Digitization 101

In a New York Times article, Brewster Kahle talks about expanding what the Internet Archive can do, if anyone (and everyone) can become a curator.  In terms of digitization, this text stood out to me:

A new book scanner was presented; Robert Miller, the archive’s director of books, literally unveiled it. This baby was only 40 inches tall and 62 pounds, versus the earlier version’s six feet and 350 pounds. In other words, it is portable, and can be taken to collections that are too fragile or cumbersome to make their own way to the archive. It’s much easier to use, too.

While that's not quite smaller enough to fit into anyone's home, it is a size that would fit into many libraries.

Abbie Grotke, from the Web Archiving Team Lead at the Library of Congress, had written the first of several blog posts about the LOC's web archiving activities.  In providing context about their activities, she wrote:

We’ve collected over 240 terabytes of content, in almost 40 event and thematic collections. Our strengths are in government, public policy and law: we archive U.S. national elections, house and senate and committee sites, changes in the Supreme Court and legal blawgs.

We also build web archives with our special collection divisions – the Manuscript, Prints and Photographs and Music divisions are archiving sites related to their physical holdings. In recent years Library staff in overseas offices in Egypt, Brazil, Indonesia, India and Pakistan captured born digital content documenting elections and other events.

In her next post, she will discuss the collaborative work that they've been doing.  Check the The Signal blog for the follow-up post.

This news comes from the European Archive.

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Yesterday I watched the inauguration of Barack Hussein Obama with a roomful of people on the Syracuse University campus. Yesterday was momentous on many levels and I'm glad that so many people stopped to watch and be a part of it.

While this blog is focused on digitization, it is important to recognize how technology is being used, because it will affect us at some point. For example:

• Thousands -- of not millions -- of digital photos were taken yesterday. How many of those should be preserved and how?
• Cell phone companies encouraged people to text message rather than making phone calls while in the D.C. area, because voice is more of a burden on the network. I suspect that some of the text messages might be worth saving, but how?
• Lots of information was posted on web sites yesterday. Can it be archived? By the way, some people did take screenshots of the White House web site before and after it changed yesterday. Should the be saved somewhere?
• People posted video messages. Can they be found and archived?
  
• Can the stories of why this is important to people -- yes, all of those personal stories -- be captured and stored for prosperity? Some of these are already on video (news reports), but many others have not been captured.
  

We know how to save the paper records of yesterday, but not the digital records. And it is the digital records of yesterday that really capture what it mean to us. The raw emotions were Twittered, Facebooked, Flickred, etc., and we don't really know how to deal with them.

This is a new era and there are things we need to learn.

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Technorati tags: Archives, Web archiving

Work since the beginning of the year has been like a growing glorious snowball rolling downhill! Notice that I use the word "glorious" so that you know that this is a good snowball. However, I'm now finding that I need to do a bit of "catch-up" before heading off to the SLA Annual Conference in less than two weeks, so my posts here may be slightly less frequent. (For those of you who live where there is no snow, when a snowball rolls downhill, it gets bigger and bigger.)

Last week, I did a digitization workshop that was co-sponsored by the Central NY Library Resources Council and the South Central Regional Library Council. The two councils (consortia) are doing a series of 10 workshops on digitization. I had the pleasure of presenting the first workshop in the series. In February 2008, I'll also have the pleasure of doing the last workshop in the series on marketing. Friday's workshop had nearly 40 attendees including a Benedictine monk! I made two promises at the beginning of the day -- to keep things interesting and to teach them something new (no matter what they already knew). Brother "B" said I delivered on both promises.

At the end of the day, I spent time talking with Steve Schneider, who is involved in WebArchivist.org. Steve came to the workshop in order to hear what libraries are doing in terms of digitization. He, however, is interested archiving web sites and has worked on several projects including the Asian Tsunami, Election 2002 (and 2004), and the September 11 Web Archives. I was impressed to hear how they jumped into action on Sept 12, 2001 and began archiving web sites, realizing that what they were archiving would be of value to others later. WebArchivist is not part of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP), but certainly has things in common with that program.

In general, libraries are aware that they will need to collect and archive materials that are born digital, although -- in the grand scheme of things -- relatively few are thinking seriously about how to do it. Libraries are not yet focused on archiving web site proactively and the information that they contain (which will be lost if not archived). [See addendum below] Understanding why it could be important and then do it requires a leap of faith. "I'm going to do this because I know that in the future, I'll be glad that I did." Some organizations might be able to take that leap of faith more easily than others (and those organizations may not be libraries).

At any rate, talking to Steve made for a wondering end of the week conversation and I look forward to talking with him again! (Personally, I think he should do some presentations in this region on web archiving....)

Now...time to get back to my to-do list...

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Addendum (4:30 p.m.): Ms. Molly has pointed out that librarians are involved in NDIIPP. And I have to admit that I've been to presentations done by librarians who are involved in NDIIPP. However, as I look out across the library community, they are the "exception." They are attached to organizations (or forward-thinking people) who understand the problem and are willing to act. Many librarians are not "there" yet.

Thanks for pointing out my error!

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Technorati tags: Digitization, SLA2007, web archiving