Wales and Dust

Here's a link to an archives conference, Archive Fervour /Archive Further Literature, Archives,and Literary Archives to be held in Aberystwyth, Wales this July. A keynote speaker will be Professor Carolyn Steedman who teaches history at the University of Warwick and whose research interests include the construction of self-identity. She is the author of Dust: The Archive and Cultural History.

An SAA review essay, published in American Archivist (Vol. 66, No.2, Fall/Winter 2003) includes this:

To begin with, Dust is heavily steeped in the academic brew of postmodernist semiotics. For the gleefully uninitiated, semiotics involves seeing human experience, in all its minute expression, as signs or symbols. The word “refrigerator” does not identify an appliance, it connotes humanity’s desire/need to safeguard food stuffs.

Yes, I can relate to this. The Ojibwe word for freezer translated into English means "stingy box". I found a copy of this book at the university library and began reading it. My favorite sentence in the book is this one, which can be found on page 81:

The Archive is (the) kind of place that is to do with longing and appropriation. It has to do with wanting things that are put together, collected, collated, named in lists and indices; a place where a whole world, a social order,may be imagined by the recurrence of a name in a register, through a scrap of paper, or some other little piece of flotsam.

Oregon Historical Society Field Trip

Our archives class visited the Oregon Historical Society again, this time so that students could give reports about the collections they had examined.


Our instructor, Mary Jo Pugh, talking with Robyn.







Special thanks to Senior Archivist, Geoff Wexler, for making arrangements to open the reading room for us, retrieving the collections we examined, and granting me permission to take these photographs.

Tools and Users, Part 2

Here's a follow up on one of my previous posts. It's a comment recently published in Information Wants to Be Free

To do a better job of preparing LIS graduates for the 21st century we need to equip them with the ability to be self-motivated and adept at learning technology skills. I don’t think it matters whether you can set up a wiki on your own server or use a free web-hosted service. I’d like LIS graduates who understand when and why a specific technology makes sense to meet users’ needs (and when it doesn’t) - and how to go about making good implementation decisions. The technology tools will always be changing. Many of them can be self-taught (as you indicated). Where we might fail our LIS students is not in letting them graduate without an HTML course, but in not providing them with good analytic and learning skills - and a thirst for “keeping up”.

Planting the Seeds of Our Research

I have been informed that I am one of six students selected to receive a scholarship from the Institute for American Indian Research (IFAIR) which will allow me to attend the Native American Graduate Students Research Conference, Planting the Seeds of Our Research, and present a paper on the power of stories and how they can be used to introduce Native students to tribal archives. This conference will include graduate students from the United States and Canada and the papers presented will cover all disciplines. The conference be held at the University of New Mexico, April 3-4.

Along with the research sessions, the conference will include keynote speaker Dr. Gerald Vizenor, student talking circles, an indigenous evening social and give away, and tours of research programs. Indigenous professors at the University of New Mexico will also comment on the papers presented in panels and sessions at the conference. I am honored to have received this opportunity and proud to be able to represent Emporia State University and SLIM.

Here the title and abstract for my paper.

The Power of Stories: Using Constructivism and Sense-Making to Introduce Native American Students to Tribal Archives

While the focus of information sharing and communication is shifting to a social bookmarking, web.2, technological, Internet, and digital viewpoint, the human-to-human, face-to-face, storytelling, oral ways of connecting families and communities remain powerful and compelling. Both constructivism (constructing our individual knowledge of the world by experiences and then considering the meaning and value of these experiences), and sense-making, (a continual process of making sense of a body of knowledge when there is a gap by gathering information and looking for patterns and connections), are influenced by cultural constructs. Both of these theories can be utilized as effective tools to make tribal archival repositories meaningful to Native American students by effectively connecting thought with emotion.

Tribal archives are like elders who protect and share our stories; they honor our ancestors, bridge generations, and share knowledge, thus preserving the history of our people. Recognizing Native American learning styles, including the use of storytelling as a teaching technique as well as language which is picture and emotion based , are techniques which can be utilized to help Native American students begin the process of recognizing that tribal archives places where we can connect with each other through time and space, providing us with a vibrant view of our history through records, letters, treaties, oral recordings, and photographs.

L-Net and Meebo

Every week I answer questions on L-net at the Oregon State University Library for two hours. L-net is an online, chat reference service provided by Oregon librarians. I answer questions both for both academic and K-12 students so I usually get a nice variety of questions. Today I answered questions about medieval clothing, who were the major actors in Shakespeare's time, how hot air balloons work, how the Swiss and U.S. Constitutions are the same and different, and when the Vietnam Paris Peace talks were held.

I've been told that many of the academic librarians don't particularly like doing L-net but I do as I not only learn about many new things I'd never thought of before, I'm also learning how to conduct good, quick reference interviews. I think part of why they don't like it is because some of the younger students are sometimes rude. My method of dealing with this is to ask them to please be polite and then just continue on and answer their questions. I've found I'm often successful that way and we are able to complete our sessions.

The questions, too, aren't usually as difficult as the ones university students ask using Meebo on the library's webpage. I usually do the Meebo when I'm working a shift at the general reference desk. I enjoy those as well, and as I don't have the luxury of backup librarians on Meebo as I do on L-net, I have found myself juggling three or four complex questions at a time and that is certainly challenging!

The Archives World and the Library World

I am comfortable in and relatively knowledgeable about both of these worlds, but sometimes I forget that others are not. I was in a small group of archivists the other day and, in the course of the conversation I told one who I know is also comfortable in both worlds how honored I was that Loriene Roy had added a comment to a post I'd written for the SLIM-Oregon Student Chapter of the ALA blog about a webcast of a lecture she'd given at the Library of Congress entitled Guiding Our Destiny.

One of the archivists listening to this conversation looked confused. "Who's Lori and Roy?", he asked me. "It sounds like a Las Vegas lounge act." I was taken aback at first and then realized that he, as an archivist, wouldn't know that Loriene Roy is the current President of the American Library Association. He doesn't need to know that. It's not really a part of his world.

Oregon State University Valley Library

Where I work!

One Day in the Life of ......

In all the years we've been married, John has never come home and asked me "So, what did you do all day?" It's a good thing too. If he'd asked me that when we owned and manged a mobile home park and I was taking care of a slew of farm animals and we had four small boys running underfoot, I probably would have clobbered him.

My life is less complicated now. We no longer own a mobile home park or farm animals and all the boys are grown. Well, at least my life should be less complicated, but it doesn't always seem that way. Perhaps it's just complicated in different ways. There are times when, at the end of the day, I wonder myself, "So, what did I do all day?". It helps if I write down what I did because then I can see I accomplished more than I thought I had and didn't just fritter the day away.

Here's my list for yesterday:

1. Finished the first of a two part article for the AILA newsletter entitled Sharing Our Stories which is about how LIS students can address the library-related needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives by incorporating this topic into their class assignments and discussions and emailed it to the editor.

2. Received an email informing me that I'd been nominated to run for the Northwest Archivist Association Oregon representative position. After reading the description of the duties, I emailed my professional mentor to ask how appropriate it was for a student (i.e., not a professional archivist) to run for this position.

3. Joined the wiki for Chapter and Loose Papers, the official SAA newsletter for students of Archival Science, and submitted a research paper abstract for their next newsletter.

4. Read the assignment for my Copyright class and began writing a post to add to the Discussion Board, but haven't posted it yet.

5. Searched for resources for the annotated bibliography for my Special Populations class.

6. Updated my blogs and EDI journal.

Add to that the usual basic housekeeping chores plus grocery shopping, laundry, and making meals and that was my day.

Today I'm working at the Oregon State University library. That will make answering the question about what I did all day much easier.

Tools and Users

I recently read an article by Tefko Saracevic entitled Information Science, published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science [50(12): 1051–1063] in 1999. In the last paragraph he states:

In all of this, I am afraid that the greatest danger facing information science is losing the sight of users, of human beings.

In 1999 libraries were still focused on their collections, on what they owned, and not on their users and how they could best help them access what they needed. That began to change until now we claim that we are user centered. But are we really? When I read descriptions of conference sessions in the library and archival worlds, there is a strong focus on social bookmarking and web2.0 tools. We look at all these wonderful playthings--Meebo ,Twitter, wikis, RSS feeds, del.icio.us, Library Thing, flickr, and yes, blogs-- and wonder how can we use them in archives and libraries instead of looking at our users and wondering how can we use these tools to better provide them with what they want and need.

We seem to be moving again towards the tools, the blocks, and away from the users and their needs and the human, face-to-face, storytelling, spiraling oral ways of connecting families and communities and sharing information, ways which are and will remain powerful and compelling.

Boxes

I love boxes in all kinds of shapes and sizes. These are just a few of my favorites. Whenever I go to a thrift store I look for more. So what does this have to do with anything? I think part of my interest in archives has to do with containers which hold treasures. The archival ones are functional only but the mysteries of what they might contain fascinates me.

25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians

Oh, good! Another fun place to find toys to play with!
25 Useful Social Networking Tools for Librarians

"From academic libraries like that at MIT or renowned research centers like the Library of Congress, the following beta research tools feature innovative tricks to connect you with the most relevant, valid results - including books (real and digital), articles, documents, web sites, and more."

I attended a workshop on Zotero (#15) last week and plan to use it as I began working on my thesis.

Field Trip!

I'm taking a class this semester taught by Mary Jo Pugh, editor of the American Archivist and author of the classic, Providing Reference Services for Archives and Manuscripts .

This past week end we visited the Oregon Historical Society and spent Saturday morning examining collections for papers and presentations. I looked through one collection in order to participate in the discussion at our next class meeting. As I don't live in Portland, my paper and presentation will be done using a collection from the Oregon State University Library Archive .

Archivist Charged with Hundreds of Thefts from New York State Library

This article , which begins,

A New York state archivist has admitted stealing hundreds of historical artifacts beginning in 2002 from the New York State Library in Albany that he sold on the internet to pay for household repairs and his daughter’s $10,000 credit card bill.

and published a few days is old news now to many interested in archives. It's been discussed on the Archives and Archivists list , but the focus has been on security measures and how it will affect archivists applying for positions. I saw no outrage that this man apparently stole things, not just from the New York State Library, not just from the people of New York. He stole from the American people. He stole our history and he did it for selfish reasons, out of pure greed. That he betrayed our trust saddens me deeply.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Internship Program/Summer, 2008

Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library welcomes applications from current graduate students in library science, information studies, preservation, archives or a related program for its newly constituted internship program. The program has been designed to provide practical experience to current graduate students interested in pursuing a career in technical services in a special
collections setting.

The Beinecke Library, one of the world's largest buildings devoted entirely to rare books and manuscripts, is Yale's principal repository for literary archives, early manuscripts, and rare books as well as strong collections of historical materials. Its collections are internationally known and heavily used by scholars from around the world. For further information about the Beinecke Library, consult the
library's web site at: http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke.

Responsibility for receiving, accessioning, processing and cataloging as well as the preservation and conservation of materials in the Beinecke, regardless of format, resides with the Technical Services Department. Printed Acquisitions, Preservation, Manuscripts, Metadata and indirectly the Rare Book Cataloging Team are all units in
Technical Services.

Interns will work in an area of their specific interest and have the opportunity to learn more about how special collection libraries and major research libraries are organized and function. Interns will undertake and complete a project based on their interests, skills and the needs of the Library.

The Beinecke Library has four internships available for the summer of 2008, and is looking to host an intern in each of the following areas(see the list at end for additional details):

- Archival and manuscript processing
- Digital library and metadata development
- Preservation
- Rare book cataloging and acquisitions

Interns will work closely with staff in each of these areas and will be integrated into the broader operations of the library through tours, meetings with staff in the Beinecke Library and the Yale University Library, and participation in special projects as available and necessary.

Eligibility and requirements

- Applicants must be current graduate students in good standing in a library science, information studies, preservation, archives or related program
- Applicants must have completed at least three courses before the start date of their internship
- Applicants must commit to 10 consecutive weeks of employment between June 1st and August 31st, 2008
- At the end of the internship, interns will be required to submit a final report describing their experiences or participate in an exit interview
- Applicants must be eligible to work in the U.S.
- Successful applicants will need to pass a security background check

Interns will receive a stipend of $7,500 to be used for housing,travel and other expenses. The stipend will be divided into three payments: one upon starting, the second halfway through and the third upon completion of the internship.

The Library strongly encourages applicants from underrepresented communities to apply.

Applicants should submit the items below by Feb. 29, 2008, with a decision made in the beginning of April. Successful candidates will be contacted in the beginning of April.
- Cover letter indicating internship area preference, as described below
- Current resume
- Three letters of reference and contact information, including one from your current institution
- List of completed classes (unofficial transcripts accepted)

Send these to:

Diane Y. Turner, Associate University Librarian for Human Resources
Staff Training & Community Development
P.O. Box 208240
New Haven, CT 06520-8240
fax: (203) 432-1806
email: hrlibrary@yale.edu,:

Please send any questions concerning the internships to hrlibrary@yale.edu

POSSIBLE PROJECTS

Archives and manuscript processing
- Arrange, describe, and preserve manuscript collections from the Yale Collection of American Literature, the Yale Collection of Western Americana, and/or the General Collection of Modern Books and Manuscripts.
- Create inventories and collection level descriptions encoded in EAD and MARC.
- Participate as needed in Manuscript Unit initiatives related to archival processing, accessioning, and manuscript cataloging.

Digital library and metadata development
- Gain a broad introduction to digital library development, metadata, and mass digitization programs with an emphasis on the digitization of rare books and archival materials in special collections
- Create metadata records across a wide range of materials that may include medieval and renaissance manuscripts, modern manuscripts and photographs, books, artwork, and maps, according to local and national cataloging standards including AACR2, LCSH, LC Authorities, and AAT/TGM II
- Develop and manage structural metadata using software such as MS Excel
- Working with library staff, design and implement web interface usability studies of digital library technologies and make recommendations on web-interface improvements
- Receive a broad introduction to various types of modern digital capture equipment (e.g., large format digital camera, flatbed scanner and film scanner), and gain an overview of scanning and editing workflows

Rare book acquisitions and cataloging
- Broad introduction to technical services functions for rare books with an emphasis on rare book cataloging for a wide range of material from the 15th century to the present
- Introduction and experience using Voyager, OCLC/Connexion and other bibliographic databases
- Introduction and experience with AACR2, DCRM(B) (Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books)), LCSH, genre headings, and authority control.
- Specific projects will depend on a person's language skills,cataloging background, and interests (e.g. early books, artist books,maps, serials, or music)
- Acquisitions workflow including accession records, physical processing and tracking of materials prior to cataloging.

Preservation and conservation
- Condition assessments and treatment proposals
- Collection surveys, including printed materials, manuscripts,photographs, and A/V materials
- Coordinate environmental monitoring program and analyze data
- Liaise with vendors, including RFPs, contracts, and proposal reviews, for conservation treatments, housing, reformatting, and mass deacidification
- Assist with disaster preparedness and planning
- Aid in developing documentation including policies, procedures, best practices for workflow

Yale University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer
See: http://www.library.yale.edu/lhr/jobs/intern/brbl-intern.html

The What? Family??

This photograph on the LC Flickr site is titled "Coney Island, the Whole Drand Family" but someone has realized that it actually says "the whole Darnd family" and what a family! Take a close look and you'll see the children aren't children at all--they're monkeys!

Thank you, John, for bringing this photo to my attention.

It's All About Access

Vachon, John,, 1914-1975, photographer. [Grand Grocery Co.], Lincoln, Neb. [1942]

Check out this post on the Library of Congress blog. LC is now using Flickr to post images.

If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity.

You can find their Flickr account here. I am enrolled in a class on copyright this semester and I was especially interested to note that LC will "include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist."

And as the blog poster wrote the really exciting part will be when people begin tagging the photographs! See "The Commons" for more information.

Dear readers....

An article in last Sunday's Oregonian newspaper, written by Jim Carmin, the John Wilson Special Collections librarian at Multnomah County Library, which is entitled
Dear readers, The letter must not die begins

The practice and art of writing letters is dying; for most of us it may already be dead. E-mail has taken over. Written communication in our daily lives now is made up of snippets of prose stored on our electronic desktops.

I agree that letter writing has become a lost art. It's rare to get one in the postal mail. A huge amount of communication is done using email. A great deal is also done through texting on cell phones and there's a lot of communication done through wikis and blogs as well. The problem with all of those is there's no way to really save it unless one is willing to print it out. And somehow, a pile of printed out text messages, even if they are love notes, just doesn't have the same cachet. I cannot imagine keeping them, tied with a ribbon, as one might with handwritten notes. An email just doesn't have that "magical" value.

There certainly seems to be more communication now but it seems harder to find anything which is thoughtful, reflective, and creative. I also have realized that even though I have only been using computers for the past 15 years or so I find it more difficult to compose a letter when writing by hand than when typing. I can copy and paste, easily insert additional sentences, and use a spell check feature when I write an email or write a blog or wiki post. My brain seems to be working differently. Or perhaps that's just age.

And there's no time lag with emails. I wrote a note to Mr. Carmin thanking him for his article and the irony, of course, was that I wrote him an email and not a handwritten note sent by postal mail. If I'd done that it would have taken one or two days to get there. I'd have had to find a stamp and make sure I remembered to actually mail it. With an email I only had to hit "send". That, too, is a lost part of the "magic". There's no delicious anticipation waiting for the postman to deliver the day's mail to see if there's a special personal letter.

NOTE: The online version of the article does not include the illustrations of a letter written by Charles Dickens or a postcard from Allen Ginsberg to William Burroughs. You'll need to find a print copy of the article to see those. You can find it in Section O, on page 10.

Two Roads: Ancient/Future Libraries

This article, Future Reading:Digitization and Its Discontents , by book historian Anthony Grafton and published in last November's New Yorker, is a fascinating read.

I especially intrigued by his description of the two ways that we now have to access information:

For now and for the foreseeable future, any serious reader will have to know how to travel down two very different roads simultaneously. No one should avoid the broad, smooth, and open road that leads through the screen. … If you want deeper, more local knowledge, you will have to take the narrower path … The narrow path still leads, as it must, to crowded public rooms where the sunlight gleams on varnished tables, and knowledge is embodied in millions of dusty, crumbling, smelly, irreplaceable documents and books.

When we digitally reformat our historical collections or build institutional repositories for new digital material, we are merely reinventing the old. There are historical precedents for such practices—in ancient and medieval librarianship and, in the more recent past, the historical manuscripts tradition—that show us how in the past libraries and archives supported a range of textual activities that enabled the sharing of knowledge.

Archives and Ethics

The Center of Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin held a conference on "Archives and Ethics: Reflections on Practice" last November and offer archived videos here .

I know that digitization is the hot topic now, that along with Web 2.0 tools, but perhaps we should be spending more time thinking about the basics-- how we capture records, how we make them available, and especially, what do we do when they reveal proprietary or controversial evidence. The complex technological issues are easy when compared to dealing with ethics.

The website offers other archived videos as well on topics such as the Googlization of everything and intellectual information. You may want to check out those topics too.

A current schedule listing future lectures can be found here .

Archivopedia

I've just discovered an archives encyclopedia wiki, Archivopedia , which includes a free job board, a resume bank for both students and professionals, a list of blogs for and by archivists, news and trends in archives as well as a search engine for primary source documents.

Google Docs

Last year I began using del.icio.us to bookmark my favorites and found it especially useful for saving and organizing bookmarks I need for my classes.

This year I've added Google Docs to my list of tools. I use it mainly to keep notes and information for my classes although I have added a packing list I can use for the seven trips I'll be making to Portland in the next four months. The main advantage of Google Docs is that I can access my work from any computer with Internet access. This would also be an excellent tool for working on group projects because the pages can be shared.

Buy Legos, Not Lasers!

I remember, one Christmas long ago, when my sons were small, seeing a group of well meaning parents on a television news segment protesting that Toys R Us sold toy guns. They paraded around the store, carrying signs declaring "Buy Legos, not lasers!!" trying to convince parents not to buy play guns. I had to laugh because, as I never bought my sons play guns, it didn't stop them from making them out of their Legos! Maybe they were just ahead of their time.

This story entitled Legos — they're not just for good kids anymore begins

A book written by two former employees of the Danish plastic-brick giant is burning up the Amazon.com sales charts — and raising eyebrows on the other side of the Atlantic.

"Forbidden LEGO: Build the Models Your Parents Warned You Against" was published in August by No Starch Press , a small independent publishing house based in San Francisco.

"You'll learn to create working models that LEGO would never endorse," the book's page on the publisher's Web site promises. "Try your hand at a toy gun that shoots LEGO plates, a candy catapult, a high voltage LEGO vehicle, a continuous-fire ping-pong ball launcher, and other useless but incredibly fun inventions."

Americans have embraced the idea in stride, putting the title at No. 244 on the Web retailer's (Amazon) book-sales chart as of midday Thursday. But in Britain, the constantly hysterical press added the book onto its ever-growing pile of Things That Threaten Society.

"Lego is set to turn slightly more sinister with the launch of an unofficial book that teaches children how to make weapons out of the iconic plastic bricks," warned London's Evening Standard.

On commentator stated:

"This is a very dangerous idea," he wrote with tongue firmly in cheek. "Kids could make atomic bombs out of Lego, and just think what would happen if some Islamic terrorist get hold of a copy. The possibilities are terrifying."

Indeed! But as someone training to be a librarian all I can say is that no one had better try to ban the book!

How Did That Happen?

The terms is, for all intents and purposes, over until mid-January and I should be thinking about relaxing and getting ready for Christmas but somehow that isn't happening. I have an interview scheduled for the end of the month so I can write a paper and then I need to write the paper, there are some scholarships I'm interested in applying for to attend various conferences, some proposals I need to put together for some conferences where I'd like to do presentations, and I want to at least begin doing the research for, if not actually write, at least two other papers.

And oh, I need to order my textbooks for next term, organize my desk, print out the syllabi for my classes and organize my notebooks, and I'm sure there are some things I've forgotten too.

Stop! Wait!I'm going to take this week-end off. I'll try hard not to read my email (but I probably won't be able to resist) and I'll do a bit of knitting. The carpets were cleaned today and tomorrow John and I will put all the furniture back. Maybe I'll start on the Christmas decorating too and make my lists for baking. A nap or two doesn't sound like a bad idea either.

Paper and Webpage for LI835

My paper on Information Transfer: A Model for Liaison Services, which includes a link to a website I constructed for it intended as a pathfinder for university students studying Native American art, can be found here .

Last Class Weekend in Portland

John accompanied me to my last class weekend in Portland. It was cold, rainy, and windy. My presentation went well and I'm glad for that. It was practicing it over and over again which made the difference, I think.

I went to the Farmer's Market, the last one I'll be able to go to until they reopen again in the spring. There were not nearly as many booths as there are in mid-summer and most of the lush produce and flowers are gone. One booth was selling mushrooms, one had a display with jars of honey, and another had a selection of homemade breads. All of the vendors were bundled up against the wind and rain in heavy coats, hats, and scarves. I did find one booth selling jams and chutneys and bought a small jar of strawberry/rhubarb jam for John. As I left the market, I noticed one booth with a basket of traditional winter vegetables-- beets and turnips--but there weren't many buyers.

As I headed back towards the classroom building, I heard roaring sounds coming for a nearby street and went to see what was going on. The street had been blocked to cars and it was now filled with motorcyclists wearing Santa hats over their helmets. Many had large stuffed animals strapped to the back of their cycles as passengers, some had sidecars filled with toys, and one was pulling a little cart piled high with gifts. They roared their engines and a few did wheelies and people watched and smiled and waved at them and they waved back with huge grins. This was the annual Portland Toys for Tots Motorcycle Parade. What a wonderful way to begin the Christmas holidays!