J. Todd Ellison - Cross-Over archival training and consulting
~~ records management, oral history, and management of archives and special collections ~~
~~ records management, oral history, and management of archives and special collections ~~
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ARCHIVAL THEORY AND PRACTICE
Lecture notes by Todd Ellison. Copyright Todd Ellison 2015. Permission is granted for use, but not for sale or any commercial or monetary gain, and you must link to this website. |
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Week 1, Class 1
#1
There once was a certain bright student,
who took Archives, which shows she was prudent.
When she finished the course,
she had no remorse
'cause she learned what she should and she shouldn't.
I. Course introduction
A. This is an introductory study of archival principles and practice. Curriculum Committee removed words "intro. to" from the title, but in no way can this course be construed as teaching you everything there is to know about archives
B. What you can expect to learn from this course:
1. you will be exposed to the practices and theories adopted or expressed within the archival profession,
2. you will learn organizational principles from the archival profession,
3. you will study effective and efficient ways of storing, accessing, and selectively preserving data.
4. practically speaking, the course should help in
a. finding jobs
b. doing historical research, and
c. organizing & preserving your own papers and records throughout life.
C. Who can benefit from this course?
1. the course should be useful to anyone considering a career in archival work, any budding historian, and anyone interested in the history of providing access to historically significant materials.
2. the tools and approaches taught in this course should be useful to anyone and everyone who aims at making a difference in today`s information age.
3. learning formats include:
a. reading and studying these notes
c. doing your own case studies of typical administrative problems
d. core readings of archival literature, and
e. an archival project.
8. discuss our experience and background in archives
D. The language of archives
1. glossary of archival terms (pass out and discuss)
2. archives is increasingly being used as term for unpublished materials--much of it unique
a. document can take many forms
b. archives are records produced during normal operations of an institution, and (at least initially) kept by that institution; whereas, manuscripts are personally generated and/or collected
c. thus, "archives" has at least 4 different meanings:
(1) the records of continuing value of an organization or individual
(a) specifically, noncurrent records that have been transferred to a place of long-term storage because of their long-range value
(b) this is the primary German and American usage
(2) the building in which the records are kept
(3) the agency, organization or program responsible for selection, care and use of these records
(4) the records (including current ones) of any agency or institution or person
(a) this is the Romance usage; Italian archivio = records
(b) Sir Hilary Jenkinson (British) used the terms records and archives (in this usage) interchangeably
(c) we encounter this usage with electronic records too
3. misconceptions of the word archivist
a. what our friends think it is
b. archivist's task (Ellis p. 18) is "the identification and preservation in context of records of continuing value for future use"
c. purpose of an archives is (Bressor, p. 3) "to meet the needs of researchers and potential archival users by ensuring that historical records are collected, identified, organized, preserved, and made available for research use."
d. "the archivist's primary duty is the moral and physical defence of the archives" (Jenkinson, in Ellis, p. 10)
e. archivist is coming to include curator
(1) curator has in the past been a title for a person who administers either MSS collections as opposed to corporate archives,
(2) more commonly, a curator is a trained professional, often academically oriented, who is responsible for the collection, preservation, and use of museum objects--esp. artifacts
4. related term: records
a. "records are the information byproducts of social and organisational activity" (Ellis, p. 3)
b. records centers hold still active but low use records of an organization
c. these records aren't necessarily permanent
d. records center is a half-way house, purgatory
e. records manager = one who controls active records (those in immediate use or needed for immediate access) through their scheduled selective retention and destruction
f. records manager focusses on current purposes
g. (more on records management in later week)
E. Readings for next class:
James O`Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, intro & ch. 1--"Recording, Keeping and Using Info." This book (to quote a review in the Spring 1991 American Archivist) "introduces the issues that define our work [in terms which are understandable] to beginning archivists, archival students..." etc., starting with the history of recording, saving, and using information.
Subscribe to the Archives & Archivists List online for emails regarding the archival profession. Choose the Subscribe Digest format, so you only receive one email a day that combines all of the emails posted on the list in that day.
Week 1, Class 2
A joke:
Are you sick and tired? If you are, this may be why: the population of the US is 220 million. 65 million of these are over 65, leaving 136 million to do all the work. 95M are under 21, leaving 41 million to do all the work. 22M are in the federal government, leaving 19 million to do all the work. 4 million are in the armed forces, leaving 15 million to do all the work. 14.8 million are in state or local government, leaving 200,000 to do all the work. 188,000 are sick or in an insane asylum, leaving 12,000 to do all the work. 11,998 are in jail, which leaves you and me to do all the work, and I'm getting tired of doing it all.
B. Review of archival terms
1. Archives is increasingly being used as term for unpublished materials--much of it unique
a. document can take many forms
b. archives are records produced during normal operations of an institution, and (at least initially) kept by that institution; whereas, manuscripts are personally generated and/or collected
c. thus, "archives" has at least 4 different meanings:
(1) the records of continuing value of an organization or individual
(a) specifically, noncurrent records that have been transferred to a place of long-term storage because of their long-range value
(b) this is the primary German and American usage
(2) the building in which the records are kept
(3) the agency, organization or program responsible for selection, care and use of these records
(4) the records (including current ones) of any agency or institution or person
(a) this is the Romance usage; Italian archivio = records
(b) Sir Hilary Jenkinson (British) used the terms records and archives (in this usage) interchangeably
(c) we encounter this usage with electronic records too
C. Definition of what an archivist does (O'Toole, p.4), in 3 pairs of
1. Appraise and acquire
2. Arrange and describe
3. Preserve and make available
4. Purpose of an archives
a. (Bressor, p. 3) "to meet the needs of researchers and potential archival users by ensuring that historical records are collected, identified, organized, preserved, and made available for research use."
b. "the archivist's primary duty is the moral and physical defence of the archives" (Jenkinson, in Ellis, p. 10)
5. related term: records
a. "records are the information byproducts of social and organisational activity" (Ellis, p. 3)
b. records centers hold still active but low use records of an organization
c. these records aren't necessarily permanent
d. records center is a half-way house, purgatory
e. records manager = one who controls active records (those in immediate use or needed for immediate access) through their scheduled selective retention and destruction
f. records manager focusses on current purposes
g. (more on records management in later week)
6. hands-on exercise (and handout, 1 p.) compare the attributes of various storage media
Week 2, Class 1
#2
Documentary sources are many,
but none of them worth e'en a penny,
'til techniques of archives
applied by the wise
make them useful to Moe, Joe and Jenny.
The setting: nature and history of documentary sources
A. Review of last week's main points
1. Archives has 4 different meanings
2. Modern records have 5 characteristics in general (O'Toole p. 20)
a. they are abundant (and thus, the significance and value of each item is less)
b. they are interrelated
c. their value is collective--it derives from their relationship to one another, rather than as a record on its own
d. records creation and maintenance is decentralized
e. the use of records changes over time; the current value and use of a set records may be much different from their original value and use
3. When records are created, it is for one (or more) of six reasons reasons (O'Toole, p. 10-13)
a. personal (correspondence)
b. social (minutes)
c. economic (invoices, bills)
d. legal (deeds, wills)
e. instrumental (passes, tickets)
f. symbolic (diplomas)
4. report on findings from newspaper microfilm of the day and year you were born
B. The nature of historical sources is drawn from our definition of history
1. Jan Vansina - Oral Traditions
a. history is mutually agreed-upon statements about the past (Kuba)
b. history continues to be an interpretation of the past in the light of the present
c. it's not the indiscriminate collection of facts but the selection of truths
2. G. R. Elton (p. 20) def. of history
3. something can only be defined as historical if there is evidence for it
a. so, historians follow archivists--or is it the other way around?
b. "no documents, no history"
c. if history is the study of what remains, shouldn't the archivist just store what survives?
(1) archivist must choose what is to be saved
(2) thinks ahead to historians' needs
(3) whereas historian knows what has happened and looks back to discover what led to that outcome
4. we automatically filter information; communication is inherently fuzzy
III. Trends in data transmission and storage modes and in the technology of record making
(O'Toole, p. 15)
A. Techniques for remembering in pre-literate societies (O'Toole, p. 8)
1. Differences between oral and written worlds
a. conservative vs. dynamic
b. repeated vs. analyzed
c. fleeting vs. recorded
d. unacceptable in court vs. proof
B. The rise of written "documents." Similarities of form and content; differences in nature of creation, ownership, legal standing.
1. (O'Toole, p. 9) discussing the rise and spread of literacy: "the key turning point for any society undergoing a transition to literacy was the point at which it came to rely on writing and written records in its everyday operations."
2. why did people begin recording information? (O'Toole, p. 11-13): personal, social, economic, legal, instrumental, and symbolic functions
3. (Posner, p. 23) "For more than half the time mankind has communicated in writing, most of the writing has been on clay."
4. written records proved to be a means of being more precise
a. more reliable--more efficient than oral forms of transmitting data
b. the word record means "to give" (dare) "back" (re) "to the heart" (cor)
C. Technological developments that have caused modern records to have their characteristics
1. letterpress book --19th C-- allowed for the creation of duplicate copies
2. typewriter-- more letters could be written, faster, and duplicated easier using carbon paper
3. photocopying machines allow for making numerous copies of the same record, thereby increasing the volume and lessening the value of any one particular document
4. automation--computerization--has enormously increased the volume of records being created, and made it easier to manipulate the data
D. That's why this course is important: this is the information age.
1. Information analyst Linda Letterman "asserts that in the course of one year the average citizen will--
(1) read or complete 3,000 notices and forms
(2) read 100 newspapers and 36 magazines
(3) watch 2,463 hours of television
(4) listen to 730 hours of radio
(5) buy 20 records
(6) spend 61 hours on the phone
(7) read three books
(8) and have undetermined amounts of conversations and information exchanges."
2. Information Literacy: Revolution in the Library (1989), university president Gordon Gee states:
a. "just one issue of The New York Times contains more information than the average person of seventeenth-century England would encounter in a lifetime.
b. Today, the amount of information is growing so fast that major libraries double in size every 14 years, or 14,000% each century.
c. `Surviving the information age requires that we ask ourselves what information is important to us.'"
d. Referring to Thomas Bacon's assertion that 'knowledge is power,' Dr. Gee fears that information alone, without affordable access to it, is more likely to produce "information anxiety," defined by Richard Wurman as arising "from the gap between what we understand and what we think we ought to understand." Furthermore, Gee states, "connecting, integrating, and managing information resources are not enough to meet the challenges of an information-based society [because]...`we must focus on the analysis of information and the development of information literacy. This goes beyond the hardware of information storage and retrieval to the development of "thoughtware," the critical thinking skills needed for lifelong learning.'" Information fails to be useful to us until we filter it through a context of meaning and applicability to our lives. There is a "'danger that greater credibility will be given to data rather than to ideas, and that information will be mistaken for knowledge.'" (Source: Gordon Gee, President of Ohio State University (formerly of CU Boulder), in OCLC's Annual Review of OCLC Research: July 1990-June 1991.)
E. Characteristics of recorded information today?
1. increased production and use of all means of information transmission
a. 1993 report of the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (quoted in 9/93 Annotation, p. 5): "State archives now hold more than 1.6 million cubic feet of permanent paper records--enough to fill the U.S. Capitol rotunda one and a half times to the top of the dome. An additional 140 million sheets of permanent records come into state archives each year. Laid end to end, they would circle the equator twice. Since 1986 the average volume of paper in state archives has risen 59 percent.... State archives now hold nearly 2.5 million reels of microfilm, up from 700,000 reels in 1986...."
2. notion of palimpsest--layer upon layer of technology for info storage and transfer--no technology is ever truly discarded
3. Schellenberg (Appraisal of Modern Public Records, p. 12): "While an archivist dealing with modern public records will have great difficulty in reducing them to manageable proportions, he will nonetheless often find that the records he wants were not produced at all. ... It is a curious anomaly that the more important a matter, the less likely is a complete documentation of it to be found. ... Important matters may be handled orally in conferences or by telephone, an instrument that has been referred to as the 'great robber of history.'"
4. simultaneous explosions today caused by electronic technological developments and the related proliferation of paper records
5. today's archivists must understand the new media (their nature and their operation), and must understand their effects upon history, upon information resource management, and upon bureaucracy -- this understanding is essential if we are to master this data explosion
a. primary uses of records (O'Toole, p. 11-13)
b. their secondary uses (O'Toole, p. 4)--unpredictable
6. review of storage technologies from the box hands-on exercise at the end of last week's class
F. The nature of the archivist's task today
1. F. Gerald Ham (archivist of State of Wisconsin) sides with Schellenberg and states that "the work and behavior of archivists is determined by the nature of the materials they deal with: physical, form, content, and especially volume." ("Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era," American Archivist (Summer 1981) (revision of address to SAA annual meeting in 1980) "Our work is determined by the way our society records, uses, stores and disposes of information." "The revolution in information processing is changing our world and our work, pushing archivists into a post-custodial era." Previously, the mass of records was smaller and archivists had a passive role, receiving what was given to them; they became introspective and isolated from one another, and were proprietary about their holdings; lack of a collecting framework and exaggeration of the sense of many records' importance led to wasteful competition. "The information revolution is forcing us into a more active role, in which we must make crucial decisions - or decide by not deciding - about the future of the historical record." "The larger problem of the 1980s is not the physical bulk but the mass of information." (problems of access and control, and of deciding what constitutes information)
2. (Naisbitt) 6,000 to 7,000 scientific articles are written each day; the data doubles every 5.5 years (as of 1982); the information flood will drown us if we don't control it and organize it: (p. 24) "Information technology brings order to the chaos of information pollution and therefore gives value to data that would otherwise be useless. If users...can locate the information they need, they will pay for it. The emphasis of the whole information society shifts, then, from supply to selection."
3. (Don Wilson, Archivist of the U.S., in a 1991 newsletter of the NY State Archives and Records Administration) "This past decade has been witness to a stunning proliferation of new information technologies and the widespread use of computers in all sectors of society. For that reason, archives must quickly develop the capacity to preserve the record in an increasing variety of formats -- paper, audiovisual, computer tapes and disks..."
4. archivists' most difficult task today is to preserve the records of the last half of this century. Before that, and certainly in previous centuries, most of the records were textual. Today, "the new media of records no longer stand still but are constantly changing in a race to provide more information, faster, and in greater detail." (The Archivist, Nov.-Dec. 1991, p. 30) The significance of electronic and audio-visual records increases steadily as we head toward the 21st century. Newscasts are overtaking newspapers, videotapes are overtaking books, and oral history tapes are gaining popularity as a means of documenting our past. "Television has taken command of the world's leisure time and has become the new medium of communication for politicians, educators, musicians and advertisers alike. The videotape recorder has suddenly extended this revolution beyond the broadcasting studio into the office, the classroom and the home...[and] has increased demand for audio-visual records of the past, which can now be presented in this new medium." (The Archivist, Nov.-Dec. 1991, p. 31) Preserving the earlier audio-visual products is problematic: early broadcasting, in both radio and television, was primarily live and not pre-recorded. The development of broadcast technology has made pre-recording more common, but the contemporary recording medium (magnetic tape) can easily be erased and reused, and therefore usually is." Broadcasting has been perceived "as a throw-away commodity fittingly stored temporarily on a reusable recording medium." Broadcasters are too pressured to fill tomorrow's programming to take time to think about preserving some of their past efforts, most of which they expect they will have no call to broadcast again. (The Archivist, Sept.-Oct. 1986, p. 2-3)
5. discussion of Ham article, incl. questions page
a. Ham article is seminal -- key article for understanding new role of archivists
b. answer 9 questions as it's read in class -- work in groups of two -- answer questions aloud -- this exercise represents the modern archivist's task of active selection from a world of information
jokes:
- have you met the woman who wants to have four husbands before she dies? She wants to marry first a banker, then a movie star, then a preacher, and finally a mortician. That way, she'll have one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.
- in the Hope family there are 7 sisters. Each sister has 1 brother. Including Mr. and Mrs. Hope, how many are in the family? (10)
6. select and schedule your project
G. Overview of the possibilities, focussing on the new records archivists will be acquiring
(O'Toole, p. 7-20)
1. the Encyclopedia Britannica can be stored on a 3.5" compact disk
2. CD-ROM
a. plastic disc with metal coating
b. laser beam makes pits and bumps on it which can be read, using accession software
c. can store up to 650 MB on a disc
d. can be read on a DOS, MacIntosh, UNIX, etc. system that has a standard drive and a software driver to read an ISO 9660 Standard CD-ROM
e. pre-mastering costs about $1,000; copies cost about $2
f. CD reader subsystem is inexpensive ($300-$400) and is becoming a common peripheral on workstation configurations
g. CD-ROM is the leading medium for distributing appliations that combine video, audio, text and graphics
h. but it's an impermanent medium (3-5 yrs.?)
3. optical disc
a. laser photographs the materials so that the user can see the page as clearly as on the original, with indexing
b. NARA and NIST don't recommend optical disc as an archival medium because its chemicals lift off and its laminates separate
c. lack of standards
(1) NIST tests show a 10 year life expectancy of these tape cartridges
(2) it's important to track the databases: document the date each tape was manufactured, when data was loaded onto it, and when it should be exercised and when it should be replaced
5. optical scanning: OCR (Optical Character Recognition) vs. Imaging
a. how they work
(1) with OCR, computer scans characters and recognizes them as the characters they are
(2) image scanning is like making an electronic photocopy, by recognizing light and dark picture elements (pixels)
b. differences
(1) OCR uses little space; imaging requires a lot of data storage capacity, because it must store data regarding every portion of the item scanned
(a) compression can reduce some of the volume, by eliminating the marginal areas, etc.
(b) compression tells it to forget the white spaces and record only the location of the darker spaces
(c) (see handout/overhead sheet) 1 p. of tabular data requires about ?_K with OCR; with imaging, the same page would require 53K
(2) OCR is slow; imaging is fast
(3) OCR data can be word processed/changed after scanning
(a) image data cannot be altered once it's been saved
(b) this permanence aspect is critical for legal aspects of imaging
(4) OCR can't improve on the quality of the original (and has difficulty matching it); imaging can improve the quality of the original
(5) OCR is so-called "intelligent" scanning; a table of figures scanned by OCR can be manipulated, averaged, tabulated, etc.; imaging is simply mechanical
(6) OCR doesn't do well with a page that contains various fonts or poor-quality characters, and no software is good at recognizing both numbers and letters; characters must be crisp to be distinguished by OCR software, otherwise it's quicker to simply key it in; these days, U.S. firms are contracting out keypunching jobs for work at low cost in the Philippines and Bermuda, etc.; for imaging, form and content don't matter--it can read images, text, numbers, etc.
c. similarities
(1) both are costly
(a) NOAA pays an outside contractor $500 to digitize a large map
(b) an imaging system can cost $22,000 to $120,000
(2) both can be transmitted
(a) OCR data can be transmitted easily
(b) group 4 compression allows for FAXing of image data
6. digital image backup
a. "data cartridge technology has penetrated the market as an optimal solution not only for backup needs, but also for applications that involve removable user files and archival data storage requirements. Further, [the use] of hard disk systems is growing at a very rapid rate, and hard-disk-intensive applications require more storage. This trend expands the need for archival storage as well as protections from data loss due to system failure, human error, or damage to equipment from unforeseen accidents." (ProQuest abstract of Steve Jackson, ".25-In. Subsystems Right Choice for CAD Archives," Computer Technology Review, Mar. 1991, p. 30-31)
b. difference between backup systems and archiving systems is that the former are focused on taking a snapshot of the contents of a disk, whereas the latter preserve "a large number of unique versions of important files across time." To correct the errors of defects that occur as magnetic tape ages and wears, the 8mm format includes a substantial amount of error-correcting code (source: ProQuest abstract of Jim Gast, "New 8 mm Is Ideal for Automated Storage," Computer Technology Review, Mar. 1991, p. 26, 28)
H. Administrative and technological changes
1. it's an emerging global information network--e.g., OCLC
a. OCLC is the world's most widely used network for interlibrary loan requests, activated in 1979
b. received its 34 millionth interlibrary loan request in Oct. 1991, only 60 days after reaching the 33 million mark
c. OCLC is used by nearly 400 libraries in 45 countries outside the U.S., including 10 in India and others in such countries as Norway, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Turkey.
d. OCLC's Online Union Catalog contains about 30 million unique records (about 26M as of 10/92)
e. no other bibliographic database rivals it (OCLC newsletter, Nov./Dec. 1991)
f. do (with Amy Brunvand) actual OCLC search (est. cost up to $10)
2. digital access to images is the new wave
a. "Currently, most image databases are stand-alone, analog optical disc systems designed to support local collections.... such systems will find widespread use and have widespread impact only when digital technology replaces analog optical technology, and when image databases can be accessed remotely using a network of computers and telecommunications lines. The base-level problem is that digital image files are huge. ...a gigabyte of memory may contain only 1,000 to 3,000 images. This compares with 108,000 images that can be stored currently on an analog optical disc. The time to transmit digital images across a network can be prohibitive..." A solution could be to display a low-resolution "browse version" of images--up to 40 images on a single large-screen monitor--and then select images for viewing at high resolution. Thus, the system wouldn't be clogged with the transmission of images not wanted by users. (Source: Howard Besser of Univ. of Pittsburgh's School of Library and Information Science, in OCLC's annual review of its research for July 1990 - June 1991, p. 49) [demo of CARL/BPL image access system]
b. digital imaging technologies increasingly are being used in document creation, distribution by fax or image networks, and in data processing and file/find operations
c. "Remote access to digital images presumes a national networking infrastructure that can accommodate the transmission of massive data at high speeds. The files for digital images are large."
(1) after data compression, the image of an 8 1/2 by 11" page would occupy an average of 60,000 to 80,000 bytes.
(a) "Transmitting a significant number of digital images would overwhelm moderate to low capacity networks."
(b) solution is pending funding from Congress. It's the National Research and Education Network (NREN), which would "consolidate the collection of TCP/IP networks now known as Internet into one high speed, high capacity system. [the Nov./Dec. 1991 OCLC newsletter reports that Senate bill 272 was approved in 9/91, authorizing slightly more than $1 billion over the next 5 years for the High-Performance Computing and National Research and Education Network Act]
(c) Michael M. Roberts, in the Summer 1991 issue of Educom Review, suggests that advances in semi-inductor and fiber optics industries have resulted in a communications revolution that offers networking speed and capacity at costs that are reasonable.... The growth of networking in the United States during the 1980s has resulted in connections between many universities as well as government and industrial partners. The digital library of image information will be available to people in any of these locations. Estimates of distribution of network access by the end of 1991 include over 1,000 sites serving 2 to 4 million people involved in research or education. NREN will triple the number of sites, reaching all states and territories by 1995. It appears that the scanning and digitizing of deteriorating library material and the establishment of large capacity networks could coincide to produce a truly national digital library."
d. Internet is a prime example
(1) what is Internet?
(a) "It is a highway of ideas, a collective brain for the nation's scientists, and perhaps the world's most important computer bulletin board. Connecting all the great research institutions, a large Unix-based netword known collectively as the Internet is where scientists, researchers, and thousands of ordinary computer users get their daily fix of news and gossip." (Source: David Coursey, "Riding the Internet," InfoWorld, 4 Feb. 1991, p. 48.)
(b) "Internet is really a jumble of networks rooted in academic and research institutions. Together these networks connect over 40 countries, providing electronic mail, file transfer, remote log in, software archives, and news to users on the 2,000 networks." (p. 48)
(2) how does it affect the world of communication and ideas?
(3) hands-on experience with Internet, using email and listserves
e. but OCLC, in its annual review of its research for July 1990 - June 1991, notes that "rapid technological advances, increased access by a growing body of users, faster transmission rates, and the possible emergence of the National Research and Education Network...all hold great promise, but these developments challenge conventional methods of finding, acquiring, cataloging, accessing, retrieving and using information by libraries and Internet users.... Increased connectivity can quickly lead to 'information overload,' and selecting relevant and useful information in such an environment is difficult for users.... The problems of poor recall and precision, long the focus of much information retrieval research, are compounded all the more in a heterogeneous network environment of electronic documents having little or no cataloging or indexing to assist users." "The national resource and infrastructure of libraries...remains underused..., and the value of computer-mediated communication is in danger of collapsing under its own weight."
I. Summary statement: "The current technology is mushrooming in quality and capacity and the price is falling While you may not be able to afford it now, that is changing rapidly. ... Even if you're not interested in it [personally], the implications of this technology on access to information will affect us all. You can't afford to be uninformed." (brochure for Colorado Preservation Alliance meeting on optical scanning on May 15, 1992)
J. A case study: the role of photographs as historical documents
1. (display Canada poster about photography)
2. photographic records generally are the most heavily used documents in archives and manuscript repositories
3. frequent users include publishers, authors, local historians, historic preservationists
4. the medium of photography itself is a relatively recent one
a. "The first permanent photographic process, called the daguerreotype after its French inventor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, was made public in 1839.
b. The daguerreotype is a polished silver-coated plate rendering a unique positive mirror-like image. The image quality remains unsurpassed by the negative/positive processes that superseded it. Because of their very sensitive surfaces, daguerreotypes were often encased for protection." (The Archivist, Jan.-Feb. 1988, p. 6) Usually, portraits; landscapes were rarer.
5. a Canadian archivist estimated (in The Archivist, Mar.-Apr. 1987, p. 22) that 14 billion photos would be taken worldwide in one year, in 1987. Many would be snapshots for family and friends; others, for the mass media, would document daily events; still others would be commercial work. The first photographs required long exposures, reproduced only tones, not colors, and were not very light-sensitive in the yellow and red parts of the light spectrum. "This lack of uniform sensitivity visibly altered the reality of the world: Louis Daguerre's first exterior view, of a busy Paris street, shows only two people--a bootblack and his customer. They were the only two objects, other than buildings, which remained in place long enough to make an impression in the photograph. Furthermore, lack of sensitivity in the red and yellow parts of the spectrum led to the overexposed, washed-out, chalky skies typical of nineteenth-century views." The photographic eye, however, can improve on what the naked eye can see. It can be made to open and shut repeatedly, showing what happens over a span of time. If pointed in the same direction for long enough, the camera can record what the human eye could not see: Pluto and its moon Charon were both discovered this century as traces of light in photographs. And today's cameras can freeze a moment of time so that we can study that moment, such as a high jumper going over the bar. The camera can apprehend actions too quick for the eye to perceive.
6. different media tend to answer different types of questions
a. writings explain "why"
b. photos answer "how"
7. photos pose special problems
a. due to their varieties, impermanence (esp. the unstable medium of color photos), and volume
b. but they've become a basic means of documentation
c. must recognize that they may have been taken for different purposes than users have in mind today
8. as mass media communicates to us the events of our global village, it is increasingly the case that "much of our knowledge and a great deal of our experience of the real world is now 'mediated,' by radio and television broadcasting. The images in our minds when we think of our society and the world around us flow increasingly from what we hear and what we watch rather than from what we read, or from what our relatives and friends tell us." The media constitutes part of our cultural heritage. Our "memory" of the past has been shaped by the way the mass media has handled its presentation of those events. For instance, "the slow-motion, grainy images of the fatally wounded President Kennedy slumped in the back seat of the car--images that we have seen replayed numerous times on television--have become so burned into the memories of many of us that it is startling to realize...that viewers only saw still photographs and slides of the motorcade. The complete film shot by a bystander of the President being hit was not shown on television until years later." (The Archivist, Sept.-Oct. 1986, p. 14-15)
K. The varieties of documents (overhead chart)
L. Is there a new, changed role for archivists: managing information, rather than managing documents?
1. there are 50 million PCs in North American today (article in Denver newspaper, 6 March 1992)
2. in the past decade we have seen a tremendous increase in the use of automation in virtually every institution
a. data processing departments can no longer manage all electronic records
b. yet, the new information technology has done the opposite of ending our use of paper
c. as the science editor of the Princeton University Press notes in an article quoted in the June 1989 Abbey Newsletter, IBM didn't make a printer to accompany its original PC in 1981; it contracted that to Epson. A records management magazine estimated that U.S. business use of paper went from 850 billion to 1.4 trillion pages between 1981 and 1984 alone. 44.7 billion pieces of bulk mail were sent in the U.S. in 1986 (see article on transmission of AP photos). Satellite text and image transmission has made possible regional editions of newspapers across the U.S.
d. German ships that bring us Mercedes and Heidelberg printing presses now return laden with wastepaper for recycling--at last an export in which the U.S. excels
e. Americans aren't flocking to electronic funds transfers; old-fashioned printed checks are thriving (thanks to Optical Character Recognition and magnetic imprinting which enables banks to handle oceans of checks)
f. according to a leading Washington-area dealer, the U.S. government buys several thousand paper shredders a year
g. library researchers, too, demand hard copy; they love the new electronic catalogs, but they want to walk away with a printout; the director of the Rush Medical Library in Chicago, which used 188.2 linear miles of paper in its photocopy machines just in the year 1982-83, observed that "'Many libraries are now acting as printing presses for electronically stored information, and as duplicators of printed materials.'" That's certainly true at FLC.
h. why didn't electronics take the place of paper?
(1) "One reason may be that Americans have always been more conservative technologically than they have admitted to themselves."
(2) second explanation is that computers are capturing so much more data than ever was possible with clay tablets, stone slabs, parchment, or even paper, so that even though much less of our data is on paper than ever before, the total is so high that even the occasional reproduction of a small part of it on paper may bring a big jump in the number of pages actually used.
(3) third, we can read print faster than computer screens (which are about 20-30% slower); screen resolution would have to be improved tenfold for excellent visual quality, and that would require too much storage capacity.
(4) fourth, security concerns force us to use paper backups of computer data
(a) we need hard copy for security
(b) the law nearly always demands a paper document
(c) a voltage spike could wipe out electronic data, and a password could alter it
(d) a single bidder for the C-5A transport aircraft contract submitted to the government 1,466,346 pages weighing 24,927 pounds
(e) a National Research Council report pointed out in 1985 that we can't assume that electronic records will be readable for a fraction of the 200-300 life expectancy of acid-free paper; data stored on tapes and on floppy disks--and even on laser disks (see articles)--degrades slowly but steadily, and as obsolescent hardware is scrapped it becomes a challenge to read older computer records ("Some Vietnam-era tapes now can be read only by one or two working computers in the world.") Fifth, electronics has blurred the distinction between the original and the copy; laser-printed originals sometimes cannot be distinguished from photocopies; this increases the proliferation of paper, as personalized copies can be sent to more and more individuals. Thus, use of paper is flourishing because of the use of electronic technology. Electronics is driving the use of the printed word. The Wall Street Journal cited a study reporting that up to 70% of office workers' time is spent handling written material; that's not apt to change. (Source of the above: "The Paradoxical Proliferation of Paper," by Edward Tenner, in the Abbey Newsletter, June 1989)
i. the trained archivist can offer a needed perspective today, by offering a broad knowledge of three aspects of records (O'Toole, p. 4--intro)
(1) of their creating institutions, organizations, or individuals
(2) of the records and their life cycles
(3) of archival principles and techniques
3. conclusion: information is a commodity
a. increasingly, it is our capital
b. it is a strategic resource, it is power
c. this makes us more than clerks, if we recognize these facts
d. communication is the life channel of the information age
e. John Naisbitt Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming our Lives (1982) declares that "the post industrial society is the information society." "Farmer, laborer, clerk: that's a brief history of the U.S." - Naisbitt says more people are employed full time in universities than in agriculture in this country
f. unfortunately, most archivists and librarians are like the pathetic major-general of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Pirates of Penzance who exclaimed: "I am the very pattern of a modern major-general. I've information vegetable, animal and mineral; I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical/ From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical." Today's archivists and librarians are the custodians of more or less ordered documentation reflecting man's great knowledge of everything under the sun, yet they struggle for professional recognition in a world that regards them as innocuous bibliophiles. For them, knowledge is not power; how different they are from the ancient Sumerian scribes who came from the upper strata of Mesopotamian society and were the equals of real generals in pay and social status. The difference is that they had an active administrative role in understanding and managing records necessary for current business and legal affairs; today, the work of an information specialist is apt to be more of a passive custodial function.
IV. Data storage modes
A. Storage space has been the engine driving the appraisal train for paper records; but this engine has stalled with the compact storage of machine readable records; instead, the cost of preserving MRRs, including the updating of files as newer technologies appear, becomes an important factor
1. Gerald Ham (archivist of State of Wisconsin) noted in his address to the 1980 SAA annual meeting ("Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era," Am'n Arch. (Summer 1981) that this technological development in storage capacity means that Wisconsin' 2.4 million tax returns which fill 1,800 records center cartons can be placed on 25 cubic feet of microfilm, most of which is then put on a computer tape which occupies less than one cubic foot;
2. (Ham, ctd.) optical disk systems, storing and retrieving data by laser beam, may hold a library of 40,000 books on one disk the size of a phonograph record
3. (Burke) compact electronic data storage should cause us to reevaluate appraisal decisions for groups of materials: IRS 1040 forms are thrown out (as of 1985) after 6 yrs. 7 mos., because the bulk of storing 200 million records and problems of access/privacy; if disk storage eliminates the bulk and use problems, it might be economical and useful for IRS (or the National Archives) to retain these tax records
B. The transfer of records - when? -new info is usually added to the store of records in the computer (p. 386) "until there is a large, amorphous, undifferentiated porridge of information in the belly of the computer"
1. information loss becomes a problem
a. (Ham) our environment is hazardous to the preservation of all this info, because it places a premium on immediacy, efficiency, and economy; "many media contain the seeds of their own destruction. Technology has created records that are fluid, amendable, [erasable], and reusable." - every word processing operator becomes his own records manager
2. software/hardware dependency; obsolescence of machines, programs, and storage media
a. records that do survive may soon be technologically obsolete, and unusable
b. the archivist must retain the tools necessary to read the records: the computer program, and the computer equipment
3. documentation to explain the location of data in the MRRs; if you are looking at a screen or a printout that is a string of numbers, they won't mean a thing unless you know that, for example, if the 56th number is a 2 it means that the person in question is a female
D. Thus, (Ham) technology and society will force us to reexamine many assumptions about archival theory and practice
E. Readings for next week:
O'Toole, ch. 2--"The History of Archives and the Archives Profession."
Maygene Daniels and Timothy Walch, eds., A Modern Archives Reader, ch. 1--"The European Tradition" and ch. 2--"Pre-archival functions."
Week 2, class 2 (lesson plan):
1. Review of archival terms -- intro -- working facility -- exposure
- list terms from glossary under 3 categories of archival functions
1. appraisal and acquisition
2. organization: arrangement and description
3. access and reference
- understanding terms gives us access to and control over the processes they label
4. Show and tell -- various media (disemboweled magnetic diskette; Vicki Goldberg's 1991 book on The Power of Photography, letterpress book, ledgers, video)
- place them under 6 functional categories
1. personal
2. social
3. economic
4. legal
5. instrumental
6. symbolic
What is the rate of growth of info these days? (guess)
What problems does this represent?
What does the modern person have to deal with that a scribe writing on clay tablets doesn't face?
What do we have to cope with that Thomas Jefferson didn't?
Vice versa on the above 2 questions--what would be awesome to you if you were in his sandals?
5. Should archivists collect everything?
What are the risks of not preserving everything?
What are the risks of trying to preserve it all?
What is "everything?"
6. Based on this discussion, I'm going to give you a summary statement that I want you to take down:
Information is a commodity; it's capital. With the proliferation of new technologies the quantity of data has skyrocketed but the quality of each item has plummeted. As a result, archivists have to take the large view of the world of information and must be selective. They can't just rake it in.
By way of review, we'll complete this graph of varieties of documents (overhead):
· immediacyreliabilityaccessibilitypermanence
· oral history
· written documents
· personal letters
· email
· photos
· audiocassettes
· videos
· magnetic diskettes
· telephone
are ____ permanent--yea or nay?
how are these various documents similar? (all are means of communication)
ownership issues for the various types; intell. vs. artifact
summary statement: This graph shows you the kinds of problems an archivist (or any person in charge of information storage and retrieval) is up against. Some of the areas are murky and ask for a judgment call. This is one of the exciting differences between a librarian and an archivist--all this decision making.
Summary:
graph shows problems
fundamental difference between archivist and librarian
7. Check out the SAA (Society of American Archivists) reference manuals to learn archival basics
#1
There once was a certain bright student,
who took Archives, which shows she was prudent.
When she finished the course,
she had no remorse
'cause she learned what she should and she shouldn't.
I. Course introduction
A. This is an introductory study of archival principles and practice. Curriculum Committee removed words "intro. to" from the title, but in no way can this course be construed as teaching you everything there is to know about archives
B. What you can expect to learn from this course:
1. you will be exposed to the practices and theories adopted or expressed within the archival profession,
2. you will learn organizational principles from the archival profession,
3. you will study effective and efficient ways of storing, accessing, and selectively preserving data.
4. practically speaking, the course should help in
a. finding jobs
b. doing historical research, and
c. organizing & preserving your own papers and records throughout life.
C. Who can benefit from this course?
1. the course should be useful to anyone considering a career in archival work, any budding historian, and anyone interested in the history of providing access to historically significant materials.
2. the tools and approaches taught in this course should be useful to anyone and everyone who aims at making a difference in today`s information age.
3. learning formats include:
a. reading and studying these notes
c. doing your own case studies of typical administrative problems
d. core readings of archival literature, and
e. an archival project.
8. discuss our experience and background in archives
D. The language of archives
1. glossary of archival terms (pass out and discuss)
2. archives is increasingly being used as term for unpublished materials--much of it unique
a. document can take many forms
b. archives are records produced during normal operations of an institution, and (at least initially) kept by that institution; whereas, manuscripts are personally generated and/or collected
c. thus, "archives" has at least 4 different meanings:
(1) the records of continuing value of an organization or individual
(a) specifically, noncurrent records that have been transferred to a place of long-term storage because of their long-range value
(b) this is the primary German and American usage
(2) the building in which the records are kept
(3) the agency, organization or program responsible for selection, care and use of these records
(4) the records (including current ones) of any agency or institution or person
(a) this is the Romance usage; Italian archivio = records
(b) Sir Hilary Jenkinson (British) used the terms records and archives (in this usage) interchangeably
(c) we encounter this usage with electronic records too
3. misconceptions of the word archivist
a. what our friends think it is
b. archivist's task (Ellis p. 18) is "the identification and preservation in context of records of continuing value for future use"
c. purpose of an archives is (Bressor, p. 3) "to meet the needs of researchers and potential archival users by ensuring that historical records are collected, identified, organized, preserved, and made available for research use."
d. "the archivist's primary duty is the moral and physical defence of the archives" (Jenkinson, in Ellis, p. 10)
e. archivist is coming to include curator
(1) curator has in the past been a title for a person who administers either MSS collections as opposed to corporate archives,
(2) more commonly, a curator is a trained professional, often academically oriented, who is responsible for the collection, preservation, and use of museum objects--esp. artifacts
4. related term: records
a. "records are the information byproducts of social and organisational activity" (Ellis, p. 3)
b. records centers hold still active but low use records of an organization
c. these records aren't necessarily permanent
d. records center is a half-way house, purgatory
e. records manager = one who controls active records (those in immediate use or needed for immediate access) through their scheduled selective retention and destruction
f. records manager focusses on current purposes
g. (more on records management in later week)
E. Readings for next class:
James O`Toole, Understanding Archives and Manuscripts, intro & ch. 1--"Recording, Keeping and Using Info." This book (to quote a review in the Spring 1991 American Archivist) "introduces the issues that define our work [in terms which are understandable] to beginning archivists, archival students..." etc., starting with the history of recording, saving, and using information.
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Week 1, Class 2
A joke:
Are you sick and tired? If you are, this may be why: the population of the US is 220 million. 65 million of these are over 65, leaving 136 million to do all the work. 95M are under 21, leaving 41 million to do all the work. 22M are in the federal government, leaving 19 million to do all the work. 4 million are in the armed forces, leaving 15 million to do all the work. 14.8 million are in state or local government, leaving 200,000 to do all the work. 188,000 are sick or in an insane asylum, leaving 12,000 to do all the work. 11,998 are in jail, which leaves you and me to do all the work, and I'm getting tired of doing it all.
B. Review of archival terms
1. Archives is increasingly being used as term for unpublished materials--much of it unique
a. document can take many forms
b. archives are records produced during normal operations of an institution, and (at least initially) kept by that institution; whereas, manuscripts are personally generated and/or collected
c. thus, "archives" has at least 4 different meanings:
(1) the records of continuing value of an organization or individual
(a) specifically, noncurrent records that have been transferred to a place of long-term storage because of their long-range value
(b) this is the primary German and American usage
(2) the building in which the records are kept
(3) the agency, organization or program responsible for selection, care and use of these records
(4) the records (including current ones) of any agency or institution or person
(a) this is the Romance usage; Italian archivio = records
(b) Sir Hilary Jenkinson (British) used the terms records and archives (in this usage) interchangeably
(c) we encounter this usage with electronic records too
C. Definition of what an archivist does (O'Toole, p.4), in 3 pairs of
1. Appraise and acquire
2. Arrange and describe
3. Preserve and make available
4. Purpose of an archives
a. (Bressor, p. 3) "to meet the needs of researchers and potential archival users by ensuring that historical records are collected, identified, organized, preserved, and made available for research use."
b. "the archivist's primary duty is the moral and physical defence of the archives" (Jenkinson, in Ellis, p. 10)
5. related term: records
a. "records are the information byproducts of social and organisational activity" (Ellis, p. 3)
b. records centers hold still active but low use records of an organization
c. these records aren't necessarily permanent
d. records center is a half-way house, purgatory
e. records manager = one who controls active records (those in immediate use or needed for immediate access) through their scheduled selective retention and destruction
f. records manager focusses on current purposes
g. (more on records management in later week)
6. hands-on exercise (and handout, 1 p.) compare the attributes of various storage media
Week 2, Class 1
#2
Documentary sources are many,
but none of them worth e'en a penny,
'til techniques of archives
applied by the wise
make them useful to Moe, Joe and Jenny.
The setting: nature and history of documentary sources
A. Review of last week's main points
1. Archives has 4 different meanings
2. Modern records have 5 characteristics in general (O'Toole p. 20)
a. they are abundant (and thus, the significance and value of each item is less)
b. they are interrelated
c. their value is collective--it derives from their relationship to one another, rather than as a record on its own
d. records creation and maintenance is decentralized
e. the use of records changes over time; the current value and use of a set records may be much different from their original value and use
3. When records are created, it is for one (or more) of six reasons reasons (O'Toole, p. 10-13)
a. personal (correspondence)
b. social (minutes)
c. economic (invoices, bills)
d. legal (deeds, wills)
e. instrumental (passes, tickets)
f. symbolic (diplomas)
4. report on findings from newspaper microfilm of the day and year you were born
B. The nature of historical sources is drawn from our definition of history
1. Jan Vansina - Oral Traditions
a. history is mutually agreed-upon statements about the past (Kuba)
b. history continues to be an interpretation of the past in the light of the present
c. it's not the indiscriminate collection of facts but the selection of truths
2. G. R. Elton (p. 20) def. of history
3. something can only be defined as historical if there is evidence for it
a. so, historians follow archivists--or is it the other way around?
b. "no documents, no history"
c. if history is the study of what remains, shouldn't the archivist just store what survives?
(1) archivist must choose what is to be saved
(2) thinks ahead to historians' needs
(3) whereas historian knows what has happened and looks back to discover what led to that outcome
4. we automatically filter information; communication is inherently fuzzy
III. Trends in data transmission and storage modes and in the technology of record making
(O'Toole, p. 15)
A. Techniques for remembering in pre-literate societies (O'Toole, p. 8)
1. Differences between oral and written worlds
a. conservative vs. dynamic
b. repeated vs. analyzed
c. fleeting vs. recorded
d. unacceptable in court vs. proof
B. The rise of written "documents." Similarities of form and content; differences in nature of creation, ownership, legal standing.
1. (O'Toole, p. 9) discussing the rise and spread of literacy: "the key turning point for any society undergoing a transition to literacy was the point at which it came to rely on writing and written records in its everyday operations."
2. why did people begin recording information? (O'Toole, p. 11-13): personal, social, economic, legal, instrumental, and symbolic functions
3. (Posner, p. 23) "For more than half the time mankind has communicated in writing, most of the writing has been on clay."
4. written records proved to be a means of being more precise
a. more reliable--more efficient than oral forms of transmitting data
b. the word record means "to give" (dare) "back" (re) "to the heart" (cor)
C. Technological developments that have caused modern records to have their characteristics
1. letterpress book --19th C-- allowed for the creation of duplicate copies
2. typewriter-- more letters could be written, faster, and duplicated easier using carbon paper
3. photocopying machines allow for making numerous copies of the same record, thereby increasing the volume and lessening the value of any one particular document
4. automation--computerization--has enormously increased the volume of records being created, and made it easier to manipulate the data
D. That's why this course is important: this is the information age.
1. Information analyst Linda Letterman "asserts that in the course of one year the average citizen will--
(1) read or complete 3,000 notices and forms
(2) read 100 newspapers and 36 magazines
(3) watch 2,463 hours of television
(4) listen to 730 hours of radio
(5) buy 20 records
(6) spend 61 hours on the phone
(7) read three books
(8) and have undetermined amounts of conversations and information exchanges."
2. Information Literacy: Revolution in the Library (1989), university president Gordon Gee states:
a. "just one issue of The New York Times contains more information than the average person of seventeenth-century England would encounter in a lifetime.
b. Today, the amount of information is growing so fast that major libraries double in size every 14 years, or 14,000% each century.
c. `Surviving the information age requires that we ask ourselves what information is important to us.'"
d. Referring to Thomas Bacon's assertion that 'knowledge is power,' Dr. Gee fears that information alone, without affordable access to it, is more likely to produce "information anxiety," defined by Richard Wurman as arising "from the gap between what we understand and what we think we ought to understand." Furthermore, Gee states, "connecting, integrating, and managing information resources are not enough to meet the challenges of an information-based society [because]...`we must focus on the analysis of information and the development of information literacy. This goes beyond the hardware of information storage and retrieval to the development of "thoughtware," the critical thinking skills needed for lifelong learning.'" Information fails to be useful to us until we filter it through a context of meaning and applicability to our lives. There is a "'danger that greater credibility will be given to data rather than to ideas, and that information will be mistaken for knowledge.'" (Source: Gordon Gee, President of Ohio State University (formerly of CU Boulder), in OCLC's Annual Review of OCLC Research: July 1990-June 1991.)
E. Characteristics of recorded information today?
1. increased production and use of all means of information transmission
a. 1993 report of the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators (quoted in 9/93 Annotation, p. 5): "State archives now hold more than 1.6 million cubic feet of permanent paper records--enough to fill the U.S. Capitol rotunda one and a half times to the top of the dome. An additional 140 million sheets of permanent records come into state archives each year. Laid end to end, they would circle the equator twice. Since 1986 the average volume of paper in state archives has risen 59 percent.... State archives now hold nearly 2.5 million reels of microfilm, up from 700,000 reels in 1986...."
2. notion of palimpsest--layer upon layer of technology for info storage and transfer--no technology is ever truly discarded
3. Schellenberg (Appraisal of Modern Public Records, p. 12): "While an archivist dealing with modern public records will have great difficulty in reducing them to manageable proportions, he will nonetheless often find that the records he wants were not produced at all. ... It is a curious anomaly that the more important a matter, the less likely is a complete documentation of it to be found. ... Important matters may be handled orally in conferences or by telephone, an instrument that has been referred to as the 'great robber of history.'"
4. simultaneous explosions today caused by electronic technological developments and the related proliferation of paper records
5. today's archivists must understand the new media (their nature and their operation), and must understand their effects upon history, upon information resource management, and upon bureaucracy -- this understanding is essential if we are to master this data explosion
a. primary uses of records (O'Toole, p. 11-13)
b. their secondary uses (O'Toole, p. 4)--unpredictable
6. review of storage technologies from the box hands-on exercise at the end of last week's class
F. The nature of the archivist's task today
1. F. Gerald Ham (archivist of State of Wisconsin) sides with Schellenberg and states that "the work and behavior of archivists is determined by the nature of the materials they deal with: physical, form, content, and especially volume." ("Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era," American Archivist (Summer 1981) (revision of address to SAA annual meeting in 1980) "Our work is determined by the way our society records, uses, stores and disposes of information." "The revolution in information processing is changing our world and our work, pushing archivists into a post-custodial era." Previously, the mass of records was smaller and archivists had a passive role, receiving what was given to them; they became introspective and isolated from one another, and were proprietary about their holdings; lack of a collecting framework and exaggeration of the sense of many records' importance led to wasteful competition. "The information revolution is forcing us into a more active role, in which we must make crucial decisions - or decide by not deciding - about the future of the historical record." "The larger problem of the 1980s is not the physical bulk but the mass of information." (problems of access and control, and of deciding what constitutes information)
2. (Naisbitt) 6,000 to 7,000 scientific articles are written each day; the data doubles every 5.5 years (as of 1982); the information flood will drown us if we don't control it and organize it: (p. 24) "Information technology brings order to the chaos of information pollution and therefore gives value to data that would otherwise be useless. If users...can locate the information they need, they will pay for it. The emphasis of the whole information society shifts, then, from supply to selection."
3. (Don Wilson, Archivist of the U.S., in a 1991 newsletter of the NY State Archives and Records Administration) "This past decade has been witness to a stunning proliferation of new information technologies and the widespread use of computers in all sectors of society. For that reason, archives must quickly develop the capacity to preserve the record in an increasing variety of formats -- paper, audiovisual, computer tapes and disks..."
4. archivists' most difficult task today is to preserve the records of the last half of this century. Before that, and certainly in previous centuries, most of the records were textual. Today, "the new media of records no longer stand still but are constantly changing in a race to provide more information, faster, and in greater detail." (The Archivist, Nov.-Dec. 1991, p. 30) The significance of electronic and audio-visual records increases steadily as we head toward the 21st century. Newscasts are overtaking newspapers, videotapes are overtaking books, and oral history tapes are gaining popularity as a means of documenting our past. "Television has taken command of the world's leisure time and has become the new medium of communication for politicians, educators, musicians and advertisers alike. The videotape recorder has suddenly extended this revolution beyond the broadcasting studio into the office, the classroom and the home...[and] has increased demand for audio-visual records of the past, which can now be presented in this new medium." (The Archivist, Nov.-Dec. 1991, p. 31) Preserving the earlier audio-visual products is problematic: early broadcasting, in both radio and television, was primarily live and not pre-recorded. The development of broadcast technology has made pre-recording more common, but the contemporary recording medium (magnetic tape) can easily be erased and reused, and therefore usually is." Broadcasting has been perceived "as a throw-away commodity fittingly stored temporarily on a reusable recording medium." Broadcasters are too pressured to fill tomorrow's programming to take time to think about preserving some of their past efforts, most of which they expect they will have no call to broadcast again. (The Archivist, Sept.-Oct. 1986, p. 2-3)
5. discussion of Ham article, incl. questions page
a. Ham article is seminal -- key article for understanding new role of archivists
b. answer 9 questions as it's read in class -- work in groups of two -- answer questions aloud -- this exercise represents the modern archivist's task of active selection from a world of information
jokes:
- have you met the woman who wants to have four husbands before she dies? She wants to marry first a banker, then a movie star, then a preacher, and finally a mortician. That way, she'll have one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready and four to go.
- in the Hope family there are 7 sisters. Each sister has 1 brother. Including Mr. and Mrs. Hope, how many are in the family? (10)
6. select and schedule your project
G. Overview of the possibilities, focussing on the new records archivists will be acquiring
(O'Toole, p. 7-20)
1. the Encyclopedia Britannica can be stored on a 3.5" compact disk
2. CD-ROM
a. plastic disc with metal coating
b. laser beam makes pits and bumps on it which can be read, using accession software
c. can store up to 650 MB on a disc
d. can be read on a DOS, MacIntosh, UNIX, etc. system that has a standard drive and a software driver to read an ISO 9660 Standard CD-ROM
e. pre-mastering costs about $1,000; copies cost about $2
f. CD reader subsystem is inexpensive ($300-$400) and is becoming a common peripheral on workstation configurations
g. CD-ROM is the leading medium for distributing appliations that combine video, audio, text and graphics
h. but it's an impermanent medium (3-5 yrs.?)
3. optical disc
a. laser photographs the materials so that the user can see the page as clearly as on the original, with indexing
b. NARA and NIST don't recommend optical disc as an archival medium because its chemicals lift off and its laminates separate
c. lack of standards
(1) NIST tests show a 10 year life expectancy of these tape cartridges
(2) it's important to track the databases: document the date each tape was manufactured, when data was loaded onto it, and when it should be exercised and when it should be replaced
5. optical scanning: OCR (Optical Character Recognition) vs. Imaging
a. how they work
(1) with OCR, computer scans characters and recognizes them as the characters they are
(2) image scanning is like making an electronic photocopy, by recognizing light and dark picture elements (pixels)
b. differences
(1) OCR uses little space; imaging requires a lot of data storage capacity, because it must store data regarding every portion of the item scanned
(a) compression can reduce some of the volume, by eliminating the marginal areas, etc.
(b) compression tells it to forget the white spaces and record only the location of the darker spaces
(c) (see handout/overhead sheet) 1 p. of tabular data requires about ?_K with OCR; with imaging, the same page would require 53K
(2) OCR is slow; imaging is fast
(3) OCR data can be word processed/changed after scanning
(a) image data cannot be altered once it's been saved
(b) this permanence aspect is critical for legal aspects of imaging
(4) OCR can't improve on the quality of the original (and has difficulty matching it); imaging can improve the quality of the original
(5) OCR is so-called "intelligent" scanning; a table of figures scanned by OCR can be manipulated, averaged, tabulated, etc.; imaging is simply mechanical
(6) OCR doesn't do well with a page that contains various fonts or poor-quality characters, and no software is good at recognizing both numbers and letters; characters must be crisp to be distinguished by OCR software, otherwise it's quicker to simply key it in; these days, U.S. firms are contracting out keypunching jobs for work at low cost in the Philippines and Bermuda, etc.; for imaging, form and content don't matter--it can read images, text, numbers, etc.
c. similarities
(1) both are costly
(a) NOAA pays an outside contractor $500 to digitize a large map
(b) an imaging system can cost $22,000 to $120,000
(2) both can be transmitted
(a) OCR data can be transmitted easily
(b) group 4 compression allows for FAXing of image data
6. digital image backup
a. "data cartridge technology has penetrated the market as an optimal solution not only for backup needs, but also for applications that involve removable user files and archival data storage requirements. Further, [the use] of hard disk systems is growing at a very rapid rate, and hard-disk-intensive applications require more storage. This trend expands the need for archival storage as well as protections from data loss due to system failure, human error, or damage to equipment from unforeseen accidents." (ProQuest abstract of Steve Jackson, ".25-In. Subsystems Right Choice for CAD Archives," Computer Technology Review, Mar. 1991, p. 30-31)
b. difference between backup systems and archiving systems is that the former are focused on taking a snapshot of the contents of a disk, whereas the latter preserve "a large number of unique versions of important files across time." To correct the errors of defects that occur as magnetic tape ages and wears, the 8mm format includes a substantial amount of error-correcting code (source: ProQuest abstract of Jim Gast, "New 8 mm Is Ideal for Automated Storage," Computer Technology Review, Mar. 1991, p. 26, 28)
H. Administrative and technological changes
1. it's an emerging global information network--e.g., OCLC
a. OCLC is the world's most widely used network for interlibrary loan requests, activated in 1979
b. received its 34 millionth interlibrary loan request in Oct. 1991, only 60 days after reaching the 33 million mark
c. OCLC is used by nearly 400 libraries in 45 countries outside the U.S., including 10 in India and others in such countries as Norway, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan and Turkey.
d. OCLC's Online Union Catalog contains about 30 million unique records (about 26M as of 10/92)
e. no other bibliographic database rivals it (OCLC newsletter, Nov./Dec. 1991)
f. do (with Amy Brunvand) actual OCLC search (est. cost up to $10)
2. digital access to images is the new wave
a. "Currently, most image databases are stand-alone, analog optical disc systems designed to support local collections.... such systems will find widespread use and have widespread impact only when digital technology replaces analog optical technology, and when image databases can be accessed remotely using a network of computers and telecommunications lines. The base-level problem is that digital image files are huge. ...a gigabyte of memory may contain only 1,000 to 3,000 images. This compares with 108,000 images that can be stored currently on an analog optical disc. The time to transmit digital images across a network can be prohibitive..." A solution could be to display a low-resolution "browse version" of images--up to 40 images on a single large-screen monitor--and then select images for viewing at high resolution. Thus, the system wouldn't be clogged with the transmission of images not wanted by users. (Source: Howard Besser of Univ. of Pittsburgh's School of Library and Information Science, in OCLC's annual review of its research for July 1990 - June 1991, p. 49) [demo of CARL/BPL image access system]
b. digital imaging technologies increasingly are being used in document creation, distribution by fax or image networks, and in data processing and file/find operations
c. "Remote access to digital images presumes a national networking infrastructure that can accommodate the transmission of massive data at high speeds. The files for digital images are large."
(1) after data compression, the image of an 8 1/2 by 11" page would occupy an average of 60,000 to 80,000 bytes.
(a) "Transmitting a significant number of digital images would overwhelm moderate to low capacity networks."
(b) solution is pending funding from Congress. It's the National Research and Education Network (NREN), which would "consolidate the collection of TCP/IP networks now known as Internet into one high speed, high capacity system. [the Nov./Dec. 1991 OCLC newsletter reports that Senate bill 272 was approved in 9/91, authorizing slightly more than $1 billion over the next 5 years for the High-Performance Computing and National Research and Education Network Act]
(c) Michael M. Roberts, in the Summer 1991 issue of Educom Review, suggests that advances in semi-inductor and fiber optics industries have resulted in a communications revolution that offers networking speed and capacity at costs that are reasonable.... The growth of networking in the United States during the 1980s has resulted in connections between many universities as well as government and industrial partners. The digital library of image information will be available to people in any of these locations. Estimates of distribution of network access by the end of 1991 include over 1,000 sites serving 2 to 4 million people involved in research or education. NREN will triple the number of sites, reaching all states and territories by 1995. It appears that the scanning and digitizing of deteriorating library material and the establishment of large capacity networks could coincide to produce a truly national digital library."
d. Internet is a prime example
(1) what is Internet?
(a) "It is a highway of ideas, a collective brain for the nation's scientists, and perhaps the world's most important computer bulletin board. Connecting all the great research institutions, a large Unix-based netword known collectively as the Internet is where scientists, researchers, and thousands of ordinary computer users get their daily fix of news and gossip." (Source: David Coursey, "Riding the Internet," InfoWorld, 4 Feb. 1991, p. 48.)
(b) "Internet is really a jumble of networks rooted in academic and research institutions. Together these networks connect over 40 countries, providing electronic mail, file transfer, remote log in, software archives, and news to users on the 2,000 networks." (p. 48)
(2) how does it affect the world of communication and ideas?
(3) hands-on experience with Internet, using email and listserves
e. but OCLC, in its annual review of its research for July 1990 - June 1991, notes that "rapid technological advances, increased access by a growing body of users, faster transmission rates, and the possible emergence of the National Research and Education Network...all hold great promise, but these developments challenge conventional methods of finding, acquiring, cataloging, accessing, retrieving and using information by libraries and Internet users.... Increased connectivity can quickly lead to 'information overload,' and selecting relevant and useful information in such an environment is difficult for users.... The problems of poor recall and precision, long the focus of much information retrieval research, are compounded all the more in a heterogeneous network environment of electronic documents having little or no cataloging or indexing to assist users." "The national resource and infrastructure of libraries...remains underused..., and the value of computer-mediated communication is in danger of collapsing under its own weight."
I. Summary statement: "The current technology is mushrooming in quality and capacity and the price is falling While you may not be able to afford it now, that is changing rapidly. ... Even if you're not interested in it [personally], the implications of this technology on access to information will affect us all. You can't afford to be uninformed." (brochure for Colorado Preservation Alliance meeting on optical scanning on May 15, 1992)
J. A case study: the role of photographs as historical documents
1. (display Canada poster about photography)
2. photographic records generally are the most heavily used documents in archives and manuscript repositories
3. frequent users include publishers, authors, local historians, historic preservationists
4. the medium of photography itself is a relatively recent one
a. "The first permanent photographic process, called the daguerreotype after its French inventor Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, was made public in 1839.
b. The daguerreotype is a polished silver-coated plate rendering a unique positive mirror-like image. The image quality remains unsurpassed by the negative/positive processes that superseded it. Because of their very sensitive surfaces, daguerreotypes were often encased for protection." (The Archivist, Jan.-Feb. 1988, p. 6) Usually, portraits; landscapes were rarer.
5. a Canadian archivist estimated (in The Archivist, Mar.-Apr. 1987, p. 22) that 14 billion photos would be taken worldwide in one year, in 1987. Many would be snapshots for family and friends; others, for the mass media, would document daily events; still others would be commercial work. The first photographs required long exposures, reproduced only tones, not colors, and were not very light-sensitive in the yellow and red parts of the light spectrum. "This lack of uniform sensitivity visibly altered the reality of the world: Louis Daguerre's first exterior view, of a busy Paris street, shows only two people--a bootblack and his customer. They were the only two objects, other than buildings, which remained in place long enough to make an impression in the photograph. Furthermore, lack of sensitivity in the red and yellow parts of the spectrum led to the overexposed, washed-out, chalky skies typical of nineteenth-century views." The photographic eye, however, can improve on what the naked eye can see. It can be made to open and shut repeatedly, showing what happens over a span of time. If pointed in the same direction for long enough, the camera can record what the human eye could not see: Pluto and its moon Charon were both discovered this century as traces of light in photographs. And today's cameras can freeze a moment of time so that we can study that moment, such as a high jumper going over the bar. The camera can apprehend actions too quick for the eye to perceive.
6. different media tend to answer different types of questions
a. writings explain "why"
b. photos answer "how"
7. photos pose special problems
a. due to their varieties, impermanence (esp. the unstable medium of color photos), and volume
b. but they've become a basic means of documentation
c. must recognize that they may have been taken for different purposes than users have in mind today
8. as mass media communicates to us the events of our global village, it is increasingly the case that "much of our knowledge and a great deal of our experience of the real world is now 'mediated,' by radio and television broadcasting. The images in our minds when we think of our society and the world around us flow increasingly from what we hear and what we watch rather than from what we read, or from what our relatives and friends tell us." The media constitutes part of our cultural heritage. Our "memory" of the past has been shaped by the way the mass media has handled its presentation of those events. For instance, "the slow-motion, grainy images of the fatally wounded President Kennedy slumped in the back seat of the car--images that we have seen replayed numerous times on television--have become so burned into the memories of many of us that it is startling to realize...that viewers only saw still photographs and slides of the motorcade. The complete film shot by a bystander of the President being hit was not shown on television until years later." (The Archivist, Sept.-Oct. 1986, p. 14-15)
K. The varieties of documents (overhead chart)
L. Is there a new, changed role for archivists: managing information, rather than managing documents?
1. there are 50 million PCs in North American today (article in Denver newspaper, 6 March 1992)
2. in the past decade we have seen a tremendous increase in the use of automation in virtually every institution
a. data processing departments can no longer manage all electronic records
b. yet, the new information technology has done the opposite of ending our use of paper
c. as the science editor of the Princeton University Press notes in an article quoted in the June 1989 Abbey Newsletter, IBM didn't make a printer to accompany its original PC in 1981; it contracted that to Epson. A records management magazine estimated that U.S. business use of paper went from 850 billion to 1.4 trillion pages between 1981 and 1984 alone. 44.7 billion pieces of bulk mail were sent in the U.S. in 1986 (see article on transmission of AP photos). Satellite text and image transmission has made possible regional editions of newspapers across the U.S.
d. German ships that bring us Mercedes and Heidelberg printing presses now return laden with wastepaper for recycling--at last an export in which the U.S. excels
e. Americans aren't flocking to electronic funds transfers; old-fashioned printed checks are thriving (thanks to Optical Character Recognition and magnetic imprinting which enables banks to handle oceans of checks)
f. according to a leading Washington-area dealer, the U.S. government buys several thousand paper shredders a year
g. library researchers, too, demand hard copy; they love the new electronic catalogs, but they want to walk away with a printout; the director of the Rush Medical Library in Chicago, which used 188.2 linear miles of paper in its photocopy machines just in the year 1982-83, observed that "'Many libraries are now acting as printing presses for electronically stored information, and as duplicators of printed materials.'" That's certainly true at FLC.
h. why didn't electronics take the place of paper?
(1) "One reason may be that Americans have always been more conservative technologically than they have admitted to themselves."
(2) second explanation is that computers are capturing so much more data than ever was possible with clay tablets, stone slabs, parchment, or even paper, so that even though much less of our data is on paper than ever before, the total is so high that even the occasional reproduction of a small part of it on paper may bring a big jump in the number of pages actually used.
(3) third, we can read print faster than computer screens (which are about 20-30% slower); screen resolution would have to be improved tenfold for excellent visual quality, and that would require too much storage capacity.
(4) fourth, security concerns force us to use paper backups of computer data
(a) we need hard copy for security
(b) the law nearly always demands a paper document
(c) a voltage spike could wipe out electronic data, and a password could alter it
(d) a single bidder for the C-5A transport aircraft contract submitted to the government 1,466,346 pages weighing 24,927 pounds
(e) a National Research Council report pointed out in 1985 that we can't assume that electronic records will be readable for a fraction of the 200-300 life expectancy of acid-free paper; data stored on tapes and on floppy disks--and even on laser disks (see articles)--degrades slowly but steadily, and as obsolescent hardware is scrapped it becomes a challenge to read older computer records ("Some Vietnam-era tapes now can be read only by one or two working computers in the world.") Fifth, electronics has blurred the distinction between the original and the copy; laser-printed originals sometimes cannot be distinguished from photocopies; this increases the proliferation of paper, as personalized copies can be sent to more and more individuals. Thus, use of paper is flourishing because of the use of electronic technology. Electronics is driving the use of the printed word. The Wall Street Journal cited a study reporting that up to 70% of office workers' time is spent handling written material; that's not apt to change. (Source of the above: "The Paradoxical Proliferation of Paper," by Edward Tenner, in the Abbey Newsletter, June 1989)
i. the trained archivist can offer a needed perspective today, by offering a broad knowledge of three aspects of records (O'Toole, p. 4--intro)
(1) of their creating institutions, organizations, or individuals
(2) of the records and their life cycles
(3) of archival principles and techniques
3. conclusion: information is a commodity
a. increasingly, it is our capital
b. it is a strategic resource, it is power
c. this makes us more than clerks, if we recognize these facts
d. communication is the life channel of the information age
e. John Naisbitt Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming our Lives (1982) declares that "the post industrial society is the information society." "Farmer, laborer, clerk: that's a brief history of the U.S." - Naisbitt says more people are employed full time in universities than in agriculture in this country
f. unfortunately, most archivists and librarians are like the pathetic major-general of Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta The Pirates of Penzance who exclaimed: "I am the very pattern of a modern major-general. I've information vegetable, animal and mineral; I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical/ From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical." Today's archivists and librarians are the custodians of more or less ordered documentation reflecting man's great knowledge of everything under the sun, yet they struggle for professional recognition in a world that regards them as innocuous bibliophiles. For them, knowledge is not power; how different they are from the ancient Sumerian scribes who came from the upper strata of Mesopotamian society and were the equals of real generals in pay and social status. The difference is that they had an active administrative role in understanding and managing records necessary for current business and legal affairs; today, the work of an information specialist is apt to be more of a passive custodial function.
IV. Data storage modes
A. Storage space has been the engine driving the appraisal train for paper records; but this engine has stalled with the compact storage of machine readable records; instead, the cost of preserving MRRs, including the updating of files as newer technologies appear, becomes an important factor
1. Gerald Ham (archivist of State of Wisconsin) noted in his address to the 1980 SAA annual meeting ("Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era," Am'n Arch. (Summer 1981) that this technological development in storage capacity means that Wisconsin' 2.4 million tax returns which fill 1,800 records center cartons can be placed on 25 cubic feet of microfilm, most of which is then put on a computer tape which occupies less than one cubic foot;
2. (Ham, ctd.) optical disk systems, storing and retrieving data by laser beam, may hold a library of 40,000 books on one disk the size of a phonograph record
3. (Burke) compact electronic data storage should cause us to reevaluate appraisal decisions for groups of materials: IRS 1040 forms are thrown out (as of 1985) after 6 yrs. 7 mos., because the bulk of storing 200 million records and problems of access/privacy; if disk storage eliminates the bulk and use problems, it might be economical and useful for IRS (or the National Archives) to retain these tax records
B. The transfer of records - when? -new info is usually added to the store of records in the computer (p. 386) "until there is a large, amorphous, undifferentiated porridge of information in the belly of the computer"
1. information loss becomes a problem
a. (Ham) our environment is hazardous to the preservation of all this info, because it places a premium on immediacy, efficiency, and economy; "many media contain the seeds of their own destruction. Technology has created records that are fluid, amendable, [erasable], and reusable." - every word processing operator becomes his own records manager
2. software/hardware dependency; obsolescence of machines, programs, and storage media
a. records that do survive may soon be technologically obsolete, and unusable
b. the archivist must retain the tools necessary to read the records: the computer program, and the computer equipment
3. documentation to explain the location of data in the MRRs; if you are looking at a screen or a printout that is a string of numbers, they won't mean a thing unless you know that, for example, if the 56th number is a 2 it means that the person in question is a female
D. Thus, (Ham) technology and society will force us to reexamine many assumptions about archival theory and practice
E. Readings for next week:
O'Toole, ch. 2--"The History of Archives and the Archives Profession."
Maygene Daniels and Timothy Walch, eds., A Modern Archives Reader, ch. 1--"The European Tradition" and ch. 2--"Pre-archival functions."
Week 2, class 2 (lesson plan):
1. Review of archival terms -- intro -- working facility -- exposure
- list terms from glossary under 3 categories of archival functions
1. appraisal and acquisition
2. organization: arrangement and description
3. access and reference
- understanding terms gives us access to and control over the processes they label
4. Show and tell -- various media (disemboweled magnetic diskette; Vicki Goldberg's 1991 book on The Power of Photography, letterpress book, ledgers, video)
- place them under 6 functional categories
1. personal
2. social
3. economic
4. legal
5. instrumental
6. symbolic
What is the rate of growth of info these days? (guess)
What problems does this represent?
What does the modern person have to deal with that a scribe writing on clay tablets doesn't face?
What do we have to cope with that Thomas Jefferson didn't?
Vice versa on the above 2 questions--what would be awesome to you if you were in his sandals?
5. Should archivists collect everything?
What are the risks of not preserving everything?
What are the risks of trying to preserve it all?
What is "everything?"
6. Based on this discussion, I'm going to give you a summary statement that I want you to take down:
Information is a commodity; it's capital. With the proliferation of new technologies the quantity of data has skyrocketed but the quality of each item has plummeted. As a result, archivists have to take the large view of the world of information and must be selective. They can't just rake it in.
By way of review, we'll complete this graph of varieties of documents (overhead):
· immediacyreliabilityaccessibilitypermanence
· oral history
· written documents
· personal letters
· photos
· audiocassettes
· videos
· magnetic diskettes
· telephone
are ____ permanent--yea or nay?
how are these various documents similar? (all are means of communication)
ownership issues for the various types; intell. vs. artifact
summary statement: This graph shows you the kinds of problems an archivist (or any person in charge of information storage and retrieval) is up against. Some of the areas are murky and ask for a judgment call. This is one of the exciting differences between a librarian and an archivist--all this decision making.
Summary:
graph shows problems
fundamental difference between archivist and librarian
7. Check out the SAA (Society of American Archivists) reference manuals to learn archival basics
