12 AM: It's late, but I'm finishing the last bit of work of writing up lecture notes. This fall, I am teaching a class on digital preservation as an adjunct in the iSchool at Drexel University. The iSchool is on the quarter system, so we have only ten weeks to cover a wide variety of material. Last week the students got an introduction to the Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System, and this week's topics (on which I am writing the lecture notes) are selection and appraisal, assessment, provenance, and authenticity. Some of the sources of the week's material include a forthcoming case study from the City of Vancouver Archives, the DCC Curation Manual's chapter on appraisal and selection, sections of the CLIR publication Authenticity in a Digital Environment, and the final report of the W3C Provenance Incubator Group. After this I head to bed.

7:30 AM: I've just gotten up and I'm using some downtime to catch up on mailing lists and blogs while I have my morning coffee. I have the chance to briefly look through the current draft of the Reference Model for Economic Sustainability of Digital Curation, currently under development by Chris Rusbridge and Brian Lavoie. I may incorporate part of this into my class as we're spending a week talking about resource allocation and sustainability. I also use this chance to look through the review of different storage and versioning options, including Git, Boar, and CDL Microservices, for digital curation, as written up by Richard Anderson at Stanford University.

8:15 AM: I'm walking up the hill from my hotel to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library for the second day of an ArchivesSpace technical planning meeting. ArchivesSpace is the project to merge the functionality of Archivists' Toolkit and Archon and to create a next-generation archival management system. On the walk up, I was talking to Joe Pawletko from NYU about case studies and other good literature to get an overview of electronic records issues. I give him the heads up about the forthcoming issue of Archivaria for which I was guest editor, our forthcoming whitepaper on the AIMS project Yale participated in with University of Virginia, Stanford University, and the University of Hull, and the CLIR report Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Institutions co-edited by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabby Redwine.

9 AM to 5 PM: The rest of the work day is booked solid with the ArchivesSpace meeting. We spend some time picking apart architectural requirements, data model issues, and look at the possibility of revising the data model to include an abstract notion of events. While not an intentional decision, several of us in the room realize that we're inadvertently approaching an object model that looks a lot like that of PREMIS.

7 PM to 9 PM: Most of the ArchivesSpace team goes out for a lovely project dinner at Berta's in Old Town San Diego. Over dinner we start discussing the issues - particularly in terms of flexibility - surrounding the implementation of METS.

9 PM to 10:30 PM: Brian Tingle from the California Digital Library and I meet up with our friend Declan Fleming from UCSD and his wife for good beer. We discuss the potential for organizing a CURATEcamp during SAA next year in San Diego and  possibility of organizing an off-the-grid unconference (possibly in the Pacific Northwest). We also talk a bit about UCSD's Digital Asset Management System and its flexibility provided by representing all of the metadata and relationships within the DAMS as RDF. We argue a bit about how librarians may not feel constrained enough when they have to think beyond implementation of a specific schema or set thereof.

11 PM: I'm back at the hotel and ready to pass out. It's been a long day, and I'm positive I'll start dreaming of electric sheep.

Hop on Twitter (#saa11) and read for a while

Unlike code4lib SAA doesn't have an IRC channel, but we do have a pretty active backchannel on Twitter. I'm not necessarily trying to convince everyone to join Twitter, but you can search for the conference hashtag (#saa11) and see the current conversation, which ranges from discussion of session-related points to making social plans. Be warned that the level of discourse on the channel can be very similar to how a group of friends would be talking around a table full of drinks. The topics range from inside jokes about bacon and sad hairstyles to esoteric explorations of provenance.

Listen 90% of the time / Talk 10% of the time

SAA is jammed with characters who are passionate about some aspect of our profession. Ask a question or two then sit back and bask in the output. Don't worry, you'll have the chance to talk about what you are working on when your companion stops to drink beer.

If you don't have a lot to share, at least try to be funny

My dirty little non-secret is that I love SAA but I'm not really a typical archivist. I'm a technical-type, but I love hearing what's new in the field. I often don't have much to offer in terms of processing plans or outreach strategies, but most people can appreciate a sense of humor.

Don't be sexist/racist/*ist

It's great to be funny, but be careful about steering into areas that make segments of the world uncomfortable, or even feel attacked. We have a wonderful opportunity to attract and promote equality in our field and there's no reason to make an underrepresented group feel unwanted just to get a couple laughs.

One group that gets beat up on a lot is vendors. There's a healthy debate that comes and goes about whether it's good to have a place to vent, or if making vendors the butt of jokes limits their interaction in the community. One of the great strengths of the community is that the norms are constantly in flux and openly discussed and debated.

Be willing to laugh at yourself

I've found that making fun of myself is a safe outlet for being bitingly clever. And once you've shown people that you don't mind being a target, they'll let their hair down and pick on you too. Besides, why not beat everyone to the punch.

Don't be intimidated by what looks like the "in crowd"

There is no in crowd - but there are many social circles. There are people who jump in and participate - both to the conversation and the ongoing work involved in promoting and supporting SAA. You'll see them as the center of things until you actually get involved - a little at first to learn the social norms of the group, then more and more until you realize that new people are seeing you as part of the in crowd. Now your job is to make the new people feel included.

Share your passion about any one thing

Being an archivist for any amount of time infects you with the depth and longevity of the problems that need to be addressed. Supporting a profession that has such a long tradition, and helping to bring it into the present and future is more satisfying than I ever thought possible. I have a passion for technology and making things talk to other things in easy ways. I've shared this a few times in bar conversations and formal talks. Nothing got people talking to me more than this.

Be ready to learn new stuff

Listen to others' passions and see if any of it strikes a chord in you. There are times when I'm listening to a talk, or on Twitter, and I'll just make lists of things I've never heard of. Later, I'll start Googling around and end up a little smarter.

Expect 80% of the value of the conference to come from things other than the presentations

I used to feel mightily guilty about spending my money - or my employers' money - to sit in a presentation and feel like I got nothing from it. Adding the backchannel to my stream of awareness either helps me ping the crowd for more depth on the presentation, or helps me see that others are struggling as much as I am. Admittedly, the backchannel can be quite distracting, but if you let go and get all Zen and let it flow over and through you, you'll be surprised how much you come away with!

Don't feel guilty about skipping sessions to do other things

Everyone needs downtime to recharge, have a meal or drink with non-archivist friends, or even to check work email. You can give the conference the best when you're not totally overloaded mentally. You can also use session, section or roundtable time to socialize and have valuable conversations with your fellow professionals.

Relax, have fun, and go outside your comfort zone

Sure, you think you want to be a manuscript cataloger or a photo archivist, but you'll have a lot of fun with the electronic records folks, the government types, and even the academics. See you in Chicago!

We're holding this year's Tweetup on Thursday, August 25, starting at 9 PM, at the Clark Street Ale House, which is about a mile from the conference hotel and easily walkable and accessible by public transportation. Feel free to join us after the alumni mixers - and please join us even if you don't use Twitter.

Please RSVP at http://twtvite.com/saa11tweetup; while RSVPs are not required, they will help us and the bar plan ahead.

SAA has not given its membership any guidance to its membership about how to support UNITE HERE Local 1 and the Hyatt's hotel workers. Accordingly, my colleague Hillel Arnold and I have put together an website for archivists to find and share ideas.

This website, Support Hyatt Workers at SAA2011: An Unofficial Resource, is now live, and provides ideas for actions that anyone can perform, plus lists of those specifically for individuals who have either chosen not to attend and for those that are attending. This site allows anyone to contribute and comment either generally on a given page or in response to particular ideas. We are particularly eager to find new suggestions that we can incorporate into the site, and if people to prefer to submit their suggestions through us privately, they can do that as well.

For those who are curious, the site is powered by WordPress and Digress.it, a WordPress plugin that provides paragraph-level commenting in passages of text. Please let us know your ideas, and feel free to share this link wildly.

http://saa2011hyatt.info/

I don't think this is the first time I've faced burnout, and while it certainly won't be the last, the extent to which it's affected me this time around is astounding. I should add that I love my job, and I'm extremely lucky to have a great supervisor. It scared the pants off me that I couldn't get excited about archival/library/digital humanities/whatever things IN THE LEAST and it's still oh my gosh so frightening. This is the type of mindset that people change careers over, and I am nowhere near confident that it's an appropriate response for me to do so. No, I need to be much more rational and find a way to get over, under, around, and through this.

So, I'm trying to get past this and see things in a new light. Sumer is icumen in, lhude sing cuccu. I haven't gotten very far yet, and I only have a handful of ideas, so I'm eager to hear more. Offhand, I have been doing my best to give myself the following advice as words to live by.

• Remember what you love outside of work. I've started cooking in earnest again, after inconsistently eating like a bachelor during the week given that I split my time between New Haven and New York. I've also tried to get more serious about my passion for beer, and spent time trying to actually learn something.
• Know your limits; say no. (This one should be obvious.)
• Force yourself to do something different.
• Stop seeing yourself as a general; see yourself as a sapper instead. Of course, this one is hard if you're not getting clear marching orders.
• Surround yourself with smart people, and only engage in the conversations when you're ready to both speak and listen.
• Realize that your conversations with other people might actually get them excited about things - don't just do it for your own good.

It's a difficult process to get out of this rut, but I'm getting there. I am at my best when I'm excited about things, so it's in my interest to keep myself moving forward. Last, but not least, I have to thank the following folks for helping me remain engaged and at least somewhat positive, regardless of whether they knew they were doing it were not. So... thanks to (in no particular order) Julie Meloni, Matt Kirschenbaum, Amelia Abreu, Corey Harper, Erin O'Meara, Hillel Arnold, Courtney Mumma, Simon Wilson, Bess Sadler, Aaron Rubinstein, Laura Tatum, Mike Rush, Caro Pinto, Daniel Lovins, Ann Green, Michael Forstrom, Kevin Glick, and of course, Chela Weber. I might have been able to do it without you, but it would have been a much longer and more complicated process.

Bob was an inspiration to many of us SI alums, and his magnetic personality, sharp wit, and joie de vivre ensured he had a bevy of his students and colleagues buzzing around him at any given time. I had the opportunity to take his class Material Culture and the Interpretation of Objects in the spring of 2004, my final semester at SI. The class was intense in a way that few of my other classes at Michigan were, and it provoked my continuing curiosity in identifying theoretical frameworks to analyze the everyday world.

Bob reinforced my fascination with Wilhelm Reich and The Fugs by introducing me to Dušan Makavejev's W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism to the point I still have the DVD bootleg copy he made me in 2004. He challenged me to become an advocate for unpopular and "unrealistic" ideas. He introduced me to the history of science. Most importantly, he was a faculty member in a huge and ever-growing graduate program who seemed to enjoy nearly every interaction he had with a student, and encouraged us to reach out to him to send him links to "cool stuff" on the Web that might interest him.

Donations in his honor may go to Team Frost.

Repose en paix, Bob.

My oldest Delicious bookmarks.

I started using Delicious in my final semester of library school, and it shows. I used it for procrastinating as well as a way to organize research materials before I had Zotero. The bulk of the bookmarks from that first day of use (February 24, 2004) were likely imports from my browser, but I quickly showed a facility for adding stuff that I saw as interesting, useful, etc. I became frantic about tagging, and quickly developed my own conventions for adding tags. One of the things I remember being impressed by was that people quickly found ways to build on top of Delicious, and going through my old bookmarks with the tag "del.icio.us" shows a whole number of these, and an October 2004 blog post from the RSS Weblog lists even more. I was particularly surprised and impressed with the number of alternate posting interfaces that sprung up, and by sid.vicio.us, which built ontologies based on Delicious tags.

sid.vicio.us

As my friend and colleague Amelia Abreu writes, part of the value of Delicious has been its ability to allow for individuals interact with others they didn't know well. Arguably, it was one of the first social networking platforms that really valued the importance of weak ties instead of strong ones. I think it's also the platform in which I first encountered Jo Guldi, who also wrote a fantastic blog post in 2007 about how Delicious changes academic research. Specifically, it allows you to sort things, and arguably more importantly, it makes things public:

What's rapidly happening with these shared tags is academics finding each other in rapid numbers. I have some twenty people in my network, at least half of whom I've never met in real life. ... Each of these is another intellectual putting together rarified connections about strange pieces of thought somehow related to my world. ... This is the nearest thing to running into someone else at the card catalog yet. I don't check in with them. I don't have, nor do I really need, the capacity to send email to them. Some of them I may actually encounter at academic conferences later, and we'll share more of a bond, through our years of doing collaborative research, than many scholars who have labored through the years in adjoining offices.

Could Joshua Schacter, the creator of Delicious, or even Yahoo!, anticipate all of the potential uses of Delicious as a platform? Definitely not. There were countless unsupported or under-the-radar ways to use it. I remember a Delicious hack (for which I can't find a link) wherein you could send someone a private message by tagging the bookmark as for:username and marking it as private.

But what is to be done given that it's not dead yet pining for the fjords? It's obviously important stuff, but I feel that it's a bit hyperbolic to say, as ReadWriteWeb has, that Delicious's data policy is like setting a museum on fire. I don't think a large cultural heritage institution such as the Smithsonian could really ever support Delicious as it is, despite what Gabe Rivera thinks should happen.

Gabe Rivera re: Delicious

In his post about preserving Delicious bookmarks through migration, Ed Summers advocates for releasing the Delicious data to the Web somehow. As he writes, this could be mediated by an institution like the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress. Nonetheless, we have to consider what this mediation means, or even what data would be made available. As Stephen Hood notes, as a platform, Delicious has a whole host important features that need saving: the networks of users, and users' inboxes, which contain bookmarks shared by others.

Although the Library of Congress reached an agreement with Twitter to acquire its data regularly, they are not promising all that much. To wit, user interaction with the data won't follow the paradigm of using Twitter (emphasis added):

Tools and processes for researcher access will be developed from interaction with researchers as well as from the Library’s ongoing experience with serving collections and protecting privacy and rights. The Library is not Twitter and will not try to reproduce its functionality. We are interested in offering collections of tweets that are complementary to some of the Library’s digital collections...

Additionally, Martha Anderson of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program was quoted in a New York Times article from May 2010 stating that access would only be granted to "qualified researchers." I have seen no other coverage that qualifies who or what constitutes a "qualified researcher" in this context. In short, I don't think the Library of Congress is a suitable candidate for transferring something that arguably needs to have open, unfettered access from the beginning.

In the meantime, we can migrate our bookmarks to other services, but how do we migrate or emulate the experience of Delicious as a platform? Is the a platform a significant property, or is it an essential part of the context of the records created on that platform? Or, perhaps more curiously, is the platform a record itself? In my opinion, these questions require in-depth critical work if we want to have any hope for the long-term preservation and access to Delicious and other platforms with social networks and user-generated content.