The Novice Archivist

While explaining to a (non-archives) friend that I was doing research for a paper on sound recordings in archives and rambling about preservation issues and proper temperature and humidity and how I was looking for sources, he interjected.

“Why don’t they just digitize everything?”

I was stunned.  This person works with computers and understands how quickly data formats become obsolete, and I pointed this out to him.  He pushed the issue saying that transferring audio now was so cheap and anyone could do it and then we wouldn’t have to worry about keeping the originals safe.

I tried, very unsuccessfully, to explain that the equipment is expensive and that it takes man hours to do that and paying people with the technical knowledge needs to be factored in.  His final take on it still was the mentality, “How hard can it really be?”

I found a paper a few days later that said exactly what I wish I could have expressed.  Presented at at least 2 international conferences, Dietrich Schüller’s paper “Audiovisual Sources and Their Future Availability” states quite nicely the amount of manpower digitizing involves.

A matter of serious concern is the time factor of such transfers.  If technically perfect source material is available, the transfer factor is three, meaning that one hour of original material will take three human work hours of transfer.  Historical mechanical carriers need a much higher time factor, as well as sticky tapes, or such that call for azimuth adjustment, etc.  For video, similar figures can be assumed.  While perfectly playable tapes will need a factor of three, historical formats and/or tapes in bad condition will need higher time factors for transfer.

Written around 2002, this factual tidbit of 3:1 for digital transfer of audio materials is helpful in summarizing many of the skeptical questions on “How long could it really take?”  These materials are to be transferred for years and years of future referencing.  They are not intended for someone’s personal MP3 music library.

701 Main Street
Racine, Wisconsin 53403-1211

Dick Ammann, Archivist
Phone: 262-636-3926.
Email: reammann[at]clmail.com
Archives hours: Tuesdays from 1 to 4:30, Saturdays from 10 to 1, and other times possible with advance appointment
http://www.racineheritagemuseum.org/

The archive has evolved, along with the Heritage Museum, from the Racine County Old Settlers’ Society of the 1800s, then onward to the Racine County Historical Society and is now the current county-wide historical society, museum, and archives collection. The major specialization is in Racine County themes and materials.

The archive is rich in family history materials and related indexes, plus resources relating to the county’s business and industry, infrastructure, institutions, and development. There are significant collections from several local industries, such as the J.I. Case Corporation, Western Publishing, and Haban Manufacturing. The Racine Journal Times newspaper has donated its clippings library and photo collection. They have been developing a reference copy set of our approximately 70,000 images, plus a copy set of materials regarding general county and municipal history, including popular topics such as the Underground Railroad in the county, the Racine Belles professional women’s baseball team, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s influence on our county’s architecture.

Community outreach programs are occurring monthly with the “First Fridays” program. Such First Friday events include Civil War reenactments, Racine Classic Cars, and tours of the Old Schoolhouse. Also occurring at these events are the openings of new exhibits and raffles. September’s exhibit was “People and Wheat,” illuminating ethnic immigration into Racine county and the importance of the wheat crop in the cultural and economical development of the area.

Long distance research services are available and reproductions of images are available for purchase.

Reproduction of a painting of Racine Harbor from the 1850s. The view is toward the southeast, with Lake Michigan at the far left and the State Street Bridge toward the right. The large warehouse southeast of the Wisconsin Avenue Bridge at the left was owned by Dutton and Raymond. It has been verified as an Underground Railroad site, a final hiding place for passengers waiting for a friendly Great Lakes vessel to drop them off in Canada.

The first diesel-powered craft in Racine Harbor was probably this unlikely visitor on August 11, 1919: the German Navy’s U C 97, which was turned over to the Allied forces at the close of World War One. She was taken on tour through the Great Lakes in 1919 and 1920 to raise funds for post-war bond drives. She ended her tour in Chicago then was sunk in Lake Michigan, in accord with naval treaties. She was used for off-shore target practice in June 1912, off of northern Illinois, and has been located by contemporary divers.

Integrated local and regional public transit is represented in this image of the North Shore interurban station in West Racine in about 1929, when a new train was displayed. In this era, over 30 passenger trains a day passed through Racine. To the right is the local Racine street car which will loop around downtown. In the foreground is a taxi cab. Today, only one lone taxi vehicle exists in the city. The street cars disappeared in the early 1950s and the North Shore was shortsightedly killed in the early 1960s.

The Racine Belles professional women’s baseball team was portrayed in the contemporary film, “A League of their Own.” Contrary to the film’s depictions, the players, coach, chaperone, and management all interacted positively. These five ladies were photographed at Racine’s Horlick Field: Betty Trezza, LaVonne Paire, Margaret Danhauser, Sopy Kurys, and Madeline English.

Top image: Postcard from the 1920s showing the Carnegie Library. The building was given a new life as the Racine County Museum (now Racine Heritage Museum) in 1962.

All images are from the Archives collection. The Museum maintains reproduction copy rights.

Entry compiled by Rachel Pieper

[originally published in Archives Month 2008: Celebrating Wisconsin's Archives]

For our “Accessioning and Appraisal” class, our final paper is aimed at being a publishable piece, approximately 17-23 pages long.  Originally, I had chosen appraisal of photographs, as that is where my major interest is.  It had been suggested to me that I do sound.  I balked at the idea at first, as I have not had any interaction with audio media in the archives realm, but as I’m reading more on it, I am becoming more interested in the complexity of issues that surround its appraisal.

Christopher Ann Paton’s article, “Appraisal of Sound Recordings for Textual Archivists” is my best resource so far, touching on many of the aspects that I would also like to incorporate into my literature review. Other sources that are proving to be very helpful are Boles’ Selecting and Appraising Archives, Paton’s “Preservation Re-Recording of Audio Recordings in Archives,” Helen Harrison’s 1984 RAMP study, and Frederick J. Stielow’s The Management of Oral History Sound Archives.

I am aware that I am not the strongest researcher.  My frustration with my searching is that the sources I’ve found are all about 20 years old, with the exception of the Boles book, but those 2 pages reference the very useful Paton articles I’ve mentioned.

I’ve done a bit of reference-chasing in the Boles book, but its not leading me to anything new.  I’m looking for and open to all suggestions for sources on appraising audio records in archives.

The goals of The Novice Archivist have been stated in a previous entry, but a new page has been created for quicker, easier access to the purpose of this blog.  The text on the new page is as follows:

I had mentioned in a previous entry, my intent and purpose for The Novice Archivist. It seems that this may be something that that should be stated just as clearly, but in a more accessible location on the site. As mentioned in the Archives, PR, Publicity: Twitter entry,

A few of the goals of The Novice Archivist include
1) A place for me to write-to-understand what I’m learning and experiencing.
2) Outreach for those who may or may not know what archives are.
3) A place and means of connecting with others involved in archives and receiving feedback.

I find topics that are relevant to current issues and topics that I am facing and would like to share my experiences and solutions or to vent/expose issues so others may benefit from the head’s up.

I feel that a blogging purpose statement, much like the About the Author and Blogging Ethics Statement are important aspects to include on a site which is aimed as establishing connections within a community.

Our speaker today was Jonathan Nelson from the Wisconsin Historical Society.

They’re working on projects using Archive-It (a subscription service from the Internet Archive) to document relevant websites in regards to the institutions collections.  I took a look that the Archive-It’s Partners list and I see some impressive names on there.

I must insert here that I am a student with no administrative experience, so the following comments are based off of my general impressions, not from real-life.

It was mentioned that this subscription costs approximately $10,000 a year.  That includes 1/2 Gigabyte of storage, the program and the interface with customizable depth of drilling for URLs.  This seems an extravagant amount for a service such as this, especially the low amount of storage space.  With the thousands of spam bots and viruses out there that do similar crawling, the programming of the project does not seem to be the limiting factor.  Is the draw that the information is being held off-site, in a “safe” repository?

The fact that it is held off-site and made searchable by the public through the Archive-It’s website is a plus, but I’m still thinking the cost is high. Realizing that you can search any partner’s archived sites is impressive to me, in the shoes of an end-user, where I don’t have to sign in or align and limit myself to a certain repository.  Strangely enough, I don’t see Wisconsin Historical Society on the list.

Some of the caveats that were mentioned about digital archiving in this manner included costliness (of course), over-collecting, and the consideration of the importance of the material in the future.  Are institutional or individual websites just a fad?  Or do they have lasting value?  I find this a  difficult question to grapple with.  The internet, for the most part, has been available in the home for a little over 10 years now.  Since then, the cost of a web domain on which to host pages has continued to decrease, to where it can be as low as $10/year (That is about what the www.thenovicearchivist.com domain was purchased for).

How does an archivist know who’s stuff to capture?  Often times many famous writers are not known until they’ve passed away.  By the time an archive is aware of their existence the website domain probably will have been resold.

Website capturing and archiving seems just as sticky as something like sound or video archiving, where the migration (or emulation) of the media will incur annual expenses. Whereas paper records can be processed and stored, with the only annual costs are the storage and proper conditions (and perhaps later on, digitization, but that is a whole different bag of worms).

This day in 1774.  Thanks to Wisconsin Historical Society’s site, “On this day in Wisconsin History” for October 7, 2008.  Text from the link is as follows:

1774 - Wisconsin Becomes Part of Quebec
On this date Britain passed the Quebec Act, making Wisconsin part of the province of Quebec. Enacted by George III, the act restored the French form of civil law to the region. The Thirteen Colonies considered the Quebec Act as one of the “Intolerable Acts,” as it nullified Western claims of the coast colonies by extending the boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River on the south and to the Mississippi River on the west. [Source: Avalon Project at the Yale Law School]

The link to the Avalon Project provides the text to the Quebec Act.  Perhaps Wisconsinites would have been known as “les têtes de fromage.”

I was given free reign to appraise the slides of the agricultural professor and after two solid days of working on them, I finished the initial appraisal.  I then moved along to a secondary appraisal.  Since the materials were in such a disarray to begin with, we had large, broad categories including “Germany and other European countries,” “Wisconsin,” “Hawaii and other US States,” and some smaller ones like “Flowers/Close-ups” and “Teaching/Photo Tech.”

There were about 30 carousels of slides that needed to be sleeved for easier viewing, which were placed into the appropriate category immediately afterward.  During the secondary appraisal stage, I sorted through each category, viewing about half of each box of slides to see if it contained images relevant to his work in agriculture.  If it did not (i.e. people-presumably family-fixing up an old house and picnicking, lots of tourist-like snapshots of buildings in a city or people-again presuming family-on a rafting trip) I moved it aside to the “Return to Family” box.

When I got to the end, there was still a “Unknown/Miscellaneous/Unsortable” box to be dealt with.  I go tthe curator at this time and we started sorting through that box together.  The first 10 minutes went alright until we got to a set of 35mm negatives that was sleeved.  The content of the negatives was a studio portrait session with a lady and two images at the end of her with her sweetheart.
“Hmmm… I think this should go in ‘Wisconsin.’” says the curator.
“I don’t know.  We don’t know who this it, its probably a family friend.” I replied, trying to swing it towards the family pile, wondering if this is really happening.
“Well, it looks like it he could’ve been taking passport photos for her.”
“Those don’t look like the type of poses for a passport.  Look, here she is with someone else,” indicating the ones of her and her sweetheart.  I’m also wondering why keeping some unnamed person’s studio shots of a passport photo would be relevant.
“We should really put this in ‘Wisconsin.’” He’s sincere about this.
I’m so confused that I’m getting frustrated. “What kind of research value does this have?” I was trying very hard no to sound as confused/frustrated as I was feeling.
“Well, she could be someone important.”

And that’s the point I engaged myself in some busywork and walked away, but my mind was reeling and I was so confused.  I was wondering if this guy ever DID appraisal.  Do all the appraising archivists appraise like this?  This isn’t how our practicum went.  Did I miss something?  And most frustrating of all, the thought that, Couldn’t every person in every photograph that comes through the archives be “someone important”?  Isn’t this what appraisal is about?  Deciding what has “enduring value”?  And making selection decisions based off of that?  How is a sheet of a portrait session, which is the same (unnamed) face over and over again, of enduring value?

Now for the flip side.
I understand that he was a photography professor, and we are keeping a lot of his “Photo Tech” teaching slides and images (which I also don’t see as having “enduring value,” but it makes more sense to me).  I’ve asked for more information on the creator, and the collections we already have, but I was met with the answer that this was just “an initial appraisal,” even after explaining that the “initial” part was completed.  Finding aids for his other collections have not been digitized and the information that I found said “see the Visual materials archivist,” which is whom I had asked in the first place.

And its not that one sheet of negatives is going to make the archive explode due to being over capacity, but he was also trying to unsleeve individual slides to put them where he thought they should go, without looking at the titles on the sleeves, which indicated they were part of a group from a carousel. It disturbed more that he was going to such lengths to keep individual items that he would be removing them form the original order.

At this point, I feel like I’ve getting highly conflicting information, from my practicum and this practical work.

And just for an ironic laugh, here is my horoscope for today:
You may have a very sharp sense of what’s right and wrong at work today. You make an excellent judge because your sense of justice is strong now, combined with an ability to see both sides of a question. Just remember that your word isn’t the final say, so only offer it up as your opinion. Give everyone else the time they need to draw their own conclusions.

Murphy Library Resource Center
1631 Pine St.
La Crosse, WI 54601
Phone: 608-785-8511
Email: specoll[at]uwlax.edu
http://www.uwlax.edu/murphylibrary/departments/archome.html

The Area Research Center in La Crosse is also the Special Collections department in Murphy Library, the main research facility on the UW-La Crosse campus. It serves and documents five Wisconsin counties; Jackson, La Crosse, Monroe, Trempealeau, and Vernon. Along with special collections and the ARC, it houses the rare book and Wisconsiana collections. The Wisconsiana materials consist of over 5000 works of non-fiction dealing with state and local topics, including histories of Wisconsin towns, villages and communities. There are also oral history collections, maps, photographs and university archives.

The Oral History program was started in 1968 under the direction of Howard Fredericks, UW-La Crosse professor and oral historian. Since then, the collection has grown to include over 3000 hours of recorded histories, focusing on the community and the history of the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. The significance of these recordings goes beyond the five counties served, and garners national interest especially in the areas of the Hmong refugee experience, European ethnic groups, turn of the century small city manners and daily life, Midwestern rural life and culture, and women’s experience.

The photographic collections total approximately 150,000 images. A major portion of the photograph collection is historic photos of La Crosse and the surrounding area. Of these, approximately 50,000 are of inland river steamboats and river scenes, making it one of the nation’s largest collections for this subject. Just recently, in 2007-2008, this collection of steamboat photographs has been digitized by the Digital Collection Center of the UW Madison campus. The digitized photographs are available at http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/LaCrosseSteamboat/.

This is the Admiral sidewheel paddle excursion boat, built in 1940 in St. Louis, where this photo was taken. Undated.

Photo of a lumber raft on the Mississippi River near La Crosse, WI, includes the towboat “Kit Carson” and the bow boat “Scotia”. This photo was taken in the 1870’s. Negative number 339

Overhead view of Levee Park in La Crosse, WI about 1913 with the steamboat “David Tipton” in the center. Negative number 389

[originally posted in Archives Month 2008: Celebrating Wisoncsin Repositories]

I am not a programmer and I don’t necessarily consider myself “techy,” even though some of my friends tell me I am. Listening to an electronic records archivist speak in class that other day talk about the emulation or migration question, I asked what his preferred method was. His answer of “I am a records person, format isn’t important to me,” didn’t satisfy me.

Image courtesy of http://www.fotosearch.com

In my understanding, “emulate” is an intermediary program which mimics the original operating system or system requirements in which the file was created was designed to run in. “Migrate” involves reformatting a file/record/program into a newer version of a similar type of software.

My opinion: Emulation would allow for other files that may come into the repository’s possession to also be read and accessed. Migration, it seems, is a temporary fix to a persisting issue and if started, migration will need to continue, due to the ever-changing software that is produced.

Perhaps a completely different approach is needed. Trying to use non-proprietary methods of storing information (which would be one of those cases where the archivist needs to be involved in the planning stages of an organization’s records program). For example: If one would like to access an image saved as a .PSD, they would need a version of Adobe PhotoShop. But PhotoShop allows you to save image files as any number of other formats. A format such as .JPG, .TIF or .BMP can be opened by many different types of image editing and viewing programs.

If emulators can be created to mimic programs, I would say that I am more in favor of the emulator instead of the perpetual cycle of migrating.

While sorting through a collection titled “Lincolnania,” I came across a piece of ephemera that I was not expecting.  But let us talk about what is in the Lincolnania collection, first.

It is a hodgepodge mishmash of anything relating to Lincoln, our dear president born in Illinois.  The first few folders were promising, period lithographs, rare photographs, images of Lincoln that are not widely circulating, as well as campaign materials; flyers, and admittance documents into the conventions prior to the election.  However, as the folder numbers got higher, the material got stranger.  Pages removed from books that had images of Lincoln, pages from newspapers with comics that used Lincoln in the opinion sections.  One folder was all postcards from various Lincoln memorial sites.  Another folder was pictures that the aggregator of the collection took while visiting many of the memorial statues of Lincoln.

The one bit of ephemera that caught my eye was something that some archivist had labeled “oversize” at one point.  The cardboard rectangle was slightly bigger than a business card (NOT an oversize piece) and was quite thick.

Admittance ticket to the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Image courtesy of http://www.columbianexpositiontickets.com/

I was quite surprised and pleased.  After doing a Google search, it seems that many of the tickets had Washington’s image.  The collector of Lincolnania sure knew how to find his stuff.

Related post: End of semester blues.