Deciding, Communicating, Planting, and Yes, Archiving

Once again, I have fallen behind in my blog duties and core values. I have missed two opportunities for workshops offered on the core values because of my schedule this semester. The first was on decision-making and the second on communication--both topics would likely have helped me. It is too easy to get so caught up in the tasks and meetings of the moment that you fail to take advantage of opportunities like this that might help you more in the future.

My own thoughts on decision-making are not very linear. My first step in grappling with a decision is to leap to the end rather than the beginning. I have to visualize the end result--that end state that I believe would constitute success--before evaluating the pros and cons, examining resources and consequences, and planning any implementation. When I first started working as an archivist "processing" collections, I would agonize over every decision and over very long and balanced lists of pros and cons. I would worry over all the "what if" consequences of every decision. Once I learned to begin with the end result, the vision would guide the process as surely as a rudder on a boat. Sometimes, it even helps me to take advantage of unexpected ideas and solutions.


I spent the last weekend in Kentucky at the Appalachian Studies Association's annual conference. It gave me an opportunity to engage in my favorite part of communicating and that is listening. All the sessions on folk culture, literature, sustainable agriculture, seed saving, and food preservation were refreshing and inspired me to start thinking of our own garden and produce. Soon, we will turn this rye grass under and start planting potatoes and the seeds that we saved from last year's crop. Consider this a first report on this year's garden.

There is one other thing that I need to address. Many archivists would quarrel with the title of this blog, Archiving in Appalachia. Archives is a noun and shouldn't be changed into a verb, they say. Language like culture evolves over time and is not set in stone or captured--frozen like a bug under glass. The usage of words change. So, I use "archiving." It just sounds more pro-active. I believe that to "archive" Appalachian culture, it will take more than "keeping" documents and images. It will require people living it--replanting the seeds kept for generations, sharing beliefs, dancing the dances, singing the songs, and continuing to stretch those tall tales. For me, archive will be both noun and verb, but maybe I should consider changing the title to just "Archiving Appalachia."

The Deal: Appalachia and 23 Things

Sorry to be away for so long. The garden and canning and the new job have just consumed my life. I know--excuses, excuses. You can see the products of our labor in the picture to the right. This is just the "ready room." You should see the root cellar. Enough beans, corn, tomatoes, tomato sauce, pickles, grape juice, peaches, and potatoes to last through the winter. Those heirloom seeds really produced when gardens around us were doing nothing. Now it is time to dry some apples and put back some cider.

So, what brought me back to the blog? Today, after a long day, I learned that the library at Appalachian State University is launching a group effort of "23 things." That is how this blog started last year when I signed up to do 23 things with the Society of American Archivists. I did it because I wanted to learn more about the new technology that is out there. I admit, I learned a lot. I also came to realize that I wasn't so comfortable with accounts with my information stored in the clouds and displayed all over the internet. I also wasn't very good at checking all the different e-mail accounts, twitter accounts--you name it. You think it is anonymous and that there are so many blogs and wikis out there that no one would notice yours--it was about archiving for goodness sakes. But find me, some people did.

Now the question becomes: Should I do it again? It is a different list of 23 things. It might be good for me. This program is giving us two weeks to do the designated "thing" instead of one. I guess I might as well do it, but here is the deal. I am going to talk about the experiments with the new technology tools, but I am also going to be talking about Appalachia. With each passing day, we lose a little more of the "old knowledge" of our ways. Archivists, more than anyone, understand how much is forgotten. Perhaps by making a practice of some of these "old ways"-- using heirloom seeds, canning, sulphuring apples--something will survive beyond me. I like the combination of technology and traditional culture.

Archiving Seeds: From the Clouds to Dirt or an Archivist Even in Retirement

My two weeks of retirement didn't last nearly long enough. I found myself working even harder than I had ever before. I found myself still archiving but archiving vegetables instead of papers and photographs. We discovered the family heirloom beans in the freezer of an aunt. It started us on a quest to find other heirloom seeds from the area. We found a nursery in Washington County that raised bed plants from heirloom seeds, and a group in Kentucky headed by Bill Best that saves heirloom seeds from around Appalachia. We planted the whole garden in different types of heirloom vegetables and we are working to keep it alive through this spell of heat and drought. I am pleased to report that we have been successful so far.

The garden is doing great with corn reaching way above our heads, and we harvested some tomatoes that weigh between two and three pounds. These old seeds are amazing. So, besides the prospect of canning a year's worth of vegetables for next year. We intend to save those seeds for the next year's garden. I think this archiving project could be among some of the most important efforts that I have ever done. There are no acid free boxes involved, but I have no doubt that we are saving Appalachian food culture.

I have started work at Appalachian State University as the University Archivist. I am sure that those Hollinger boxes are in my future here. I am looking forward to further exploring archiving Appalachian history and culture in this new setting and working on new ways to share this information through the web.

Mountain Culture and History Captured in Podcast

Let me start out by saying that I am not going to get the three things done this week in whatever week of 23 Things this happens to be. We are supposed to explore creating podcasts, recorded sound, video, and a combination of still images and sound. While I have not made the recordings myself, I have worked on a collaborative project to design an iTunes U page for the Archives of Appalachia and to select items from our collection to make available through this page. So far, we have digitized and uploaded over 200 short segments from our recorded sound collection. The site is intended to be a sampler from our collection. You can find our site at http://www.etsu.edu/itunes and then click on the link to the Archives of Appalachia or http://ow.ly/1fHRO

We designed the page around subject categories and topics of interest. We used the following broad categories: Music, Life Cycles - From the Cradle to the Grave,Oral Traditions - Tales and Lore, Life and Times - Stories from Our Past, Subsistence Traditions or Just Plain Living, and Religion. We deliberately chose to use short segments from our oral history collection and folklorists field recording collections, because the people from Digital Media Services in the e-Learning Division told us that the number of downloads on iTunes U would decrease dramatically beyond 15 or 20 minute length segments. While the archivist in me is a bit troubled by presenting these podcasts without the context of the longer recorded interviews, I have been pleased with the use of the site. We have averaged 2000 to 3500 downloads per week. Even at the lowest number, it would be the equivalent of pulling 400 items per day. If our entire staff did nothing else, we could not match this on-line service statistic with in-person service. It reminds me of the traditional song, "John Henry," that recounts a race between a railroad man driving a steel drill by hand and a steam powered drill while building the Big Ben Tunnel in West Virginia. I can relate to John Henry dying with the hammer in his hand. Sometimes I feel like an archivist dying from technology overload, still clinging to the gray manuscript box.

We hope to continue building our iTunes U site and add video recordings to it. We also hope that with our new web page that we can provide additional background information on the collections and speakers and performers featured in the site. All in all, I am pleased with the iTunes U site and believe that it has been worth the effort. We did receive some recognition for it this past Sunday in the local newspaper through a feature story about our digital efforts. http://www.johnsoncitypress.com/News/article.php?ID=74282

I do want to explore combining pictures and sound recordings. We hope to begin producing readings of our Civil War letters and diaries along with photographs and scans of the documents. We want to release them as a series--a continuing story--on iTunes U as part of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Mashups and Badges

This week our assignment was to look at mashups and badges that could be placed on our websites. I first explored Big Huge Lab site and practiced making trading cards using one of my own photographs as well as one from the Archives of Appalachia. It was pretty exciting to see how easy it was to create a very nice looking trading card. I decided to post one of my own photographs from my personal Flickr site rather than the photographs from the Archives. We are in the middle of a total redesign of our web pages and I didn't want to add anything to the old site right now in fear that it would impede progress in getting the new web site up and going.

When thinking about how this could be used with photographs from the Archives, I immediately thought of all our railroad photographs and many devoted railroad buffs that support the Archives. Trading cards, posters, calendars, etc. would be of interest to them. One of the trading cards that I created is to the right of this text.

The next task involved creating a badge for a web page. The first thing that I tried was to create a flash badge using Flickr. I couldn't get it to work. It wouldn't appear in the blog text. After attempting several times, I decided to try the html badge. While it appears on the page below, it doesn't look like what I created in Flickr. The border and background color was lost. I am going to keep experimenting with it.

www.flickr.com Go to Cove of the Doe's photostream

Mountains and Mole Hills: the Small Applications of Web 2.0

Have you ever heard the phrase, "You are making a mountain out of a mole hill?" The statement is intended to say that you are making a big deal about something that truly is quite small. This week the phrase is haunting me, but I feel as if the quest is turned around to turn something really big into something rather small. One of our bluegrass music students put it differently in a song about daily life in prison "making little rocks out of big rocks" all day. This week, in "23 Things," we are looking at Twitter and services that shorten URL's. In the spirit of making larger things small, I will describe my feelings about this week's assignments in one word, conflicted.

The concept of shortening URL's excited me. I chose to try bit.ly. Changing the URL for the Archives of Appalachia's Facebook page from http://www.facebook.com/home.pho#!/pages/Johnson-City-TN/Archives-of-Appalachia/300223478446 to the shortened version, http://bit.ly/ArchivesAppalachia-FB was most definitely an example of making gravel from a boulder. I believe it can be a very useful tool when using Twitter and adding links to our Facebook page. I share a concern that the links would no longer work should the service end, but maybe we would at least get a "tweet" about it. I also discovered that it would not work for everything. Maybe, I should step back and say that I haven't figured out how to make it work for everything. I was equally excited about shortening our link to our iTunesU site. The URL for our iTunesU page is: itms://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/BrowsePrivately/etsu-public.2101594451 which is a very ugly URL. The bit.ly service would shorten the URL, but the link would not work. I could not get the long or short version of the iTunesU address to work from our Facebook page. The link will work from our web page, but it would not work from Facebook. It looks as if bit.ly turns everything into http whether that is correct or not. When adding a link on Facebook, it seemed to do the same. I would welcome any hints about making this work.

Twitter is another matter. I entered into opening an account with absolute dread. When I got to the point of creating a one-line description of myself, I said, "Archivist and native of Appalachia, longing for a simpler life." It made me pause. If I long for a simpler life, what, for heaven's sakes, am I doing with a Twitter account. Having said that, I can see how Twitter could be used to quickly get an announcement out or to share a link to some video or webpage. I also can see how it could be used to feed announcements into a Facebook page. Some of my folklorist friends prefer the Google version, Buzz. Why? They like the fact that you can use more words. They want to make boulders into rocks instead of gravel. Will I continue to "tweet" and "retweet" after completing the "23 Things." I rather doubt it, but you never know, I could have a change of heart.

To catch up on one of the "things" from last week, I did create a Facebook page for the Archives of Appalachia. After about three days of a live page, we have over 140 fans. I was shocked by the speed that the word got out through the social network. I chose to use a page rather than a group after looking at the way several other organizations and groups used their pages or their groups. The group feature worked well with a group of international fiddlers. This Facebook group came together as friends and formed a group because they were all interested in traditional fiddle music. They are scattered throughout the world but regularly share links to recordings and insights about fiddle tunes, performers, etc. It seemed to me that the page would work better for an institution like the Archives of Appalachia. I think it will be an excellent tool to share information about new collections, special events, topics of interest to researchers, etc. It also gave me a chance to do a behind the scenes photo tour of the Archives. I do intend to keep this page going after the 23rd thing is completed.

With all these comments from so many being shared with anybody over services like Facebook and Twitter, I wonder if we are trivializing what we have to say to fit it into the format. Are we creating a mountain out of trivial conversations that are truly just mole hills? I guess the answer to that is up to us. Are we talking "to hear our head roar," as my mother used to say, or are we saying something meaningful? I worry about thinking and communicating in "sound bites." I hope that the "sound bites" can be used to catch the attention of those that would have never thought about archives and the wonderful things that can be found there.

An Introduction to SlideShare

This is week two of 23 Things for Archivists, and we are up to "Thing #3: SlideShare." Each new "thing" we try just reinforces my amazement at how many individuals have put up so many things on the internet for sharing. There is so much information out there that it is difficult to navigate through it to find those few things that are useful to you. It was fairly easy to create an account in SlideShare and to search for presentations that related to Web 2.0. I chose to narrow the search to Web 2.0 and libraries and archives. I found several presentations that were quite interesting. The presentation that focused on the angry staff person giving all the reasons why you should not use Web 2.0 as a means to access your collection was fun but to the point. I certainly have heard all those reasons presented so forcefully that it made me pause to doubt my thinking.

The other thing that I keep realizing with every new application that I explore is that so many of the barriers are falling away. You can create beautiful blog pages without knowing XML and not having access to the server manned by the Office of Information Technology. I created the first web page for the Archives of Appalachia writing the html code on an IBM mainframe using Xedit. It is so much easier now. There are so many more possibilities especially for smaller archives that have limited staff and resources.

The one fear that I am not over is how materials will be used once we have placed them out there on the web. I am excited by the possibility of enriching the information through the contribution of users, but I am concerned about two things. How do you get beyond the trivia and how do you protect the people that you are documenting. This Archives documents life in Appalachia. The culture is one that has spawned many stereotypes, and I have seen requests to use images in a way that can be damaging not only to the individual but also to the Appalachian culture. When I search these sources for materials on Appalachia, I find information on coal and poverty. Maybe I have a new quest to study the region on the web through all these different means of people contributing content to see if the crowd depiction of Appalachia is any different than the stereotype of the hillbilly that has been alive and well since the advent of the color writers at the turn of the century.

Stepping from the Hills into a Digital Abyss

When I first began as an archivist at the Archives of Appalachia, we had one computer, an Apple IIE, that had just been purchased to create a database that would index our manuscript collections. Descriptions of collections were created by a typewriter and sat on a shelf. Mostly, we worried about having boxes and folders enough to store our paper collections. Life was so much simpler then, but it was much more confining. What consumed our thoughts and filled our dreams was how to take the sounds and images and stories of life in Appalachia beyond the confines of the reading room walls. We are still struggling with that, but the possibilities are so much greater. So, now we begin a journey to step into the digital abyss and enter the Web 2.0 world.

We have made a few tentative steps into this new world by using Flickr to post some photographs from our University Archives photograph collection and by creating an iTunesU site with a sampler from our sound recordings. I was amazed to find that there were 3779 downloads from our iTunesU site in the first week of January. This statistic strengthened my resolve to explore new ways to take our collections beyond our storage areas and reading room. So, I am going to try 23 things in the weeks to come. Maybe, they will inspire me and we can find some new (and cheap) ways to fulfill the dreams that we have had since the very beginning of the Archives of Appalachia.