Dear Benjamin S. Bromley,

Below is some quick information about how our complementary Wantlist program is helping archivists and Fortune 500 collection managers handle their collections smarter.

I know that your time is precious. You probably spend a number of hours tracking auction results and looking for appropriate new purchases.

Simply reply to this email with the names of the artists and keywords you most often track, and I’ll send you a regular email that will link you to relevant items currently going up for auction. You’ll stay current on major sales without the hassle of constantly monitoring the auctions.

Heritage Auctions is the world’s largest collectibles auctioneer with over $650mm in annual sales. We also have over 120 specialists on staff, available to assist the archival community with formal appraisals in over 30 areas of expertise.

My office deals specifically with the needs of Corporate and Institutional Collections. Please let me know how I can be of service. I can be reached directly (214-409-1279) or via email (Jared@HA.com).

Again, I encourage you to reply with your list of keywords so that you can have the immediate benefit of regular Wantlist results.

Regards,

Jared Green Vice President, Corporate Art & Archives Heritage Auctions Galleries 3500 Maple Avenue Dallas Texas, 75219 Email :: Jared@HA.com Office (Direct) :: 214-409-1279 Fax :: 214-409-1101 Dallas | New York | Beverly Hills | Paris | Geneva

Cheers!

One of the biggest expenses that archival repositories and libraries have to deal with is the expense of digitization.  Options include renting a Scribe from the Internet Archive or partnering with Google to digitize books in your library.  For archival repositories, high-quality planetary scanners cost just as much.  All of these options have their problems and so a community has arisen to try and develop do-it-yourself replacements for these scanners.

The primary community for this is the aptly named DIY Book Scanner community. Their goal is to create book scanners out of parts that can either be scavenged or easily purchased.  The County of Brant Public Library in Ontario, Canada, has created a book scanner out of a dSLR camera and three-panel presentation boards (like the ones that used by science fair projects).  They are currently using the scanner to digitize, among other things, large ledgers.  The quality that they get out of their scans, which you can see through the previous link, is impressive.  On the DIY Book Scanner site, there are a plethora of designs, ranging from the cheap and easy to build all the way up to impressive and professional looking scanners.

Other members of the community are trying to build portable scanners to take into archival repositories and use them to quickly take pictures of materials that they need for their research.  This is more problematic, for a variety of preservation and copyright reasons.  But what do you think of users trying to democraticize the digitization process?  Are there any circumstances under which you would allow visitors to set up a portable digitization stand at your repository? And would you consider building your own DIY Book Scanner for use at your own repository?

1. Difficult to access: Although this has been made easier with the advent of the new website, A&A has always been difficult to sign up for.  It is located on a part of the website away from anything else, meaning that you would have to go to that page specifically wanting to sign up for “Email Discussion Lists.”  You also need a separate login and password from the credentials that govern your SAA profile to be able to sign into the listserv system.  In an age where integration of web services is becoming the norm, a separate system is just not something to which people want to go.

2. Intimidating personae: Once you get people to subscribe to A&A, however, many aren’t posting.  In any forum of communication, there are going to be people who are more active than others.  But when those people dominate the conversation to the exclusion of others, then it becomes a problem.  Is it entirely their fault? Of course not.  People also need to just plunge into the conversation.  However, if they feel that posting something to the list is not worth the resulting conversation, they won’t do it.

3. Listservs are Web 1.0 technology in a Web 2.0 world: As has been mentioned on A&A, it has been in existence since 1989; listservs themselves have been around since 1986, making them one of the first methods of communication over the internet.  They have an important place in the communication of some organizations, but those are primarily more technical ones.  Most of the lists to which I subscribe that have actual discussion are in the Linux community.  More and more, people today aren’t thinking of listservs as locations of discussion; even fora, that staple of mid-1990s Internet life, are being pushed aside.  Discussions have moved to blogs, to Twitter, to Facebook, and to other social networking sites.  I personally read A&A through an RSS feed in my Google Reader, so that it can be with the rest of the information I regularly consume.  However, I didn’t know that was possible for the longest time, having to search through the back messages to find it.  Perhaps if this was made more public, more people would sign up and perhaps some of those people would contribute.  I understand the need for a place of discussion sanctioned officially by SAA; I just don’t think people should be surprised when conversations happen in more than one location.

Finally, I welcome any discussion about this topic that may occur.  I, like most blog owners, would never delete comments that simply disagrees with my opinions.

Well, I’ve already kind of decided what I’m going to, and that decision was made for me by the set up of the websites. With my Google Reader, I’m trying to catch up on the things I missed, quickly scanning through titles and deciding whether or not I’ll read the whole post.  A few feeds I’ve already marked as read instead of scrolling though them; however, I’m skimming through most of them.  This will take awhile (I still have over 1000 unread), but I’m still going to do it.

Twitter, however, has a built in ephemeral quality.  There’s no way to know how many tweets you haven’t read, at least on the main Twitter website and Brizzly, the client that I use.  Even if I could go back and see what I have and haven’t read, I don’t think I would go back and read many of the tweets.  Tweets are more heat of the moment sort of posts and, without context, a lot of the meaning can be lost.  This makes me think about how the Library of Congress is going to make Tweets accessible.  Are they just going to dump the tweets out there, making a giant database of text available by itself, or are they going to try and surround it with context to allow people to make sense of more of the tweets?  Are they going to try and make a database of hashtag meanings? The newspaper Guardian did this in a slight way by creating twitter recaps of World Cup matches.  They measured the popularity of certain terms on Twitter in real time as the match progressed and it was very interesting.  But adding this sort of context to 140 characters worth of information will obviously involve a lot of work.  It will be interesting to see what LoC decides to do when and how they make this database available.

sites containing child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence, detailed instruction in crime, violence or drug use and/or material that advocates the doing of a terrorist act.

Now, I’m all for getting rid of child pornography.  But banning a list of 10,000 websites will not do a thing to stop the child pornography industry.  People in Australia who want to view it will still do so, either using proxy servers or visiting any of the multitude of websites that aren’t on the banned list.  It is really just a stunt, aimed to convince people that their government is trying to do something to prevent child pornography without actually doing anything.  Instead of trying to really address the situation, by prosecuting those who create, distribute, or view child pornography, their merely assuaging their own guilt and scoring political points while doing so.  Whipping up a list with some websites on it and blocking them is easy; actually doing something about the problem of child pornography in the world is very hard, requiring the cooperation of the entire world, and apparently not something the Australian government wants to do.

It also sets a dangerous precedent. An older list, obtained by Wikileaks and containing 2,000 websites, included such things as “the websites of a dentist from Queensland, a pet-care facility in Queensland, and a site belonging to a school cafeteria consultant.” Not only does this blocklist carry the risk of accidentally banning perfectly legitimate sites, but it could also lead to the government banning other sites in the public’s interest.  It is a slippery slope to full on censorship, and not one we want to get even close to.

This study is a content analysis that investigates whether the user education resources available on the websites of archival repositories reflect an understanding of Archival Intelligence. This was done by analyzing the websites of thirty archival repositories, selected from the list of the member institutions of the Association of Research Libraries. The findings of the study indicate that the websites of most archival repositories do not reflect an understanding of Archival Intelligence. The study also suggests that archival repositories are not currently taking advantage of the Internet as a medium for user education, which is necessary in a time where the only interaction many users have with an archival repository is through its website.

I’ve also attached it to this post, if anyone wants to read it.  I’m also going to maybe start posting here again more often, but I’ve said that before.

“Finding What, You Know?”: A Content Analysis of the Websites of Archival Repositories for Markers of Archival Intelligence.

Update: Now updated with actual working link to my paper.

We’ll see what the rest of the data collection finds.  Also, sad to say that I never got a reply from the Eloquent Systems people about the email I sent them… oh well.

I am, obviously, also a member of the archival community, and I got an email yesterday that really made me angry.  It was from an archival vendor, Eloquent Systems Inc., the seems to provide software that fills the same role as Archon.  In trying to convince me to purchase their system, they painted the entire free software community with a single stroke, saying that free software is basically unusable in a production environment.  They obviously have a right to compare themselves to other products and to state why they believe their product is better than this competition.  However, I feel that trashing an entire community is just ridiculous.  I’ve attached their email to me, along with my response, beneath the fold.

Attention: Benjamin S. Bromley ,
RE: Does free software cost too much?

So many archivists are complaining that “time is wasting” and their valuable archives are still not online for the world to see. Time and money is being spent trying to get their free software working. Their professional skills cannot be used for describing their rich holdings and serving their clients.

Free software sounded good, but almost a year later the results are disappointing:

Lost Opportunity
Other institutions have something concrete to show their stakeholders. They are attracting funding to do “more of the same”. An established system is in place and all that is required now is more help to process the backlog.

Wasted Talent
Too much talent is being wasted chasing the ever-evolving technology. Practical results are elusive. Staff becomes frustrated and impatient. Programmers come and go with little to show for their time.

Questionable Sustainability
Free software (open source) lacks a history of ongoing support. The people disappear. The funding disappears. Remaining support teams hold you hostage. Your system becomes dated.

Do the Right Thing
Find a supported software package with everything you need, but pay now for only what is required to get started. Then, pay as you grow.

Check off the items you require from this features checklist and see if Eloquent Archives™ is right for you. Then call Lawrence Boscoe at 1-800-663-8172 ext 100 for a free demo and a quote. Plan for a significant database to show your stakeholders within 90 days.

We look forward to having you as a customer!

Sincerely,
Corinne Hawksworth
Eloquent Systems Inc.
Organizing data for eloquent presentation!

My main concern about the email which you sent me is with your characterization of the free software community as a whole.  In your section entitled “Questionable Sustainability,” you say that “Free software (open source) lacks a history of ongoing support. The people disappear. The funding disappears. Remaining support teams hold you hostage. Your system becomes dated.”  This is completely wrong.  Free software has been around for over 25 years, and some of the most important applications on the internet are free software.  For example, the Apache web server is an open source application and it serves over 50% of the websites in the world.  WordPress, the most popular blogging software in use today, is also free software.  Mozilla Firefox, the second most popular web browser in the world, is free software.  Drupal, the content management system that will soon power the home page of the Society of American Archivists and that currently powers whitehouse.gov, is free software.  These applications, along with countless others, are supported by major corporations and foundations who hire developers to work on them.

Archon, an archival information system that seems to be your competition, will soon be combined with Archivists’ Toolkit.  This application will be supported by the University of Illinois, NYU, the University of California, and the San Diego Libraries.  This is a sustainable application that will be available for the long term.

In the end, it comes down to where a repository wants to spend its money.  Both proprietary and free software have their advantages, and their disadvantages.  And of course you have the right to point out areas where you believe that your product is better than the product of your competitors.  However, I am disappointed that you and your company would spread such egregious lies about the free software community, of which I am a member.

Thank you for your time,
Ben Bromley