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.

Still in the Clouds

This is the road where I start my journey to work each morning--descending from the foot of a mountain to the valley and the clouds. I used to deal with concrete things once I got to work: papers, printed photographs, folders, and acid free boxes. Now, I deal more and more with things in the digital cloud. On days that are more frustrating than others, I often think that it was so much simpler back then, but really it wasn't always. Some of the new technologies that I have learned to use make tasks simpler. I am finding that the difficult thing is knowing when to use this new technology and when it is advisable not to.

This past week, I experimented with different tools for making simple on-line surveys and experimented with Google Docs. I experimented with Zoomerang, Survey Monkey, and SurveyGizmo. All of them were fairly easy to use for short simple surveys that you wanted to distribute through e-mail or by posting on a web site. Of the three, I liked SurveyGizmo the best. As is typical of most web 2.0 tools, they only offer so much for free and then as you try to use them for more complicated processes, you have to purchase the product or different levels of the product. I can't blame them for that--they are in business to make money after all. If you did a lot of surveys, it would probably be worth purchasing their product.

I have to wonder about one point. Who owns the data? Could you extract your data and perform other statistical analysis with it than are offered through these services? I haven't tried anything that complex and probably wouldn't need to but I wonder about it. I do think that they could be an excellent tool for evaluating public service through a web site. It could also be useful to gather information from your researchers, professional colleagues, or donors on whatever topic you were interested in learning about.

I really like the concept of Google Docs as well. It would be so much easier to edit group documents when members are scattered over geographic distances. I can also see how it could be useful in compiling reports even when the individual contributors are not scattered over distances. I intend to keep working with it and hope to really put this tool to use in the future. My first attempt to use it involves a book about my family. I inherited a host of family photographs from various households. I hope to upload selected photographs and mine the memories of selected family members to capture family memories that would be lost otherwise. This is something that I have been wanting to do for some time, but this exercise showed me a way to do it.

This is my last friday working in my current position. I have three days to work here next week. In July, I will start working on the other side of the mountain at Appalachian State University, but I still will be archiving in Appalachia. Basically, when I get to the bottom of the hill, I will turn left instead of right and cross the Eastern Divide. It will be a big change for me. I have been the director here for the past 22 years and have been working here even longer than that. It is a new beginning. I thought that I was at the end of my career, but now I am starting a new path. Hopefully, I have learned a few things along the way that can help. I hope to keep writing this blog and share about Appalachia and archives.

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.

Music and Photographs or Appalachian Animoto

This week, I am trying to play catch up on my 23 Things. So, I went back and put together a video using Animoto by uploading a tune from the Archives of Appalachia's iTunes U site and personal photographs from my Flickr site. It was incredibly easy to do, but I think that I would like to have more control over the end result if I did this for work. We have video editing software, so I would be able to do add photographs and select the time the photograph appeared on the screen as well as the way that it appeared on screen. The media specialist in the Archives has been working on adding screen titles, collection name, and repository information to our digitized films and videos.

The result of my efforts with Animoto should appear below. I was pleased with the way they put together the music and digital images to create a video. I doubt that what we created would be this "slick," but I found it frustrating to not have more control over how it was put together with the entrance and exits of images.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

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

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