Posts

Thanks to the wonderful people at ibiblio, ArchivesBlogs will be changing hosts! If you're not familiar with ibiblio, it's one of the largest and oldest public digital library collections on the Internet. In addition to the upcoming hosting of ArchivesBlogs, ibiblio also hosts librarian.net and Library Web. Pardon any interruptions in access given the impending move; everything should be settled within a few days.

Also, a few changes I've made to the backend should fix most of the continuing issues with certain feeds not aggregating. Let me know if there are any problems that still occur.

After many late nights toiling away, I'm done with the latest version of ArchivesBlogs. I've changed things quite a bit - most notably, I've switched platforms from Plagger to Wordpress using the FeedWordpress plugin to do the heavy lifting of syndication. I've decided to do away with the old OPML structure as well since the taxonomy wasn't as refined as I would have liked. Instead, FeedWordpress can categorize posts as they come in, which has allowed me to create a brand new taxonomy for ArchivesBlogs based on language. Each language can also have its own feed now. The one thing missing that I'm really itching to put back in place are the social bookmarking links; none of the plugins I've come across so far seem to like my theme, so I may just end up writing my own plugin. Anyhow, please give me feedback - I'm itching to do more.

I've been thinking about the biblioblogosphere's reaction to Casey Bisson's decision to use the $50,000 he was awarded by the Mellon Foundation for his work on WPopac to purchase LC bibliographic data and open it up to anyone who wanted to take a crack at it. Yes, this is a "Good Thing," and valuable to the library community as a whole, but I feel like there are some things we're overlooking. Dan Chudnov and I seem to agree, but I'm not going to go so far to damn those who herald this as a "new era." It's a little premature to say where it will go, but I have to admit that I'm occasionally confused and often a little bit insulted by some of the talk surrounding this issue.

I wonder how interesting all the bibliographic data of LC is to begin with. What's in the dump paid for by the Mellon Award money? I'd guess monographs and serials, and probably audiovisual materials. What about archival records? What would anyone do with those? Those won't be interesting to the small libraries that could benefit the most from this altruistic move, and in fact I believe that the biggest problem other than maintaining the records for changes will be separating the wheat from the chaff, which is ultimately an institutional (departmental, consortial, individual ...) decision. I'd love a dump of all the archival records, but I don't know what I'd do with them all; it's much easier for me to wade through them using their OPAC for the time being when I do institutional surveys.

It's been a while since I've written here, but other responsibilities at both at home and work have kept me busy. To get back into the swing of writing regularly, I thought I'd take a look at one of the biggest hot-button topics in archives this year: the development and release of open source archival management systems. Between this year's and last year's SAA conferences, there were three sessions that, at least in part, dealt with the development of open source software for archives. In turn, this reflected the three major projects that archivists have been developing: Archivists' Toolkit, Archon, and ICA-AtoM.

Archivists' Toolkit is the oldest of the three projects; the first meeting and project proposal date from 2002. It may very well be the best funded of the three projects, as it received a $847,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation. However, it also seems to be the least mature, in my opinion, as I've not seen a live demo that's publicly accessible. (There have been live demos available at presentations, but I argue that it's not quite the same thing.) Perhaps this is the nature of the application itself, as it serves only as a back office database and not a patron interface. In addition, Archivists' Toolkit doesn't use a web application like the other two (it uses a Java client using Swing classes). That said, other somewhat comparable applications, like the Evergreen open source ILS, have made the staff client available for testing with a large number of sample accounts. These issues plus the fact that the project team requested a no-cost extension to the project have me remarkably concerned about how Archivists' Toolkit was going to look when it was finally released, which was just this week. An important aside: I started writing this post before Archivists' Toolkit was released, so I'm going to end any further comments until I have a chance to put it through its paces.

The mid-Atlantic archivists are in a brief recess between now and the final session of the day, and it's been thoroughly interesting to say the least. I missed the caucus meetings this morning, unfortunately, but the plenary session was well worth it because it's got the gears turning about archival access systems even though it wasn't directly about them.

Paul Israel of the Edison Papers Project spoke at length about Edison's legacy and collaboration with others. The talk emphasized that Thomas Edison was much more than a great inventor and owed a great deal of his success to his entrepreneurial nature, which I didn't know much about.
While we didn't get to see him give us an interactive presentation of the site, I noticed how exhaustive the digital edition was. While the architecture of the site is a little confusing for me, there's so much content I didn't know where to begin or even what to search for! The series notes are a great way to browse through the collection, though. Even better is that the site is written in PHP.

I'm at the Westin Governor Morris in Morristown, New Jersey for the MARAC Fall Meeting. I just got back from visiting the Morris Museum with a few folks, and now I'm enjoying the (expensive) wireless connection here. This time around I don't know so many folks here, so shoot me an e-mail or comment if you're in attendance. Expect a more detailed post soon; I'm exhausted from being up early to catch Amtrak!

I know this post is well overdue, but the last few weeks have kept me extremely busy. Library Camp East was amazing; fun, thought-provoking, and inspiring. John Blyberg and Alan Kirk Gray (as well as the rest of the Darien Library Staff) did a heck of a job preparing for all of us descending into the auditorium. They even gave me a cool mug that my co-workers envy. I also finally got to meet Dan Chudnov and Casey Bisson, whose blogs I've followed for a while now. Jessamyn West and John posted nearly exhaustive lists of posts by LCE attendees for reference. (For what it's worth, Jessamyn also tips her hat to ArchivesBlogs and apologizes for us not meeting at two conferences so far. I share the blame!)

Fortunately for my readers, I have precious little to add in terms of comments (although I tagged some Library Camp-related links on Unalog). I actually was called into service to lead a session by accident (I happened to be scratching my nose), but I was happy enough to moderate the discussion on how techies and non-techies can learn to talk to each other. The discussion was spirited to say the least, and it seems like some good networking occured as a consequence. The OPAC discussion was pretty interesting as well.

After doing some frantic hacking this week I'm happy to announce that I've unveiled the second major revision to ArchivesBlogs. Other than a change in color, I have added the subscription list in the sidebar using a slightly modified version of Dan McTough's Optimal browser for OPML.The OPML file it renders is also the subscription list used by Plagger. Anyhow, let me know what you think. I'm sure there are some kinks that need to be ironed out.

I'm off to Library Camp East early tomorrow (a 4:05 AM train out of DC). I hope to write-up a post-mortem soon after.

I had fully earmarked addressing Thomas G. Lannon's "Archive Blogs" post on Documenting Sources, his blog, for over a week now after discovering it in my requisite vanity search of Technorati. Other things (even reading) have kept me busy, though, hence the unintentional neglect. I've had plenty of time to reflect upon it at this point, so I might as well respond to some of his points.

He first asks the following:

What is an Archive Blog? This should be a crucial question as the growing field of "blogs about archives" offers up posts stretching from the recent SAA conference to South Carolina Gamecocks. Perhaps it would it be helpful to make a distinction between official blogs relating to news and services from archival repositories and personal blogs written by people who happen to work in archives?

It is an important question indeed. When I came up with the idea for ArchivesBlogs (and when I was still calling it "Planet Archives" and using Planet), I found a couple links to lists of "blogs about archives." I noticed that that there were primarily two categories in these lists: blogs by individual archivists, students in archives programs, etc., and blogs by organizations. This distinction will be apparent when I add an OPML blog directory with categories, which I hope to have done by next week. Searching for blogs that dealt with archival issues was difficult in itself because of the omnipresence of the word "archive(s)" in blogging parlance as a reference to the collection of past posts. Searching Google using the words "archival" and "blog" didn't particularly help either, since Google uses stemming to "improve" search results.

During the Description Section meeting at this year's SAA conference, I made an informal proposal for a session concerning the changing nature of OPACs, changes in the library cataloging world, and the impact of those on descriptive practice in archives and manuscript repositories. I'd like to invite any of you, if you're interested, to let me know if you'd be interested in assisting me with putting together a proposal on this topic.

A small group of us met briefly after the Description Section meeting and discussed the possible formats and areas of discussion. We determined that a seminar-style discussion seemed most appropriate, with perhaps a brief presentation on a specific area presented by the panelists on a given aspect of these issues. Possible areas for presentation and discussion include:

• The changing nature of the OPAC in the library world: open-source, problems with vendors, adding Web 2.0-like features (the "next generation of finding aids" session at this year's conference included good examples of this)
• The impact of changes at LC and the OCLC/RLG merger: LC's decision to end creating series authority records, rumors of abandoning LCSH, decreased importance of cataloging in general to LC administrators, the future of NUCMC and ArchiveGrid
• The impact of Meissner and Greene's "more product, less process" on archival description: minimal/extensible description, streamlining processes, using simple/faceted access points, reusing metadata
• How we haven't changed: questioning existing descriptive practice, ignoring collective wisdom and current research in LIS

I think discusing any of these issues would be helpful to archivists -- a lot of these discussions have been taking place in the library world, and honestly I'm surprised that so few archivists have picked up on them. I'm also willing to solicit further ideas, of course.