I am profoundly proud of the work that my colleagues and I undertook on Lighting the Way, especially the efforts in year two to host the Working Meeting and the project’s culminating outputs: The Lighting the Way Handbook and our final report. I am grateful to the contributors, our participant advisors, and my colleague Dinah Handel, who contributed to the facilitation and editorial work. While “archival discovery and delivery” is a new turn of phrase that has its origins in this project, I’m hoping that our findings and conceptual framing resonate broadly. I’m also deeply appreciative of the OCLC Research Library Partnership and the SAA Electronic Records Section, both of which provided venues for promotion of our work.

I also spent considerably more time on creative efforts over the last year. Music is in some ways no surprise, but I was frustrated with the pace at which I was completing my upcoming EP. While the initial recording only took no more than two months, it took me nearly ten months to finish the mixes. Getting in the right headspace to think about them holistically proved incredibly challenging, and every increment of change led me to second guess past decisions. With recording and mixing done, however, I’ve been able to start recording and composing again and picking up old projects that were left incomplete. This finally allows me to leverage and incorporate the wide swathes of field recordings that I’ve made since starting my cross-country rail trip last summer.

Beyond composition and improvisation, I’ve also gotten back into writing and occasional bits of art and design and oddly related bits of logistical work. I’m thrilled to have written a small prose contribution for the first issue of Fantômes, a collaborative ghost story zine. While I haven’t done too much scholarly writing over the last year, I found a lot of satisfaction in the process of authoring my keynote for the 2021 Society of California Archivists conference and made some revisions in the hope of getting it into a publishable form. This year was my first attempt at working with risography, and that experience led me to get more practical hands on experience with both Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. Those efforts ended up coming together in the form of a d66 minizine that focused on building out the world and characters I envisioned for my 2020 album. While it’s small, I also finally put together a website for my small record label. We have also invested a lot of time and energy into gardening and yard work, although it’s hard to reduce that to a single set of deliverables. Nonetheless, things have been dug up, cut back, planted, rearranged, and so forth, and we moved lots and lots of cedar play chips into place during the rainy season.

It is easy for me to disparage myself about not doing enough. I believe that I do that because I precisely have so many ideas about what I can do with my own time. I get frustrated with my inability to complete things. Over the last year and more, however, a noticeable weight has come off my shoulders as I see things materialize and come to fruition. This has allowed me to achieve a better balance and to be excited instead of frozen in fear about undertaking a new project. I’m excited to see what the next 14 months will bring, and there will be plenty of new projects for me to demonstrate how far I’ve come.

One of the centerpieces to the setup is the Zoom H6, which is a lovely handheld recorder. It comes with a very nice XY mic “capsule” for stereo imaging and supports up to 6 inputs in multitrack recording. One of the nice things about the H6 is that it not only serves as a multitrack recorder, but also can act as a USB audio interface that supports either a multitrack setup (6 in/2 out) or a stereo mix (2 in/2 out). Battery life is also great, and mine is powered by rechargeable batteries. Setup is mostly a breeze, although I stashed a PDF copy on my devices for reference in case I got stuck. I also have a cheap but somewhat sturdy table tripod that came with a webcam that I brought to elevate the H6 when I need to. I have a couple of inexpensive windscreens to go over the XY mic, and house the whole thing in an Analog Cases GLIDE case for the H6.

I also wanted to pack a durable and light keyboard controller to use with virtual synthesizer setups. When I first started acquiring modular gear a few years back, I bought a KMI QuNexus keyboard controller because of it’s versatility (USB MIDI and CV support, velocity, other control signals). While KMI makes a lot of claims about its durability, I’m not the kind of person who would intentionally run it over with a truck or spill a beer on it. However, the durability comes at a price - the rubber keys are not always intuitive or respond, and getting used to how it’ll respond in terms of velocity is hard to learn. The QuNexus nonetheless is a great compromise - it’s light, will handle reasonable wear and tear even while traveling, and is small enough to fit into a backpack.

While I’m used to working in REAPER to do most of my recording, I wanted to avoid bringing a laptop because they’re heavy and often of marginal utility. In it’s place, I brought my well-worn iPad Air 2, a 2014-era model. While it’s not the slickest model, its performance is adequate enough to run some of the software that I chose to use on the trip. The reviews of recent versions of Auria and Cubasis didn’t seem promising enough to plonk down $40-$50 for a pro-style DAW, but I’ve been happy with my alternatives. My software kit includes miRack, an iOS port of the open source VCV Rack virtual modular synthesizer. miRack is not a full replacement for VCV Rack in part because modules also need to be ported, so I’m missing some of my favorites that I use while at home. In addition, I use AUM for routing, mixing and processing audio sources, Audiostretch for looping and sampling, and even GarageBand in a pinch. In addition to the iPad itself and the music software, I also have a Logitech K380 Bluetooth keyboard and use Ulysses and Working Copy to update my website. I use the iPad Camera Connection Kit to plug USB devices like the Zoom H6 and the QuNexus into my iPad; with power coming in to the included Lightning port, it’s a good alternative to traveling with a powered USB hub. I can also offload recordings from the H6 to the iPad for further editing, processing and the like when the recorder is put into its SD card reader mode.

Listening is obviously important for working on music while the train. For listening while recording and playback, I have a set of Shure SE215 in-ear headphones, which are light, easy to pack, and provide good enough isolation for me. For phone calls and more casual listening (i.e. not recording/monitoring) , I also have a pair of Jabra Elite Active 75t Bluetooth earbuds. Most of the rest of the gear like cables, chargers, and the like don’t require a whole lot of detail to mention, but I will note that audio and USB cables seem to be the most flaky part of the setup. A USB battery pack, a battery charger for rechargeable batteries, audio and USB cables, and a few various small noisemakers go into a Thule Subterra PowerShuttle case, and phone chargers and other small cables go into a (sadly discontinued) tiny REI toiletry bag.

The end result is that I have a fairly lean setup that I can pack into my daily-carry commuter-style backpack with room to spare for snacks, sunglasses, and the like. I’m still getting the setup ironed out, and I’m sure I’ll develop stronger opinions over time, especially on cables. In the mean time, it’s been a joy to set bits of this up in my roomette, in the observation car, or on fresh air breaks to capture sounds of train yards and small towns across the country. I’m hoping to simplify further and have things feel more natural, but that will come in the future.

Of course the possibility of remote access raises real concerns about sustainability, ethics, and a whole host of other issues, and it’s become a lot more important as we’re still stuck in an unprecedented global health crisis, which has had its own material realities on people’s lives and livelihoods. This has impacted both the lives of archivists and academic researchers, too, with the latter lamenting how this impacts their research. While archivists tend speak to frustration about demands for access. This can have significant impact on a doctoral student’s ability to advance, or an early career or adjunct faculty member to work towards securing tenure.

It is between these two contexts that I find myself thinking about Sourcery, in development at Greenhouse Studios at the University of Connecticut, and a project of the Corporation for Digital Scholarship, which also develops and manages Zotero and Tropy. Sourcery endeavors to make document requests “easy” by “[giving] archival staff and patrons one easy platform for requesting and receiving scans”. It reduces costs for researchers by reducing travel costs, and hopefully, the environmental impact of travel. As described by Tom Scheinfeldt in a panel at the Spring 2021 CNI Membership Meeting:

Sourcery is a sort of very specific solution to a very specific problem that scholars face more often than archivists may realize, which is access to known archival sources right a [particular] source that you know, is in the archive. … The scholar here in question needs access to a source that he already knows sits at the National Archives in London. And the question is, how does he get it – he’s not in London, not sure where he is, but he’s not in London – how does he get this source that he knows is there? (08:15-09:09)

Scheinfeldt acknowledges a few questions in this panel that are underscored more implicitly by the Sourcery website: 1) how does this intersect with existing rights and policies; 2) what are the integration points with systems and metadata managed by archives and libraries; 3) how does this impact the visibility of archival labor; and 4) what does entering the gig economy mean for librarians and archivists? Questions 1 and 2 are of great interest to me given Lighting the Way and the work on virtual reading rooms, but that’s perhaps a separate post and line of discussion. What I want to do in the rest of this post is to focus on 3 and 4, given my recent keynote at the SCA AGM.

The visibility of archival labor has much to do with the perception of archival labor. As I shared in the keynote, and as acknowledged by Scheinfeldt and his copanelists Dan Cohen, Barbara Rockenbach, and Greg Colati, this also needs to be understood in the context of resource and staffing availability within archives and libraries, which is further complicated by Cohen’s description (and to be fair, problematization) of a “gold standard” for archival access that’s had to shift because of the pandemic (41:22-43:13). What I think Scheinfeld, Cohen, Rockenbach, Colati, and the moderator and CNI executive director Cliff Lynch ignore is the context of the “multi-decade cycle of poverty” as described by Eira Tansey in her article ”Archives Without Archivists”. Tansey contextualizes this through both looking at number of reports from the 1980s onwards, notably Levy and Robles’ The Image of Archivists: Resource Allocators’ Perceptions. Levy and Robles describe stereotypes of archives and archival work in way that made me go white like a ghost:

A stereotype of archivists and their work clearly emerges in the study of resource allocators. Archivists are viewed as quiet professionals, carrying out a practically frivolous activity. … Archival work is plagued by stereotypes, too. … Although resource allocators think they know what archives are, they are wrong. (“Archivists’ Resource Allocators: The Next Step”)

Tansey also provides tangible examples of underfunded archives programs: the Target corporate archives, the State Archives of Georgia, and Lincoln University, a historically Black university that closed its special collections and archives in 2010. It is impossible for me to engage with the Sourcery and remote access panel without considering the positionality of its speakers. Cohen and Rockenbach are university librarians/library deans at Northeastern University and Yale University respectively; Scheinfeldt and Colati run programs at University of Connecticut; Lynch, as moderator, is an executive director of an organization that holds membership meetings with a limited number of slots where lots of deans, associate deans, and CIOs are in attendance. Their audience is, largely, academic library and IT administrators, although sometimes they let some of folks in the “unwashed masses” (26:44) attend if we’re presenting. The reality in particular is that that Cohen and Rockenbach are resource allocators, and Lynch is in a considerable position of influence himself on resource allocators. It’s easy to say that Sourcery obfuscates archival labor further, but it also obfuscates how we resolve issues of how archival work is perceived and resourced in times of increasing austerity. Colati argues in the panel (55:52) that our perceived notions of quality should go down, such as digitization at lower resolution, but I wonder if that just speaks to further cycles of poverty and introduce a form of technical debt to operations that still misunderstands the total cost of stewardship as defined by Chela Scott Weber, Martha O’Hara Conway, Nicholas Martin, Gioia Stevens, and Brigette Kamsler.

As for the gig economy, I recognize that Scheinfeldt and the Greenhouse Studios team are thinking about this carefully, as he’s generously engaged with me on Twitter about this. While he acknowledges that Sourcery is or will be open source, so far only the frontend web app and its associated components are - that’s less substantial to the rest of my concerns and critique. At it’s worst, and as I described in the SCA AGM keynote, my fear is that Sourcery potentially introduces a “quadruple threat of enclosure”:

• In an ungenerous view, linked with Colati’s suggestion above, it introduces the notion that archival digitization can be viewed as piecework to serve researchers with specific demands. This has two possible impacts. First, it incentivizes avoiding at looking at archives holistically and systematically. While I recognize that many archives need to continue patron-driven digitization, it’s still understood and contextualized amongst other selection criteria that many institutions have overhauled to address concerns of diversity, equity and inclusion. Secondly, it suggests that digitization and the “last mile problem” archival delivery can be compensated as piecework, which is among my biggest fears.
• Sourcery uses an “algorithm tuned to local conditions” to determine how much a researcher pays for a request. While Scheinfeldt indicates that Sourcery is open source, I haven’t been able to find that algorithm in the code yet (there is likely a distinct backend codebase not yet open), but it is described as using “the scope of the request, the number of local Sourcerers [i.e., Sourcery workers] available at the time, the urgency, and other variables.” Locality suggests that the application needs some type of position information from Sourcerers. While Sourcerers are arguably opting in to work and participate, they are also opting to a form of surveillance that tracks their location. Whether this happens in realtime, or is disclosed to Sourcery in other ways, is yet unclear.
• Sourcery, in Lynch’s words, allows “credentialed people who essentially can monetize their credentials” (25:09-26:00) by participating in the platform. While Scheinfeldt, Rockenbach, and Cohen engage with this on questions of openness and have lofty goals of democratizing access, this does play to equity concerns faced by the archival profession about access itself, such as the problematic access policies of the Huntington Library juxtaposed with the fact that they hold the papers of Octavia Butler. I referenced Cecelia Caballero’s “Mothering While Brown in White Spaces” in my talk, albeit just through a footnote; Lindy Smith engages with this piece further in her blog post about access and inclusion in the reading room from 2018.
• What becomes of the access copies? As Colati suggests, perhaps archives are well served by relying more on lower resolution imaging to fulfill these needs. As the Folger Shakespeare Library has demonstrated, reference images have enough value to warrant retention and reuse, and the Folger is allowing such reference images taken with smartphones to accrete value through making them available. Colati and Cohen suggest in the panel that “you could run [reference images] through some some machine learning or computer vision techniques” to add metadata. However, once that metadata is added, through any process, there’s the possibility that they’ll be leveraged to create ML training data. While this could improve metadata creation and the like, the training data sets, or algorithms refined thereupon, themselves could be subject to enclosure, as I suggested in the talk, and as expanded on further by Sam Popowich.

All of these remarks lead me to not to say simply that Sourcery any of these folks are “bad”; I know and respect them, and some are former coworkers. But nonetheless, I ask them, and us, to remember that what they say can, and does, influence their peers, and those of us charged with putting work into place. Sourcery, as envisioned could be viewed as akin to a supply-chain management system’s interface as described by Miriam Posner, and as such, it could have significant effects and affects on Sourcerers as “mouseworkers.” I would hope for further engagement with the Sourcery team, as well as the panelists, and I look forward to engagement and continuing conversation.

The Assignment: Here’s your next single’s cover. Now record it.

While submissions are formally limited to one track per participant, I actually recorded two, which I’m including here - mostly because I’m not sure which one to pick. Both tracks are built from casemundy’s “Wind Chimes.wav” from Freesound, part of the “Sounds of Houston” pack, manipulated using VCV Rack with the NYSTHI Sussudio multihead sample player, and recorded, processed, and mixed in REAPER. Both tracks are recorded at 98 BPM.

“a furtive world of bats” was recorded in two takes with seven tracks each (six mono tracks, one per sampler playhead; and one stereo track for an emulated magnetic disk echo unit). Each sampler playhead, plus the echo unit’s six playheads, erase head, and finger gate, are controlled by a Grayscale Permutation sequencer. The second take was recorded using a clock divider at 2/3 the speed of the first take. Each take’s combined track is further processed separately using two layers of reverb, and the two tracks for the echo unit are routed to their own reverb and EQ chain.

“hardy toll road” was recorded in a single take. A clock divider and LFO were used to drive a sample and hold module, which controlled varying aspects of particular playheads (start/stop location, speed, direction, and restart), with some of these controls also manipulated live using an external MIDI controller. Each track has its own separate effects chain and vary, but include filters, EQ, delay, echo, and compression.

Oatmeal chocolate chip cookies

For 40-45 cookies:

• 8 ounces unsalted butter (or 4 ounces each unsalted and salted), softened
• 1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cups bread flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon sea salt
• 1 teaspoon ground Vietnamese or Korintje cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 3 cups rolled oats (or 2 cups oats/1 cup muesli)
• 8 ounces chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup flaked coconut (optional)

Steps:

1. In a large bowl, cream brown sugar into softened butter using a hand mixer or stand mixer until light and fluffy.
2. Add eggs, 1 at a time, mixing until just combined. Add vanilla extract and repeat.
3. Combine flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and baking powder in a medium bowl, and whisk together or stir with a fork.
4. Slowly add the flour mixture (in 3-4 portions) to the butter, sugar, and eggs, mixing until combined. As needed, scrape down the sides of the bowl with a spatula.
5. Add the oats, chocolate chips, and coconut if desired, mixing until just combined.
6. For best results, refrigerate at least 1 hour. 30 minutes can be sufficient, but save some of your dough for the following day.
7. While refrigerating, preheat oven to 350° F and prepare two half sheet pans with a Silpat or parchment paper.
8. When the dough is chilled, make balls of dough approximately the size of a golf ball. Place each ball on the baking sheet and flatten with your hands, ensuring each are at least 2 inches apart.
9. Bake for 15 minutes, rotating the pans at the halfway point.
10. Transfer to a wire rack and cool for at least 5 minutes before eating.
11. Store baked cookies in a sealed container.

On Sunday, October 4 at 1:30 PM Pacific/4:30 PM Eastern, those of us who knew him through Code4Lib and the world of libraries are encouraged to gather to share our memories of him and to appreciate his life and work. Please join me and my co-organizers, Mike Giarlo and Declan Fleming on Zoom (registration required).

We miss you, Rob.

I went out hiking yesterday at El Corte de Madera Open Space, one of my go-to hiking spots. Without realizing it until later, when I looked at my APRS traces, I had walked directly through the activation zone for Sierra Morena, W6/NC-209, on the way back from the tafoni sandstone formation, which is a perennial favorite. Feeling sheepish, I realized I didn’t even have a clear idea of how to activate it. I returned today after registering and reading up on rules and protocols as a way to try out SOTA before driving out to the coast.

Most of the other write ups about this activation share most of the important details, but here’s a quick recap. If you want the closest and most convenient parking, the Skeggs Point parking area is the best bet. Slightly further south there are two entrances to the Sierra Morena trail, each with their own parking lot. The largest parking lot (CM00) is the one for the sign for the preserve, with restrooms. If you’re coming from the north trailhead (e.g. you parked at Skeggs Point), you’ll pass through a gate, head up hill via paved path and ultimately head past a microwave radio facility with another gate in front of you. This area serves as the start of the activation zone. If you continue on the trail, you will enter into clearing with a path heading towards the summit. The summit itself is still closed for restoration, but the base of this path makes a good location to set up for QSOs to allow you to get out of the way of hikers and mountain bikers. I set up hear around 1:00 pm local time, and did a self-spot online. I am not sure I got APRS2SOTA to actually work, but I tried that too. With two VHF/UHF HTs at my disposal I ended up calling CQs on 2 m and 70 cm. While I didn’t end up getting all four QSOs needed for points, I ended up getting three. I came close, though, because there were doubles in a couple of pileups - but either because of poor line of sight or loss of interest I couldn’t confirm all the doubles.

In any event, it was a fun way to get started as a SOTA activator. And thanks to the three folks who made it a successful activation. On the way back, I had a quick convo with someone else on the N6NFI repeater, and then headed out to Pescadero. (Incidentally, I had great reception of hams working the International Space Station’s new repeater as I headed up Highway 1!)

For example, I’ve debated adding a Micropub endpoint for my site, and whether to automate sending webmentions within CI. In some ways, it could make things “easier”, and it could make the process of POSSE-ing content to other sites (e.g. Twitter or Mastodon) all the either. What I’ve found is that it doesn’t quite make my own process of writing or thinking about posts or content any easier. Somehow, writing short notes in Netlify CMS, adding syndication links to trigger Bridgy to post to Twitter/Mastodon on my behalf, and using another webmention client does - even if it means I’m manually updating the syndication links later.

Similarly, while I could update my personal 2014-era MacBook Pro to have a larger hard drive and a new battery, I’ve been oddly content with making do. The process of having to be intentional about how long I work away from a charger, and negotiating disk space while undertaking audio production and recording music has led me to sketch out ideas and plan more. Switching to making pizza with the Beddia dough means that I can’t just make pizza whenever I want it - I need to know in advance and take the 24-hour cold ferment into consideration. Even weirder is that this also seems to resonate with my recent forays into exploring Plan 9. At first, I asked my self why I should bother with an operating system where TLS and a modern web browser might not work out of the box. The answer is multifaceted - but its design is both unfamilar and intuitive, and wrapping my head around how things work makes me understand what I actually want out the systems I invest in.

Maybe I’m getting older, or just more patient I’m aware of what I’m doing at every step in the process, rather than having it be fully automated. It’s harder to shitpost if you’re thinking everything through, just like it’s harder to make bad pizza if you know you can’t get instant gratification. I still occasionally make bad posts as well as bad pizza, but I am certainly more aware of the cases where I’m setting myself up for it.

Getting a consistent way to load multiple IIIF manifests, either into comparison view or for populating a resource list also needs some work, which also led me to grapple with thinking through the IIIF Content State API spec, which will require some more attention, too.

{{<  mirador  manifest="https://cdm15799.contentdm.oclc.org/iiif/info/p15799coll41/1738/manifest.json">}}

{{<  mirador  manifest="https://iiif.archivelab.org/iiif/m8coastalsanmateoc138calirich/manifest.json">}}

I’d forgotten to include the code for the shortcode in the original version of the post, but here it is. The static page to load Mirador is viewable in my implementation.

{{- $miradorLink := newScratch -}}{{- $miradorLink.Set "url" (printf "%s?" ("/iiif" | absURL) ) -}}{{- with .Get "manifest" -}}  {{- $miradorLink.Add "url" (printf "iiif-content=%s" .) -}}{{- end -}}{{- with .Get "enableWorkspaceControlPanel" -}}  {{- $miradorLink.Add "url" (printf "&enableWorkspaceControlPanel=%s" .) -}}{{- end -}}<div class="mirador">  <iframe style="width: 100%; height: 50vh;"    src="{{ $miradorLink.Get "url" }}"></iframe>  <p>    <a href="{{ $miradorLink.Get "url" }}" target="_blank">Open in new window</a>  </p></div>

Hopefully, this might be of use to someone other than me, but in any event, it’s been an enjoyable way to understand the subtleties of Go templates.

At the same time, I feel myself slowing down, or at least to continue trying to slow down. I have not read anything more substantial than an article since February, despite getting a stack of books out of the library in preparation for more time at home. The cognitive load of mailing packages can sometimes be too much. My tendency is to be impatient with myself because there will always be more that I wish I had the energy to undertake. These days, I often feel like it is no longer my choice. My brain feels like it is being besieged, and it reacts by protecting itself the only way it knows how.

I am asking you this: What can you see when you can no longer visualize what’s outside of arm’s reach? What can you think about when you feel like your brain is enrobed in molasses? What is it like to worry that you are a disappointment to someone you care about or respect, but to be unable to remember why you might be a disappointment in the first place? What can you sense beyond the ceaseless din resonating throughout your body, from the hairs on the back of your neck to your bones?

Finding comfort has required me to accept smaller increments of success, frequent remapping of where I am trying to get to, and why. It requires studying and looking at the tools and structures I end up using to provide that comfort. Without really trying to I end up perfecting recipes for crackers and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies that are nearly memorized from the routine of executing them. Tending to the garden, with its many varieties of tomatoes and basil, means apply a degree of systems thinking otherwise unfamiliar to me. Relearning and applying creative technology - digital audio workstations, multichannel audio routing, vector illustration - is a directed effort to help me express and actualize something. The outcomes are a gift in disguise, but for the most part, it feels like I am doing them for myself even if someone else gets to enjoy them.

These practices are a way of grounding myself. Despite how valuable they are, they still often feel like a luxury. When I end up feeling mentally saturated, some days they are luxuries, and get cut out themselves. When my energy comes back, I find them waiting patiently, eager to be picked up where I left them, quietly chanting that perfection is not the point.

My thanks go to SAA Council for reviewing and proposing revision to the SAA Statement on Diversity and Inclusion. My comments are brief and provide what I hope will be a starting point to a more in-depth conversation between Council and SAA membership.

• Under “Diversity,” I ask Council to consider inclusion of an additional category in “professional and geographic factors” to describe job classification or rank. This can be considered from multiple angles: in terms of years of experience or early/mid-/late career status; and positional classification (e.g. faculty, administrative staff, or classified staff in educational institutions; or, more broadly, “paraprofessional” staff, “professional” staff, etc.).
• Under “equity,” I encourage Council to consider revising the first bullet (“Equal access to educational and leadership opportunities…") to include awards, and funding opportunities, given SAA’s programs supporting awards, scholarships, travel, and the grant funding available through the SAA Foundation.
• Regarding both “Provenance” and “Implementation and Governance”, I ask Council to consider including a reference to the SAA Code of Conduct, and to review the Code of Conduct in light of the revised statement. I recognize that the Code of Conduct was just reviewed last July, but there is an opportunity to strengthen and align these documents and SAA’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by a coordinated review along with the SAA Equal Opportunity/Non-Discrimination Policy.
• Finally, while I recognize that SAA is a membership organization, the statement overall could be made stronger by demonstrating a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion across the archival profession within the United States. This may open up SAA to further partnerships with other organizations, such as regional or specialized archival organizations.

M.A. Matienzo

Unceded Ohlone Territory / San Mateo, CA

Key: ✅ finished; 👍🏽 recommended; 🤯 blew my mind; 🔀 non-linear reading; 😒 meh

• Cynthia Cruz, Disquieting: Essays on Silence (Book*hug, 2019) ✅👍🏽🤯
• Margarita García Robayo, Fish Soup (Charco Press, 2018, tr. Charlotte Coombe) 😒
• The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks (Penguin Books, 2003, tr. Benedicta Ward) 🔀🤯
• Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Melville House, 2019) ✅👍🏽
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge UP, 1990)

It is important to look at Amazon as an entity that has woven itself our lives - not merely as an agent of platform capitalism, but as one extending its grasp through the realm of logistics. Amazon not only owns fulfillment centers, but also has subsidiaries focused on shipping, such as Amazon Maritime, Amazon Prime Air, and Beijing Century Joyo Courier Service). Amazon Web Services as a subsidiary focuses on delivery of a cloud computing platform originally envisioned as “completely standardized [and] completely automated”. We can read infrastructure as provided by AWS itself as an effort in logistical delivery, given how they are used and made available.

The metaphor of IT infrastructure of logistics extends further. Looking at Docker and other containerization technology here is worthy of further analysis, from the use of terminology of neatly setting boundaries at the level of the container and the visual metaphor of container ships treating our applications and their components as interchangeable things packaged up in a consistent way to be shipped from place to place. However, these parallels also bring to mind the rich history of unions and labor organizing by dock workers, and how the adoption of standardized shipping containers in the mid-20th century impacted workers in the shipping industry through deskilling and the changing nature of work.¹

With deskilling and worker conditions on mind, the question of solidarity and enacting serious change arises. As mentioned earlier, much of the tenor of the solidarity actions has focused on boycotts, and unions and groups like Amazon Employees for Climate Justice have both sent folks to Minnesota and statements of solidarity for those who can’t be there in person. Of course, I can’t help but wonder what a larger scale industrial action could look like - and which lessons we can take from the radical unionism of workers and organizers in the logistics industry both through history and into the future. What would a large scale action that impacts an AWS availability zone look like? How do you successfully organize a boycott that avoids as much as possible that which uses AWS for its infrastructure - meaning not just Amazon and Whole Foods, but other commercial parties like Netflix, and nonprofits like DPLA as well? What would it mean to have such a profound outage where the impact would be akin to spoilage of agricultural products? And how do we organize this both bravely and safely to positively impact all workers?

The work world

• I’ve said it before but I am endlessly grateful for my time in ITLP as a period of reflection and growth, especially amidst my own professional uncertainty. It helped me get out of my cultural heritage technology bubble for a while amidst other smart and talented colleagues from a pool of other institutions. It also helped reinforce a commitment to developing professional relationships into something much bigger. My time with everyone in the program was valuable, but I’d like to recognize my coach, Laura Patterson, and my colleagues Dani Aivazian from Stanford and Luis Corrales from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for their support and strong feedback throughout the program.
• While I tend to present at conferences with some frequency, the presentations of which I am the proudest are those which I got in touch with something deeper in me. I had two of those this year, which is pretty good by all considerations, and my thanks extends to those involved. The first was a panel with Aliza Elkin, Mallory Furnier, Monika Chavez, and Elisa Rodrigues at the New Librarian Summit on mixed/multiracial identity and librarianship. Their contributions were profound, thoughtful, and mutually supportive, and it was absolutely awesome to collaborate with group of information workers of color. The other was my lightning talk, “Evidence of Them: Digitization, Preservation, and Labor”, from the “Digitization Is/Not Preservation” session at SAA this year. We had a great group of controversial ideas - some funny, some troubling - and it brought me closer to pretty much everyone on the session. Again, thanks to Julia Kim, Frances Harrell, Tre Berney, Andrew Robb, Snowden Becker, Fletcher Durant, Siobhan Hagan, and Sarah Werner, and to Fletcher, Siobhan, and Maureen Callahan for being willing to take the lead on getting a pop-up session proposal submitted.
• Huge thanks go to the Code4Lib community, especially as we prepare for Code4Lib 2019 in February in San José, California.
• And of course, I have to acknowledge my broader professional family. I really feel lucky to be surrounded by smart folks with great ideas, and in 2018, I continued to learn and be inspired by Jarrett Drake, Eira Tansey, Hillel Arnold, Ruth Kitchin Tillman, David Staniunas, Maureen Callahan, Shannon O’Neill, Dinah Handel, Erin O’Meara, Camille Villa, and many, many more.

Personal life

• My partner, Chela, has been a great source of support and strength. She has really done the world for me and helped me think through where I’m headed.
• The San Mateo Quaker Worship Group has been instrumental in resituating my spiritual life.
• Getting the courage to reconnect with the creative process around music has been huge. I just issued digital rerelease of a tape from 15+ years ago that I remain proud of. I’m grateful to everyone who encouraged me or gave me advice as I relearn lots of stuff about recording and music technology.

Music I listened to

This is not a ranked list, nor a list based on number of listens. Lots of records came out this year that are incredibly important to me. The list below are those that had the most profound impact. I probably listened to a lot of these alone, while on a hike, at the gym, on the train to work, or in the car. These are the records that struck a chord, that caused me to feel twinges of something, that made me feel either more or less alone. Thanks go to everyone who was involved with them.

• Thou - Magus
• Thou - Rhea Sylvia
• Cruel Diagonals - Disambiguation
• Ross From Friends - Family Portrait
• Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt - Brace Up!
• Helado Negro - Island Universe Story Four
• Without - Elaborations: III
• Moloch - A Bad Place
• Ragana/Thou - Let Our Names Be Forgotten
• Blood Orange - Negro Swan
• Panopticon - The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness, Parts 1 and 2
• Emma Ruth Rundle - On Dark Horses
• Low - Double Negative
• Vile Creature - Cast of Static and Smoke
• Xinlisupreme - I Am Not Shinzo Abe

What’s next

I want to extend this practice of gratitude into this new year, and I’m going to keep my goals a little closer to the chest at the suggestion of a few folks. However, I think that gratitude really needs to not be something to be reflected at the end of something - be it a year, a project, or anything else. I look forward to reestablishing a sense of connection between people and place and appreciating both of them, and hope you’ll join me in doing the same.

I’ve been reading Edward Espe Brown’s No Recipe: Cooking as Spiritual Practice, slowly, after picking it up on a personal retreat a few weeks ago. I have found it to help ground me in the practice of cooking, something I love to do when I have time (as I do right now, in the midst of time off from work), but loathe when I’m too busy. Standing outside, next to our raised bed, with garden shears in hand, I finally felt myself reconnect back to these lush and marvelous green and purple wonders growing in our raised beds. I felt the sunlight envelop me, and I saw how absolutely blissful the pollinators were amidst our basil plants: not just bees, but spiders, ants, and other bugs, too. And with all that basil, there’s but one thing to do: make lots and lots of pesto.

One of the things I’ve learned over time is that there’s no wrong way to make a pesto. Yes, there are wrong ways to make pistou, or pesto alla genovese, but that’s beside the point. With a good blender or food processor, you can do just about anything. With a mortar and pestle, it’s harder but you can appreciate the effort. But you don’t need a recipe to make pesto. Sure, there are proportions you have to get “right,” but that’s all a matter of preference, too. So here’s a recipe, lovingly imprecise, in the spirit of Ed Brown, based onhow I make it. It might or might not work. It’s up to you to figure it out.

pesto

• about four parts green stuff (herbs, greens, arugula, carrot tops, what have you)
• one part fat (oil, lard, butter i guess)
• one to one and a half parts umami/textural stuff (shredded hard cheese, nuts, breadcrumbs, maybe some dried mushrooms if you wanna get wild)
• some alliums (garlic if you’re a traditionalist, could get wild with some scapes or shallots)

Chop how you’d like, as much as you’d like. Mix it together in some kind of bowl or vessel. Add salt, pepper, or anything else you like. Taste it; if you don’t like it, add what feels like it might be missing. If you make a lot, stick some in the freezer as a nice surprise. If you want to make a spread out of it, add some yogurt, or sour cream, or coconut milk.

Good afternoon. I’m here to tell you that digitization is preservation of our prevailing societal context surrounding those projects, and how we value the labor of people who work on those projects. Reading the presence and absence of people involved in the labor of digitization can tell us about what we view as important and unimportant, whether we value the labor, and what we have been willing to compromise.

The work undertaken to digitize collections occurs within societal and political contexts and underscores the reality that archives are not neutral. As such, our value systems are reflected in those projects and their outputs. In the rest of this presentation I want to consider this from two angles: the traces of people in digitized resources, and the presence of people in the discourse around digitization projects, such a articles, conference presentations, and the like. I hope that this framing is useful in considering how projects are conceptualized at their beginning, how we disseminate information about them, and how they can be interpreted in the future.

We see traces of people in digitized materials usually through the the presence of the person doing the imaging. Writer Kenneth Goldsmith describes the work of a number of artists including Benjamin Shaykin, Andrew Wilson, and Krissy Wilson as “artful accidents” in the context of Google Books. Here we can see an example of this: the presence of a scanning operator’s hand. Goldsmith seems to play at the uncanny aspect of this, but what is it that’s precisely the most discomforting about this image? Many of you will notice that hands portrayed in images from Google Books are those of people of color. Consider that images like this one are also considered an aberration, and the absence of the operator is viewed as desirable.

What happens in the cases we willingly choose to correct, or overcorrect that presence? Overcorrections like the ones in this image, which are largely applied using computer vision algorithms, What are the motivations for leaving such traces at all? What is the imperfect removal of the trace supposed to address? This sort of change suggests that perhaps the idealized surrogates one where the operator is the least present.

By comparison, let’s now consider how we talk about digitization when we report out on our projects regarding the labor used within them. I have found a number of excerpts from descriptions of projects that use prison labor for digitization and text encoding. When we read these excerpts we can notice two things: the recognition that the use of the labor of incarcerated people is read as a positive thing, given its cost effectiveness and the fact that it is viewed as “helping” incarcerated people - either in an abstract way, to reflect “good behavior,” or perhaps even job training. At the same time, we notice an undercurrent that without the availability of incarcerated people to digitize these materials, the prospect of digitization would be unaffordable.

As we consider the presence or absence of people and their labor involved in in digitization production, we must also consider how our projects, and not just the underlying intellectual work of the surrogates we produce, impact and document the labor of those involved. I ask you to consider your choices around project design you credit those who have contributed to your project. Cost effectiveness is a two-way street, with lasting ethical implications.

Since before the second ITLP workshop in March, the last several months have been a challenge for me professionally. I have become increasingly uncertain about the direction of my career - I don’t always feel confident about my trajectory or what I should be planning for, and I get to questioning a lot of what I know or I’ve become comfortable. In part, I can directly ascribe this to my participation in ITLP, and in some ways, it’s a good thing to be pushed out of my comfort zone. I absolutely should be thinking this deeply about where I’ve been and where I want to be going. At the same time, it feels like many things have shifted and I’m feeling more unsettled than normal, lacking motivation towards accomplishing things at work, and needing positive energy in a time when I really need it to be successful as a leader in the context of my organization. I also realize that at the same time I’ve been experiencing a slow uptick in depression, which amplifies and distorts this further. This also ties into an seemingly ever-expanding skepticism about some of the big picture ideas or nominally agreed upon set of higher purposes that are emphasized in libraries, which Fobazi Ettarh has identified as vocational awe. What started as a potentially healthy exploration of what I want to be doing has turned into something much more uncomfortable, and it has been incredibly unpleasant.

One of the things that ITLP has emphasized for me is that I should be looking for patterns in my behavior and reactions, interrupt them when they are negative, and reinforce them when they’re positive. In this case I knew some of my own past behavior that I tried to interrupt or discourage earlier, like applying for lots and lots of positions as a way to make an undirected and imprecise change. Being in ITLP has helped me realize I need to be a bit more intentional about what I’m looking for and where I’m looking to go, so this helped me slow myself down. I also realized that when I’m feeling this way, and especially when I’m depressed, I tend to isolate myself a bit more. This is a common occurrence for people with depression, but even knowing that it was hard to interrupt this. Being together in the workshops has helped, which underscores the importance of building relationships. Just the same, it also reinforced the need to sustain relationships through continued investment in them, both in terms of the ITLP cohort, as well as my friends and close colleagues who know both me and my career better than I know myself. As my friend Eira Tansey recently wrote regarding surviving current political landscape:

The most important thing you can do right now in this absolutely terrifying hellscape is to build a community of people, preferably in either close proximity or frequent contact, who care for you, and both hold and inspire you to the standards of bravery and accountability you aspire to. This is the foundation for surviving the foreseeable future.

So, with that in mind, I have really doubled down on having to both lean on and invest in my friends and colleagues. It hasn’t been enough to connect in spaces like ITLP workshops and at conferences, which means the onus has been on me to make space actively for additional conversations. All said, it’s sometimes a struggle, but this focus has also helped me choose the important over the immediate.

Finally, through all of this I’ve come to the realization that one of the things that can be the most challenging about dealing with kind of self-examination and questioning one’s own professional compass is how to articulate this to others. In my experience, there are very few ways to do so which are professionally acceptable. The seemingly professionally acceptable thing is to be silent; as leaders, we know we should be mindful of our presence. When we’re expected to bring our whole selves to work, being this open feels like a risk. Acknowledging this kind of doubt, indirection, or what have you in itself is vulnerable, and I was certainly less inclined to be open about it to others — even those closest to me — since I was worried that it would impact my credibility or authority. It’s also clear that something was in fact amiss - that my colleagues knew or saw something even though I had chosen to say nothing. As I’ve been able to open up about this more, I’ve realized that being this vulnerable is part of acknowledging my humanity as a leader. It’s still a scary subject because I am still afraid this openness might be used against me, or that it will somehow be a barrier to success. Nonetheless, my willingness to be more authentic about this has allowed me to connect with others even more closely now that I understand how common this feeling actually is.

Most notably, what are the shifts that we should seek understand among archivists, and between archivists and others we work with to carry out archival work?¹

What I am trying to navigate is what makes the work that I do worthwhile, and what it would mean to craft or exist within a radically empathetic workplace. All the while, I find myself around parts that want change but might not know what or how, and watching others not know where our responsibility to one another stops or starts. Our professional communities also talk increasingly about the importance of bringing our whole selves to work, without always reflecting about what we ask of people and their boundaries when we emphasize that. To be radically empathetic in our workplace, that empathy must extend to our fellow workers “even when our own visceral affective responses are steeped in fear, disgust, or anger” (Caswell & Cifor, 25). As those of us who who are committed to this kind of transition move into greater situations of leadership and influence I want to talk more about what these pathways look like. The panel presentations and discussion in the SAA 2017 session on radical empathy and archival practice, followup conversations with a number of individual panelists and participants in the session, and their subsequent CFP for a special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies have all helped inform the way I’ve thought about this. In addition, Ruth Kitchin Tillman’s opening editorial from Code4Lib Journal 35 has helped me understand that we need to conceptualize archivist/archivist(s) relationships and those with allied workers in complementary, but not always identical ways. To that end, what follows is a few questions I’ve been pondering over the last few days:

• What new or unique affective spaces do we need to step into within our workplaces that are unique to our field?
• What is the responsibility of a professional community in regards to empathy?
• How do we navigate this with workers in archives or allied fields that we collaborate in archival practice (digital library staff, developers, project managers, metadata librarians, etc.)?
• How do ensure that we don’t feel so alone, and how do we make time for the hospitality essential to maintain radical empathy?
• How do managers redress the potential or actual toxicity or psychological fatigue that may arise?

I’m eager to discuss this further, and I’m still determining where this could go in terms of a potential contribution to the JCLIS special issue, or just even to deeper possibilities of learning how to work together oriented towards mutual respect and care. I’m also eager to think how this informs education, training, or onboarding as well, so please share any thoughts you might have. I also recognize that my thoughts here are not fully formed, and want to particularly note my gratitude for the deep reflection of many people on this (as well as much else), to ensure they’re recognized for their generosity and kindness to me. So to Jennifer Anderson, Hillel Arnold, Ben Armintor, Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, Shawn Averkamp, Karen Estlund, María Estorino, Gloria Gonzalez, Dinah Handel, Shannon O’Neill, Jack Reed, Craig Savino, Camille Villa, and Jennifer Vinopal, thank you for going beyond hearing me. I know I didn’t see all of you this week but I’ve cherished our recent conversations to help me better understand myself.

One challenge with Jekyll and other static site generators is that “dynamic-ish” functionality, including sending notifications through protocols like WebSub. The trouble is knowing where these actions fit into the build process for your site: you don’t want to send the notifications before your site gets built, or pushed to the CDN hosting your site. Recently, Netlify announced a private beta for its new Netlify Functions service, which provides lambda-style functions deployed as part of your site deployment. One of the neat features that exists as of the beta is the ability to trigger the functions via Netlify events, like when your site successfully deploys.

As a beta service, some of the features are still somewhat rough around the edges (not to mention the documentation). Nonetheless I was able to get a proof of concept working pretty quickly, as I flew from California to DC for Code4lib2018. So, what does this look like in practice? I used netlify-lambda to help me build out the function locally. The code itself is fairly simple and is fired on a deploy-succeeded event: it checks to see if the deploy happened in production, attempts to ping my Superfeedr hub, and handles errors somewhat gracefully, with some light logging for debugging. I did a little refactoring based on Alex MacArthur’s post on building Netlify lambdas, which helped me think through some of the complexity on dealing with Netlify build environment variables. I couldn’t get that to work quite right, so I’m using sed to inject the variable’s value instead. Not pretty, but it works (for now).

This has been a great deal of fun to experiment with, and at some point, I’m hoping to experiment by adding the ability to send Webmention requests directly from this or a similar function as well. If you’re a Netlify user and would like to experiment during the Netlify Functions beta, you can request access.