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Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

“What made America? What makes us? These two questions are at the heart of Faces of America with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The Harvard scholar turns to the latest tools of genealogy and genetics to explore the family histories of 12 renowned Americans — professor and poet Elizabeth Alexander, chef Mario Batali, comedian Stephen Colbert, novelist Louise Erdrich, journalist Malcolm Gladwell, actress Eva Longoria, musician Yo-Yo Ma, director Mike Nichols, Her Majesty Queen Noor, television host/heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Meryl Streep, and figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi. Gates unravels the American tapestry, following the threads of their lives back to their earliest origins around the world. Along the way, the many stories he uncovers — of displacement and homecoming, of material success and dispossession, of assimilation and discrimination — illuminate the American experience.”

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/facesofamerica/

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There is a big momentum these days about data being accessible, available, and re-usable. Increasingly people want open data; Science Commons have been recommending using CC0 to make the fully open status of data clear. More recently the Panton Principles start:

“Science is based on building on, reusing and openly criticising the published body of scientific knowledge.

For science to effectively function, and for society to reap the full benefits from scientific endeavours, it is crucial that science data be made open.”

We’ve been big fans of Open Access at the DCC since its early days. We use a Creative Commons licence for our content by default. This blog was one of the earliest to be specific about a Creative Commons licence not only for the core text that we write, but also for the comments that you might add here.

So we strongly support the Open Data approach… where possible. For of course in some areas of science and research, there are data that cannot be open. Usually this is because the data are sensitive. They could be personal data, protected under Data Protection laws. Sensitive personal data (such as medical record data) has extra requirements under those laws. They could be financial microdata, commercially sensitive. Or perhaps data with strong commercial exploitation potential. They could be anthropological data, sensitive through cultural requirements. Research needs to go anywhere, whatever the issues; we can’t be constrained to only research where the data can be open.

So perhaps it’s as simple as that: some science should have open data, and some should have closed data?

Well, maybe not. Because the underlying issue of the Panton Principles must still apply. Research should be verifiable, whether through repeatable experiments or through re-analysable data. Unverifiable research is, well, unreliable- perhaps indistinguishable from fraud. Some access is needed; perhaps we should think of even sensitive data as Less Open Data rather than closed data.

So how do you go about dealing with sensitive data? Keep it secure, transfer securely, provide access under strict licences and controls in dat enclaves, aggregate, de-identify, anonymise, there are plenty of tricks in the book. That’s the topic of the 4^th Research Data Management Forum starting tomorrow in Manchester. I’ll hope to have more to write about what we learn later.

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This morning’s visit from Dr. Charles Grossman brought us a nearly complete set of presentation technologies from the 1940s to the present: glass lantern slides (talk on C14 glycine), 35 mm slides (cancer and hypothyroidism), 3 x 5 floppy (“Multiple cancers”–not sure yet what software), and DVD with PowerPoint (Hanford). We’re on the watch for Dr. Grossman’s latest publication to hit the electronic presses of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society so that we can add PDF to the mix. We are lucky enough to have the equipment to view all of these lectures–and print them out onto paper when necessary.

His visit also brought us a charming booklet of housestaff photographs from New Haven Hospital, 1944, including this shot of the young Dr. Grossman “doing something with a burette.”

The booklet has photos of the following staff:

Francis Blake
John Peters
Art Geiger
Marion Howard and Allen Poole
Ted Danowski and Alen[?] Winkler
Sam Kushlan[?]
Bernie Ravlin[?]
Nick Tierney and [blank]
Frank Ferguson
John Findley
Charles Grossman
Bob Furman
Joe Kriss[?]
Alan Peterson? [sic]
Don Seldin
Margaret, Mary, and Mac
Ben Robinson
Tom Sappington
Sandy Paley
Moe Tulin

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Please note: Care has been taken to transcribe these entries without alteration to preserve the original language of Herbert Vincent Reynolds. Australian infantry on a route march near Mena Camp, ten miles from Cairo. C01641
‘Spent the morning on a route march along the Gizeh road. Paid after dinner. The 3rd Contingent arrived here today and are camped [...]

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In the first couple of Harry Potter books, the editions that were offered for sale in the United States were Americanized versions of the original works. What was a “jumper” in the original became a “sweater” in the US version. Lorries became trucks, boots became trunks, etc. Even the title of the first book was changed to suit the American audience. Once the books became a world-wide phenomenon, everyone was presumably familiar with Britishisms and the practice stopped I believe.

This is an interesting and possibly significant issue as we begin to develop our distributed cataloging project for the work of Semyon Fridlyand. Will we need to develop a semantic thesaurus of some kind that will help us bridge the gap between how we think about and name things and how others do? Adding to the dilemma is the fact that we will also be dealing with multiple languages and even multiple alphabets.

At the Web Wise conference last week, I heard Monika Hagendorn-Saupe of Europeana the EU’s aggregator of digital libraries. They are dealing with a huge alphabetic, semantic, and language issue and are developing a semantic search engine that you can test. I think it has promise and I’m hoping to find out more about the project and will report it here.

The concept of the semantic web has been around for a number of years, and for at least 10 years we’ve been hearing how the semantic web would change the way we use the web. The automatic linking of similar ideas, even if those ideas are not specifically indicated in the resource has been something of a holy grail for information professionals since the digital age began and we realized that it would be impossible to maintain metadata about digital content in the way that we did for analog content.

Finding a way out of our semantic/language/alphabet dilemma is going to be a bigger deal than we had originally thought when we come up with this idea.

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According to the web site, the “Digital Lives Research Project is designed to provide a major pathfinding study of personal digital collections.”  One of the ways that the project released information was (is) through its blog. An initial synthesis of the project is available (259 pages).

This looks like a report that should generate a wealth of discussion and ideas.  The idea of “personal curation” is one that might filter its way into the tools and training that we give students and adults.  I’ll be interested to see what comes out of this…

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Arthur Hill Hassall’s work in public health led to reforms in water purity and to the Food Adulteration Act of 1860 in the UK and subsequent laws against the practice. Woodward may have gotten the title of his book wrong. It might be Food and Its Adulterations. Woodward, this letter’s author, was a pioneer in photomicroscopy. Henry, its recipient, was head of the Smithsonian. The history of federal American food quality control begins a decade after this letter was written.

March 9, 1875

Professor J. Henry.

Respectfully returned. Beautiful plates of the microscopical appearances of various kinds of milk can be found in the Atlas of the “Cours de Microscop[i]e,” of A. Donné, Paris, 1845, Plates XVII, XVIII, and XIX, and very good woodcuts, with an excellent account of the subject, in the article on “Milk and its adulterations,” in Arthur Hill, Hasslin [Hassall] “Adulterations Detected,” 2nd Edit, London, 1811, p. 205.

Very respectfully,
J.J. Woodward

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Pauling family portrait taken in 1941. Back of photograph is annotated, "1941. Daddy very ill."

[Part 1 of 5]

On March 7, 1941, Linus Pauling stood before distinguished colleagues prepared to deliver an address in response to his receipt of the prestigious William H. Nichols Gold Medal, presented by the New York chapter of the American Chemical Society.

Before Pauling began his recitation, he spoke candidly to his audience. He thanked the award committee for his selection and expressed gratitude that the acceptance of this award had provided him with an opportunity to reconnect with old friends.

On this rare occasion, however, it was apparent to all in attendance that Pauling’s physical health was suffering. His face was bloated and he reportedly lacked the enthusiasm that he was so well known to exude. Addressing the observations of many of his peers, Pauling joked, “Several of [my old friends] said to me tonight that I appeared to be getting fat. This is not so.”

Just that morning, Pauling had awoken to find his face so bloated that his eyes were nearly swollen shut. His tongue felt enlarged and his voice was flat. Over the previous few weeks, Pauling had been experiencing noticeable swelling, weight gain, and chronic fatigue but he could not identify the cause of his ailments.

With his audience, Pauling half-heartedly pondered over the cause of his puffed-up appearance. He compared the experience to childhood memories of unfortunate encounters with poison oak.

Yesterday I must have bumped into something similar…while I was wondering what the responsible protein could have been, I decided that it was a visitation – that I was being punished for thinking wicked thoughts.

The following evening Linus and Ava Helen had dinner at Alfred Mirsky’s residence. Pauling was examined by another guest at the dinner party, Dr. Alfred E. Cohen, a cardio specialist from the Rockefeller Medical Institute. After ruling out problems with Pauling’s heart, Dr. Cohen remained perplexed by Pauling’s condition. Nothing appeared to be wrong with the forty-year-old man other than his extreme edema. Concerned by the severity of the swelling however, Dr. Cohen recommended that Pauling come into his office the following day for a more thorough examination and lab work-up.

Adhering to the physician’s recommendation, the Paulings met Dr. Cohen in his office at the Rockefeller Medical Institute the next day. After a battery of lab tests, Pauling was diagnosed with Bright’s disease – a potentially fatal renal disease that results in the degradation of the kidneys. At the time, little was known about Bright’s disease and the majority of the medical community considered it to be a terminal condition.

After receiving this diagnosis, Pauling was fortunately referred to a leading specialist in renal diseases, Dr. Thomas Addis, head of the Clinic for Renal Disease at Stanford. Dr. Addis was a pioneer in the field of nephrology and his treatment plan, at the time, was new and revolutionary. Had Pauling not been referred to Dr. Addis’ care, the treatment he would have received elsewhere would almost surely have killed him.

Under the guidance of Dr. Addis, Pauling’s condition was effectively treated by alternative means – a low-protein, low-sodium diet – rather than the polysaccharide infusions that would have reduced his edema but done little to improve his health.  By May, Pauling reported improvements in his overall well-being and by August, the edema had completely disappeared.

Since Pauling’s time of diagnosis, Bright’s disease has been reclassified and redefined. Now it is believed that Pauling was affected by what is currently termed acute glomerulonephritis.

Acute glomerulonephritis is characterized by inflammation of the kidneys due to an immunological response. Damage to the small clusters of capillaries within the kidney, known as glomeruli, results in what can most simply be described as a “leaky kidney.” When the glomeruli are damaged, proteins leak from the bloodstream into the urine through the damaged portions of the kidney. Thus glomerulonephritis consequentially leads to excessive protein loss. Glomerulonephritis profoundly effects the body’s ability to function, because the nephritic kidneys are unable to properly filter the blood.

In his 1941 speech, Pauling had wondered aloud about a protein that was responsible for his swollen condition. The culprit protein can now perhaps be identified as albumin. As proteins leak from the bloodstream into the urine, blood proteins, called albumin, exit the bloodstream. These proteins are known to be essential in the regulation of blood osmotic pressure. Without sufficient albumin in the bloodstream, the body becomes incapable of efficiently extracting excess fluid from the body cavity. This excess fluid then remains trapped in the body and ultimately results in excessive swelling – such as the bloating that Pauling experienced in 1941.

Although the albumin did not cause Pauling’s condition, the loss of this blood protein due to the nephritis appears to have resulted in the symptoms that he was experiencing at his award ceremony. Therefore, contrary to his original speculation, it was the absence, rather than the presence, of a protein that caused his extreme fluid retention.

Over the next series of posts, we’ll explore the details of Pauling’s battle with this frightening disease, and learn more about the people and methods who saved Linus Pauling’s life.

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Processing at the Tamiment Library’s Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives offers a significant contrast to what I’ve focused on for much of my academic career. I often feel like I can’t bring the same subject expertise to my work as some other employees might offer, but I believe the variety in my research experience helps me understand more about how documents can be used. I’ve researched a spy ring from the American Revolution for a dozen years, and I expected the Wagner Archives would offer a different focus from the 18th century. At Tamiment, I process one of the performing arts unions, and I find myself drawing on my research experiences. After a few classes with professors who rail against researchers who want to save everything, I’d like to share some thoughts on my experience balancing the two perspectives, which archivists may forget.

First, keep in mind that archival collections are rarely used exclusively for the subject they were created about. This is extremely important to remember when describing collections. Every professor is happy to mention that Google-searchable encoded finding aids create a new market of researchers. What they’re not telling you is how many people saw their great-uncle’s name on a folder list for an organization’s records and think there must be a lot of material on the guy there, and proceed to check every folder labeled “General” or lacking specific details about material in the subject line. Also, remember student papers are often fueled on ideas like gender roles in unions or artists in the blacklist era, which are not necessarily subjects that are obvious from DACS-based titles.

Applying that to this collection means little things like adding brackets to the folder for anything like the Union Executive’s correspondence or local chapter correspondence when there’s a topic or issue that comes up frequently. My supervisor also advocates putting notes involving famous names in parentheses. Researchers must be optimistic about a collection’s contents, or they wouldn’t be looking for their needles in haystacks. Some researchers will try any long shots, so adding a few notes before the eternally optimistic researcher explores another general file is in the best interest of everyone involved, not to mention the documents. I’ll never forget working with the National Park Service’s perfectly arranged William Floyd papers, described entirely in the context of property records, which made the description useless to historians.

My research also increased my awareness of the difficulty in distinguishing people with the same name. With modern privacy concerns, performing arts unions become particularly challenging in this respect, especially due to practices of preventing people from working under the same name. Unions distinguished people involved in these issues using personal data. Given the volume of correspondence in performing arts unions trying to distinguish between performers with the same name, this gets tricky. When redacting or restricting personal data, archivists need to remember that some information may be useless if researchers can’t distinguish their person from any other person.

Archivists frequently offer the specter of the terrorizing researcher demanding to know why every scrap of paper was not saved on their pet interest. I’m not suggesting gum wrappers need to be saved. But people processing collections should consider the research potential of what they’re working with, and remember their descriptions impact who uses the collection. That goes both ways—no one will ever be able to find—or want to look for—brochures for technology or hotels in the collection I’m working with. But receipts can indicate where people were at what time, and ones offering specific details of purchases can change a picture. Researching my spies I learned a little bit about using evidence beyond the traditional historian’s “find a primary source saying the words.” I used financial records to try to mirror modern espionage institutions’ methods of tracking operatives. Try to remember the variety of researchers that could be using your collection, and assess their needs as you describe a collection.

Andrea Meyer is a student in the dual-degree program and a student employee at the Tamiment Library’s Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. She will complete her M.A. in Public History and Archives from NYU this spring, and her M.L.I.S. from Long Island University this summer.

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The Oscar nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers has footage from the Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection in it. The footage, of Richard Nixon, was partially used in the representative clip shown during the Academy Awards broadcast.

More information about the documentary
Visit the Brown Media Archives & Peabody Awards Collection

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In what could be an interesting development, the New York Times blog, Arts Beat, recently announced a (temporary?) new feature, “Ask a Theater Historian,” in which readers get to post questions “about the history of the American theater” to Marc Robinson.  There already are quite a few questions.   Stay tuned.

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Below is a press release that I received via email. The idea of preserving our digital knowledge is something we all know and something that many of us ignore. The fact is that our reliance on digital information means that our knowledge could be lost very quickly, if saving it is not made a priority.

Digital Preservation

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This post is part of our ongoing series From the Trenches, which focuses on the hunt for first time archival employment. ~ed.

One of the things I think anyone who has ever been on a job hunt has to deal with is limbo. There’s the time between when you apply for a position and wait to hear back, hoping it is a request for an interview. If the stars are aligned and it is a call for an interview, then following the interview, you end up back in another limbo waiting to hear back. Very very rarely have I heard of anyone getting a job offer at the end of the interview (although it has been known to happen). Most times, whenever I have gone in for an interview, I’ve known they still have more people scheduled, so regardless of what they thought of me, the panel will see more people. Following the interview, one of two things will happen: a) you get a phone call or some communication indicating the institution wishes to make an offer or b) a nice and/or terse letter thanking you for your time and wishing you the best of luck in your further endeavors. Then with other positions, the process resumes until hopefully the cycle ends with the offer an acceptance of a new position.

Limbo on either side of the application process can last for a long time. Especially in a market like today’s where there are not as many job postings and quite a bit of competition for those postings, especially if you’re confined to a specific area. What’s been helping me is doing volunteer work. Besides what I have heard so many people say about it being good for adding to a resume and for offering something to potentially discuss at an interview (I have had earlier volunteer experience actually give me an edge the last time I was looking for jobs), I think what helps me the most is that it keeps me focused. Doing something in my chosen field, even if it’s not paying, helps give a purpose. It also helps to keep up to date with what’s happening in the field. One way I’ve found to that is using Twitter. There are several archivists who are active users and it’s a great way to keep up with what other archivists are doing and what might be happening at conferences and work shops. If you’re not already a member of SAA and your local state/regional society, join up. The local society’s listserv is how I found out about a few possible job openings the day they were posted. The world’s becoming a lot smaller thanks to social networking and the like, and my experience has been that the network is very welcoming to newcomers and if you post a question, within a short time you’ll have others happy to answer it for you. Most societies will also offer discounted rates if you’re unemployed and if you’re a student, there are deep discounts available. Conference meetings and workshops are a great way to meet others in the field, ranging from those who are new to those who have been working for years. Keeping up with the newest developments in the field and taking opportunities presented to meet and interact with other archivists can help make limbo a lot easier to deal with.

Right now, I’m on both sides of the limbo I mentioned earlier. I’m hopeful and right now what’s helping to keep me sane is the hours I’m volunteering. All the best.

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Items of interest in recent memory:

• Chicks Dig Time Lords successfully debuted (and sold out!) at the Gallifrey One convention. It is available at fine booksellers of all kinds officially on March 15. We now also have a Facebook page. Those of you on Twitter can look for the #cdtl and #chicksdigtimelords hashtags.
• The 30th annual Children’s Literature Conference at NIU, featuring Tamora Pierce, Nnedi Okorafor, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, and Jill Thompson, is later this week. You should come!
• OCLC has issued a report on barriers to EAD adoption that is worth a look.
• DigitalKoans notes a paper posted in the SSRN that states that the Amended Google Books Settlement is still exclusive. ARL and the Library Copyright Alliance have released a March Madness Grid of possible paths forward for the settlement.
• Neal Beagrie notes that the Final Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access is now available.
• JISC has released a report on Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries. (via DigitalKoans)
• For those interested in writers, writing, fiction, and media, here is a great discussion of taxes, and one on strong female characters, and the Supreme Court’s recent copyright decision about freelancers.

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I’m pretty sure that 6 years part can’t be true.

A.M.M. [Army Medical Museum] No. 10156
Pathological Section

Washington, D.C.
March 9, 1891

Robinson Dr. C.B.
Veterinary Surgeon

Foetal bones, said to have been discharged from the uterus of a mare, about 12 years old. Owned by Senator J.S. Barbour of Virginia.

It is stated that she had not been put to a horse for 6 years.

History received verbally
Specimen received Mar. 8, 1891

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CD-ROM

Recognition

CD-ROM stands for Compact Disk-Read Only Memory and is a manufactured pre-pressed disk. As a data disk it is commonly used to hold and distribute software and as an audio disk it contains commercial music. Because these are predominately commercial disks they are not the most common form of CD to be found in an archive collection, but it is not unheard of.

Because these disks are manufactured and made commercially available they are usually very easy to identify: it is unusual to find a completely blank CD-ROM. These disks conform to the Yellow Book standard if containing data, or Red Book if they are audio disks.

CD-R

Recognition

CD-R stands for CD-Recordable and is also known as CD-WO (CD-Write Once). These disks can be written to once and the data or audio added cannot be erased or written over. However, the data does not have to be added all at once; provided there is free space on the disk, more data can be added at a later date. This is multisession recording.

Data CD-R disks adhere to the Orange Book standard and audio CD-R disks conform to the Red Book standard.

Most CD-R disks are clearly labelled as such, though they can be blank. If this is the case more detail can be obtained from the report produced by imaging software during the disk image process. The report often states what type of CD the disk is, although in a few cases it does not.

CD-RW

Recognition

CD-RW stands for CD-Rewritable. These disks can be written to, with the data then being deleted and new data written to the disk. Such a disk typically has around 1,000 write cycles. As with CD-R the book standard is orange for data disks and red for audio.

The disk format is also determined in the same way as CD-R: through the disk image report if the disk itself is devoid or labels or markings.

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For the past 6 weeks level 3 Illustration students from the University’s Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design have been working on a D’Arcy Thompson project as part of the celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth. They’ve been taking inspiration from D’Arcy’s collections in the Zoology Museum and his theories of mathematical biology pioneered in the book On Growth & Form. An exhibition of their work opened last Friday in the Bradshaw Art Space at Duncan of Jordanstone and has been a fantastic success.

My main concern was that they would simply produce lots of nice drawings of animals, but I needn’t have worried. The students really engaged with D’Arcy’s ideas and produced work in a whole range of media, including printmaking, sculpture, animation, and artist’s books. One of the students even did a performance piece at the opening, plugging himself into D’Arcy’s brain (which he’d helpfully brought along for the occasion) and answering questions on behalf of the great man.

The exhibition can be seen in Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design until 20 March. It finishes just after the main historical exhibition on D’Arcy’s life and work (and in particular his 32 years in Dundee) opens in the Lamb Gallery of the University Tower Building. Accompanying that will be a new publication on D’Arcy and the history of the Zoology Museum, which includes images from the collections held by Museum Services, Archive Services and from the Special Collections at the University of St Andrews Library.

Finally, there’s a whole programme of special events to mark D’Arcy’s birthday in May including music, talks, poetry readings and even live street theatre. There’s lots of information on the events taking place to make the 150th anniversary of D’Arcy Thompson’s birth online at www.darcythompson.org or you can become his friend on facebook.

Matthew Jarron, Museum Curator

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When we talk about long term digital preservation, about access for the future, about the digital records of science, or of government, or of companies, or the designs of ships or aircraft, the locations of toxic wastes, and so on being accessible for tens or hundreds of years, we are often whistling in the dark to keep the bogeys at bay. These things are all possible, and increasingly we know how to achieve them technically. But much more than non-digital forms, the digital record needs to be continuously sustained, and we just don’t know how to assure that. Providing future access to digital records needs action now and into that future to provide a continuous flow of the necessary will, community participation, energy and (not least) money. Future access requires a sustainable infrastructure. Ensuring sustainability is one of the major unsolved problems in providing future access through digital preservation.

For the past two years I have been lucky enough to be a member of the grandly named Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, along with a stellar cast of experts in preservation, in the library and archives worlds, in data, in movies… and in economics. C0-chaired by Fran Berman (previously of SDSC, now of RPI) and Brian Lavoie of OCLC, the Task Force produced an Interim Report (PDF) a year ago, and has just released its Final Report (Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information, also PDF). (The Task Force was itself sustained by an equally stellar cast of sponsors, including the US National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in partnership with the Library of Congress, the UK’s JISC, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and NARA.)

Sustainability is often equated to keeping up the money supply, but we think it’s much more than that. The Task Force specifically looks at economic sustainability; it says early in the Executive Summary that it’s about

“… mobilizing resources—human, technical, and financial—across a spectrum of stakeholders diffuse over both space and time.”

If you want a FAQ on funding your project over the long term you won’t find it here. Nor will you find a list of benefactors, or pointers to tax breaks, or arguments for your Provost. Instead you should find a report that helps you think in new ways about sustainability, and apply that new thinking to your particular domain. For one of our major conclusions is that there are no general, across the board answers.

One of the great things about this Task Force was its sweeping ambition. Not just content with bringing together a new economics of sustainable digital preservation, but thinking so broadly. This was never about some few resources, or this Repository or that Archive, it was about the preservation and long term access of major areas of our intellectual life, like scholarly communication, like research data, like commercially owned cultural content (the movie industry is part of this), and the blogosphere and variants (collectively produced web content). Looking at those four areas holistically rather than as fragments forced us to recognise how different they are, and how much those differences affect their sustainability. They aren’t the only areas, and indeed further work on other areas would be valuable, but they were enough to make the Task Force think differently from any activity I have taken part in before.

The report is, to my mind, exceedingly well written, thanks to Abby Smith Rumsey; it far exceeds the many rather muddled conversations we had during our investigations. It has many quotable quotes; among my favourites is

“When making the case for preservation, make the case for use.”

Reading the report is not without its challenges, as you might expect. It has to marry two technical vocabularies and make them understandable to both communities. I’ve been living partly in this world for two years, and still sometimes stumble over it; I remember many times screwing up my forehead, raising my hand and asking “Tell us again, what’s a choice variable?” And the reader will have to think about things like derived demand for depreciable durable assets, nonrival in consumption, temporally dynamic and path-dependent, not to mention the free rider problem. These concepts are there for a reason however; get them straight and you’ll understand the game a lot better.

And there are not surprisingly big underlying US-based assumptions in places, although the two resident Brits (myself and Paul Ayris of UCL) did manage to inject some internationalism. Further work grounded in other jurisdictions would be extremely valuable.

Overall I don’t think this report is too big an ask for anyone anywhere who is serious about understanding the economic sustainability of digital preservation and future access to digital materials. I hope you find the great value that I believe exists here.

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This is a nice example of why pinback buttons fall under the heading of ephemera.  Who (well, besides me) would have held onto this teasing question from officials at Raleigh-Durham International Airport after they added an American Airlines flight to Paris in 1988 — a direct connection then lacking at Charlotte/Douglas International.

American dropped the Paris flight in 1994 and shut its RDU hub a year later.

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We have yet to encounter a depositor who has a Facebook account, but it’s sure to happen at some stage. With that in mind, Victoria has been looking at how we could archive content in web 2.0 services like FB. I spoke with Mark Guttenbrunner (Tu Wien) about this at the Planets training day in London last month, and he told me that there was an ‘archive’ friend you could add through Facebook that would archive your profile (whatever that means :-) ). FB’s ‘archive friend’ seems to have gone to ground, but Mark did point me at this Firefox add-on which should achieve something similar. We’ll have to give it a go and see what happens. Anyone got any other ideas about how to archive Facebook profiles?

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Dated 1825, this folk art “reward of merit” is being offered on eBay. According to the listing, the reward of merit features a girl in a bright yellow dress reading a book. Written on the front is “Miss Margaret A….

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Here’s an interesting whitepaper from WordStream, a search marketing company, called The Experts’ Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media.

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The Google Public Data Explorer is now available in Google Labs. The data sources are mostly from the United States. Google is looking for feedback.
Source: “Google Adds Public Data Search Tool To Labs“, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land, 02010 03 08

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According to its front page, ArchivePress
is a blog-archiving project being undertaken by the University of London Computer Centre and the British Library Digital Preservation department, funded by the JISC Information Environment Programme under its Rapid Innovation Grants Call (03/09).
The project will explore practical issues around the archiving of weblog content, focusing on blogs as records [...]

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I’ll never turn down a good apple tart / skillet cake. But my wife’s apple cake still takes the cake, so to speak. This recipe comes from the Amateur Gourmet.

Caramelized-Apple Skillet Cake
from Karen DeMasco’s “The Craft of Baking”

Ingredients:

• 1 cup sugar
• 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter, very soft
• 2 tart baking apples, such as Mutsu or Granny Smith
• 3/4 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs, separated
• 3/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
• 3 tablespoons coarse yellow cornmeal or fine polenta
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1/3 cup whole milk

Preheat the oven to 350 F.

In an 8-inch ovenproof skillet, preferably cast iron, combine 1/4 cup of the sugar with 2 tablespoons water, stirring to make sure all of the sugar is damp.

Cook over high heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar turns a golden brown caramel, about 2 minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and whisk in 2 tablespoons of the butter.

Peel, core, and using a mandoline or a sharp knife, cut the apples crosswise into 1/8-inch thick rings. Tightly shingle all of the apple rings over the caramel, starting around the outside of the skillet and working toward the center, overlapping the slices.

[Note from Adam: that step may've been where I messed up, I only had one apple. But would that have made the cake less likely to detach?]

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, combine the remaining 3/4 cup sugar, the remaining 6 tablespoons butter, and the vanilla. Beat on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Mix in the egg yolks, one at a time.

In another bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, baking powder, and salt. In three additions, add the flour mixture, alternating with the milk, to the butter mixture. Using a rubber spatula, scrape the batter into a large bowl.

Clean and dry the bowl of the electric mixer well. Add the egg whites and, using the whisk attachment on medium speed, beat to soft peaks, about 4 minutes. In three additions, fold the whites into the batter.

Spread the batter evenly over the apples in the skillet.

Bake, rotating the skillet halfway through, until the cake is golden brown and firm to the touch, 45 to 50 minutes. Place the skillet on a wire rack and let it cool just until the cake is warm, about 30 minutes. Then run a knife around the edge of the cake and invert it onto a plate. Serve warm or at room temperature.

The cake is best eaten the day it is baked but can be kept at room temperature, wrapped in plastic wrap, for up to 2 days.

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Note, that’s not “Should NARA support user contributions,” it’s “How should NARA support user contributions.” The time has come for our National Archives to start drawing on the collective wisdom and energy of the Web to enhance its online descriptions. The question is, how should that best take place?

In considering this question, I was reminded of a previous post about how the “space” in which interaction takes places affects the quality/quantity of interaction. Building on that discussion, I can see several possible ways to proceed (although I’m sure there are others).

First, allowing users to add tags, comments, and additional information to the catalog records in ARC or to other descriptive information on the NARA site. Questions immediately arise about the level of moderation this would entail, both to avoid information with no value and potentially offensive information. Does the question of moderation arise if only tags are permitted? I think it would, although it certainly might involve less time. I would be surprised if NARA would allow users to post information on their site (even if the information were clearly differentiated from NARA-provided data) if it did not go through a moderation process, wouldn’t you? This also requires that users add their information within the current descriptive structure (Record groups, series, file units, etc. and as well to the the records for people and organizations). So this option is essentially allowing users to annotate and supplement NARA’s information within NARA’s current descriptive products.

A second option would be creating a separate space, still controlled and moderated by NARA, dedicated to collecting user-provided information along the lines of The National Archives (UK)’s Your Archives wiki. The advantage of this option is that it clearly separates user-provided information from “official” information, and also allows the user community more freedom in how it structures the information it provides (at least in the wiki model, users can add pages, etc.). In such a model there might be a greater reliance on the kind of community policing one sees in Wikipedia, where inaccurate information is identified and deleted by the community of interest for the topic. Clearly this kind of site would also have to be monitored or moderated. And, of course, it wouldn’t have to take the form Your Archives does, of one large resource that is sub-divided. Smaller topical “spaces” could be established, perhaps around areas that have an active community of interest (or for which information is particularly needed).

Another option would be to directly solicit the participation of researchers in the description of materials. If a researcher is working with a given group of records, there’s a good chance he or she may know more about the materials than the description reveals. Why not provide them with a template for providing descriptive information (and guidance about what information to provide) and let them take a crack at adding more to the description provided? Yes, of course, all of it would have to reviewed and some of it might be worthless, but there are many highly skilled researchers who might be able to provide either relatively complete descriptions or at least valuable supplementary material. NARA may even have developed its own online tutorials for its staff about how to write descriptions, which could be easily reworked as a tool to train researcher volunteers.

I don’t know about the viability of this idea, but I’ll throw it out there anyway. As a way of possibly mitigating “frivolous” tags, comments, and notes in Option #1, provide a “space” that’s dedicated to adding personal or creative content to collection descriptions. A place where people can essentially have tools to remix or annotate NARA’s content any way they want. (Yes, again, within the terms NARA would have to establish to ensure people weren’t creating offensive products.) But think about the potential for that one–galleries, exhibits, videos, performances? If it actually took off it could even the kind of thing where notable examples were highlighted on a regular basis. And, while we’re at it, why not actually make this area a larger playing field and have it also draw from the collections of the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress? That’s an idea, isn’t it?

But I wandered away from the issue of description. Still, providing an area for “play” might help keep the “serious” area more serious. Just a thought. Similarly, providing designated “discussion spaces” (in either of the first two options) might provide a channel for debate or information exchange other than the comments on the descriptive information.

In the comments on the earlier post I referred to above people also discussed the need to consider collaborative sites that the archives doesn’t control, created by communities of interest–either scholarly or not. “Partnering with a community, in a neutral space, as power equals” as one wise commenter put it. I feel as though I’m once again wandering away from the topic of user contributions to descriptions, but not entirely. Communities might be more inclined to share their knowledge in a space where they are “power equals.”

So, I’ve provided you with a range of options, from small steps that have already been implemented elsewhere to possibilities that might not yet exist anywhere. Can you add any other possibilities for harnessing the wisdom of NARA’s users? Which of the ideas above do you think has the most promise?

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First pages of a handwritten draft of ‘Infinite Jest’ by David Foster Wallace.

Bonnie Nadell, longtime literary agent of David Foster Wallace, shares her thoughts on what scholars can learn from Wallace’s archive about his creative process:

Organizing David Wallace’s papers for an archive was not a task I would wish on many people. Some writers leave their papers organized, boxed, and with careful markers, David left his work in a dark, cold garage filled with spiders and in no order whatsoever. His wife and I took plastic bins and cardboard boxes and desk drawers and created an order out of chaos, putting manuscripts for each book together and writing labels in magic markers.

But what scholars and readers will find fascinating I think is that as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful. For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence, and notes to himself about how to sharpen a phrase until it met his exacting eye. Having represented David from the beginning of his writing career, I know there were people who felt David was too much of a “look ma no hands” kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are. How a character’s name was gone over and over until it became the right one. How David looked through his dictionaries making notes, writing phrases of dialogue in his notebooks, and his excitement in discovering a wild new word to use.

We want readers to see how he thought because how he thought was unique and beautiful and precise. So anyone looking through his drafts and even his books will see the levels of thinking that went into every sentence and every page. The corrections on Infinite Jest for the paperback edition even after a master copyediting job, David’s love of language in his dictionary and in his notebooks, and how he deconstructed other writer’s stories and sentences so he could teach his students how to write better and how to read better. The archives are a window into his mind, and I really think scholars and readers will appreciate seeing that for the first time.

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David Foster Wallace’s copy of ‘The Cinema Book.’ Photo by Pete Smith.

Approximately 200 books from David Foster Wallace’s library arrived at the Ransom Center with his papers. When the staff unpacked the collection to check its condition, we could see immediately that the library was not simply a supplement to the archive but an essential part of it. Wallace annotated many of the books heavily: he underlined passages, made extensive comments in the margins, and utilized the front and back inside covers for notes, vocabulary lists, brainstorms, and more. As a reader of Infinite Jest, one book in particular caught my eye: a battered paperback copy of Pam Cook’s edited volume The Cinema Book (New York: Pantheon, 1985). This reference work is heavily used: it lacks both its front and back cover, its spine is held on with two pieces of tape, and the exposed inside cover is inscribed “D. Wallace ’92,” four years before the publication of Infinite Jest. 

Infinite Jest is a book about many things, and the mesmerizing power of movies is one of its most dominant themes. One of the book’s central figures is the late James O. Incandenza, an auteur whose filmography has left an indelible mark upon all of the novel’s characters in one way or another. Early in the novel, the reader learns of the extent of his importance in endnote 24. Endnote 24 comprises Incandenza’s entire filmography, which fills eight pages in tiny print. The reader discovers here that it is essential to actually read Wallace’s footnotes (spoiler alert), because only in this endnote do we learn that Infinite Jest is the title of an Incandenza film.

Traces of The Cinema Book may be found throughout Wallace’s novel, beginning with the basic format of the filmography itself: notably, Wallace penned a bracket around the “Special Note” at the front of The Cinema Book, in which Cook outlines the format her citations will take, and Wallace’s citations of Incandenza’s films resemble these closely. Wallace may also have gathered much film knowledge from this volume. The Incandenza filmography is a virtuosic pastiche of film history, technology, and vocabulary. We are told that Incandenza made every kind of film: “industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic noncommercial, nondramatic (‘anti-confluential’) noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works” (985). Wallace annotated passages throughout The Cinema Book, with the exception of two theoretical chapters. He noted concrete information such as the names of actors, directors, production companies, film journals, and significant events in film history. His annotations show his interest in a wide range of terms and themes covered in the volume, with particular interest in sections on the idea of the auteur, the technology of deep focus cinematography, new wave cinema, the Hollywood star system, and most film genres (with the notable exception of the “the gangster/crime film,” the only genre lacking any Wallace annotations).

At two points in the volume he explicitly mentions Infinite Jest. In the section on “National cinema and film movements,” he underlines much of the section on Roberto Rossellini’s place in the neo-realist Italian tradition, writing in the bottom margin “Rossellini + ‘ad-hoc’ structure—Infinite Jest” (39). More dramatically, he writes the letters “IJ” no less than four times in the three-page section on “The Hollywood Star Machine.” He underlines several passages with particular attention to the following, which will not come as a surprise to readers of Infinite Jest:

It has been argued that the erotic play of the “look” around the female star figure in classic Hollywood cinema is an integral part of the narrative drive towards closure and the reinstatement of equilibrium (Mulvey, “Visual pleasure and narrative cinema,” 1975). This argument uses psychoanalytical concepts to address the question of the fantasy relationship between spectators and film and the role of the star in that relationship (see also Cook, “Stars and politics,” 1982; Friedberg, “Identification and the star,” 1982). [51]

Finally, my favorite set of annotations surround the section on the genre of the musical, written by Andy Medhurst. Medhurst spends a considerable amount of time discussing this genre’s dominant theme: entertainment. Wallace has underlined passages discussing the ways in which this genre taps into viewers’ nostalgia and their desire to experience a “vision of human liberation” in a utopian entertainment experience. Wallace has penned “ENTERTAINMENT” at the top of the page and circled the page number (107). This word is central to the project of Infinite Jest, and it is enlightening to read one of the sources from which its meanings in the novel likely derive.

Unpacking Wallace’s library was a once-in-a-lifetime experience for this reader; once this and his other books have been cataloged, I look forward to seeing what insights scholars will derive from the hundreds of books and thousands of annotations beyond the few I have noted here.

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Materials and books from David Foster Wallace archive. Photo by Anthony Maddaloni.

The journey an archive takes from an author’s desk to the Ransom Center is often long and circuitous. The archive of David Foster Wallace arrived at the Ransom Center in the last days of 2009, but the earliest seeds of the acquisition were sown years before.

Because of the Ransom Center’s strong collections in contemporary literature, our curators and staff keep careful watch on promising, young writers. Over the past 20 years, we have built a list of hundreds of contemporary writers we follow, and we collect first editions of all their books. David Foster Wallace was added to this list early in his career. As we watched his career progress, it became apparent that he was one of the great talents of his generation.

We had our first glimpse into Wallace’s creative process in 2005 with our acquisition of the papers of Don DeLillo. Unexpectedly, the archive included a small cache of letters between Wallace and DeLillo, a correspondence initiated by Wallace when he was struggling through his colossal novel, Infinite Jest. Wallace’s letters show a writer who was deliberate, funny, and often uncertain, but most clearly, they show a writer who took painstaking care with his art.

In 2006, after reading Wallace’s essay on tennis player Roger Federer in The New York Times, Thomas F. Staley, the Director of the Ransom Center and an avid tennis player, wrote to Wallace to inquire about his archive, invite him to visit the Center, and challenge him to a friendly match of tennis. For years Wallace had been among the top names on our wish list of potential speakers—a long-shot, of course, for a writer who made few public appearances. The letter went unanswered.

Several weeks after the shocking news of Wallace’s death, we wrote to his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell, to express how saddened we were at the Ransom Center by this tragic loss. We also expressed our hope that Wallace’s papers would be preserved somewhere—anywhere—so that his remarkable contributions to our culture could be studied for generations to come.

Several months later, we were contacted by a bookseller representing Wallace’s literary estate, and we began the negotiations that led to the eventual arrival of Wallace’s archive at the Ransom Center. This long journey, however, has not quite come to an end. Wallace’s papers related to his final book, The Pale King, though part of the archive acquired by the Ransom Center, will remain with publisher Little, Brown until the book’s release, which is scheduled for April 2011. After the book’s release, the papers, notes, and computer disks related to this novel Wallace never fully completed will be reunited with his archive at the Ransom Center. If these materials are anything like the papers already here, they will be a fascinating and rich resource for students and scholars.

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The ads press the case that magazines remain an effective advertising medium in the age of the Internet because of the depth and lasting quality of print, compared with the ephemeral nature of much of the Web’s content.

“The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive,” says one ad.

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