Professional

In the best of times, “year in review”-style blog posts can be inspiring and provide an important sense of closure. When it’s not the best of times, they can be painful reminder of your own misgivings and missteps. Time has moved differently over the last two years, and the calendar itself no longer feels like a good marker of even the progression of days and months that have intervened. But here I am, wanting for the closure that such a review would provide. It feels dissatisfying not to remember that I have finished many things over the last 13 or 14 months, but the struggle to articulate them all has been incredibly real. While I may not touch on all of them, the goal is to describe some highlights to help me retain some perspective.

Commons areas have been constituted through history as places open to all. The LAM sectors describe our work using the term. What if our work reflects a history of commodification? We explore the realization of the commons as an interdisciplinary goal and how to creatively respond to threats of enclosure.

I spent a little time over the last day or so trying to bodge together a shortcode for Hugo to embed an instance of Mirador. While it’s not quite as simple (or full-featured) as I’d like, it’s nonetheless a starting point. The shortcode generates a snippet of HTML that gets loaded into Hugo pages, but (unfortunately) most of the heavy lifting is done by a separate static page that gets included as an <iframe/> within the page. That page parses URL parameters to pass some of the parameters when Mirador gets instantiated.

Getting a consistent way to load multiple IIIF manifests, either into comparison view or for populating a resource list also needs some work, which also led me to grapple with thinking through the IIIF Content State API spec, which will require some more attention, too.

RightsStatements.org is a consortial initiative that focuses on providing a set of interoperable rights statements that make it easier for people to engage and reuse digital cultural heritage, particularly when provided by metadata aggregators. Since 2014, I have served as the co-chair of the Consortium’s Technical Working Group, which is responsible for maintaining the initiative’s vocabulary and infrastructure. We maintain our projects on GitHub.

I’ve been involved in modeling archival information as linked data since about 2009. Most recently, this includes work with the ARLIS/NA, RBMS, and SAA Joint Task Force on Art and Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension. and Archives and Linked Data Interest Group.

I have worked on metadata aggregation and consortial discovery projects since the beginning of my career, much of which focused on special collections and archives.

The SAA Council has issued a call for comments on the SAA Statement on Diversity and Inclusion. As noted in the announcement, the revision includes changes to expand the statement to cover equity as well. Comments are open on the revisions until March 12, 2020, and what follows are the comments that I’ve submitted.

July 15 and 16th are “Prime Day,” Amazon’s attempt to drive up sales and artificial demand around things we don’t need at prices they’ve convinced us that we can afford. Thanks to Mar Hicks, many of us heard that workers at a Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center are holding a six-hour work stoppage on one of the busiest days of the year. Alongside, many have called for a boycott on Amazon and its subsidiaries (Whole Foods, Goodreads, Twitch, etc.), and others have called for a general strike to protest Amazon’s collaboration with Palantir in aiding ICE. With all of this in mind, I’ve been reflecting on what larger scale industrial actions could look like when we look at Amazon’s simultaneous leveraging of centralization and unreliability of single resources to provide critical infrastructure for the IT sector and its own operations.

This year was largely complicated and often felt like a massive garbage fire to myself and my crew. I didn’t accomplish a number of my goals and was inconsistent about others, so recapping awesome things I did doesn’t feel appropriate and also happens to be a soft reminder of either failure or things not going as planned. I also tend to hate “best of the year” lists but I find them helpful to remember about where I found joy or the ability to connect to something outside of myself. I suppose this is an attempt to reconcile those things, or perhaps more in line with the end of year spirit, a way to articulate gratitude to the people and things around me that impacted me.

This is a lightly edited version of the presentation I gave as part of as a part of Session 507: Digitization IS/NOT Preservation at the 2018 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The session was overall pure fire, with thoughtful, funny, provocative, and challenging presentations by Julia Kim, Frances Harrell, Tre Berney, Andrew Robb, Snowden Becker, Fletcher Durant, Siobhan Hagan, and Sarah Werner. My heart goes out to all of them. All of the images used in the presentation were adapted from The Art of Google Books.

This is a lightly edited version of the presentation I gave as part of as a part of Session 507: Digitization IS/NOT Preservation at the 2018 Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The session was overall pure fire, with thoughtful, funny, provocative, and challenging presentations by Julia Kim, Frances Harrell, Tre Berney, Andrew Robb, Snowden Becker, Fletcher Durant, Siobhan Hagan, and Sarah Werner. My heart goes out to all of them. All of the images used in the presentation were adapted from The Art of Google Books.

I am writing this amidst being crammed into a seat flying back from New York City, after a few days of intensive meetings. Between a number of good and less ideal things, my mind has felt really unsettled lately, and I’m working through some professional malaise, and feeling a bit rudderless. In an attempt to give myself something be myself optimistic about and to set some direction, I reread Michelle Caswell and Marika Cifor’s 2016 Archivaria article “From Human Rights to Feminist Ethics: Radical Empathy in Archives”. Part of their analysis outlines four affective shifts in archival relationships based on radical empathy - those between 1) archivist and records creator, 2) archivist and records subject, 3) archivist and user, and 4) archivist and larger community. Given a long list of topics on my mind (precarity, developing inclusive workplaces and cultures, my own uncertain pathway), it felt like there was plenty of space to identify other shifts.

As part of my iterative intentions for 2018, I started a project to rebuild and simplify my website. I’ve used Jekyll for quite some time (either by itself or with Octopress), and as part of the latest iteration of the site, I’ve been working to align the site more with Indieweb principles, and to smooth the deployment path for my site by hosting it on Netlify.

One challenge with Jekyll and other static site generators is that “dynamic-ish” functionality, including sending notifications through protocols like WebSub. The trouble is knowing where these actions fit into the build process for your site: you don’t want to send the notifications before your site gets built, or pushed to the CDN hosting your site. Recently, Netlify announced a private beta for its new Netlify Functions service, which provides lambda-style functions deployed as part of your site deployment. One of the neat features that exists as of the beta is the ability to trigger the functions via Netlify events, like when your site successfully deploys.

I completed my reading and viewing assignments for my cohort’s IT Leadership Program Workshop 1 (January 9-January 11 at UC Berkeley.) This is a brief set of notes for my own use about how all of them tie together.

Hyku, formerly Hydra in a Box, is a next-generation repository solution based on Samvera. From I served as the Project Director (2015-2016), and Data Modeler (2016-2017) for the implementation partnership grant between DPLA, Stanford University, and DuraSpace, and funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

My current position at DPLA, especially since we are remote-first organization, requires me to be on lots of conference calls, both video and audio. While I’ve learned the value of staying muted while I’m not talking, there are a couple of things that make this challenging. First, I usually need the window for the call to have focus to unmute myself by the platform’s designated keystroke. Forget that working well if you need to bring something up in another window, or switch to another application. Secondly, while we have our own preferred platform internally (Google Hangouts), I have to use countless others, too; each of those platforms has its own separate keystroke to mute.

This all leads to a less than ideal situation, and naturally, I figured there must be a better way.

One of the most important aspects of the work of the DPLA Technology Team is ensuring that we maintain a common frame of reference for all of our efforts. This is situated in multiple aspects - in terms of our shared technical knowledge, the overall DPLA strategic plan, and more. Overall, however, the guiding principles for our work are best understood through the core values that inform how we work together within our team, as well as with our colleagues at DPLA and across the network of our stakeholders and collaborators. These values are not only designed to be aspirational; instead, they also inform practical aspects of our day to day work, allowing us to work together effectively through their articulation of cultural norms and expectations. In addition, our values encourage us to be intentional about our work, even when faced with challenges from deadlines, staff capacity, and other external pressures.

DPLA is pleased to announce that the entirety of our website, including our portal, exhibitions, Primary Source Sets, and our API, are now accessible using HTTPS by default. DPLA takes user privacy seriously, and the infrastructural changes that we have made to support HTTPS allows us to extend this dedication further and become signatories of the Library Digital Privacy Pledge of 2015-2016, developed by our colleagues at the Library Freedom Project.

DPLA, along with representatives of a number of institutions including Stanford University, the Yale Center for British Art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and more, is presenting at Access to the World’s Images, a series of events related to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in New York City, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Academy of Medicine. The events will showcase how institutions are leveraging IIIF to reduce total cost and time to deploy image delivery solutions, while simultaneously improving end user experience with a new host of rich and dynamic features, and promote collaboration within the IIIF community through facilitated conversations and working group meetings.

Anna Naruta-Moya and I prepared presentations on using IIIF to provide access to archival material; my presentation focused on generalities, while her presentation focused on the Indigenous Digital Archive project.

This is the written version of my presentation from Code4lib 2016 in Philadelphia, on March 8, 2016. My presentation was part of a panel with my friends Christina Harlow, Ted Lawless, and Matt Zumwalt, after which we had some discussion moderated by Matt Miller. My slides are available, as are the video of all talks from the panel.

A running list of things I want to do or have done. A lot of this relates to adopting the IndieWeb ethos

This is the written version of my keynote presentation from the 2015 LITA Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 14, 2015. I am grateful for the thoughtful and critical feedback from my friends and colleagues Maureen Callahan, Jarrett M. Drake, Hillel Arnold, Ben Armintor, Christina Harlow, and Chela Weber in their review of earlier drafts of this text.

Within the Technical Working Group of the International Rights Statements Working Group, we have been focusing our efforts on identifying a set of requirements and a technically sound and sustainable plan to implement the rights statements under development. Now that two of the Working Group’s white papers have been released, we realized it was a good time to build on the introductory blog post by our Co-Chairs, Emily Gore and Paul Keller. Accordingly, we hope this post provides a good introduction to our technical white paper, Recommendations for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements, and more generally, how our thinking has changed throughout the activities of the working group.

Two weeks ago, we officially announced the initial release of Krikri, our new metadata aggregation, mapping, and enrichment toolkit.

In light of its importance, we would like to take a moment for a more informal introduction to the newest members of DPLA’s herd. Krikri and Heiðrún (a.k.a. Heidrun; pronounced like hey-droon) are key to many of DPLA’s plans and serve as a critical piece of infrastructure for DPLA.

They are also names for, or types, of goats.

This post has been crossposted to the Digital Library Federation blog.

Code4lib 2015 was held last week from February 9-12, 2015 in Portland, Oregon. The Code4lib conferences have grown in the last ten years, both in terms of size and scope of topics. This growth is particularly impressive when you consider that much of the work of organizing the conference falls upon a circulating group of volunteers, with additional organizational support from organizations like the Digital Library Federation. It has become clear to me that the Code4lib community is interested in ensuring that it can develop and support compelling and useful conferences for everyone who chooses to participate.

As you probably know, DPLA is committed to making cultural heritage materials held in America's libraries, archives, and museums freely available to all, and we provide maximally open data to encourage transformative uses of those materials by developers. In addition, DPLA is also proud to distribute the software we produce to support our mission to the wider community.

ArchivesSpace is an open source archival management system. During the project’s grant-funded phases in 2010-2013, I worked as a technical consultant during the planning phase, and as Technical Architect and product owner during the implementation phase.

In my past life, I worked as a digital archivist, focusing on managing born digital collections. Links to some of the past projects I’ve participated in follow.

For some, the phrase “born digital resources” may be unfamiliar, but Ricky Erway, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research wrote a brief essay entitled Defining “Born Digital”, which provides a handy, working definition: “items created and managed in digital form.” Manuscripts and Archives, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Yale University Library overall have had a notable history of working with born digital resources over the past ten years.

[Edit (Feb 24, 2013): Thanks to the fantastic work of Tara Robertson, the video of my lightning talk is now available!]

I gave a lightning talk entitled “Wielding the Whip: Affect, Archives, and Ontological Fusion” at the 2013 Code4lib conference in Chicago, Illinois. This lightning talk was one of the most difficult presentations I’ve ever given for a number of reasons, including the emotional aspect of the content itself, as well as the fact that several of the ideas I was trying to articulate weren’t fully baked. I’ve been thinking about this for the four to six months in various capacities and with different focuses, especially as I read more interactive fiction and learn more about it (as well as about hypertext in general). This post serves as an expansion of some of the ideas in my lightning talk and as a way to further the discussion around the following question:

Can we write interactive fiction and (semi-/para-)fictional hypertext that leverages linked data to create an emotional connection to the “real world”?

This course will explore concepts, principles, and practice for the preservation of digital information resources. Digital preservation is a fundamental issue for anyone responsible for the creation or management of digital information. The class will address conceptual models, policy frameworks, technical approaches and requirements, and a number of case studies of real-world digital preservation projects and systems.

This course will explore concepts, principles, and practice for the preservation of digital information resources. Digital preservation is a fundamental issue for anyone responsible for the creation or management of digital information. The class will address conceptual models, policy frameworks, technical approaches and requirements, and a number of case studies of real-world digital preservation projects and systems.

Inspired by my friend Declan Fleming's "How to Hack Code4lib," I have been motivated to put together a guide to surviving and enjoying the Annual Meeting. It can be a seemingly scary (and potentially lonely) experience if it's your first conference, and we archivists are not always known for our extrovertedness. So, without further ado, here is my brief list of suggestions - again, some of which have been shamelessly stolen adapted from Declan's guide.

[Update: Aus-Archivists might not be gone for good, as ASA intends to share the entire run of postings on its website. See this post for details.]

Despite my relative distaste for the A&A list, I have previously found it useful and argued for its retention when it was threatened in 2007. I still agree with most of what I wrote 3.5 years ago, although I might have toned things down in retrospect. In an effort to find other e-mail discussion lists on archives that engaged my interest, I joined Arcan-L (the Canadian archivists' listserv) and Aus-Archivists (the Australian archivists' listserv, maintained by the Australian Society of Archivists).

Surprisingly, Aus-Archivists had been idle since around the end of October. I noticed this tweet from the Australian Society of Archivists only in passing at the beginning of November:

The ASA Office would just like everyone to know that our List Serv is still currently unavailable, we apologize for any inconvenience...

I didn't hear anything else between then and earlier today. I should note that I'm not a member of ASA, and so I can't speak to any communication they had with their membership. However, today a message was sent out by Pat Jackson, the ASA President, to all Aus-Archivists subscribers, announcing that the listserv was lost entirely.

This class aims to prepare students to think proactively, creatively, and critically about planning, implementing, and evaluating digital library projects in a variety of institutions. In addition, this class is designed as a seminar to allow proactive discussion of topics between both the students and the instructor; this format allows you to learn from each other as well as from me.

Previously posted on http://labs.nypl.org/.

A week ago today, a few of my DEG colleagues and I went to see Liz Lawley from RIT's Lab for Social Computing give a talk entitled "Libraries as Happiness Engines." It was a modified version of a talk she gave at this year's CiL conference. The gist of the talk was that gaming in libraries means not just using established games to draw the public into the library, but also to begin implementing game mechanics into libraries that allow them to flourish as social spaces. In particular, these game mechanics include things like collecting, points, feedback, exchanges, and customization.

I've been ruminating on this for the last week or so in a couple different ways. First of all, I've been trying to figure out how we could implement game mechanics within NYPL.

Previously posted on http://labs.nypl.org/.

Getting up to speed is hard anywhere, and it's especially difficult in a large, complex institution like NYPL. Other than just understanding the projects that you're given, you also are thrown headfirst into making sense of the culture, the organization, and all the unspoken and occasionally unseen things that allow you to do your job. There's no clear place to start this, so a good portion of the time you have to keep on top of that while you start thrashing away at your work. The question remains, though, how do you organize this stuff? How do you enable sensemaking in yourself and your peers?