Returning from the Bureaucratic Abyss and Reaching into the Clouds

I know, I know. I have done the thing that I hate most about blogs. I disappeared for a couple of months. I hate that when other people do it. I have no excuse really other than getting caught up in that annual bureaucratic abyss called budgets, annual evaluations and reports, and end-of-semester work. I am also preparing for retirement from my position as director of the Archives of Appalachia and preparing for a new challenge working in North Carolina, but enough about me.

Now that I have gotten caught up on all of those things, I decided to go back and finish the assignments that I missed in 23 Things for Archivists. I am starting back with week 10 on Cloud Computing. After reading through the resources listed, my first thought is that perhaps it is not surprising that there is so much disagreement on how to define or describe cloud computing. It is a cloud, after all. On many Appalachian mornings, you often find that the clouds have descended and draped themselved around the mountains or settled into the valleys. Walking through a cloud on a mountaintop, you feel cut off from the rest of the world below, but you can not grasp it in your hand or hold on to it. I think of cloud computing the same way. I do not have technical knowledge to understand how it all works, but I can sure experience the effects of it.

At the Archives of Appalachia, our main experiences with "cloud computing" have been through photosharing on Flickr and with the creation of an Archives of Appalachia Facebook page. Both cloud computing applications made what seemed impossible, before because of the lack of resources and technical support, not only possible but easy. Do we have a wonderful digital library complete with metadata and information about each image available in Flickr. No, but we have something. We also have the possibility of users adding to our knowledge with the addition of tag and comments. In fact, we did have a visitor to our Flickr site identify the individuals in one of our photos and describe the event captured in the photograph. This would not have been possible if we had waited until we had the time and the money to launch a fully described digital library site. Both of our experiences with Flickr and with Facebook were, I believe, productive and cost effective. They were worthwhile endeavors that I hope will prove useful into the future rather than something that disappears into the cloud.

I do have some doubts about cloud computing especially in the area of personal privacy. I wonder just how much information is being compiled about individuals in the cloud. I wonder if these resources will remain viable and affordable into the future. We are not trusting the cloud to store our digital images and are keeping multiple copies of our uncompressed images. I think that what bothers me most is that it just seems too good to be true that with Flickr you can pay $29.95 a year and upload unlimited numbers of photographs. I am wondering what are the hidden costs and will this continue to be possible.

From Photo Albums to Photo Sharing: How Many Pictures of Trees Are There?

Another week of "Twenty-three Things for Archivists" has just about gone past me. I will admit that I am having trouble keeping up with everything, so this week's post may be short. I bet this is common in the world of blogs--people just get busy and after the initial excitement start to drift away from it. I am still here and trying to compose a new post each week. This week our assignment was to explore photo sharing sites like Flickr, to post some photographs on Flickr (or a competitor's service), and to explore geo-tagging.

I have been familiar with Flickr for some time through friends that have used it. I found it a great way to view photographs from friends in Europe especially. My first realization that archives were using it to share photographs came when I was exploring the website,"Interactive Archivist," http://www.lib.byu.edu/sites/interactivearchivist/ and trying to learn more about Web 2.0. I discovered some articles that talked about experiences at some other universities, and I started exploring their sites. We were facing a 100th anniversary at our university, and my memories of the demand for photographs during the 75th anniversary led me to the conclusion that placing historical photographs of the university on Flickr for people to view and download would be a WONDERFUL idea. So, our journey began into the Web 2.0 world of photosharing. One of our archivists was given the task to create the Flickr site for our University Archives. We have three sets of photographs, over two hundred images, up so far.

This semester, a graduate student studying to be an archivist, approached us about a final project of creating a Flickr site for some of our Appalachian photographs. She wants to focus her project on the tagging and folksonomies and the question of users creation of sets--taking the photographs out of the original context. I agreed to let her use us as a guinea pig, so we are venturing into another Flickr experiment. We want to explore the use of Creative Commons licensing and users adding tags to the photographs.

Do I have doubts about all this? Yes. The archivist and librarian in me would prefer controlled, detailed descriptions such as could be done with ContentDM. The practical side of me realizes that we do not have time to create catalog level descriptions for our photographs. The adventurous part of me realizes that many of our users, such as our rail enthusiasts, know much more about our photographs than we do. Browsing through the public institutional photographs that are in "The Commons" on Flickr, I could see the best of both worlds. The detailed cataloging information in the description and the tags applied by viewers of the images. In many cases, the natural language in the tags applied provided a "richer description" and more possibilities of discovery by users for uses that the archivists perhaps could ever imagine.

When I explored geo-tagging, I was frustrated. I put up some of my own photographs using the Creative Commons licensing and applied geo-tags to some of them. My photostream on Flickr can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/coveofthedoe and contains Appalachian landscape shots taken during the past year. Applying the geo-tags through the map was not difficult. I have used the searching capability of the map when I just want to look at some pretty pictures. I discovered that there must either be delay time before the geo-tagged items appear or I didn't do the tagging right. I could not find my photographs through the map. I also found lots of photographs of North Carolina in Tennessee. I also worried about telling the world where photos were taken on a map and would not use it for many images.

I am anxious to see how all of this will look in a few more years. So much is changing in such a short time. It makes me wonder just how many pictures of trees are there? Search the Flickr map and you will know that there are probably more than we need, but I have certainly taken my share. Frankly, it all makes me long for retirement