<![CDATA[Mx A. Matienzo]]> 2017-01-17T12:35:20-05:00 http://matienzo.org/ Octopress <![CDATA[A Push-to-Talk Conference Call Foot Pedal]]> 2016-09-04T14:16:50-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/push-talk-conference-call-foot-pedal My current position at DPLA, especially since we are remote-first organization, requires me to be on lots of conference calls, both video and audio. While I’ve learned the value of staying muted while I’m not talking, there are a couple of things that make this challenging. First, I usually need the window for the call to have focus to unmute myself by the platform’s designated keystroke. Forget that working well if you need to bring something up in another window, or switch to another application. Secondly, while we have our own preferred platform internally (Google Hangouts), I have to use countless others, too; each of those platforms has its own separate keystroke to mute.

This all leads to a less than ideal situation, and naturally, I figured there must be a better way. I knew that some folks have used inexpensive USB footpedals for things like Teamspeak, but that ran into the issue where a keystroke would only be bound to a specific application. Nonetheless, I went ahead and bought a cheap PCSensor footswitch sold under another label from an online retailer. The PCSensor footswitches are programmable, but the software that ships with them is Windows-only. However, I also found a command-line tool for programming the switches.

After doing some digging, I came across an application for Mac OS X called Shush, which provides both push-to-talk and push-to-silence modes, which are activated by a keystroke. Once installed, I bound Shush to the Fn keystroke, which would allow me to activate push-to-talk even if I didn’t have the pedal plugged in. However, I couldn’t get the pedal to send the Fn keystroke alone since it’s a modifier key. As a workaround, I put together a device-specific configuration for Karabiner, a flexible and powerful tool to configure input devices for Mac OS. By default, the pedal sends the keycode for b, and the configuration rebinds b for an input device matching the USB vendor and product IDs for the pedal to Fn.

Since I’ve bought and set up my first pedal, I’ve gotten used to using the pedal to quickly mute and unmute myself, making my participation in conference calls become much more smooth than it was previously. I’ve also just replaced my first pedal which broke suddenly with a nearly identical one, but I might make the switch to a more durable version. My Karabiner configuration is available as a gist for your use - I hope this helps you as much as it helped me!

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<![CDATA[How We Work: The DPLA Technology Team Core Values]]> 2016-07-05T00:00:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/dpla-tech-team-core-values One of the most important aspects of the work of the DPLA Technology Team is ensuring that we maintain a common frame of reference for all of our efforts. This is situated in multiple aspects - in terms of our shared technical knowledge, the overall DPLA strategic plan, and more. Overall, however, the guiding principles for our work are best understood through the core values that inform how we work together within our team, as well as with our colleagues at DPLA and across the network of our stakeholders and collaborators. These values are not only designed to be aspirational; instead, they also inform practical aspects of our day to day work, allowing us to work together effectively through their articulation of cultural norms and expectations. In addition, our values encourage us to be intentional about our work, even when faced with challenges from deadlines, staff capacity, and other external pressures.

The DPLA Technology Team core values document delineates the following eight areas of focus and awareness for our efforts:

  • Maximal openness to DPLA technology and infrastructure, through use of minimally restrictive open source or reuse-friendly licenses for software, documentation, and related assets.
  • Diversity and inclusion, focusing on developing an inclusive environment and eliminating discrimination within our team, our organization, and our network.
  • Transparency for all our aspects of our operations, balanced with security and privacy concerns.
  • Reliability, accountability and shared responsibility for the systems and software we develop and maintain, through a culture of testing and free and open communication.
  • Empathy and mutual respect, as a reflection of DPLA’s commitment to the public good and as a rejection of a culture of blame or shame.
  • Appropriate use of resources, facilitated by pursuing cost savings of infrastructural costs, collaboration, and through management of a sustainable pace in our work.
  • Leadership and support of and for the cultural heritage sector, the DPLA network of Hubs and partners, and beyond.
  • Continued learning and growth, in terms of gaining new skills and familiarity with emerging methodologies, supported by a culture of sharing across the team and our network.

All of the members of DPLA Technology Team recognize that we are not only responsible for following values set out in the document, but for shaping them as well. We started developing the values document for the Technology Team two years ago, after our team grew over the period of six months from zero to three staff members. Once we added our fourth team member, we reviewed our early drafts and revised them into their something close to their current form, and used it to guide our work from October 2014 onwards. Just recently, the Technology Team took the opportunity to review the document again and identify areas in which we were meeting the delineated norms and areas we could improve or expand our work.

If you are interested in reading through our full values document, please do so - we have made them available for review and feedback (link to local mirror). If you’re interested in actively helping to shape these values, please consider applying for our open Developer position, or contact us if you’re not looking for new opportunities with your ideas.

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<![CDATA[Open, Free, and Secure to All: DPLA Launches Full Support for HTTPS]]> 2016-06-01T00:00:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/dpla-launches-full-support-for-https DPLA is pleased to announce that the entirety of our website, including our portal, exhibitions, Primary Source Sets, and our API, are now accessible using HTTPS by default. DPLA takes user privacy seriously, and the infrastructural changes that we have made to support HTTPS allows us to extend this dedication further and become signatories of the Library Digital Privacy Pledge of 2015-2016, developed by our colleagues at the Library Freedom Project.

The changes we’ve made include the following:

  • Providing HTTPS versions of all web services that our organization directly controls (including everything under the dp.la domain), for both human and machine consumption,
  • Automatic redirection for all HTTP requests to HTTPS, and
  • A caching thumbnail proxy for items provided by the DPLA API and frontend, which serves the images over HTTPS instead of providing them insecurely.

After soft-launching HTTPS support at DPLAFest 2016, DPLA staff has done thorough testing, and we are fairly confident that all pages and resources should load over HTTPS with no issues. If you do encounter any problems, such as mixed content warnings or web resources not loading properly, please contact us with the subject “Report a problem with the website” and describe the problem, including links to the pages on which you see the problem.

These changes are just the start, however. To ensure better privacy, DPLA encourages both its Hubs and their partners to provide access to all of their resources and web services over HTTPS, and to join DPLA in becoming a signatory of the Library Digital Privacy Pledge. By working together, we can achieve a national network of cultural heritage resources that are open, free, and secure to all. Please join me in thanking the Mark Breedlove, Scott Williams, and the rest of the DPLA Technology Team for making this possible.

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<![CDATA[DPLA and the International Image Interoperability Framework]]> 2016-05-10T00:00:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/dpla-and-iiif DPLA, along with representatives of a number of institutions including Stanford University, the Yale Center for British Art, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and more, is presenting at Access to the World’s Images, a series of events related to the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) in New York City, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Academy of Medicine. The events will showcase how institutions are leveraging IIIF to reduce total cost and time to deploy image delivery solutions, while simultaneously improving end user experience with a new host of rich and dynamic features, and promote collaboration within the IIIF community through facilitated conversations and working group meetings.

The IIIF community provides the following overview for its mission and goals:

Access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge. Digital images are a container for much of the information content in the Web-based delivery of images, books, newspapers, manuscripts, maps, scrolls, single sheet collections, and archival materials. Yet much of the Internet’s image-based resources are locked up in silos, with access restricted to bespoke, locally built applications. … IIIF has the following goals: to give scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world; to define a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories; and to develop, cultivate and document shared technologies, such as image servers and web clients, that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images.

Just like our Hubs are much more than data providers to DPLA, we are also much more than an aggregation. Our core services, which are driven by metadata aggregation, are proving to be successful, indicated by our traffic, with 57% of that traffic via portal and 43% through our API. However, part of our larger role is to stand behind the development of efforts that make cultural heritage materials easier to use and share by anyone who wants to use them. Accordingly, we believe it aligns with our larger mission to support the development and implementation of standards and software that make encourage interoperability and reuse of the materials that we aggregate. In turn, from our perspective, DPLA's support of the International Image Interoperability Framework aligns naturally with these efforts, and we have been encouraging the adoption across our network.

DPLA has a number of motivations for promoting the adoption of IIIF within our network of partners. As noted, we see a high level of value in the use of open standards both within our community, as well as within allied communities within which we participate. However, IIIF also allows us to begin to address some larger needs at DPLA as well, particularly in terms of improving the user experience of accessing, delivering, reusing, and annotating image resources from our Hubs and partners. Our experience has shown us that this work will also have high value internally at DPLA, allowing us to more easily reuse image content in exhibitions and other curatorial contexts. In particular, we are aware of user experience issues through user testing of the DPLA portal, much of which relate to the "last mile" aspects of delivery to resources that we have aggregated. While some of these issues are not necessarily related to images, these aspects nonetheless impact images for us consistently. Across the board, we have discovered that access to images can often be unclear for many users, especially once they land on a DPLA item page. Furthermore, this is not only true for portal users, but API users as well. A lack of a reliable API to identify images that may provide zoomable views or at specific sizes is essentially impossible right now, without crawling the remote site. The consistency that IIIF would bring to the DPLA community would allow for greater possibilities of reuse.

Currently, there are five DPLA hubs with production IIIF implementations. Three Hubs, Digital Commonwealth, Harvard University Library, and the Internet Archive, all have production services running. Two additional hubs have implementations of the Image API. California Digital Library’s new version of Calisphere supports IIIF for a subset of images from a number of specific institutions in the University of California system, including UC Riverside and UC Merced. Finally, two additional hubs, The David Rumsey Map Collection and ARTstor, have been working to push their implementations to production.

Nonetheless, there are some issues that serve at least minor barriers to an exhaustive rollout of IIIF at DPLA, regardless of the value or possibilities implementation would provide. First, DPLA needs to establish how to best represent IIIF-accessible resources within DPLA Metadata Application Profile is based. We have been communicating with both the IIIF community and staff at Europeana and the National Library of Wales about potential modeling decisions, and significant progress was made at the IIIF meetings in Ghent, Belgium in December 2015. Secondly, DPLA doesn't always know that IIIF resources exist for a given item we've harvested, often because the institution hasn't specified this in the metadata about the item. We are interested in hearing from Hubs and institutions willing to work with us to determine a reliable and consistent way to do this. In addition, we are also concerned about the potential user experience mismatch between IIIF-accessible resources and those which are not, and how to best provide guidance on understanding usage statistics for IIIF image access. We hope to address this in conversation with the IIIF and DPLA communities in the coming year. Finally, we realize that IIIF might be a high bar to cross for some institutions, so we have been considering a number of options, including speaking with vendors and possibly providing an IIIF service, to make it easier to expose image resources effectively.

We are enthusiastic about the possibilities, and hope to be able to prototype IIIF implementations with content from DPLA partners in the coming months. We are interested in hearing your thoughts on this, particularly if you’re part of the DPLA network and have implemented or considering implementing IIIF, so please contact us!

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<![CDATA[Ever to Excel: Towards an Apologetics of the Spreadsheet]]> 2016-03-08T16:54:32-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/ever-to-excel-towards-an-apologetics-of-the-spreadsheet This is the written version of my presentation from Code4lib 2016 in Philadelphia, on March 8, 2016. My presentation was part of a panel with my friends Christina Harlow, Ted Lawless, and Matt Zumwalt, after which we had some discussion moderated by Matt Miller. My slides are available, as are the video of all talks from the panel.

Spreadsheet software is a ubiquitous technology. This ubiquity encourages us to use them as a default starting point for lots of different kinds of tasks. In fact, let’s consider how you use spreadsheets. How many of you use spreadsheets on, say, a monthly basis? How many of you us them on a weekly basis? How about on a daily basis? And, more specifically, how do spreadsheets make you feel when you use them? But how do other people talk about spreadsheets, even if they know that you use them regularly? I have noticed that spreadsheets are often seen as the wrong tool for lots of jobs, particularly in libraries, archives and museums. I certainly know that I’ve been guilty of holding this view before on previous software projects I’ve worked on, and I’ve started to realize that it wasn’t particularly generous way of approaching user needs. So, if you’ve ever felt slighted by me in this regard, please accept my sincerest apologies.

Before we get too much further, I should probably articulate what I mean by a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is a file with a specific form, which represents data in a tabular format, and within which formulas can be applied to that data. Spreadsheets are read and interpreted within the environment of spreadsheet software, such as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. In the context of spreadsheet software, the data in tabular format is addressable through coordinate-based reference to cells, or by address- or category-based ranges. I want to emphasize, however, that tabular data on its own does not adequately qualify as a spreadsheet, meaning that a freestanding CSV-based dataset doesn’t qualify as such either. Nonetheless, such datasets can easily be “converted” or be understood using the paradigm of the spreadsheet, by loading it into spreadsheet software, or into an environment that provides somewhat similar functionality, such as OpenRefine.

This specific consideration allows us to see spreadsheets as the unification of tabularly expressed information and formulas. To put it plainly, as a form of information, a spreadsheet can be seen both as data and a program. This combination is a handy packaging format, which makes it easy to ship your data and the tools you use for calculations and methods for processing or analysis around to others to work with them. The increased ubiquity of spreadsheet software on personal computers over time has expanded the potential for end users to work with data directly in flexible and independent ways, and the unification of data and program has allowed for effective collaboration within groups of users working in a common domain.

This is a longstanding trend that has been fostered by the underlying design of spreadsheets as an application tailored towards end user needs from their inception, as we review the history of spreadsheet software development for personal computers. Arguably, the spreadsheet revolution originated with the development and release of VisiCalc by Software Arts. In his 1984 article on the emergence of spreadsheet software in Harper’s, Steven Levy describes source of the idea by Dan Bricklin, VisiCalc’s co-creator, as originating working on a class assignment while in an MBA program that required Bricklin to complete ledger sheets to analyze the implications of a merger between businesses.1 More specifically, Burton Grad describes Bricklin’s motivation as also being upon his frustration of recognizing that then-current methods of programming were failing him to solve real-time needs based on the interruption and time it took to run a simple program in a timesharing environment to solve a problem.2

In addition, Levy notes that Bricklin’s desire to make a end-user focused version of a spreadsheet designed to run on a personal computer as a potential means to simplify this analysis was met with derision by his professors, as stated by Levy: “Why would a manager want to do a spreadsheet on one of those ‘toy’ computers? What were secretaries and accountants and the people down in [data processing] for?”3

VisiCalc’s co-creators, Bricklin and Bob Frankston, have acknowledged many times over that the product was designed in part to give more power to the user. While Bricklin himself has noted that neither that he nor Frankston were the originators of computer-based spreadsheets in general, he describes the value what VisiCalc provided as an what-you-see-is-what-you-get model of interactivity, wherein a user could point to change values, and see figures automatically recalculated based upon stored formulas.4

More broadly, VisiCalc also heralded a change in how users could approach computers. Martin Campbell-Kelly describes a paper given by Frankston in which he compared the potential of VisiCalc to how the projected growth of the telephone system between the 1930s and the 1950s would lead to an unsustainable number of operators. Ultimately, the resolution in the case of the telephone was to provide telephone users with the ability to dial telephones themselves; similarly, Frankston realized that “VisiCalc made everyone a programmer.”5 Similarly, Bricklin cites Jean-Louis Gassée’s description of his encounter with VisiCalc: “That was the day I realized that you didn’t have to be a programmer any more to use a computer. … Approximations, trial and error, simulations – Visicalc is an intellectual modeling clay. It lets you program without knowing it.”6 The power of VisiCalc, and arguably spreadsheets overall, then is this fundamental tension, wherein programming is both perceived to be both fundamentally accessible and simultaneously unnecessary to leverage the potential of the technology.

In this case, another strength of spreadsheet software on personal computers — particularly early applications like VisiCalc — is that they provided this power and control to end users with a degree of constraints within the user interface. Bonnie Nardi and James Miller have identified two specific factors that have demonstrated why spreadsheets work so well: in their words, “computational techniques that match users’ tasks and that shield users from the low-level details of traditional programming; [and] a table-oriented interface that serves as a model for users’ applications.”7 In other words, these are the formula languages targeted at users trying to get stuff done and the constraint of the grid-based format. Specifically, the visual constraint of the spreadsheet’s tabular format for data and formulas allows users a clearer understanding of how to complete their work at hand. In Nardi and Miller’s words,

As a user begins developing a spreadsheet, the tabular grid provides an overarching structure into which the parameters and variables of a model are cast. As the spreadsheet begins to take shape, the user views the emerging model and evaluates its accuracy and completeness. Within the framework of the rows and columns the user can restructure the model by re-arranging rows and columns and by adding new parameters as they become known. A spreadsheet model is grounded in the distinct tabular format of rows and columns, and is constructed in successive approximations as the user critiques the emerging model.8

Frankston himself notes that the “the grid was key”9 to the usability of VisiCalc, which provided a simplified representation of the structure in which users would be working:

If anything, the big break with the VisiCalc was the grid that actually reduced the amount of interactivity. The original design was much more flexible and powerful. The key was the grid, which gave you a framework for reference and simplified everything. It’s almost the opposite of what people think—people think that more features make a design easier. It’s actually a reduction in features that make it feasible. Later, as people became used to it, you could add features, but the basic idea was reducing the grid.10

In her recent book Calm Technology, Amber Case states that “a product that utilizes the right amount of technology becomes invisible more quickly.”11 By constraining options in terms of data representation up front, spreadsheet users and developers can work to address their work at hand more directly.

Both beyond and including of VisiCalc, Martin Campbell-Kelly describes the personal computer spreadsheet sector as being notably responsive to user needs and usability concerns as the market emerged. For example, in describing Lotus 1-2-3, Campbell-Kelly writes that usability-related development was most often targeted at providing user support in environments that were lacking an in-house information technology support staff. Not only did Lotus 1-2-3 provide macros, which assisted end users in automating repetitive tasks, but Lotus also provided extensive documentation and infrastructure to support tutorials, and by providing a “development kit” to allow 1-2-3 users to easily spin up user groups intended to be broader than those targeted previously at “computer professionals.”

In addition, Lotus ultimately encouraged the development of “add-ons” for 1-2-3, such as spreadsheet templates and additional enhancement applications that augmented the functionality of the application. Campbell-Kelly indicates that while Lotus was originally resistant to encouraging the development of these add-ons, they recognized the complementary nature of these products to address user needs that were likely unable to be addressed by a single company, and that a regional “spreadsheet industry” developed in the metropolitan Boston area over time. As such, Campbell-Kelly thus demonstrates that “by the end of 1986, Lotus had a very definite vision of 1-2-3 as a technological system—a platform consisting of the spreadsheet ‘engine’ that could support ‘an entire system of products.’”12

By extension, spreadsheets and the other actors that interact with them as boundary objects can also be seen as a socio-technical system — not only through the case of Lotus 1-2-3’s ecosystem of add-ons and the vendors that developed and marketed them, but also through the collaborative nature of spreadsheet development as described by Bonnie Nardi and James Miller. Using ethnographic methods, Nardi and Miller establish in their research that the creation of spreadsheets is most often a site of “co-development”, wherein they come about through the efforts of a group of individuals working closely together. In addition, Nardi and Miller view spreadsheets as an excellent medium for supporting such co-development, as they serve as a conduit for communication, particularly in terms of how they “support design, development and use by people with different levels of both programming and domain knowledge.”13 I believe that this “bridging” function across levels and areas of domain knowledge is incredibly important, in that it improves the potential for dialog around the work at hand, and such co-development can allow for sustained collaboration in the longer term, allowing trust to be built across disparate teams.

In summary, spreadsheets as they’ve developed over time provide a useful instruction in terms of the types of interaction and collaboration we should be considering around the software, products and services we develop. I am deeply curious to hear why we haven’t been able to address this in our profession, and why we’re unable to develop transformative tools that empower users to work more closely together to solve common problems. The continued presence of spreadsheets in our domain of cultural heritage is precisely because they provide an adequate degree of constraint and power, particularly in institutions with small staffs, lower resourced institutions, or institutions where it’s frankly not feasible to develop custom solutions that are seen as well-architected. While not strictly speaking a spreadsheet application itself, I think that these same kinds of considerations in terms of collaboration and usability can account for the success of other applications like OpenRefine. They do just enough to allow us to do our work; they make us feel powerful and productive; and we can work closely with others to establish a shared network of solutions. In opposition, denying users the ability to work with the tools in which they feel the most productive demonstrates a lack of empathy and understanding, and can frankly hinder the efforts to develop a healthy collaborative environment between users and developers. I expect this community to carefully consider how productive and empowering tools are developed, when constraints themselves add value and the likelihood of comprehension, and how to ensure that we can build on this legacy developed over more than 35 years.

  1. Steven Levy, “A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge.” Harper’s, November 1984. Republished online at https://backchannel.com/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledge-8de60af7146e.

  2. Burton Grad, “The Creation and the Demise of VisiCalc,” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July-September 2007, 21.

  3. Levy.

  4. Dan Bricklin, “Was VisiCalc the ‘first’ spreadsheet?” http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm. Accessed March 6, 2016.

  5. Quoted in Martin Campbell-Kelly, “Number Crunching without Programming: The Evolution of Spreadsheet Usability.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, July-September 2007, 7.

  6. Jean-Louis Gassée, The Third Apple, quoted in Bricklin.

  7. Bonnie A. Nardi and James R. Miller, “The spreadsheet interface: A basis for end-user programming.” In D. Diaper et al (Eds.), Human-Computer Interaction: INTERACT ‘90. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990. Republished online at http://www.miramontes.com/writing/spreadsheet-eup/.

  8. Nardi and Miller 1990.

  9. Grad, 25.

  10. Software History Center Oral History Project. “Personal computer (PC) software workshop: VisiCalc.” Ed Bride, Moderator. May 6, 2004, Needham, Mass. Computer History Museum, 2004. CHM Reference number: X4276.2008. Available at http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102658146.

  11. Amber Case, Calm Technology: Principles and Patterns for Non-Intrusive Design. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2015.

  12. Campbell-Kelly, 13.

  13. Bonnie A. Nardi and James R. Miller. “Twinkling lights and nested loops: Distributed problem solving and spreadsheet development.” International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 34 (1991), 161-184. Republished online at http://www.miramontes.com/writing/twinklinglights/.

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<![CDATA[My Jekyll todo list]]> 2016-02-16T23:01:24-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/jekyll-todo-list A running list of things I want to do or have done. A lot of this relates to adopting the IndieWeb ethos

  • DONE Enable sending and receiving webmentions
  • DONE Minimal h-entry markup
  • New theme!
  • Enable incoming webmention displays from Webmention.io.
  • Redo build process, perhaps running on Travis or my own server.
  • Enable automatic POSSE to Twitter, Medium, Slideshare, LinkedIn, and Facebook(?). Consider using Bridgy if this will lower friction.
  • Send automatic webmentions through Webmention.io on build.
  • Mobile post creation and editing using an existing Git client and Markdown editor.
  • Adopt Micropub or something comparable to potentially stage posts through pull requests. Longer term goal is to have a nice mobile client.
  • Refactor the publication and resume to be data driven.
  • Reuse and refactor existing codebases, like Aaron Gustafon’s Jekyll plugin for webmentions (Github repo) and Will Norris’ syndication plugin.
  • Implement Jekyll collections as a proxy for managing h-entry post-types.
  • Cache and eventually move commenting away from Disqus.
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<![CDATA[To Hell With Good Intentions: Linked Data, Community and the Power to Name]]> 2016-02-11T01:48:00-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/to-hell-with-good-intentions This is the written version of my keynote presentation from the 2015 LITA Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 14, 2015. I am grateful for the thoughtful and critical feedback from my friends and colleagues Maureen Callahan, Jarrett M. Drake, Hillel Arnold, Ben Armintor, Christina Harlow, and Chela Weber in their review of earlier drafts of this text. My slides are also available.

Good morning. I am honored to be here in Minneapolis, and I have to admit it’s the first time that I’ve been able to attend the LITA Forum. Today I’ll be trying to provide some structure to a few longstanding thoughts that have been percolating about the work that we do with metadata, which I see as being at the intersection of libraries and technology, and the rhetoric around linked data in particular. My hope is that we can start to examine linked data, particularly within the context of cultural heritage, and how it is decidedly not neutral, nor an intrinsic good, but instead as another space in which ideology and systematic oppression are likely to be reproduced. It is my belief that we have the power and the obligation to intervene in this, and that part of that intervention can involve both an intercession into our professional norms and practices and getting out of the way enough for communities to determine how they want to best document themselves.

I want to start my talk by defining my own “personal graph”1 in relation to this presentation by acknowledging two things: the work and thought of others who inspire me and have helped me understand the provocation behind this presentation, and the context that I bring to this presentation. I am lucky to have a group of thoughtful colleagues who have helped me form my thoughts, whether they realize it or not. This is certainly not a list of everyone whom has ever inspired me to be an effective archivist and technologist willing to engage critically with the work that I do – it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Nonetheless, I would like to acknowledge the following people because of their profound impact on how this presentation has come into being. To Jarrett Drake, Christina Harlow, Benjamin Armintor, Bergis Jules, Ed Summers, Tara Robertson, Shirley Lew, Baharak Yousefi, Alison Macrina, Amelia Abreu, Maureen Callahan, and Hillel Arnold – thank you. And, if you’re a conference organizer, please consider one of them as a potential keynote speaker in place of someone who looks like me or talks like me. We might speak about similar things but we don’t always agree with each other, which makes it more interesting.

So, let’s talk about context. This is not to acknowledge my degrees and professional accolades, but rather to lay bare who I am and how some of the topics I’ll be navigating speak to me. I am called to do this in part because of my recent experience at the Digital Library Federation Forum in Vancouver. From the opening session and keynote presentation by Safiya Umoja Noble, to the concluding plenary panel, “Capacity and Community: Setting Agendas for #ourDLF,” the discussion of acknowledging the context that people, as well as institutions, bring to their professional lives and projects percolated throughout the conference. This in part relates to the need to acknowledge the potential bias that we bring to our professional projects, and to allow our potential audiences to identify points of commonality or discord.

So, who am I? Professionally speaking, I have worked in a variety of institutions, with an overwhelming focus on archives, metadata, and technology; the overwhelming majority of those institutions have been well-resourced and well-respected by people who find that important. I have been a project archivist, an assistant archivist, an application developer, an adjunct professor, a contractor, a digital archivist, and now a director of technology. I have worked with lots of metadata and have had lots of experience thinking about, implementing, and maintaining linked data and RDF over last couple of years. Generally, I think that unfettered access to information is a good thing. Nonetheless, my professional experience is an odd one, because I’ve found myself between worlds, dwelling in a liminal space between archives and technology. At least in the past, the relationships between archivists and technologists in my experience have never been smooth, and throughout my career, I have been given the message by one group that I didn’t really belong there since I was perceived to be part of the other one. IT folk have seen me as the demanding archivist who probably, in their mind, understand the complexity of their work. Archivists have labeled me as decidedly not an archivist, a data peddler, the resident geek, and someone unqualified to work in archives. In all fairness, this has gotten a lot better over the last few years – both for myself and the professions in general. Regardless, this is part of the reason why I say that I’m both an archivist and a technologist, even if at times I’m one moreso than the other.

This is a feeling I have to acknowledge, because it is so familiar in a personal context as well. It starts with my family. I am a child of two lovely people, an American and a first-generation immigrant who came to the US to further his education. My father, who’s now been in the states for most of his life, seemed intent on minimizing difference between my family and everyone else around us. So what? Assimilation is common. Throughout my life, however, this difference seemed to be unavoidable. My skin is relatively pale, and I am deeply aware that on a daily basis that I benefit from and am expected to contribute to the economy of white privilege. Nonetheless, I can’t shake that liminality. By some people’s read, I’m White; by others, I’m Latino. I don’t know what I am supposed to be, but I know I’m both. I also know that the way that people look at me in public changes when I’m by myself versus when I am with my father in the US, or when my mother and I are with him and his family when we visit them in Peru.

And such it is with other aspects of my identity. In the interest of time and perceived vanity I’m not going to itemize this for you further, but if you want to know, you can ask. Regardless, just look at me. I’ve got this white skin, and this masculine body and presentation. I have a reasonably secure income with a job I love that compensates me fairly. I am in a committed heterosexual partnership. I am not here to whine about myself precisely because I have a ton of privilege. Nonetheless, the context you should take with you is that identity - or your story - is a hard thing to assert when you have no control of how you will be read. People see what they want to, and elide or emphasize that difference. It is no surprise that this is painful and tiring. Sometimes the world drowns your voice, and more often than not, the voices in your head can do that too.

The other thing that weighs heavy on my mind, and adds to the context of my presentation today, is the stark reality that students of color are facing at University of Missouri, and other campuses across the country. It is an unfortunate truth that systemic racism and disenfranchisement are not news, but specific incidents are what draw attention. And such it is with what’s been playing out on the Mizzou campus. The racism experienced by people in Columbia, Missouri - itself less than five hundred miles from Minneapolis - is not new. These are all part of a broader series of events and historical realities, with a campus that was likely built on the labor of slaves. And even more recently, the opposition is nothing new; it’s part of a larger context.

I want to acknowledge these larger struggles even from the last three months at University of Missouri. Graduate students at MU organized, participated in a walkout, and begin unionizing in response to cuts to health care coverage for domestic and international students and to address other aspects of their working conditions, including better wages, tuition and fee waivers, and access to housing and childcare. There were three “Racism Lives Here” rallies this fall on the Mizzou campus even before the campus discovered the hateful graffiti in a residence hall bathroom. In October, three immigrant students filed separate lawsuits against the University of Missouri, St. Louis Community College, and the Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City. The suits were filed in reaction to the recent rewording of Missouri House Bill 3 from the 2014 version, which prohibited students with an “unlawful presence” from receiving in-state tuition rates, to students having an “unlawful status.” Two undocumented MU students that were not publicly identified would have seen a $15,000 per year tuition increase based upon this change. The University of Missouri Health System drastically reduced access to women’s healthcare through the ending of “refer and follow” privileges and the cancellation of agreements that allowed graduate students to receive training at Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri’s clinic in Columbia. I recommend looking at this timeline published by The Maneater, a student newspaper at University of Missouri, which allows you to start to see this greater trajectory.

Across all these aspects we see the interplay of issues of justice related to race, ethnicity and immigration status; to access to education and healthcare and the economic issues entangled within; and to gender. What speaks to me the most about this is the consciousness of the activists involved to want to ensure they are represented accurately and fairly. Specifically, I’m talking about the conscious decision to develop a “no media” safe space in an encampment set up on a campus quad, and the intentional reaction to eject an MU student who was working on assignment for ESPN.com who was trying to take photographs. To the Concerned Student 1950 movement, to all students, communities, and activists recognizing the need to protect themselves and designate that space for healing, fellowship, and organizing: bravo, I stand with you. To those of you decrying this as an assault to free speech, I offer the following inspired by Ivan Illich: to Hell with good intentions. This is a theological statement. The media will not help anybody by its good intentions.2

On Thursday, Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, wrote a blog post in response to a Twitter conversation she had with Roxane Gay and David Simon. Her post dismantles Simon’s assertions “that the Mizzou students were fascists in ‘intent’, the photographer was the real hero of recent events, and that these were the moments on the slippery slope to the decline of American democracy” through acknowledging the complicity of the media as being neither a rational, objective actor nor a neutral presence. Specifically, she asserts the following early on in her post:

The press is not a rational objective actor. The press shapes as much as it documents. All press benefits as much from social change as it benefits from the status quo. That means the press, especially corporate media, is always serving two masters. The press has rights but so do persons and sometimes we define those rights by working through the moments when they clash.3

I found out about Tressie’s post from my colleague Jarrett Drake, who posted a series of tweets that really blew my mind with his framing of the post. As an aside, I have to acknowledge that the process of how I learned and interpreted this itself was extremely serendipitous and haphazard. Jarrett was providing his own gloss on a blog post where Tressie was writing about an hours-long Twitter conversation. Jarrett tweeted the following:

Okay, read this and insert “the archives” where you read “the press” or “the media” and watch it still make sense.4

Especially this line: “The press shapes as much as it documents.” “The archives shapes as much as it documents.”5

The archives as shapers of the past, not merely documenters of it. I hope someone dissertates on this.6

To build off Jarrett’s reading of that critical sentence, I’ll ask you to do the same as he did. For “the press” or “the media,” replace that with “libraries.” Replace it with “library technology” or “library systems.” Replace it with “metadata.” Replace it with “linked data.”

I cannot help but emphasize how much this framing has helped me make sense of this presentation, particularly when read alongside “Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression,” an article that nina de jesus wrote for In the Library with a Lead Pipe, which demands that we see the complicity of libraries and librarianship in maintaining a perception of neutrality. Bess Sadler and Chris Bourg’s article in the Code4lib Journal, “Feminism and the Future of Library Discovery,” urges us to question our supposed professional neutrality in the context of developing systems and services to support discovery in a library context, and how to imbue a feminist agenda into not only how we think about our work, but also into those systems and services themselves. Bess and Chris acknowledge the work of Hope Olson, in particular her book The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries, as establishing that subject classification systems are bound to their historical context and reflect bias.

More generally, Olson also establishes that subject classification itself is a type of “naming” information, or the creation of document surrogates. She continues (emphasis added):

Naming is the act of bestowing a name, of labelling, of creating an identity. It imposes a pattern on the world that is meaningful to the namer. Each of us names reality according to our own vision of the world build on past meanings in our own experience. … Dale Spender was speaking in general terms, but might have been describing the way librarians name information when she wrote: “All naming is of necessity biased and the process of naming is one of encoding that bias, of making a selection of what to emphasize and what to overlook on the basis of a strict use of already patterned materials.”7

Arguably, by extension, this also includes the creation of descriptions, or metadata about “real-world objects” in the parlance of RDF: books, places, people, topics, and so forth. It should be obvious that naming is power, as the title of the chapter of Olson’s book from which the previous quote is taken. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan further acknowledges this in the the specific case of geographical names, and how naming itself can be used to construct an convenient thing that previously did not exist, most specifically in the construction of “Asia”:

We may trace the continent in its present shape and size back to the end of the seventeenth century, when modern Western people felt the need for a collective name to designate their own society and culture. … “Europe” came to be seen as the handy term with which to describe a geographical area and an assortment of peoples, which, by the late seventeenth century, did have a large measure of unity in linguistic and civilizational origin, in physical (racial) type, and in religion. Asia, then, was defined negatively as all that was not Europe. Asia’s reason for existence was to serve as the backward, yet glamorous because exotic, Other. It had no independent reality; and yet, in the course of time, people who lived in this European creation began to accept it and exploit the name of Asia, and the sociopolitical reality it could call into existence, for their own purposes.8

If we return to the world of libraries and the management of metadata, we can notice a refraction of related issues. Building on Hope Olson, Chris Bourg identifies cases relating to subject classification in her talk “Never neutral: Libraries, Technology, and Inclusion” she gave at the OLA Superconference earlier this year. She relates a discovery where Randy Shilts’ book Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the US Military, by virtue of the call number assigned to it, was shelved with works related to “Minorities, women, etc. in armed forces,” which let to the book being, in her words, “literally shelved between Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star and Military Trade – a collection of stories by people with a passion for military men.” She also acknowledges the recognition of Myrna Morales in discovering that materials related to the Young Lords Party, a Puerto Rican nationalist and activist group, as being classified under a subject heading of “gangs” within the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature.

Amber Billey, Emily Drabinski, and K.R. Roberto critically examine RDA Rule 9.7, which instructs catalogers to record gender with one of three options – “male,” “female,” and “not known” – as part of the process for constructing an authority record.9 Billey, Drabinski, and Roberto acknowledge that from the perspective of queer identity and lives that it erases or oversimplifies the reality of how people view their own gender. Specific issues, in their view, are threefold: that, contra RDA Rule 9.7 and the Library of Congress interpretation of that rule, gender is not reducible to a binary and innate state; that the rule fundamentally misunderstands how queer, transgender, genderqueer, and gender non-conforming people understand their own identities; and that gender can fundamentally be “read” by a cataloger. Most troubling is the recommendation in Rule 9.7 that gender “changes” be recorded associated with a given date. Billey, Drabinski, and Roberto note this practice as “insensitive at best, painful at worst, and belies, the often decidedly non-linear paths gender changes can take.”

It should be clear that the naming function of metadata raises a contentious point in that it allows assumptions and oppression to be reproduced over time. That is not to say that metadata and the process of naming does not have any positive value within the context of libraries and cultural heritage institutions. Structure and conformity – the basis of standardization – allows us to build systems that support discovery at all. Even a consistent locally-defined or discipline-specific vocabulary provides the potential for marginally better discovery insofar as you understand the context enough. Moreover, naming is fundamentally unavoidable in knowledge representation. As such, we need to make a decision whether we choose to name with an intention of justice, or with the pretense of neutrality and objectivity. Karen Coyle, in the first chapter of Understanding the Semantic Web: Bibliographic Data and Metadata, her ALA Library Technology Report, also notes that metadata should be defined as “constructed, constructive, and actionable”; in other words, metadata is a manufactured artificiality, developed for specific purposes, and can be used to satisfy a particular need. In my read, this further emphasizes that by definition metadata, nor its creation or interpretation can never be neutral, and it is incumbent upon us to recognize the damage we can or have inflicted on the communities represented, absent, or served by our institutions and collections.

So, if this is generally true for metadata, and if you’re an astute observer or maybe just opinionated you’ll probably guess this is probably true for linked data as well. If you’re not familiar with it by now, linked data relies on the standardized identification and naming of things – which again, include people, books, and so forth – in a global context using aspects of the Web as part of its core architecture. Specifically, and depending on how dogmatic you are, the preferred mechanisms are to use HTTP URIs for naming, and RDF as the underlying model for how you define the world. Linked open data assumes that your data is, well, open: in other words, publicly accessible, and ideally licensed for reuse.

In a library context, then, we can see that there are any number of entities we can consider – people, organizations, bibliographic works, cultural heritage objects, concepts, places, and so forth. The presumption is that Linked open data in libraries can hence help improve discovery – and, fundamentally, that this process of discovery is understood to be positive. In particular, this acknowledges one value of linked data for libraries in that it makes information more accessible to the Web. With a specific angle, this value is communicated by publishing linked data for libraries using Schema.org. The Schema.org initiative was originally started by Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex to “create and support a common set of schemas for structured data markup on web pages.”10 In turn, the intent is for Schema.org to assist with discovery on the web, as it can be leveraged as part of search engine optimization.

I am less convinced that this is really a revolutionary thing when you do this by itself, without critically examining the rest of the practice. Yes, our resources should be broadly discoverable even on the broader web. This value of SEO within the context of linked data and libraries really doesn’t change much about how the Web operates nor does it demand that we change our processes of naming. I think those of us who work at the intersection of libraries and technology are directly responsible for the implementation choices that we make, and by merely opting into linked data in this manner we are trafficking in a Web that is built by corporations who are opting out of this responsibility. That lack of inaction is a conscious choice that allows for searching the Web to remain fundamentally undemocratic as described by Safiya Umoja Noble. In Dr. Noble’s words,

[N]ot all organizations have the ability to promote their URL via other media. One of the myths of our digital democracy is that what rises to the top of the pile is what is most popular. By this logic, sexism and pornography are the most popular values on the Internet when it comes to women.11

Another specific set of foundational concepts within linked data is ripe for questioning and critical analysis, and this set of concepts has two heavily interrelated aspects. The first aspect is the open world assumption, which is a theoretical premise underpinning linked data. The open world assumption states that the truth value of a statement may be true irrespective of whether or not it is known to be true. As such, it emphasizes the fact that no single person or agent has comprehensive knowledge, and accordingly, we are limited about what we can infer from that knowledge to which we have access. The complementary aspect to the open world assumption is the view that “anyone can say anything about anything,”12 which over time has been changed from the original claim, to “anyone can make simple assertions about anything,”13 to “anyone can make statements about any resource.”14,15

These concepts are heralded by a handful of people as the power of linked data as a means for us to shift the narrative, to make it easier to assert truths as we know them. By publishing them as linked data, there’s also the possibility that someone else can pick up these narratives, read and interpret them, and help promulgate them further. In particular, the work of Tim Sherratt, an Australian historian and digital humanist comes to mind. In a presentation to the 2012 National Digital Forum in Wellington, New Zealand, Tim stated the following:

But to really have access, for something to be truly open, people also have to have the power to create. To take what they’re given and build something new — to challenge, to criticise, to offer alternatives. That means allowing people the space to have ideas, giving them the confidence to experiment, providing useful tools and the knowledge to use them.

This is precisely where I think we can really make ourselves useful, but first, we need to step back a little. We need to begin having some serious conversations about how we can best serve our communities not only as repositories of authoritative knowledge or mere individuals who work within them. We should be examining the way in which we can best serve our communities to support their need to tell stories, to heal, and to work in the process of naming. Part of that involves knowing how to engage in these conversations and asking how we can help instead of constructing a representation of the worst that is best flawed and perhaps unrelatable, and at worst, knowledge organization that inflicts or reproduces violence on those whom we intend to serve.

In addition, we have to recognize the folly of imposing our good intentions in regards to the production of linked data, or any form of documentation, without listening to these communities. These spaces are not always ours, and like the students occupying the quad at University of Missouri, we should be ready to make the space they demand when they do so. Even when we directly engage members of a community and request their presence in a project to correct a perceived absence of voices, we must recognize that this in itself is a form of labor that also has political and emotional impact. In her recent article “Minor Threats,” Mimi Thi Nguyen relates a case where she was urged to add materials to the riot grrrl archive at the Fales Library at New York University which viewed the absence of materials created by or about women of color from the collection, as “a crisis, a decisive historical moment that demanded mediation.”16 She asks us to consider what might be lost or hidden in the process of “correction” of an absence and that correction is pursued. Without thought, without conversation, and without vulnerability on the part of those of you with good intentions, our process of correction can simultaneously introduce and spackle over its own violence. To Hell with good intentions, and to Hell with well-intentioned linked data.

None of this is easy, even from a technical perspective. There’s a William Gibson quote that futurists like to use: “the future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” This quote is in some senses true with the reality of linked data and the tools that support it. The technology is not new and relatively mature but few organizations have been able to wield it effectively. The thing is that I also think this quote is also bullshit. The past and present are already here too, and neither are evenly distributed. Owen Stephens, in a recent talk on enhancing library data with linked data, quotes G.L. Holbert’s assertion that “With the Internet, we each have our own printing press.” In response, I offer A.J. Liebling’s aphorism that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” There are far too many tools and pieces of infrastructure that support publication and consumption linked data that are hard to set up. The possibility of using inference or questioning the provenance of linked data resources unfortunately remains somewhat unavoidable.

In his National Digital Forum talk, Tim Sherratt demands “simple tools” and “no platforms,” arguing that publication of linked data should be as easy as uploading an HTML page to a web server. While that is a noble goal, I nonetheless think that a certain level of additional of tool development is really necessary to help communities build out these narratives. There is a strong value for applications like Omeka and Mukurtu, in this space, and I am particularly interested to see how easy to use, open source, and visually welcoming authoring environments for interactive fiction like Twine can be leveraged or can inform how what direction these tools can take. We need to work more effectively together with our communities to produce these tools and to understand their impact.

I’d also like to add a word of warning here against being overly reliant on overcentralization here despite the gap in infrastructure. In the blog post I referenced earlier, Tressie McMillan Cottom responds to David Simon’s labeling as “fascism” of the actions of the students at Mizzou who removed the photographer from their encampment:

Fascism means something more than a thing one does not like. Fascism means a system of social organization that concentrates power and doesn’t just discourage dissent but organizes the State against it. … It is that hand-waving about a fascist state can confuse us about what making democracy looks like.3

Centralizing the process of naming in any context overly concentrates that power. I am not saying that all vendors are inherently bad, or that institutions responsible for metadata standards and authority files are bad. Yes, there’s a lot of work to be done to make linked data itself easier to publish, consume, and reuse for all kinds of institutions and communities, but I worry about our deference to this centralization. Despite my concerns about the lack of access to effective user-facing tools for linked data, I still believe its power is in its ability to leverage that decentralization. Relying on centralized authority management or metadata creation for everything, and the corporatization of library infrastructure, actively resists that decentralizing force, further limiting our own effectiveness in the construction of radical democracy.

I will close here to acknowledge some initiatives who have thought about this carefully and are taking action. It’s not to say that there haven’t been some missteps, but I urge you to read about their work. First, please read about the the People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, an online archive to collecting, preserving, and providing access to stories of police violence as experienced or observed by people living in Cleveland. It was organized as a collaboration between Cleveland residents and professional archivists across the United States in reaction to the epidemic of police violence over the last few years. Also, read about the Find & Connect site, developed to help Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants understand more about their past and about the historical context of child welfare. It provides contextual information not only on sites of “care,” but also on associated archival records and photos, and information about how to connect with support services including counseling, assistance in accessing archival records, and, when possible, reconnection with family. It also provides important context about how and what you might find on the site, and what might be confronting, disturbing, or otherwise upsetting. Finally, please read the papers as they are published from the annual conference organized by the Community Informatics Research Network. Unfortunately, this year’s conference was held earlier this week, and I found out far too late. All of these examples have given me a lot to think about in this space and I am looking to you to help determine what’s next.

So, think about what and how you name. Decentralize the ability to tell stories. Remember that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Shut up enough and step back far enough to listen, so you can make a lasting relationship to the people and communities you serve. Thank you.

  1. All credit goes to Hillel Arnold for this framing.

  2. Illich, Ivan. Address to the Conference on Inter-American Student Project, Cuernevaca, Mexico, April 1968. Published as “To hell with good intentions” in J.C. Kendall & Associates (eds.), Combining service and learning: A resource book for community and public service (Raleigh, NC: National Society for Internships and Experiential Education, 1990, 314-320).

  3. Cottom, Tressie McMillan. “Fascism.” tressiemc. November 12, 2015. 2

  4. https://twitter.com/jmddrake/status/664783302079987713

  5. https://twitter.com/jmddrake/status/664783611200192512

  6. https://twitter.com/jmddrake/status/664783969704087552

  7. Olson, Hope A. The Power to Name: Locating the Limits of Subject Representation in Libraries (Dordrecht: Springer, 2002, 4).

  8. Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 81(3), 1991, 689.

  9. Billey, Amber, Emily Drabinski, and K.R. Roberto. “What’s Gender Got to Do with It? A Critique of RDA 9.7.” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 52(4), 2014. Preprint: http://scholarworks.uvm.edu/libfacpub/19/

  10. Goel, Kavi and Pravir Gupta. “Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web” Google Webmaster Central Blog. June 2, 2011.

  11. Noble, Safiya Umoja. “Missed Connections: What Search Engines Say About Women.” Bitch Magazine 54 (2012). See also Safiya Umoja Noble, “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible,” InVisible Culture 19 (2013).

  12. Klyne, Graham, and Jeremy Carroll (eds.). “2.2.6 Anyone can say anything about anything.” In Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Data Model. W3C Working Draft 29 August 2002.

  13. Klyne, Graham, and Jeremy Carroll (eds.). “2.2.6 Anyone Can Make Simple Assertions About Anything” In Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Data Model. W3C Working Draft 23 January 2003.

  14. Klyne, Graham, and Jeremy Carroll (eds.). “2.2.6 Anyone Can Make Statements About Any Resource” In Resource Description Framework (RDF): Concepts and Abstract Data Model. W3C Working Draft 10 February 2004.

  15. See Mirna Willer and Gordon Dunsire, “Semantic Web and Linked Open Data”, in Bibliographic Information Organization in the Semantic Web (Oxford: Chandos, 2013), 119.

  16. Nguyen, Mimi Thi. “Minor Threats.” Radical History Review 122 (2015), 17-18.

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<![CDATA[IndieWebCamp NYC 2016]]> 2016-01-24T17:24:49-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2016/indiewebcamp-nyc-2016 I’m at IndieWebCamp NYC and I just added some microformats data to my site. Hurrah!

Edit: And I’ve successfully sent a Webmention by hand from the command line. Time to add that to the Jekyll build process…

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<![CDATA[Developing and implementing a technical framework for interoperable rights statements]]> 2015-05-20T00:00:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2015/developing-and-implementing-a-technical-framework-for-interoperable-rights-statements Within the Technical Working Group of the International Rights Statements Working Group, we have been focusing our efforts on identifying a set of requirements and a technically sound and sustainable plan to implement the rights statements under development. Now that two of the Working Group’s white papers have been released, we realized it was a good time to build on the introductory blog post by our Co-Chairs, Emily Gore and Paul Keller. Accordingly, we hope this post provides a good introduction to our technical white paper, Recommendations for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements, and more generally, how our thinking has changed throughout the activities of the working group.

The core requirements

The Working Group realized early on that there was the need for a common namespace for rights statements in the context of national and international projects that aggregate cultural heritage objects. We saw the success of the work undertaken to develop and implement the Europeana Licensing Framework, but realized that a more general framework was necessary to be leveraged beyond the Europeana community.  In addition, we established that there was a clear need to develop persistent, dereferenceable URIs to provide human- and machine-readable representations.

In non-technical terms, this identifies a number of specific requirements. First, the persistence requirement means that the URIs need to remain the same over time, so we can ensure that they can be accessed consistently over the long term. The “dereferenceability” requirement states that when we request a rights statement by its URI, we need to get a representation back for it, either human-readable or machine-readable depending on how it's requested. For example, if a person enters a rights statement’s URI in their web browser’s address bar, they should get an HTML page in response that presents the rights statement’s text and more information. By comparison, if a piece of software or a metadata ingestion process requests the rights statement by its URI, it should get a machine-readable representation (say, using the linked data-compatible JSON-LD format) that it can interpret and reuse in some predictable way.

Beyond these requirements, we also identified the need for both the machine-readable representation to provide specific kinds of additional information where appropriate, such as the name of the statement, the version of the statement, and where applicable, the jurisdiction where the rights statement applies. Finally, and most importantly, we needed a consistent way to provide translations of these statements that met the above requirements for dereferenceability, since they are intended to be reused by a broad international community of implementers.

Data modeling and implementation

After some discussion, we decided the best implementation for these rights statements was to develop a vocabulary implemented using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) standards. These standards are broadly used throughout the Web, and are both used within the Europeana Data Model  and the DPLA Metadata Application Profile. We are also looking at the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL) and Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) models to guide our development. At this stage, we have a number of modeling issues still open, such as which properties to use for representing various kinds of human-readable documentation or providing guidance on how to apply community-specific constraints and permissions. Deciding whether (and how) rights statements can be extended in the future is also an intriguing point. We are looking for feedback on all these topics!

As part of the process, we have been managing our draft implementation of the RightsStatements.org data model in a GitHub repository to allow for ease of collaboration across the technical subgroup. As the proposed rights statements become finalized following the discussion period on the two white papers, we will be working to provide a web server to host the machine-readable and human-readable versions of the rights statements in accordance with our requirements. To guide our implementation, we are building on the Best Practice Recipes for Publishing RDF Vocabularies with a slight modification to allow for better support for the multilingual requirements of the Working Group. Advice from the technical experts in our community is also highly welcome on this approach.

The end of the public feedback period has been set to Friday 26th June 2015, but the Technical Working Group will try to answer comments on the white paper on a regular basis, in the hope of setting up a continuous, healthy stream of discussion.

Acknowledgements

The technical work on implementing the rights statements has been deeply collaborative, and would not have been possible by the dedicated efforts of the members of the Technical Working Group:
  • Bibliothèque Nationale de Luxembourg: Patrick Peiffer
  • Digital Public Library of America: Tom Johnson and Mark Matienzo
  • Europeana Foundation: Valentine Charles and Antoine Isaac
  • Kennisland: Maarten Zeinstra
  • University of California San Diego: Esmé Cowles
  • University of Oregon: Karen Estlund
  • Florida State University: Richard J. Urban
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<![CDATA[DPLAFest Attendees: Support LGBTQ Youth in Indiana!]]> 2015-04-17T00:00:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2015/dplafest-attendees-support-lgbtq-youth-in-indiana This is a joint blog post by DPLAFest attendees Benjamin Armintor and Christina Harlow, and DPLA staff members Mark Matienzo and Tom Johnson.

After the passage of SEA 101 (the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act), many scheduled attendees of DPLAFest were conflicted about its location in Indianapolis. Emily Gore, DPLA Director for Content, captured both this conflict and the opportunity the location provides when she wrote:

We should want to support our hosts and the businesses in Indianapolis who are standing up against this law… At DPLAfest, we will also have visible ways to show that we are against this kind of discrimination, including enshrining our values in our Code of Conduct.  We encourage you to use this as an opportunity to let your voice and your dollars speak.

As DPLAFest attendees, patronizing businesses identifying themselves with Open for Service is an important start, but some of us wanted to do more. During our visit to Indianapolis, we are donating money to local charities supporting the communities and values that SEA 101 threatens.

One such local charity is the Indiana Youth Group (IYG). The IYG “provides safe places and confidential environments where self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth are empowered through programs, support services, social and leadership opportunities and community service. IYG advocates on their behalf in schools, in the community and through family support services.” IYG was written up as a direct-action donation option in the New Civil Rights Movement, and they provide services and support in parts of the state with a more hostile legal environment than Indianapolis.

This kind of local, direct action effort needs our support in Indiana right now.  If you can, please consider donating to the Indiana Youth Group while in Indiana for DPLAFest. There is an existing GoFundMe campaign that IYG recommended linked below. If you choose to donate via GoFundMe, please consider tagging your donation with #DPLAFest so that we can communicate the goodwill of DPLAFest attendees as a group to the charity. The GoFundMe campaign sends money directly to IYG regardless of fundraising goals.

GoFundMe for Indiana Youth Group: http://www.gofundme.com/qpkabg

You can also donate via PayPal through IYG's website. If you choose to donate through PayPal, please consider mentioning DPLAFest in the related forms on IYG site. IYG has offered to collate those responses with donations to again communicate the positive support DPLAFest attendees give to the charity and to LGBTQ youth in the state of Indiana.

Thank you for considering joining us and other DPLAFest attendees in supporting LGBTQ communities in Indiana. We look forward to seeing you in Indianapolis.

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<![CDATA[Profit & Pleasure in Goat Keeping]]> 2015-02-26T00:00:00-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2015/profit-and-pleasure-in-goat-keeping Two weeks ago, we officially announced the initial release of Krikri, our new metadata aggregation, mapping, and enrichment toolkit.

In light of its importance, we would like to take a moment for a more informal introduction to the newest members of DPLA’s herd. Krikri and Heiðrún (a.k.a. Heidrun; pronounced like hey-droon) are key to many of DPLA’s plans and serve as a critical piece of infrastructure for DPLA.

They are also names for, or types, of goats.

Why goats? As naturally curious, browsing animals that will try to consume almost anything, our new caprine friends are especially suited to their role in uncovering and sharing treasures of our cultural heritage (by consuming metadata and producing enriched Linked Data).

Krikri makes it possible to harvest from multiple sources (e.g. OAI-PMH), map the resulting metadata to Linked Data, and perform quality control and data enrichment.

We’ve taken care to build these features to be broadly useful so we can share with others doing similar work.  So the name is fitting, as Kri-Kri is a feral goat.

Heidrun, Krikri’s ruminating counterpart, is DPLA’s local implementation of the Krikri features. This is the application that handles the harvests specific to our partners and enriches metadata for the DPLA Portal and Platform API. Heiðrún is named after the mythical Norse goat that eats the leaves and buds off the tree Læraðr and produces mead—enough for all to have their fill.  We couldn’t think of a better goat to represent DPLA!

The title of this post notwithstanding, we remain as committed as ever to openness and to free, democratic access to knowledge. Accordingly, both Krikri and Heidrun are free and open source software.

Goats are notorious escape artists, anyhow. Let us know if any of ours wander into your backyards.

You can find more information about Krikri and Heidrun at our overview page for the project, and in the form of a recent presentation at Code4lib 2015 (video).

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<![CDATA[What DPLA and DLF Can Learn from Code4lib]]> 2015-02-18T00:00:00-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2015/what-dpla-and-dlf-can-learn-from-code4lib This post has been crossposted to the Digital Library Federation blog.

Code4lib 2015 was held last week from February 9-12, 2015 in Portland, Oregon. The Code4lib conferences have grown in the last ten years, both in terms of size and scope of topics. This growth is particularly impressive when you consider that much of the work of organizing the conference falls upon a circulating group of volunteers, with additional organizational support from organizations like the Digital Library Federation. It has become clear to me that the Code4lib community is interested in ensuring that it can develop and support compelling and useful conferences for everyone who chooses to participate.

I believe communities like Code4lib are important for organizations like the Digital Public Library of America and the DLF in several ways. First, Code4lib conferences provide a structure that allows its community members to have venue to act on areas of interest. While Code4lib has a similar process to the DLF Forum for selecting sessions, the key difference is there are ample opportunities with semi-structured time for community members to self-organize. For example, each Code4lib conference has multiple blocks for five-minute lightning talks that open for signup at the conference itself. These presentations are often the most memorable content from the Code4lib conferences, as they include an element of risk, such as a live demo, an unrehearsed presentation, or untested ideas. Code4lib also ensures ample time for breakout sessions. Like lightning talks, topics for breakout sessions are determined at the conference itself, rather than in advance. These topics can range quite widely, from working sessions to collaborate on software development, to discussing ways to work through very specific but shared problems.

Secondly, Code4lib and communities like it provide a forum to talk through their values openly and honestly. While it was not an easy conversation, the community deliberated and ultimately developed a code of conduct for its conference and online channels. Conference presentations at this year’s Code4lib have also made it clear that there are social implications for the cultural heritage technology community in terms of how we adopt, develop, and release open source software, such as “Your Code Does Not Exist in a Vacuum” by Becky Yoose, and Jason Casden and Bret Davidson’s presentation, “Beyond Open Source.” Other important presentations from this year that talk about values within our community include Jennie Rose Halperin’s “Our $50,000 Problem: Why Library School?”; Margaret Heller, Christina Salazar and May Yan’s “How To Hack it as a Working Parent”; and the two keynote presentations by Selena Deckelmann and Andromeda Yelton.

Finally, Code4lib is important to organizations like DLF and DPLA because it provides the opportunity to have a strong regional focus. When community members have significant interest to see an event in their region, they are welcome to organize regional meetings or groups along the same rough model. So far, this has included several regional meetings in the United States and Canada, as well as two regional groups in Europe, Code4lib Japan, and Code4GLAM Australia. Having this flexibility can make it easier for people access to large travel budgets to participate in a larger community, and can improve outreach opportunities for organizations like DPLA and DLF.

DPLA and DLF have a great opportunity to support and learn more from the vibrant Code4lib community, by encouraging members within our networks to self-organize in similar ways. In particular, we at DPLA look forward to providing an opportunity to do this at DPLAfest 2015, to be held April 17-18, 2015 in Indianapolis. We are particularly eager to see members of the DLF and Code4lib communities attend and participate in shaping large-scale cultural heritage networks for the future. In addition, DPLA and DLF are offering DPLAfest 2015 cross-pollinator travel grants to support attendance by staff from DLF members not currently part of a DPLA Hub team. Please consider applying - we would love to support your attendance!

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<![CDATA[A Helping Hand: Free Software and the DPLA]]> 2014-02-24T00:00:00-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2014/a-helping-hand-free-software-and-the-dpla As you probably know, DPLA is committed to making cultural heritage materials held in America's libraries, archives, and museums freely available to all, and we provide maximally open data to encourage transformative uses of those materials by developers. In addition, DPLA is also proud to distribute the software we produce to support our mission to the wider community. Dan Chudnov, the Director of Scholarly Technology at the George Washington University Libraries, recently wrote:

... being able to write software ourselves means we can take advantage of the many software solutions others have already developed. And in turn, when we write an application ourselves, we can share it with others.

DPLA would not exist as we know it today without free and open source software, and accordingly, it is a reasonable expectation that we leverage our ability to develop new software by sharing what we develop openly with the rest of the world. Here are some the different ways that free and open source software supports our work, both in terms of software that we use and software we've developed.

  • Ingesting data from hubs. We receive data from our hubs in a variety of formats, and we use the Akara framework and the Python programming language to process and enrich the data to conform to the DPLA Metadata Application Profile. Once processed, the data gets stored in CouchDB, an open source database.
  • The DPLA platform. The platform, which provides an API to DPLA's data, is a Ruby on Rails application that interacts with our Elasticsearch search index.
  • The DPLA portal. Our portal is our public interface to the materials provided to us by our content and service hubs, and is built using Ruby on Rails, the PostgreSQL database platform, and JavaScript libraries such as Backbone.js, Leaflet, and jQuery.
  • DPLA Exhibitions. Our exhibitions are built using Omeka, and feature a zoomable image viewer using the OpenSeadragon JavaScript Library.

All of this software that we've developed -- the DPLA ingestion code, platform, portal, and exhibitions -- is available on Github under a free software license, such as the GNU Affero Public License. We look forward to getting your feedback if you try out our software, particularly as we move towards giving back further to the free software community as our technology staff grows.

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<![CDATA[The Greatest Adventure]]> 2013-11-20T13:00:00-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2013/the-greatest-adventure With apologies to Rankin/Bass and Glenn Yarbrough, the greatest adventure is what lies ahead. After almost four great years working for Manuscripts and Archives at the Yale University Library and two and a half rewarding years as the Technical Architect on ArchivesSpace, I am excited to announce that I’ve accepted a position as the Director of Technology for the Digital Public Library of America, a small but well-supported non-profit dedicated to free and open access to cultural heritage materials. More information about my new position can be found in the press release.

While I am sad to be leaving a great institution and a great project, both with fantastic colleagues, I look forward to contributing my time, energy and expertise to the addressing the huge challenges and encouraging the exciting possibilities of DPLA. If you’d like to join me in this adventure, I’m also happy to announce that DPLA will be hiring two Technology Specialists very soon, so if you’re interested or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

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<![CDATA[Computer Anonymous New York]]> 2013-10-22T09:30:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2013/computer-anonymous-nyc In my previous post, I wrote about wanting to address issues of privilege in the space between archives and technology. As a first step, I mentioned organizing a New York group of Computer Anonymous. I’m pleased to announce that we’ve scheduled our first meeting:

Tuesday, October 29, 2013, 6:30 PM - ?, at Pacific Standard, 82 Fourth Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

We have about seven people who have indicated that they’re planning on attending. If you’re interested, please comment here, contact me via Twitter or Email, or leave a comment on this Github issue.

I believe that a Computer Anonymous group in New York is a great chance to start having both tough and positive conversations. I realize that it won’t solve everything, and that our initial location may not be ideal, but I’m certainly amenable to other ideas and doing better outreach. I want to see both the technology and archives professions become more diverse, more equitable, and healther communities that in which I can encourage others to join.

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<![CDATA[Cha(lle)nging the dynamics of privilege in archives and technology]]> 2013-10-15T23:23:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2013/privilege-archives-technology Like others, I found the presidential address of Jackie Dooley last August’s Society of American Archivists annual meeting to be problematic. At the time, I had little more to add than what was articulated by others, such as Sam Winn’s post on professional privilege. As the dust settles, though I’ve gotten a lot more clarity.

The Society of American Archivists is not really an easy place to examine our privilege or our struggle. There are many ways in which we desperately need to examine privilege within the context of our profession as well as the overall organization, but for now, I’m going to limit this post to addressing an issue that has been racing through my head since the SAA annual meeting, which concern privilege and the intersection of archives and technology, the area in which I work.

I am nothing if not enthusiastic about open culture and open source software and their transformative potential. I release my own work (meaning software, presentations, writing, etc.) under an open source or Creative Commons license whenever possible, and I’ve spend the better part of the last three and a half years working on technology projects within archives that have developed open source software (ArchivesSpace and the AIMS project, which developed the requirements for and prototype of Hypatia). Yet I’m troubled when I am put in the position of having to encourage colleagues to participate in open source, knowing that only 1.5% of open source community members are women, that incidents of sexism (trigger warnings on links from that post) are so rampant that they merit being documented, and that women and people of color in my our profession can’t speak out for fear of having charges of snark or airing dirty laundry leveled against them. I also have my concerns that “digital archives” (whatever that may be) is becoming one of the least diverse and welcoming areas of our profession, despite there being a history of amazing women working in this field like Margaret Hedstrom and Nancy McGovern.

There are a few things that I want to do to start to fix this, to make this space of the profession to be more safe, welcoming, and supportive:

Restructuring the dynamic of continuing archival education and mentorship. I am not convinced that continuing archival education is really all that helpful beyond getting either a big picture view or focusing minutely on using specific tools. In many cases we presume that the level of expertise of the instructor far exceeds that of the student. Despite being a so-called “expert” in born digital records and software development for this profession, I disclaim this expertise by realizing that the process of learning for this stuff has to be continuous, and is largely driven by focusing on either relevance to a task at hand or personal curiosity. Satisfying the latter is usually only possible if you have some degree of privilege. What I’d like to see is a different type of educational dynamic where people with different backgrounds and strengths, types professional experience, and issues to solve come together with some regularity - to share skills, to look to each other for counsel, and to break bread together as equals as we progress forward on common goals. I think this absolutely has to happen at a smaller level than an organization like SAA, and perhaps locally is the best option.

Developing explicitly safe spaces for professional interaction. I’ve seen many definitions for safe space, but that developed by Advocates for Youth is by far one of the clearest:

a place where anyone can relax and be fully self-expressed, without fear of being made to feel uncomfortable, unwelcome, or unsafe on account of biological sex, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, cultural background, age, or physical or mental ability; a place where the rules guard each person’s self-respect and dignity and strongly encourage everyone to respect others

Despite my concerns about SAA’s efficacy for some of these issues, an actionable effort for SAA would be to develop a code of conduct for its events. I am happy to say that Code4lib adopted a code of conduct over the last year, as did the Digital Library Federation. Stanford University Libraries also have strongly encouraged their employees to only attend conferences with anti-harassment policies.

I’m also hoping to try out this educational model I mentioned above within the New York area some time soon, and I’d like to get together with others interested in getting a better understanding of applied technology and how we collaborate that values everyone’s expertise equally. In the short term, I’ve also decided to organize a Computer Anonymous group in New York with Alex Duryee. Computer Anonymous (which doesn’t have anything to do with Anonymous) describes itself as the following:

This might be the group for you if you want to meet socially conscious nerds to talk about interesting things. This is not an entrepreneurial meetup, nor is it networking: It is a support group, a place to meet good people and talk about good and bad things. … [T]he primary goal is to create a social group for people in and around tech, from all backgrounds, where they feel comfortable and welcome.

If you’re interested and have any feedback, be it concerns, suggestions, or encouragement, please comment here or reach out to me on Twitter.

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<![CDATA[Collaboration Before Preservation: Recovering Born Digital Records in the Stephen Gendin Papers]]> 2013-09-26T00:00:00-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2013/collaboration-before-preservation-recovering-born-digital-records-in-the-stephen-gendin-papers For some, the phrase “born digital resources” may be unfamiliar, but Ricky Erway, Senior Program Officer at OCLC Research wrote a brief essay entitled Defining “Born Digital”, which provides a handy, working definition: “items created and managed in digital form.” Manuscripts and Archives, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and Yale University Library overall have had a notable history of working with born digital resources over the past ten years.

Past projects undertaken within the Yale University Library have included the Fedora and the Preservation of University Records project (funded by the National Historical Records and Publications and Records Commission, in collaboration with Tufts University Digital Collections and Archives), Michael Forstrom’s case study of the George Whitmore papers in the Beinecke 1, the migration of government information on CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs 2, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project Born-Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship (AIMS), a collaboration between Yale, University of Virginia, Stanford University, and University of Hull. In 2012, the AIMS project received an National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Award.

Manuscripts and Archives shares a lab space for working with born digital records and obsolete media with the Beinecke. The lab began as a result of our collaboration with the Beinecke on the AIMS project, and now a few years after it began, we have one of the best facilities in the northeastern United States to work with old computer media formats. Our equipment includes consumer-grade computers and drives for a variety of media formats (floppy disks, compact discs and DVDS, Iomega Zip disks, etc.), as well as some specialized equipment, such as forensic write blockers, which prevent a computer or its operating system from modifying the data on a disk or device during the transfer process. We have recently begun a project to begin arrangement and description for a number of collections that contain born digital records. While MSSA staff including myself will be writing more in the future about processing these collections for this blog, I wanted to write a post about a specific example within one of the collections we are processing that emphasizes the importance of collaboration both within Yale and beyond about our efforts to preserve and provide access to born digital records.

MSSA holds the papers of Stephen Gendin (1966-2000), a lifelong HIV/AIDS activist and writer. Gendin’s activism started soon after he tested positive for HIV as a freshman at Brown University. Gendin was an early member of ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a direct action-focused group, and he founded ACT UP/Rhode Island in 1987. With Sean Strub, in the early 1990s Gendin co-founded the Community Prescription Service, a business and advocacy group for patients requiring FDA-approved drugs for treatment of HIV/AIDS. With the exception of the born digital records within the collection, Gendin’s papers have been processed. After consulting with Arrangement and Description Archivist Matthew Gorham, who originally processed this collection, and Mary Caldera, MSSA’s Head of Arrangement and Description, I agreed to assist with the processing of the born digital records within the collection.

The born digital records within Gendin’s papers, which were created approximately between 1985 and 2000, were received on a variety of removable computer media, including 3.5” and 5.25” floppy disks, a CD-ROM, and a SyQuest 44 megabyte 5.25” removable hard disk cartridge. While we have established some infrastructure and procedures for working with very common computer media formats, this would be the first time in which we had to work with SyQuest cartridges. While not necessarily uncommon when they came to market, today SyQuest cartridges are now very difficult to read because the original drives are very hard to find.

Syquest photo

SyQuest 44 MBs. Photo by portmanteaus.

My first goal was to set forth and find a drive that could read these cartridges, and I turned to my network of colleagues who had similar expertise and equipment. Don Mennerich, a MSSA alumnus and a digital archivist in the Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library, has a similar lab as we have within the Sterling Memorial Library, and I scheduled time to visit him. Don had a SyQuest drive that he was not able to get working, so the first order of business was to see if I could help him make it work. After spending about an hour or so there, we made no progress, but he agreed to lend me his drive on the condition that he could visit our lab at Yale to transfer data from a SyQuest cartridge in NYPL’s holdings if I was able to get it to work. I did some research on SyQuest cartridges and found documentation about how to write-protect them thanks to Al Kossow’s Bitsavers project, which is an online repository of software and documentation for old computers. Kossow, a former software engineer at Apple, is the Robert N. Miner Software Curator of the Computer History Museum.

Syquest photo

Write-protecting the SQ400 disk cartridge. 3

I brought the drive to our lab the following week, and tested it with similar combinations of hardware. After remembering that Michael Forstrom, an archivist at the Beinecke, had brought over an Apple PowerBook G3 “Wallstreet” laptop for our potential use in the lab about three years ago, I realized that I could likely get the borrowed drive working with that computer, and asked Gabby Redwine, the Beinecke’s digital archivist to confirm this. The “Wallstreet” PowerBook G3 has been described by Doug Reside as “Rosetta machine” given its ability to act as “a translation aid for those wishing to transfer information from one encoding to another.” 4 In particular, the PowerBook in our lab has a SCSI port, to which we could connect the SyQuest drive, as well as a drive for Zip disks, with which we could transfer the data to a more recent machine. After a bit of trial and error, I was able to get the PowerBook to recognize the drive and to read the disk, which appeared to contain several databases.

Even though we were able to read the cartridge, my colleagues in Manuscripts and Archives and I still have a good amount of work in front of us to process the born digital records in Gendin’s papers and to integrate the description of those records into the existing finding aid. In the words of Erin O’Meara’s presentation from the OCLC Research Past Forward conference at Yale University this summer, “no one cooks the bacon alone.” In other words, one person cannot do all of this work in isolation – it requires collaboration within the department and institution, and it requires drawing on a variety of expertise, including knowledge about the collection and its creator, that of the archivists who have previously processed these and similar collections, and those of us who have expertise and knowledge about current and obsolete computer technology.

Thinking beyond this sort of collaboration, it should be clear that, as MSSA’s digital archivist, even I needed to draw on a strong professional network to be able to even begin doing this work. Our lab did not have the equipment necessary to work with these materials, so I had to connect with colleagues like Don and Gabby, and use community resources such as Bitsavers as my base of resources and knowledge for obsolete and now rare storage technology. Ben Fino-Radin, formerly the digital conservator at Rhizome, writes in his post “It Takes A Village To Save a Hard Drive” about the experience of recovering and transferring the work of artist Phil Sanders during the New Museum’s XFR STN exhibition as one that needed to leverage a grassroots network that brought together equipment, practicing artists, cultural heritage and preservation professionals, computer history experts and enthusiasts, humanities scholars, and beyond. While more and more academic research libraries such as the Yale University Library grow their capacity to work with born digital content, it is clear that we will not be successful unless we also continue to develop and leverage a strong community based on expertise, trust, and collaboration.

In that spirit, I will continue to share the information that I gain in working with these materials, both on this blog and in other channels such as the Yale ERecs blog about my work and my discoveries. In particular, I will be writing a more detailed blog post about the work I’ve undertaken with the media and records in the Stephen Gendin papers and in other collections I help to preserve and make accessible for our patrons.

References

  1. Michael Forstrom, “Managing Electronic Records in Manuscript Collections: A Case Study from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.” American Archivist 72(2) (2009): 460-477.

  2. Gretchen Gano and Julie Linden, “Government Information in Legacy Formats: Scaling a Pilot Project to Enable Long-Term Access.” D-Lib Magazine 13(7/8) (2007). doi:10.1045/july2007-linden

  3. SQ555 Removable Cartridge Drive: OEM Technical Reference Manual. SyQuest Technology, June 1990, p. 2-5. Available from bitsavers.org.

  4. Doug Reside, “Rosetta Computers.” Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Gabriela Redwine, and Richard Ovenden. CLIR Publication No. 149. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, December 2010, p. 20. Available from http://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub149/.

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<![CDATA[Emotion, Archives, Interactive Fiction, and Linked Data]]> 2013-02-18T01:03:00-05:00 http://matienzo.org/2013/emotion-archives-interactive-fiction-linked-data [Edit (Feb 24, 2013): Thanks to the fantastic work of Tara Robertson, the video of my lightning talk is now available!]

I gave a lightning talk entitled “Wielding the Whip: Affect, Archives, and Ontological Fusion” at the 2013 Code4lib conference in Chicago, Illinois. This lightning talk was one of the most difficult presentations I’ve ever given for a number of reasons, including the emotional aspect of the content itself, as well as the fact that several of the ideas I was trying to articulate weren’t fully baked. I’ve been thinking about this for the four to six months in various capacities and with different focuses, especially as I read more interactive fiction and learn more about it (as well as about hypertext in general). This post serves as an expansion of some of the ideas in my lightning talk and as a way to further the discussion around the following question:

Can we write interactive fiction and (semi-/para-)fictional hypertext that leverages linked data to create an emotional connection to the “real world”?

Emotion in the archives

Starting from the beginning of my talk, I invoked a presentation from last November by Tim Sherratt that explored the role of emotion in archives. Tim’s presentation is very compelling, and I won’t go over it in detail here. One of the most critical points that Tim made was asking why we refuse to acknowledge the place of emotion in archives (arguably, both in materials themselves and in archival practice):

Why are we so reluctant to acknowledge that archives are repositories of feeling? Is emotion meaningless because it can’t be quantified, dangerous because it can’t be controlled, or does it simply not fit with the professional discourse of evidence, authority and reliability.

Tim’s presentation also referenced two other things that influenced my thinking. The first was another talk he’d given recently at the National Digital Forum (NDF) in New Zealand that urged us to think about linked data as more than just an infrastructure project, and as a means to contextualize stories. The other was Courtney Johnston’s NDF presentation, which in part ends with her articulation of a “daydream” about a Museum of Emotions:

For a long time I have been frustrated that I can’t search our collections by emotion. Cataloguers record a factual description (‘Boy, aged approximately five, wearing woollen pullover and crying’) but rarely emotional tone or content (‘Boy, aged approximately five, wearing woollen pullover and crying with frustration’). But I want to type happy or sad or loving or bored or awed into a search box and get a stream of results.

The presentations by Tim and Courtney resonated with me because it seems that archives (in the sense of being cultural heritage institutions) can very rarely acknowledge their emotional aspects. Language used in our descriptive apparatuses is often flat in affect and feels clinical to me even when the records don’t have emotional content. As Courtney suggests, emotion could be essential in the discovery process for certain types of collections or subjects. But by far, emotion is how we develop our bond with the past represented through records.

Archives of emotion

My lightning talk also engaged with some of the ideas put forth by Ann Cvetkovich. I’ve recently started reading her book An Archive of Feelings. The book focuses on a slightly different meaning for the word “archive” when she defines “an archive of feelings” as “cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions … encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception.” Cvetkovich establishes the necessity of this shift through the focus of her research on trauma:

Because trauma can be unspeakable and unrepresentable and because it is marked by forgetting and dissociation, it often seems to leave behind no records at all. … It thus demands an unusual archive, whose materials, in pointing to trauma’s ephemerality, are themselves frequently ephemeral. Trauma’s archive incorporates personal memories, which can be recorded in oral and video testimonies, memoirs, letters, and journals.

This has made me realize that we don’t have much to gain about quibbling about what “archives” are or are in many cases. This is not just an issue of “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Cvetkovich’s definition includes that which is not “normally” archival because of the need to represent that which is problematic to document (i.e., in her words “to make not just texts but whole cultures visible”). In the broadest sense, claiming something may not be or is not “archives” constitutes a form of erasure of that which refuses to be assimilated (cf. pages 11-12). In a discussion with Kathryn Garcia, Catherine Lord, and Martabel Wasserman, Cvetkovich also articulates the importance of establishing context and recognizing the social relations inherent in archives:

When you do research in queer archives you discover that behind every name or better-known name, there are always so many other names. Archives allow you to start tracking those friendships and connections. Those relationships are the foundation for the production of art and for a life well lived (which might be one of the best forms of art) – and, indeed, the ability to do anything in the world. … I always want people to take their own connections seriously. There is a kind of political depression that can come from the sense of belatedness we discussed earlier: “they had this special set of relations and we don’t.” … There is still a tremendous amount of scholarship to be done just to fully excavate those queer social worlds. But I want that work not to mystify those worlds but instead to provide enabling models for you and me having this conversation or for the conversations I have with my friends.

The archive, then, ultimately also has the possibility as serving as an empowering tool - not just in capturing culture, emotion and lives, but also as a resource in terms of allowing us to build a bond to past worlds and lives. It is ultimately also a site of creation and construction of cultural works and emotion. While Cvetkovich says she means something different than the “traditional” meaning for “archives,” I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that, given the right situation, they could have also serve a similar dual purpose.

Small data, big data, and platform as a social monopoly

Tim Sherratt’s NDF presentation also specifically acknowledged the need to “fight back against the homogenisation of data” in the big data world, and casting the creation of companion narratives that linked to cultural heritage resources as “small stories.” This reminded me of some of the recent work by my colleagues Amelia Abreu and Amelia Acker on developing a research agenda for small data. At the same time, I’ve had a growing concern about the use of platforms like Facebook as a means to collect and analyze data created through the behavior of those users. While this is troublesome on its own, I’ve found it moreso with the addition of Facebook Graph Search available as an end-user tool. There’s a bit of discomfort when browsing through the Actual Facebook Graph Searches blog, and even more so when you consider the tangible ramifications of the parody video “When Facebook Resurrected the Dead”, created by the blog’s maintainer, Tom Scott.

At a larger scale, my primary issue is how Facebook generates value through free labor, or in the words of Böhm, Land, and Beverungen, “work that is both free from the obligations, constraints and managerial imperatives of formal employment, and work that is done for free and without financial recompense.” Böhm, Land, and Beverungen’s analysis suggests that autonomous behavior/autonomous labor of Facebook users occurs while their social relations and lives are being subsumed under capital. They identify the advantage that Facebook has in this sector by recognizing that the company is positioning itself to monopolize network-based social interaction:

Bill Gates’ business model is based on creating a form of monopolistic control over the basic infrastructure of the knowledge economy and doing everything he can to ensure that Microsoft maintain effective control over the networks and protocols of communication that are used in the communicative circuits of production in the social factory. Facebook is the new Microsoft. It has established itself as the de-facto gatekeeper and standard of the social networking world.

We see this monopolization more and more places, most notably through frictionless sharing and the increased use of Facebook accounts as an authentication mechanism on the open web. Through this, Facebook-as-platform has reduced some degrees of expression down to the mechanics of consumption, through the “Like” button and traces left by frictionless sharing (that I uploaded a file to Scribd, bought tickets through Ticketmaster, or even just read an article). Reduction of behavior to “likes” and a few select other actions through the platform’s Open Graph Protocol is a form of protological control which, according to Gerlitz and Helmond, “enables particular reactions and activities rather than others.” Accordingly, certain types of affect and emotion are by necessity filtered out within the Facebook Graph because they are fundamentally at odds with the underlying values represented by the platform. Lin and Qiu note that Facebook users who have used the platform longer tend to express emotion less over time. One has to wonder if this has anything to do with the recognition of what and how things are actually shared and expressed through Facebook.

Public emotions: a personal digression

At the very beginning of my talk I indicated that I’d had a difficult year but glossed over many of the details. Providing this information is just as valuable from a contextual standpoint as everything else I’ve covered so far and will mention in this post, so please stay patient.

This year I’ve been dealing with an unusual bout of depression. It is certainly not unusual to be depressed (and I am no stranger to it), but the way one particular bout manifested itself was unusual - it came on suddenly and was oddly crippling to an extent I’d never experienced. My tendency, when depressed, is not to reach out to people. This time, however, I was compelled to acknowledge it - not entirely publicly, but to select friends through an email message. This in itself was a big step, and my friends who I wrote to were all great and responsive. At the same time it made me want to pull away from social media platforms, most notably Facebook. Even on my best days I find Facebook more and more alienating as it becomes allegedly “easier” to maintain friendships and relationships through a few clicks.

Last October, I also lost my friend Laura Tatum to ovarian cancer. Laura, a fellow archivist, University of Michigan alum, and former colleague from Manuscripts and Archives at Yale, was the first person for whom I have ever truly grieved, and she is still on my mind almost constantly. My circle of friends and colleagues, especially in the cultural heritage sector, has last many others as well: Michael Cohen, Lee Dirks, Michael Nash, and of course, Aaron Swartz.

Through depression and loss I have learned that keeping my emotions private was deleterous to my well-being. Making them public was a necessity, even to just a selected public. It also dawned on me that acknowledging emotion publicly could be a political act or bound with political expression, which I surprisingly discovered as also being present in some of Ann Cvetkovich’s more recent work. Expressing emotion itself could also, in some cases, become an expression or assertion of power. The hardest part of this, at least, was finding my voice.

Interactive fiction and hypertext

Some time last fall I started getting curious about hypertext as literature. It probably started as a result of reading about Michael Joyce’s “afternoon, a story” in Matthew Kirschenbaum’s book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. This was all well and good, and it piqued my curiosity further. What I noticed, however, was that these “serious” works felt somehow fundamentally inaccessible. It wasn’t because I was by intimidated by their authors or their content. The level of commitment required to find them, purchase them, ensure that they’d work, however - that’s what pushed me away. I didn’t feel like I could take a risk with a work of hypertext that saw itself as “serious.” It also felt in some ways alien to the hypertext that I use everyday and in which I feel fluent: the World Wide Web.

I’d never considered myself much of a gamer but I was also curious about interactive fiction. (Where the boundaries lie between hypertext and interactive fiction is not something about which I’m certain.) I’d played a few Infocom games growing up, and I found a few others. There are a couple of things that really drew me in, however. The first was reading about First Draft of the Revolution, a collaborative work between Liza Daly and Emily Short. I was impressed with the elegance in design and content, and it felt compelling that this all could be experienced in a browser. Some time shortly after that I discovered Twine, which seemed like a great system: simple enough to get started, sophisticated enough not to get in the way, particularly if you were trying to build something along the lines of a choose-your-own-adventure piece of interactive fiction.

It all changed - radically - when I discovered Porpentine. Someone I follow on Twitter posted or retweeted a link to her post Creation Under Capitalism and the Twine Revolution. This was heavy stuff. It distilled some of the discomfort I felt with what I thought was “hypertext literature” while demonstrating that an alternative was not only possible, it was already here in the form of something like HyperCard. There is so much exquisite brilliance in her post that any pull quote won’t do it justice. So read it, and read it again. It’s taken me at least five passes and it hasn’t totally sunken in yet. The two quotes that have stuck with the most are the following:

The only sympathetic depiction we can trust is the one we make ourselves, in love and tenderness and the desire for justice. We don’t have to wait. We have the power to create those depictions right now because those depictions live in our bones. They couldn’t give us shit with a budget of $25 million dollars. We can do better for the price of food and shelter.

…and…

Twine is the closest we’ve come to a blank page. It binds itself and it can bind itself along an infinite number of spines extending in any direction. It’s hard to visualize our problems and emotions when they get interrupted by code, but we know the feel of words. They’ve dwelt in us our whole life. They are alive and they want to come out. Twine is the invitation to be personal.

Twine had to be a solution. I started reading works built in Twine. I laughed and was moved in a way I hadn’t been by fiction in quite some time - works like Porpentine’s howling dogs, Adam Dickinson’s weird tape in the mail, and Anna Anthropy’s HUNT FOR THE GAY PLANET. I was utterly devastated by Kim’s Story. I’ve started writing in Twine - I don’t quite feel like I’m on my feet yet, but I’m getting there.

Bringing linked data to Twine and hypertext fiction

Looping back around to where I began this post, I started to wonder if there was a way where I could leverage the “real world” through linked data. We very well could have something simple that would allow people to tell stories - even explicitly fictional ones - that allowed us to pull in details about the past and the present in a more meaningful way. We already can harness emotion through narrative, and if we wanted, we could tie that emotion and the narrative to recorded information - to substantiate it, to reference it, or to refute it.

Tim Sherratt’s presentations have shown what was really possible using simple tools. If it was totally reasonable for Tim to augment a previous presentation using “simple tools, no platforms, and no markup madness,” yet having linked data and have some nice UI tidbits provided by JavaScript and CSS, what would happen when we did the same with hypertext fiction, especially in something as simple as Twine? This could just be just as Tim suggested: stories + data = fighting back.

I had visions of untamed hypertext - interactive fiction built on the native technologies of the web that actively defied the some of the platform’s nature. Inadvertently, I stumbled on a few publications by Jill Walker while I was working on my lightning talk. The two that really got the gears turning were “Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control”, and “Performing Fictions: Interaction and Depiction”. Both works gave me great ideas, and Walker’s notion of feral hypertext spoke to what I felt might be possible with Twine:

Feral hypertext has a tendency to move beneath the radar. It is easy to not identify feral hypertext as hypertext at all. Feral hypertexts are not as clearly delimited and disciplined as domesticated hypertexts are, and our language and culture aren’t designed to speak about things that lack boundaries. What feral hypertexts have in common is that they have reverted to the wild, in one respect or another. They are no longer tame. They won’t do what we expect and they refuse to stay put within boundaries we’ve defined. They don’t follow standards – indeed, they appear to revel in the non-standard, while perhaps building new kinds of standard that we don’t yet understand.

Meanwhile, “Performing Fictions” provided me with an important notion of “ontological fusion,” wherein one world (say, a fictional one) is overlaid on top of another (say, the “actual” world). This is precisely what I wanted to do. But we still have an open question of how we can actually implement these ideas into something that may be useful.

What are we building?

What I want to build is something that’s simple, that stays in the spirit of Twine. I want there be an easy way of annotating text or adding another kind of link to something outside of a Twine story. I want these outside links to be some times obvious - maybe sometimes not. I don’t know how I want to surface this information, or whether (or when) I want a Twine story to pollute the global graph. So roughly, I see us needing to come up with the following:

  • An extension to Twee (Twine’s markup language) and the JavaScript code that turns it into reader-actionable HTML.
  • Some thought to the UI containing the links as represented in a reader-facing Twine story.
  • How to represent these outside resources in Twine node maps.
  • A dead-simple way to add these things using the Twine GUI.

It doesn’t even have to be Twine, but it makes sense because it’s already out there.

I don’t want to worry about the problems of the semantic web. Provenance is an issue near and dear to my heart but focusing on that it this point stands to complicate the entire task of building this. Worrying about the “proper way” to build this stands only to get in the way and threaten the necessity of this being a grassroots project. I want this to be more than an academic exercise. If the semantic web community cares about what we’re doing, maybe what we’re doing matters more than we think.

By taking back or taking issue with linked data through our stories built on a free/libre tool, we are committing a political act. We are fighting back and we’re taking the whole world of knowledge either with us or standing in opposition to it.

Are you on our side?

What do you think we should build?

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<![CDATA[24 Hours: The Day of Digital Archives]]> 2011-10-07T10:05:21-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2011/digital-archives-day Thursday, October 6 was the Day of Digital Archives, organized by friend and colleague Gretchen Gueguen at the University of Virginia. I missed the post deadline yesterday, but it's been a busy week, so I might as well walk through some of the highlights of my work related to digital archives that occurred during that 24 hours from 12 am Thursday to 12 am Friday.

12 AM: It's late, but I'm finishing the last bit of work of writing up lecture notes. This fall, I am teaching a class on digital preservation as an adjunct in the iSchool at Drexel University. The iSchool is on the quarter system, so we have only ten weeks to cover a wide variety of material. Last week the students got an introduction to the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, and this week's topics (on which I am writing the lecture notes) are selection and appraisal, assessment, provenance, and authenticity. Some of the sources of the week's material include a forthcoming case study from the City of Vancouver Archives, the DCC Curation Manual's chapter on appraisal and selection, sections of the CLIR publication Authenticity in a Digital Environment, and the final report of the W3C Provenance Incubator Group. After this I head to bed.

7:30 AM: I've just gotten up and I'm using some downtime to catch up on mailing lists and blogs while I have my morning coffee. I have the chance to briefly look through the current draft of the Reference Model for Economic Sustainability of Digital Curation, currently under development by Chris Rusbridge and Brian Lavoie. I may incorporate part of this into my class as we're spending a week talking about resource allocation and sustainability. I also use this chance to look through the review of different storage and versioning options, including Git, Boar, and CDL Microservices, for digital curation, as written up by Richard Anderson at Stanford University.

8:15 AM: I'm walking up the hill from my hotel to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library for the second day of an ArchivesSpace technical planning meeting. ArchivesSpace is the project to merge the functionality of Archivists' Toolkit and Archon and to create a next-generation archival management system. On the walk up, I was talking to Joe Pawletko from NYU about case studies and other good literature to get an overview of electronic records issues. I give him the heads up about the forthcoming issue of Archivaria for which I was guest editor, our forthcoming whitepaper on the AIMS project Yale participated in with University of Virginia, Stanford University, and the University of Hull, and the CLIR report Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Institutions co-edited by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabby Redwine.

9 AM to 5 PM: The rest of the work day is booked solid with the ArchivesSpace meeting. We spend some time picking apart architectural requirements, data model issues, and look at the possibility of revising the data model to include an abstract notion of events. While not an intentional decision, several of us in the room realize that we're inadvertently approaching an object model that looks a lot like that of PREMIS.

7 PM to 9 PM: Most of the ArchivesSpace team goes out for a lovely project dinner at Berta's in Old Town San Diego. Over dinner we start discussing the issues - particularly in terms of flexibility - surrounding the implementation of METS.

9 PM to 10:30 PM: Brian Tingle from the California Digital Library and I meet up with our friend Declan Fleming from UCSD and his wife for good beer. We discuss the potential for organizing a CURATEcamp during SAA next year in San Diego and  possibility of organizing an off-the-grid unconference (possibly in the Pacific Northwest). We also talk a bit about UCSD's Digital Asset Management System and its flexibility provided by representing all of the metadata and relationships within the DAMS as RDF. We argue a bit about how librarians may not feel constrained enough when they have to think beyond implementation of a specific schema or set thereof.

11 PM: I'm back at the hotel and ready to pass out. It's been a long day, and I'm positive I'll start dreaming of electric sheep.

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<![CDATA[How to Hack SAA]]> 2011-08-21T12:50:48-04:00 http://matienzo.org/2011/how-to-hack-saa Inspired by my friend Declan Fleming's "How to Hack Code4lib," I have been motivated to put together a guide to surviving and enjoying the Annual Meeting. It can be a seemingly scary (and potentially lonely) experience if it's your first conference, and we archivists are not always known for our extrovertedness. So, without further ado, here is my brief list of suggestions - again, some of which have been shamelessly stolen adapted from Declan's guide.

Hop on Twitter (#saa11) and read for a while

Unlike code4lib SAA doesn't have an IRC channel, but we do have a pretty active backchannel on Twitter. I'm not necessarily trying to convince everyone to join Twitter, but you can search for the conference hashtag (#saa11) and see the current conversation, which ranges from discussion of session-related points to making social plans. Be warned that the level of discourse on the channel can be very similar to how a group of friends would be talking around a table full of drinks. The topics range from inside jokes about bacon and sad hairstyles to esoteric explorations of provenance.

Listen 90% of the time / Talk 10% of the time

SAA is jammed with characters who are passionate about some aspect of our profession. Ask a question or two then sit back and bask in the output. Don't worry, you'll have the chance to talk about what you are working on when your companion stops to drink beer.

If you don't have a lot to share, at least try to be funny

My dirty little non-secret is that I love SAA but I'm not really a typical archivist. I'm a technical-type, but I love hearing what's new in the field. I often don't have much to offer in terms of processing plans or outreach strategies, but most people can appreciate a sense of humor.

Don't be sexist/racist/*ist

It's great to be funny, but be careful about steering into areas that make segments of the world uncomfortable, or even feel attacked. We have a wonderful opportunity to attract and promote equality in our field and there's no reason to make an underrepresented group feel unwanted just to get a couple laughs.

One group that gets beat up on a lot is vendors. There's a healthy debate that comes and goes about whether it's good to have a place to vent, or if making vendors the butt of jokes limits their interaction in the community. One of the great strengths of the community is that the norms are constantly in flux and openly discussed and debated.

Be willing to laugh at yourself

I've found that making fun of myself is a safe outlet for being bitingly clever. And once you've shown people that you don't mind being a target, they'll let their hair down and pick on you too. Besides, why not beat everyone to the punch.

Don't be intimidated by what looks like the "in crowd"

There is no in crowd - but there are many social circles. There are people who jump in and participate - both to the conversation and the ongoing work involved in promoting and supporting SAA. You'll see them as the center of things until you actually get involved - a little at first to learn the social norms of the group, then more and more until you realize that new people are seeing you as part of the in crowd. Now your job is to make the new people feel included.

Share your passion about any one thing

Being an archivist for any amount of time infects you with the depth and longevity of the problems that need to be addressed. Supporting a profession that has such a long tradition, and helping to bring it into the present and future is more satisfying than I ever thought possible. I have a passion for technology and making things talk to other things in easy ways. I've shared this a few times in bar conversations and formal talks. Nothing got people talking to me more than this.

Be ready to learn new stuff

Listen to others' passions and see if any of it strikes a chord in you. There are times when I'm listening to a talk, or on Twitter, and I'll just make lists of things I've never heard of. Later, I'll start Googling around and end up a little smarter.

Expect 80% of the value of the conference to come from things other than the presentations

I used to feel mightily guilty about spending my money - or my employers' money - to sit in a presentation and feel like I got nothing from it. Adding the backchannel to my stream of awareness either helps me ping the crowd for more depth on the presentation, or helps me see that others are struggling as much as I am. Admittedly, the backchannel can be quite distracting, but if you let go and get all Zen and let it flow over and through you, you'll be surprised how much you come away with!

Don't feel guilty about skipping sessions to do other things

Everyone needs downtime to recharge, have a meal or drink with non-archivist friends, or even to check work email. You can give the conference the best when you're not totally overloaded mentally. You can also use session, section or roundtable time to socialize and have valuable conversations with your fellow professionals.

Relax, have fun, and go outside your comfort zone

Sure, you think you want to be a manuscript cataloger or a photo archivist, but you'll have a lot of fun with the electronic records folks, the government types, and even the academics. See you in Chicago!

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