This Thursday, from 3-4 p.m. EDT online via WebEx, is the chance to learn. All are invited to attend.

In ArchiveGrid and Related Work, the ArchiveGrid team – Bruce Washburn, Merrilee Proffitt, and Ellen Eckert – will:

• Review ArchiveGrid’s background, what it is, and its mission
• Discuss who uses ArchiveGrid and how
• Lead a brief tour of ArchiveGrid
• Describe how we get collections in and promote it
• Explain recent OCLC Research work done to better understand the ArchiveGrid aggregation, how information about special collections is used, and new methods for making connections between related archival collections
• Facilitate questions and answers from attendees
• Monitor Twitter #archivegrid usage

First: A widget (code is at the bottom of our about page) which Bruce Washburn created for anyone to embed on guide pages so users can start an ArchiveGrid search and get taken to search results in our system.

Second: Extent, or physical descriptive data, in search result displays. These brief additions come from MARC record sources that include a 300 field subfield a, and for EAD sources that include an extent element value.

Third: A webinar from 3-4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, May 23. In this hour-long session we will review what ArchiveGrid is and how it works, share our latest developments, and answer questions. Please register here to attend. Advance registration is required.

Also we welcome five new finding aid contributors to ArchiveGrid:

University of California, Berkeley – Environmental Design Archives
Seton Hall University
University of California, Los Angeles – Ethnomusicology Archive
Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation – Presidio Research Center
West Virginia University – West Virginia and Regional History Center

With the addition of data from these new contributors, our index count is now nearly two million finding aids. Number of visits to ArchiveGrid has also climbed and was most recently at its second-highest since we started keeping track toward the end of 2011. We are thankful for these achievements and we hope for the growth to continue!

Among those who attended the farewell dinner for Marc was Bruce Washburn, who worked closest with Marc on projects involving ArchiveGrid data and TopicWeb. TopicWeb, putting it bluntly, is a way to “play” with archival data in the context of a game and we expect it will change the way archivists think about and interact with collections. It’s something that hasn’t been done before and to accomplish such a task is a milestone in Marc’s early career in library and information science. It definitely won’t be his last.

Right now, however, is a time to talk about last’s. After a somber ArchiveGrid team meeting – the last one we would have with Marc – Bruce wrote about Marc’s time with us:

“Marc has been an outstanding addition to the small but mighty ArchiveGrid team … we miss him already. While here, Marc was instrumental in carrying out the first comprehensive tag analysis of the 130,000 or so EAD files that we’ve gathered together in ArchiveGrid, and is working with Merrilee to complete and publish a report of the results. He worked with our colleagues Jean Godby and Devon Smith in OCLC Research to test Named Entity Recognition tools with the EAD sources, with the results of that effort providing a way to better support faceted searching in ArchiveGrid.

“Marc led the team on a journey to find innovative ways to find related archival collection descriptions: the NER work was part of that effort, but it evolved into the development of an experimental collaborative game for searching ArchiveGrid and drawing connections between collections related to a topic. In a few short but very busy weeks we were able to assemble a system that we could demonstrate at the Society of California Archivists meeting in April, and we’re continuing to develop this idea into a system that we can share more widely. In all, an important and transformative period in ArchiveGrid’s history, primarily due to Marc’s intelligence, persistence, and deep and wide-ranging knowledge of information retrieval.”

One way to say “bye” in Dutch is “dag,” and we look forward to following Marc’s promising future.

With themes of Earth Day, nature conservation, and environmental destruction threaded throughout one week, what’s an ordinary person concerned about such matters to do?

According to the Louis Friedman papers in Swarthmore College’s Peace Collection, a citizen can do a lot. The finding aid for his papers from 1973 to 2003 which were gifted to the college is the only record retrieved in ArchiveGrid for a keyword search using: earth day audubon chernobyl. In the 35 linear feet of papers related to the work of Louis Friedman and his wife Judi, there are National Audubon Society publications, items from Earth Day 2000 in Beijing, and materials related to Chernobyl.

Beyond what the keyword search matched, however, is a finding aid describing a trove of testimony in line with the spirit of Earth Day: the power individuals have to facilitate, or participate in, meetings where productive relationships which can advance progress start.

Friedman and his wife traveled extensively together as citizen diplomats, peacemakers, and activists, and gained recognition for their work in each of those roles. They used an effective combination of passion, diplomacy, and media knowledge to build relationships, organize events, and educate the public for the better of environmental, social, and political causes. In the finding aid’s historical background, “While in a country, I would meet with officials employing my skills of patience and open-mindedness, conciliation, mediation, reconciliation, conflict resolution, peace-making; and my knowledge of the media.”

So although Earth Day week is ending, a practical take on the spirit of positive global change can be this: Take one passion, and double it – or triple it, quadruple it, whatever…and work endlessly until there is progress.

(People pictured above: Merrilee Proffitt, Bruce Washburn)

Don’t let these frustratingly tiny mobile image uploads fool you. They tell the story of a big week we just wrapped up at OCLC Reseach. While eggs laid by Canadian geese outside OCLC Research’s San Mateo, Calif., offices hatched, we geared up for the annual Society of California Archivists (SCA) conference held April 11-13 across the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley.

Big ideas and strategies about TopicWeb, a newly-hatched development of our own in connection with ArchiveGrid meant to improve how we understand key collections, filled an office whiteboard. But that scenario has already happened more than once before, so what’s more significant is what resulted from hours of intelligent and hard-working people perfecting TopicWeb for demonstration at SCA. This post cannot go further without crediting the natural teamwork between Bruce Washburn and Marc Bron to put together TopicWeb and promote it at SCA to interested archivists who visited the ArchiveGrid booth.

(Pictured here: Marc Bron, left, and Bruce Washburn, right, chat at SCA with Brian Tingle from the Online Archive of California.)

What is Topic Web? Here is the short answer: TopicWeb is a game we developed and refer to endearingly as “Yelp for Archives,” yet it’s more. It’s designed to bring a team of experts on a particular topic together to evaluate EAD and MARC collection descriptions in the ArchiveGrid index for their relevancy, or importance, to a topic that one person, the TopicWeb creator, chose. Building the TopicWeb happens when players on the team search for and locate collections relevant to the topic and add them to the web and leave comments explaining why. Then the team members review suggested collections and vote on whether they are relevant or not to the topic, and again leave comments explaining why. Each team has one week to complete their TopicWeb before it can get published – although we have not finalized that stage. Points accrue, players advance levels, and other incentives happen. It’s filled with potential for capturing the exchange of knowledge between archivists and collections in ways we will gain valuable research data from and that are fun.

Since TopicWeb is still in development mode, we welcome any feedback, and interest in helping us improve the game further.

For kicks, I searched for the symbol π in ArchiveGrid because the term pi as a keyword retrieved a list of unrelated results that seemed as endless as the number itself. But π retrieved a more rational set: eight matches with direct links to online finding aids.

One finding aid at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at University of Texas caught my eye because a piece of the display text read “Notes on transcendence of π,” which sounded profound. Mathematically, pi is a prominent example of a transcendental number, and I hoped to find a more philosophically transcendent connection between pi and something, or someone, in ArchiveGrid.

And I did. Read on:

The finding aid is for a collection of papers William T. Reid accrued between 1925, when he was an undergraduate student in Texas, and 1977, when he died in Texas after a lifelong career in mathematics.

Reid was a mathematics professor at University of Chicago from 1931 to 1944 and at Northwestern University from 1944 to 1959. During those years in the Chicago area, Reid would have known a fellow mathematician, Ernst Hellinger. We know this because in Reid’s collection are materials related to Hellinger, a German mathematician whose career for 29 years as a university professor in Germany ended when the Nazi regime removed him and other Jewish mathematicians and scientists from German universities. Later Hellinger was arrested and spent six weeks in the Dachau concentration camp until a job which friends arranged for him at Northwestern allowed him to emigrate. He joined the faculty in 1939 and died in 1950.

By the time Hellinger was safe from the effects of World War II, Reid’s involvement for the United States in the war had started. According to the finding aid’s biographical note, “During World War II he served as consultant in mathematics to the Army Air Corps and served in the Pre-Meteorology program. He was chairman of the subcommittee on examinations of the War Policy Committee of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America.”

In Reid’s papers are correspondence about Hellinger’s death and biographical and memorial items, a photograph of Hellinger, manuscripts, notes, seminars, letters, reprints, and a few other remnants of his career.

One remnant is Hellinger’s “Notes on transcendence of π; Bericht über die Entwicklung seit 1933 und über den gegenwärtigen Stand des Mathematischen Seminars der Universität Frankfurt, 1949.” (Via Google Translate: “Report on developments since 1933 and on the current state of the Mathematics Department of the University Frankfurt, 1949.”)

Such findings leave more questions that access to these primary sources could answer. What was the friendship between Reid and Hellinger like? Did Hellinger ever return to Germany following World War II? Both pi and war can be described as irrational – what did Hellinger think?

Here are links to their collections:

Circus World Museum – Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center
New College of Florida – Jane Bancroft Cook Library
Trinity Wall Street – Archives
Carnegie Hall Archives
Yellowstone National Park – Yellowstone Heritage and Research Center
Queens College – Benjamin Rosenthal Library

Yellowstone’s presence in ArchiveGrid is also what we hope a start to getting collection descriptions from more national parks archives represented in our system. We also hope the presence of collection descriptions from our other new contributors is a start to more smaller archives getting their finding aids online and available for machines to harvest.

Anyone who has camped at Yellowstone, driven through, or encountered wildlife there may appreciate a nearly 100-year-old photograph collection of sagebrushers (campers), who traveled by train to West Yellowstone, Mont., and entered the park in wagons because automobiles were not yet allowed inside. According to the finding aid, “Images of a black bear include several photographs depicting members of the party feeding the bear.”

However, this collection is also appropriate for anyone who likes historic photographs of views and everyday people. In addition to images of landscapes, geysers and thermal features, and buildings, “Images with people include one image of a Reverend Rice as well as views of hiking, camping, a picnic, and cooking outdoors. There are also views of the tents, a camp stove, the wagons, and a surrey.”

If Daylight Savings Time this weekend prompts people to start making summer travel plans, Yellowstone is a good destination choice. Just don’t feed any bears.

Scrapbooks in collections come in more than one distinction. Bruce found in ArchiveGrid’s search results one collection, “Scrapbook.,” at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, has materials about the International Earth Ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl in August, 1950. In formats one might typically find in a scrapbook: newspaper clippings, letters, and photographs. What we know from the finding aid is who gifted the scrapbook to the museum. What we don’t know is who the scrapbook is by. Maybe no one knows, maybe the donor made it, or maybe that information is accessible somewhere else. Or maybe that information would be more relevant in connection with a personal scrapbook rather than one that functioned for a group. Either way, (in my opinion I think) a name or biographical information – or preferably both – indicating the creative force behind the making of a scrapbook would be useful because it would give the researcher context.

So I searched ArchiveGrid for a finding aid which would give me exactly that: A name and biographical information about who a scrapbook is by. Since I saw the movie Lincoln not too long ago and enjoyed it, I narrowed my search to scrapbooks about Abraham Lincoln. Three scrapbooks in a collection at University of California Santa Barbara pertain to the centennial celebration in 1909 of his birth. “The scrapbooks were compiled by Benjamin DeForest Curtiss,” states the finding aid, and “The collection contains…mainly newspaper and magazine clippings, with portraits and accounts of the life and death of Abraham Lincoln, including tributes paid him on the one-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1809.” Since we have studied the use of names and locations in our EAD tag analysis, this record contains a hefty amount: “Newspapers represented include the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Globe and Commercial Advertiser (New York), New York Daily Tribune, New York Evening Post, and New York Times.”

What else will we see in our EAD? Stay tuned.

In his own words, here is a description of what Marc’s project this spring will be:

“Archival collections provide us with a window into history, and Encoded Archival Descriptions (EAD’s) support the discovery of these collections by carefully describing each collection. Each EAD, however, describes an individual collection in isolation of other collections. That both collections have something in common, i.e., the history of California, remains hidden. In the next three months we will investigate whether it is possible to make meaningful connections between EAD’s and thus the collections they describe. As a starting point we focus on entities and perform Named Entity Recognition (NER) on the EAD’s. By analyzing the co-occurrences of entities across EAD’s we will gain an understanding of what type of co-occurrence constitutes a meaningful connection. We plan to incorporate these findings into the ArchiveGrid system as a new discovery model and to evaluate the model through A/B testing.

“My personal interest lies in investigating the type of connections between entities that can be automatically detected in contextually sparse documents such as EAD’s. Answering this question would further our knowledge about the opportunities for using automatic methods to supplement the annotation of archival collections.”

Marc has been thoroughly enjoying the weather and the beautiful environment in the San Francisco Bay area and he is planning some weekend trips to the national parks.

Welcome, Marc!