American Library Association Conference

Safe travels to all of you heading for Anaheim in the next few days! Have fun!

All Things Are For Human Beings

I've just finished reading this article
Araghi, G.F. (2005) Users satisfaction through better indexing. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 20(2), 5-17 for my cataloging class. I was impressed with this sentence:

One must not forget that although highly-automated technology dominate, all things are for human beings. (p. 14)

My primary professional interest is in providing reference service. Finding accurate information quickly is my passion. I agree that the classifier is the co-partner of the reference librarian. It doesn’t matter how good a reference interview I do if I can’t then find the answer to the user’s question because the information needed has been badly cataloged and remains hidden and cannot be retrieved.

I work as a part-time reference librarian at the Oregon State University library. I provide reference services face-to-face, by telephone, and through email. I also provide chat-based virtual reference services through L-Net and Meebo and I find that the most challenging of all. The questions from university faculty and students may be very detailed and complex, requiring a half-hour or more to answer. Many users are K-12 students asking basic homework related questions and there are always a few questions from members of the general public. Because it is a virtual environment and there are no visual cues, a good reference interview is essential. Some of the questions I receive are like this (real) example: “How much does a fully loaded tank weigh?” Where do I start?!

Araghi’s comment about “the ambiguity of index terms across cultures, languages, and time” has much truth in it. Language just isn’t always precise; there are countless opportunities for misinterpretation making access to accurate information complex. In the above example, what did the user mean by “tank”—gas, air, fuel, military, fish, something else?

Providing the information the user wants in a virtual environment also requires providing ongoing reassurances that I’m still there and looking for the information requested. Many expect an instant answer. I may ask the user to give me a minute, come back in less than that with the information they’ve requested only to discover the user has already logged off. I’ve found that recognizing there is another human being on the “other side” of the computer screen by using emoticons and addressing the user by his or her log-in name is very helpful in keeping the user engaged.

Alaska!

I had the great good fortune to be able to attend the Northwest Archivists and ARMA Spring Conference, New Frontiers in Archives and Records Management, which was held this year at the University of Alaska, Anchorage from May 28-31.

I was honored to be one of panel members for a session entitled Breaking the Ice: Protocols for Native American Archival Materials and Archivists in the Northwest. I learned a great deal, reconnected with people I'd met before, met more new, wonderful people and had a great time. I didn't have the opportunity to take many photographs. I did see a moose, but didn't have my camera at the ready.

However, as I always do when I go to a conference, I made certain to take photographs of the library where it was held.

Twittering

I've used many of the web2.0 social networking tools, but twitter is the one that has my heart. I like it because it's so simple, you can follow others and they can follow you, and you can respond to one another. It also doesn't take much time and I've learned how to express more with fewer words because there's a 140 character limit to each tweet. I made a twitter cloud. (Click on it to make it larger.)

The New Blank Society and Web 3.0

Web 3.0 is the content and services produced by people using Web 2.0 as the platform. It is the reinventing of the online world. And like anything new,it's exciting and scary.

The implications for the future mentioned in this blog post are intriguing.

Never Judge A Book By Its Cover

I was very tempted to title this blog post ARGGGGG!!! I came across this article, Read a Book, Harass a Co-Worker at IUPUI a few months late, but it is timeless. This kind of nonsense just never ends. The article begins

In a stunning series of events at Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Keith Sampson, a university employee and student, has been charged with racial harassment for reading a book during his work breaks.

Sampson is in his early fifties, does janitorial work for the campus facility services at IUPUI, and is ten credits shy of a degree in communication studies. He is also an avid reader who usually brings books with him to work so that he can read in the break room when he is not on the clock. Last year, he began reading a book entitled Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. The book, which has garnered great reviews in such places as The Indiana Magazine of History and Notre Dame Magazine, discusses the events surrounding two days in May 1924, when a group of Notre Dame students got into a street fight in South Bend with members of the Ku Klux Klan. As an historical account of the students' response in the face of anti-Catholic prejudice, the book would seem to be a relevant and worthwhile read, both for residents of the state of Indiana and for anyone interested in this chapter of American history.

A shop steward told him this was like bringing pornography to work and a co-worker told him she was offended. A racial harassment complaint was filed against Sampson. No one had any interest in hearing what the book was really about. He was ordered to not read the book in the presence of his co-workers and to sit apart from them whenever reading it.

Why did I write at the beginning of my post that this nonsense never ends? Because,when I was a high school student, I was reading a book by Somerset Maugham during my lunch break when a teacher came up to me and grabbed it from my hands, scolding me saying "What would your mother say if she caught you reading that book?" I took my book back and, to her shocked face, replied that it was my mother who had suggested I read it. The name of the book? Of Human Bondage. Clearly this teacher had neither read nor heard of this classic book and had based her attempt to censure me solely on her assumptions about the content from the title.

P.S. I did find a follow up article Victory at IUPUI: Student-Employee Found Guilty of Racial Harassment for Reading a Book Now Cleared of All Charges

Administrators at Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) have revoked their finding that a student-employee was guilty of racial harassment merely for publicly reading the book Notre Dame vs. the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. Following pressure from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), IUPUI has declared that Keith John Sampson's record is clear and said it will reexamine its affirmative action procedures relating to internal complaints.

and this article by Keith Sampson My ‘racial harassment’ nightmare published in the New York Post earlier this month.

SAA Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award

I have just been informed that I am one of two students nationwide to receive the 2008 Harold T. Pinkett Minority Student Award , sponsored by the Society of American Archivists Society (SAA). I am the first Emporia State University SLIM student to capture this award. Established in honor of archival pioneer Harold T. Pinkett, the first African American to be appointed an archivist at the National Archives, the award recognizes and acknowledges minority graduate students of African, Asian, Latino, or Native American descent who, through scholastic and personal achievement, manifest an interest in becoming professional archivists and active members of the society.

The award will provide me with full complimentary registration and related expenses for hotel and travel in order to attend the SAA Annual Meeting in San Fransisco in August, 2008. I am very honored to have been given this award and I am grateful to SAA for making these types of opportunities available to students. I also wish to thank Mary Jo Pugh, Tiah Edmunson-Morton, and Erika Castano for nominating me.

Always Looking for More Books/Reader's Advisory

I am an avid and prolific reader. I usually have a couple of dozen fiction books checked out of the library at a time, average reading at least two a week beyond the non-fiction and textbooks that I must read, and I'm always searching for more. So where do I look? One place is Amazon. If you have an account they love to give you recommendations based on what you've bought. And even if you don't have an account, if you go look at a book that you do like you'll see their "customers who bought this item also bought" feature.

Another tool I use is The Readers Robot although there aren't very many books there yet. It is growing, however.

The Reader's Advisor Online is for

readers' advisors and bibliophiles who work with readers. You'll find essential news, tips, fun stuff, and a community for exploring RA issues.

There are a number of these kinds of websites including Reader's Advice and the Reader's Advisory Link Farm.

The keys are knowing the collection, knowing the reader, and knowing where to look to find good recommendations if they're not right there at the tip of your fingers. There are some authors I especially enjoy and once I discover them, I devour all of their books. There are some series I like and again, I'll read every book in the series. Some I've found just by browsing. Others are recommended to me personally.

I use LibraryThing to keep track of my books and I also use that as a tool to find others using tags. I have signed up to be an Early Reviewer and have requested books, but so far I have not been one of the chosen.

Read on!

Cultural Ownership

I've only read the review of Who Owns Antiquity? by James Cuno
Treasures on Trial: In Defense of Museums That Resist the Call To Repatriate Ancient Artifacts, not the book, but I think the author makes some good points. I especially liked this:

He felt momentarily part of immemorial human endeavor. That kind of wonder may still be possible only in an "encyclopedic museum," where antiquities from all cultures are assembled to reveal the full range of human genius. As the French poet Paul Claudel wrote: "For the flight of a single butterfly the entire sky is needed."

Part of the power of archives is the ability to make us feel part of a whole.

The question, however, is who has ownership and who has control. Whether antiquity can be owned or not, I don't know, but certainly physical items have ownership. Whether the item is owned by the community, the legal government, an archives or museum, or an individual is the question. My tendency is to want ownership by the community whose members created the items. I think the comment "this is where they can do the most good" from Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum when refusing even to lend the Elgin Marbles to the Greeks is misguided at best, arrogant at worst. I also have reservations about partage; it smacks too much of "dividing the loot" and "finders keepers".

Traditional Buckskin Dress Found in Garbage Dump

This traditional dress was found in the garbage at Capilano, Vancouver, British Columbia. It is suspected that it may come from Alberta or the States. If you have any information about the owner, please contact:

Alice Besito
Financial Aide Worker
West & Central Regions
Sto:lo Nation Social Development
Phone: 604-847-3299
Fax: 604-847-3280

Cultural Respect in Preservation and Conservation

This topic will be discussed at the North Carolina Preservation Consortium Annual Conference, which will be held on November 20, 2008 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Preservation and conservation of collections in libraries, archives, museums, and historic sites are guided by professional ethics, standards, guidelines, and best practices.

This year's North Carolina Preservation Consortium (NCPC) annual conference will address the issues of cultural respect. Objects of material culture often hold intangible values for the community of origin. Do collection institution leaders honor these values with policies of respect and community collaboration? Some artifacts may not be intended for use or view by the public. Do collection institution caretakers place restrictions on access and exhibition? Some communities may wish to use artifacts in traditional ceremonies and rituals. Do collection institution stewards approve such requests? Some communities believe their cultural objects should deteriorate naturally. Do preservation and conservation professionals permit this to happen? We often profess to champion diversity in our collections. Do we respect multicultural perspectives on the preservation and conservation of heritage collections? Is there a moral imperative to preserve and conserve books, manuscripts, documents, photographs, film, sound recordings, art, and artifacts?

One of the papers presented at the Indigenous Graduate Student Research Conference discussed ancient baskets. During the discussion it was mentioned that there are some tribes in California which view baskets as sentient beings which are created for a specific use and that it was wrong to put them in glass cases where they could not be handled and touched, where they would not be allowed to do the task they were intended for, and where they would not be allowed to die a natural death.

I find this a fascinating topic. I'm hoping that I have the chance to read more and perhaps write a paper on this topic for my class on Preservation this summer.

Snow??!

I'm going to the Northwest Archivists & ARMA 2008 Spring Conference being held May 28-31 at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. This afternoon I came across this AP article: Anchorage digs out from snow again.

Anchorage continues to dig out from a snowfall that set a record for the day and the month. The National Weather Service says 17.2 inches fell at its office just south of Anchorage's international airport and 22 inches fell in northeast Anchorage on Friday and Saturday.

I hope it melts quickly.

Copyright Slider: Quick Easy Access to Copyright Laws and Guidelines

I'm taking a class on Copyright this semester and, while doing some research, came across this handy little tool, a creation of the ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP). You can find more official information over on ALA’s Washington Office blog (Let the OITP Copyright Slider Answer Your Questions!) and order one of your own for only a bit more than $5.

This single, sturdy product provides instant access to copyright laws and guidelines. Simply align the arrows by date of publication and determine a work’s copyright status and term. And the “Permission Needed?” box provides a quick answer to this very important question.

The Copyright Slider lets you answer questions such as :

* Is a work in the public domain?
* Do you need permission to use it?
* When does copyright expire?

What a cool little tool!

Stories and Words

I received my copy of Easy Access, the newsletter for the Northwest Archivists, about a week ago. I have been thinking long and hard about the President's Message written by Terry Baxter. In it he talked about what we archivists are--we are the keepers of the stories-- and what records are--the stories told by someone and waiting for someone else to listen.

He quotes this powerful poem, The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart, from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 by Jack Gilbert:

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love we say.
God, we say. Rome and Michiko, we write, and the
words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of cooper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the window's labor.
Her breats are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and
birds.

And yet and yet.... When I say ma maison you may wish to translate that into English as "my house" and not "my home", but that's not quite right either. If there are not two words--one for house and one for home-- does that mean French speaking peoples have any less feeling for home and everything that home represents? Do they not get homesick even if there is no word for it?

And the people in northern India may not have words like our words that are endearments. We may recognize little bird and twinklet and poppet as endearments, but would they? Surely they must feel love and if they do then they must express it to each other. And, well, if they don't then that's the reason their people are dying out, not because they lack the words to express love.

Archivists are indeed the keepers of the stories, but the stories are not the same for us all. They're not told in the same ways. Stories important to one people may not be important to another. Some stories are sacred and profound. Some are secret. Others have more than one meaning. And all stories are more than mere words.

P.S. See The Whale Hunt, "an experiment in human storytelling" in which photographs only are used to tell a story.

Last Week-end in Portland (Spring Semester)

The Oregon EDI students (me, Chau, Terrilyn, Max, and Toan) and Dr. Agada.

Oregon Multicultural Archives Related Resources

Last summer I took a class in repackaging information and wrote an annotated bibliography of digital web exhibits featuring Native American materials in the states served by the Northwest Archivists Association (Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, and Alaska). I included exhibits which appeared to have potential as well.

These have now been incorporated in the Oregon Multicultural Archives Related Resources page. Thank you, Erika.

Navajo Nation Likely to Lose Internet Service

I recently completed an annotated bibliography on the underserved Native Americans for one of my classes and have just returned home from Albuquerque, New Mexico, where I made many Navajo friends.

I was very saddened to read this on CNN.

Indigenous Graduate Student Research Conference

What is Indigenous Self-Determination in Education? Panelists

Tiffany Lee (Dine, Lakota)
Assistant Professor, Native American Studies UNM
Glenabah Martinez Taos Pueblo/Dine’
Assistant Professor, College of Education,UNM
Carlotta Bird (Santo Domingo Pueblo)
Indian Education Consultant
Kara Bobroff(Dine’/Lakota)
Principal, Native American Community Academy (NACA)
Trisha Moquino (Santo Domingo/Cochiti Pueblos)
Founder, Iiwas Katrusini Immersion Preschool


I have just returned from Albuquerque, New Mexico where I presented a paper at the Indigenous Graduate Student Research Conference held at the University of New Mexico. Sponsored by the Institute for American Indian Research (IFAIR), it brought together twelve Masters Degree and Ph.D candidates from the United States and Canada who presented their research papers in various disciplines.

I am honored to be have been provided with an opportunity to both share my passion for archival work and learn from others who are passionate about their fields. It was so wonderful to be a part of this community and spend time connecting with others who face many of the same challenges as I.

I am very thankful to Dr. Beverly Singer, Director of IFAIR, who organized this conference and made it possible for me to attend. Dr. Beverly Singer (Tewa/Navaho), Associate Professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies, UNM and Director of IFAIR
Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico

With Only One Eye

In the class I attended last weekend, we discussed how data, information, knowledge and wisdom form an information hierarchy where each layer adds certain attributes over and above the previous one. I have a concern here as I believe wisdom encompasses far more than data, information, and knowledge. Wisdom requires being aware of when and how to apply knowledge. It also requires experience and intuitive understanding and more.

Among the Sioux there is a saying, “The white man ….sees with only one eye’. That is because the white man is taught to see only with the mind—facts—and he forgets to combine or add that imaginative and moral aspect of nature which alone makes facts meaningful and beautiful to human beings.

From: Bunge, R. (1987). Language; the psyche of a people. In Our Languages, Our Survival. University of South Dakota: Bismark, Vermillion, S.D.

Conferences

I've been asked how I can afford to go to so many library/archive conferences and the answer is: I can't. I am very selective about the conferences I decide to attend, I give preference to those in which I will be presenting or at least, would consider presenting at at a future date, and then I only go if I can obtain a scholarship to pay most of, if not all, my expenses.

Next week I'll be in New Mexico presenting a paper at the Institute for American Indian Research's (IfAIR) Indigenous Graduate Students Conference, Planting the Seeds of Our Research. If I had not been awarded a very generous scholarship which pays airfare, hotel, and meals, I would not be attending.

Next month I'll be on a panel discussing the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials at the Northwest Archivists Conference in Alaska. I'm paying for this trip by using some scholarship funds I was awarded. Again, if it weren't for that scholarship, I would not be going to this conference.

If you are seriously interested in attending conferences then pick a few you think you would really enjoy and which fit in with your career goals and interests and begin looking for ways to finance them. There are many scholarship and grant opportunities if you look and are willing to apply.

The Red Leather Diary

The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal (HarperCollins, April 8, 2008) by Lily Koppel.

Kept by Florence Wolfson Howitt in the 1930's, the diary was found in a steamer trunk in a dumpster outside the author's apartment building. The journal reveals what life was like for Florence in 1930s New York—-horseback riding in Central Park, summer excursions to the Catskills, and an obsession with a famous avant-garde actress. It has nearly two thousand entries, written in faded black ink, covering every day from 1929 to 1934.

The book's author, a New York Times reporter who has found her niche writing about the hidden characters of New York, such as Manhattan's last typewriter repairman, set out to find the owner of the diary with her only clue being the inscription on the frontispiece--"This book belongs to Florence Wolfson" and found her, now 90 years old.

A New York Times article can be found here

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.