonable way to look at it?

Other OCLC Research colleagues and I have been mentioning in recent months that we’re working toward launching a survey of special collections and archives in academic and research libraries. It seemed about time to follow up on ARL’s catalytic survey from way back in 1998. At long last (seems that way to those of us designing it), blast-off is in sight! It’ll be arriving mid-week in the e-mail box of the director of every library that belongs to the RLG Partnership in the U.S. or Canada, ARL, CARL (Canada), IRLA, and the Oberlin Group. Those of you running a special collections department or archives in one of those zones may want to be sure that it makes it to your desk soon thereafter (responses due by 18 December).

The questions cover the gamut from the routine (how much stuff do you have, how accessible is it, how many reading room visitors, etc.) to the timely (are you using the latest archival management tools and Web 2.0 social networking technologies, have you made progress on born-digital, do you have any staff or money left in this budget climate, etc.). Get ready to tell us all about your institutional selves. The project is described in detail here. Questions? Let me know.

I’ve been skimming the report from the University of Minnesota Discoverability. Lorcan recently blogged about this report in detail, but this bit caught my eye:

Users draw little distinction between discovery and delivery; systems, data, and information objects should be optimized for fulfillment.

This is no surprise, but the finding deserves attention in relationship to unique materials. In special collections, the “information objects” that should be “optimized for fulfillment” are usually not. The report does not specifically address concerns related to special collections, focusing instead on materials where timeliness of delivery is a factor. However, with the expectation of timely and convenient availability of materials (if not instant access to materials) a growing trend in general collections, what about special collections?

Two activities in the RLG Partnership are addressing this: Sharing Special Collections (led by my colleague Dennis) and Streamlining Photography and Scanning (led by my colleague Jennifer). Both groups are have working groups populated by smart and motivated professionals.

We’re some distance from special collections that are optimized for fulfillment, but I’m pleased that we have great minds focusing on the issue. Take a look at these activities and let us know what you think.

The Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, more RLG Partners and others have participated in the Flickr Commons, all to try to leverage what’s become known as “crowdsourcing” — “the act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call,” as Wikipedia describes it. By posting content on the web in places where many people frequent, the Library of Congress and others are hoping to attract descriptions, subject labels, and other useful content to enrich their finding tools. And this has undeniably led to enriched descriptions.

But tossing something out on the “interwebs” and creating an effective crowdsourcing environment are two very different things. And this article, from the Nieman Journalism Lab, describes lessons from the Guardian newspaper in the UK that recently used crowdsourcing in their amazing unveiling of the British Parliament expenses scandal. The “four lessons” they point out include:

1. “Your workers are unpaid, so make it fun.” Make it feel like a game, even if it seems like work to you.
2. “Public attention is fickle, so launch immediately.” If it is newsworthy, in other words, strike while the iron is hot.
3. “Speed is mandatory, so use a framework.” Again, applies if something is newsworthy and has a limited span of time to attract attention. Luckily, there are fast ways you can get going with a site.
4. “Participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready.” Also important for when you have a short but intense focus of attention. The Guardian used Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure, for which during the brief span of their project they figure they spent somewhere under 60 pounds. Right, chump change.

Although these tips are definitely skewed toward a crowdsourcing opportunity tied to a newsworthy situation (and therefore of a short-lived attention span), libraries, museums, and archives are not immune from such events. Therefore, it would be good for us to be ready to exploit such opportunities when they arise. For example, what about the 100th anniversary of an author’s birth? That’s a newsworthy event, were an archive chock-full of that author’s content and papers able to exploit the crowd in some useful way. Just sayin’.

Note: Thanks to Rose Holley, of the Australian Newspapers Project and a member of our RLG Partnership Social Metadata Working Group, for pointing this out.

Last Friday the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) standard for archival authorities was released to the international community for review. Warning: an EAC record is not your grandmother’s MARC authority record. EAC is a companion standard to Encoded Archival Description (EAD), yet now seems to be useful well beyond the world of archives.

Managing collections archivally requires archivists to create comprehensive descriptions of corporate bodies, persons and families. Who would know better the context of records and creators than the archivists with the stuff in their hands? And who knew that this contextual information would be exactly what folks want to share when Networking Names [pdf]? With EAC we can link the creators, the context and the stuff. EAC goes one step further, facilitating the exchange of authoritative contextual information across many domains.

It turns out EAC is useful infrastructure for metasearch. At our RLG Annual Meeting, Warwick Cathrow demonstrated The National Library of Australia’s prototype “one-search” service. Here one can discover everything - pictures, books, archives, newspaper articles, music, etc. - by and about a creator. The Australians have used EAC to collate dispersed, silo-ed information. (Just search the Christian name “Nellie” and watch it go! Hats off to Basil Dewhurst and his team.) Read the rest of this entry »

At the RLG Partnership Roundtable’s annual meeting last week during the SAA conference in Austin, the Roundtable’s membership elected two new co-chairs. I’d like to welcome Susan Hamson of Columbia University and David de Lorenzo of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, as the new leadership of the Roundtable. Congratulations David and Susan!