Klye’s Links on Tagging/Keywords/Taxonomy
So they are easy to refer to, and because I am in a rush, I’ll just make a list and move it later.
These will be very useful if HRAF ever calls back!
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html
http://interactivearchivist.archivists.org/technologies/tagging/
http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html
Of course these are all from Kyle’s work in the Fall of 2010 here: http://klynes.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/follow-up-from-my-follow-up/
Job Description: Something to aim for…
Job: Digital Archivist: New Museum (New York)
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By Updates and Current News – Posted on 05 May 2011
The New Museum seeks an experienced Digital Archivist to lead the second phase of the museum’s digital archive project. The Digital Archivist will provide leadership and strategic planning for the project, manage the museum’s physical and digital assets, train staff on best practices, research and digitize materials, ensure public dissemination and develop new areas of the archive.
Working hours will be 40 hours/week, 10:00 – 6:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. The position reports to Deputy Director and works closely with Information Technology Manager, Curatorial, Education and, External Affairs departments.
NEW MUSEUM DIGITAL ARCHIVE (background)
http://archive.newmuseum.org
Founded in 1977 by Marcia Tucker as an alternative museum site, the New Museum has been an important platform for emerging theories, cultural debate, and early exposure and scholarly treatment for important yet under recognized figures in contemporary art over the last 34 years. Our acclaimed solo exhibitions and landmark group shows define key moments in contemporary art history, the evolution of contemporary art institutions, and reflect the global nature of art today.
Unlike most museum digital archives whose purpose is primarily focused on object collections, the New Museum’s Digital Archive is a groundbreaking project to archive the programmatic history of an institution – what an art museum did, not what it owns. Over the past 5 years the museum has been developing a digital archive of the programmatic activity of the institution -exhibitions, public programs, performances and publications encompassing its 34 year history. The digital archive currently contains over 7000 images and documents, 200 audio recordings, 60 videos, 45 publications and over 4000 artists, curators and authors associated with New Museum. Phase I of the Archive has accomplished the following. 1) Established infrastructure and meta-data structures, 2) Digitized and imported primary materials 3) Launched public website and internal interface. The archive was built and developed in Collective Access software, an open source code and database system and uses modified Dublin-core metadata standards.
RESPONSIBILITIES
* Preserve the New Museum’s history that would otherwise be lost or inaccessible by organizing and cataloging our current physical and digital assets;
* Research and digitize materials, manage the selection of the appropriate formats, and ensure that all items are properly encoded within the archive;
* Contribute to the development, digitization and implementation of new digital archive areas not in Phase I including, institutional history, building architecture, and educational materials, including curriculum and teaching guides;
* Continue to research and import comprehensive audio, visual, and textual digital materials on the Museum’s exhibitions, performances, publications and public programs of the past 34 years according to a prioritized matrix of assets. Phase I includes approximately 40% of the possible assets for the archive and additional materials are to enrich and amplify existing asset categories;
* Organize, catalogue and classify existing physical and digital materials to be used internally and externally;
* Create procedures, train staff, and establish a sustainable work flow for the maintenance of the digital archive into the future;
* Establish and manage an archive internship program working with local university undergraduate and graduate programs. Supervising in-house digitization process, data entry and application of criteria;
* Ensure the Archive is widely disseminated to the public-universities, libraries, archivists, scholars and museum professionals by establishing digital links and participating in professional forums, panels and discussions.
GENERAL QUALIFICATIONS
Candidates must have Master’s degree in Library and Information Science or equivalent. Candidates must have 2 to 5 years experience in the digital archive field. In addition to technical skills below, applicants must possess excellent written and verbal skills and ability to provide leadership within a collaborative environment. Knowledge of contemporary art history and previous work experience within museum or cultural non-profit art environment preferred.
TECHNICAL QUALIFICATIONS
Thorough knowledge, aptitude and experience with database systems commonly employed for digital archives. Working knowledge of Collective Access in particular extremely helpful.
Knowledge of software programs such as Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro video editing beneficial.
Programming knowledge in PHP a plus.
Read more: Job: Digital Archivist: New Museum (New York) | conference.archimuse.com
A Poem
GETHSEMANE
In the garden at Gethsemane,
Mary and Eve sit beside each other
under one of those desert trees
so ravaged and improbable
that its perfume becomes a witchery.
Is it the smell of birth or death around me,
Mary asks, her grief as old a companion as Eve,
its jolt still a surprise between them.
What did it even matter, Eve asked,
where she had come from,
whether it be from a rib
or some yearning loneliness?
Eden had turned so treacherous,
why such devotion then
to the teasing of light from darkness
when they are so inseparable?
And so Mary felt about her son.
Did not every mother know her own
to be part blessing, part permission
to begin again? Inside he waited
to be betrayed, history unconcerned
that the distinction between
criminals and heroes
is frequently only fashion.
-Sarah Lantz
And miles to go before I sleep
I am grateful the VOICES team and Mary Fetchet pursued the grant and conceived of the project. They invested their time and money into developing our skills and with time I hope this proves to be a good foundation for the VOICES archive. I hope that the project continues and they are able to reach out to the previous students and others in the community that have the desire and skills to build on the work we have started. This is where the hearts and minds of students, archivists, and social workers can join together.
The skills we have developed this project are more conceptual, but so grounded in the hands-on struggle with definitions of elements and desires for the appearance of the items and the data. While I was all excited about cutting and pasting Java scripts in to do the lightbox, it made me realize how far away from coding and scripting I have moved. For years I said I know just enough to be dangerous, but now my knowledge is so old it’s nonexistent. At the same time it was still exciting to make something work, especially since we had to troubleshoot and correct the bits we pasted in.
I can not help but reflect on the journey. It has been emotional and exciting. But this is not the end. We have another day of class and weeks of rounding out before I can feel satisfied with my work on this project.
About Kyle’s Post: Tagging
I have finally read the articles Kyle linked in her blog last week. (sorry for the delay.) My understanding of tags that we would add is that they should be descriptive but not any field covered by metadata. Perhaps elements of the descriptive titles or captions work as tags, but the subject’s name is something most people would type into a search box. After reading the articles what stands out is that we are not creating a classification system. “Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags” and Ontology is Overrated” shifted my understanding of the role of tags. As a self-editing base for classification, with size, font, or color weighting popular tags, this is really democracy in action. While I can see exactly why you wouldn’t run a library this way, or any collection, we do have the metadata and are putting significant effort into standardizing it. So the tags are really there for the community of users. Libraries have a long tradition of opening up to the users. The extension of literacy, the opening of the shelves, and now a voice in relevancy are a part of the evolution of library service. Librarians will still create controlled vocabulary taxonomies to assist in searches. They are an even more useful tool in the age of the ubiquitous google search box. (There is one on my public library’s home page.) By allowing a separate, anarchic tagging system, we can serve more parts of the searching community.
Two quotes from the articles that sum this up for me:
The answer is to remain open minded and look at solutions that retain as much as possible of the metadata submitted, bearing in mind that metadata can be mined in all sorts of ways. Amy Gahran of Contentious observes that “A folksonomy merges, diverges, and evolves much the way language does, through usage and interaction” [23]. This is one of folksonomy’s great strengths. There is a real danger that by tidying up tags we are condoning the implementation of a destructive solution that may lose valuable metadata. The two questions we need to ask ourselves may be: Even assuming that such a consensus were possible, do we really want a world where everyone speaks a collaboratively defined analogue to the Queen’s English? To what extent, in this instance, with a fantastically complex and valuable database of user contributions from all over the world, is it possible to separate the metaphorical baby from the bathwater? (Guy, M., Tonkin, E.: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january06/guy/01guy.html )
Similarly, the idea that the categorization is done after things are tagged is incredibly foreign to cataloguers. Much of the expense of existing catalogue systems is in trying to prevent one-off categories. With tagging, what you say is “As long as a lot of people are tagging any given link, the rare tags can be used or ignored, as the user likes. We won’t even have to expend the cost to prevent people from using them. We’ll just help other users ignore them if they want to.” (Shirky, Clay: http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html )
- what we did and didn’t get to…
I kept this image as a way of reminding myself what topics we covered, or wanted to cover, in class last week. I found that we touched on many of the topics, but left some under-explored.
Archival Perspectives.
Dr. Brown is bringing up copyright issues, and emotions keep bubbling through as I work on this project. Some of our work is at cross purposes between build a memorial and/or an archive. I considering the shear volume of newspaper clippings and articles in the folder we worked on at the VOICES office, I think we may have to consider links for the Living Memorial and archive the scans of the articles. The clippings have sentimental and archival value on their own, and without citations, they are truely stand-alone pieces. The personal letters are different and I just realized that I have posted a private letter that reveals the full name and job title of someone who may not wish to be a part of this project. does the fact that the family has already made this available through their personal online memorial change our position, or the creator’s?
However, the complete articles may pose thornier copyright issues. I believe properly cited articles do not violate copyright, but that would be an area to research. I feel for a memorial, as with Youtube, the burden is on the copyright holder to request a removal. We can certainly go above and beyond, and send notices to cited pieces so they are aware and have the opportunity to request removal. I do not know if we to get permission for every piece. Do museums contact creators of publiclly disseminated items before constructing an exhibit?
The Beginning of the Process.
Saturday’s workshop at the VOICES office felt like the beginning of the process. One, because we began with the raw materials for the Living Memorial and the archives, and two because we began to define work-flow and processes. The first session oriented the class to the software and key concepts, but seeing the physical materials brought the concepts of the exhibits and pages together. The reality of fidgeting with technology didn’t distract us from the work to be done, but we did not get to fully explore some elements of the items, pages or exhibits to be created. One concept I need to clarify is the tags to be attached to the items. Should we go detailed with the tags, including tertiary information about the photo? If the photo is labeled “college” by the family, and we know the subject graduated from “___ U.”, should we tag the name of the university? The tags are less formal than the metadata, so I don’t think we have to be as uniform, but there should be a list of topics as potential tags. This probably belongs on the wiki.
In addressing the work-flow issues, I feel that I could not have defined them before starting, and now that we have started, I wish I had defined them… The selection of items had to take place before we could build an exhibit page, but now having built one, I would choose different items to upload. The items chosen, the exhibits built and the displays will evolve as our work-flows evolve.
I also found a wealth of information on the Family Tribute pages, through VOICES and a personal page her family posted. Through research, we could fill in many of the gaps in our knowledge. Most of the items included are already posted on the VOICES page by the family. However, I have to keep in mind the time spent on each subject, and the scope of the project. To honor each person, I should spend all the time it takes to include all the information the family has made public. But I also would like to honor many in a limited time. As Will said on Saturday, we can not let one family’s loving tribute with 400 items prevent us from honoring many families’ memories with ten, or twenty, or fifty items.
Thoughts from the first class…
This is some parts re-hash of our discussions. I have thought about the tags we need to add. I am wondering if this is the best way to identify educational affiliations, employer, office location (floor/area), and gender. While I said in class that the victim’s gender does not have any bearing on their position with the towers or reason for being there the morning of the attacks, I know future scholars may need this information and will definitely want the breakdown. History is made and lost on what we record. There is no way to predict future studies involving gender explicitly or how the information may be useful. So I am switching positions to an emphatic ‘yes’ on gender.
In considering themes and way of displaying metadata for the VOICES exhibits, I found two from the Omeka wiki. Both of these use the exhibit builder plug-in.
Good integration of sound and video in the exhibit. As the VOICES office collects more oral and video testimonials, this will be relevant. Still images presented well, but metadata is lacking. The site is clean and focused.
http://www.ohiocivilwar150.org/
The home page makes good use of the plug-ins and gives an idea of how far Omeka can take the memorial. The collections and exhibits are not that exciting to look at, but the way they are organized is applicable. Just for the viewer’s reference and orientation, consistent visuals should represent each collection. This site lacks any visual on the collections/exhibits pages.
I am breaking down the VOICES narratives in my head in three or four collections, victims, first responders, survivors and community response. Their profiles are the exhibits, and can be tagged by employer, office location, religious and educational affiliations, and perhaps even mapped for residence at the time of the attacks and/or birthplace.
The community contributions plug-in will be invaluable as the project moves forward. As we discovered in class, we sometimes have very little information about the victims and items donated.
Why and How
As a history student and through my work with the historical society, I recognize the value of memorials and scrapbooks. People use the tools they have, and the materials they are comfortable with. In this new century, the tools and materials many people reached for to commemorate their loved ones, contend with their grief and preserve their memories and feelings were electronic. These first recordings are in various digital formats, many incompatible and impermanent. The sooner we address the special needs of digital preservation, the more material we will save for our children and grandchildren, as well as scholars. The families and communities struck on Sept. 11, 2001 represent a broad swath of our community. By preserving the memory of their lives and stories, they will represent our communities to generations to come.
Academically and personally, I am pursuing preservation and archives through a Masters in Library Science at Southern Connecticut State University as well as the local historical society and libraries. My classes this semester are Preservation of Library Materials and Information Architecture. Preservation is addressing the physical needs of traditional and digital resources. Information Architecture considers the organization and presentation of digital resources as well as information on traditional materials. I am excited to join the Digital Archiving class sponsored by and in support of the VOICES of September 11th project. Through digital media we can connect so many more people than physical exhibits can possibly allow. I am looking forward to stretching and strengthening my computer skills. My HTML and Database building skills are ten years out of date, but the fingers are itching to get going again. I have only an academic exposure to CCS and Dublin Core, but I’m a quick study with these sorts of things.
