crowd-sourcing

I'm re-posting a section of the most recent post from our office blog here in the hope that a few more people might see it and get involved.

One of things we have begun to develop is a link library of online materials relevant to CAIS’ students. Using a small sub-group of our tutors and the delicious social bookmarking site we have established a process that we think can ultimately create a rich resource. You can see the small number of links we've added so far as we've been refining our ideas at delicious.com/CAIS_Archives.

Clearly this resource won’t just be of use to our students. We’re hoping to develop something that contains links which should be of interest or relevance to any archivist, records manager or other information professional. To that end, we would like to invite contributions from anyone in the record keeping community who uses delicious and is interested in helping build the link library and making it as worthwhile as possible.

All we’re asking is that whenever you save a bookmark on a record keeping or related subject with your own delicious account (which is free) you tag it 'for:CAIS_Archives' (without the inverted commas). That sends the bookmark to our inbox and we can then save it for inclusion in the main list. The reason we've used this approach is so that we can keep a modicum of control over the vocabulary we use for tagging. As the list of links grows the tags will become crucial for discovery. However, we will take into consideration any tags you have already attached to the link.

You can read the full post here.

Wave hello?

Like everyone else and their auntie (including my friend and colleague Steve and many of the archivists and records managers on twitter) I'm interested to see what the potential of Google Wave might be for record keepers. I don't have an invite, but as a result of some long drives this week I've caught up with several podcasts and listened to a lot of people discussing the way that Wave seems to work at this early stage and the prospects for the Wave environment. The best single source I've found so far was this podcast on the TWiT network which, if you're interested, is well worth a listen.

Like most online systems, Wave will evolve based on the choices and actions of its users. However, right now I'm interested in Wave's potential as a collaborative environment where the metadata generated by changes and the conversation about those changes is explicitly linked to the object of the collaboration. That object could be a web page, a document or anything else that a group of people can work on together in an online environment. Wave seems to have the potential to be an environment that moves us beyond sending multiple emails with the thing we're working on attached. Wave could be the environment that moves collaboration beyond the current mess of comments in email, track changes in documents and multiple iterations of the same thing with ever so slightly different filenames and no indication of which copy is 'definitive' (there's an old post of mine on this issue here). Another way to conceptualise Wave at a more basic level, and this was the very helpful example given on the podcast I link to above, was as a focussed, real time Wiki where the conversation and changes aren't buried, but are seen alongside the object.

Admittedly there are lots of collaborative environments and ways of working other than sending emails, but it's the final point in the paragraph above that I think makes Wave so exciting and have so much potential importance; 'the conversation and changes aren't buried, but are seen alongside the object'. Google seems to have created the first collaborative environment where context, conversation and object are captured together and can be rendered together as the record of any collaboration. Context is not managed separately from content. Tantalisingly for record keepers, Wave could be an environment where we can capture everything of consequence in a single output. Yes, some outputs will always need to be separated from notes about their development in certain contexts in the same way as, for example, final versions of reports are produced with all changes accepted or rejected before publication. However, if the record keeper wishes to capture process as well as product for whatever reason, Wave seems to be an environment that could facilitate that capture in a coherent way.

Another thing that interests me about the Wave environment is that, when used in the way described above, the focus of any collaboration or conversation is the object or shared goal of those involved. I wonder if this could almost be characterised as a refresh of the document metaphor for online working? Until I see the system I'm not sue of the answer to that question, but given the prospective focus on the 'thing' at the centre of any collaboration I think there may be some interesting discussions to be had in this regard.

The potential for Wave appears to be vast and it is easy to be excited by the next new thing. However, there will be problems with using Wave and Robert Scoble has rehearsed some of those in a couple of posts on his blog. I won't spend time going over this ground again, suffice to say that I recommend reading what he has to say as a useful counterpoint to many of the positive comments on Wave being made at the moment. From a record keeping perspective it's also worth noting that Wave appears to use a new file format which has been developed by Google for this system. Having thought about the potential for record keepers, there's an obvious issue there too.

The big disclaimer for all of the above is that I haven't yet used the system myself. Having said that, there's so much discussion of Wave at the moment I thought it might be useful to set down some thoughts about what it could mean for record keeping. I'm looking forward to finding out what we can do with Wave.

total archives

We've had the concept of total archives for some time now, but I heard about two collections this week that illustrate beautifully the idea of trying to capture the recorded memory of 'all segments of a community'. Firstly, there was the story about a grant to improve access and encourage user contributions to the Grateful Dead Archive and then came the news that the archive of the Flat Earth Society is looking for a new home.

Somehow the world seems like a better place when you know that not only do these collections exist, but that they are being looked after by archivists.

a digital life

Anyone who followed our office blog last week will have noticed that we were hosting our bi-annual Study School, which is a week where the new intake of distance learning students come to Dundee and we introduce them to our VLE, to some of the ideas they will encounter during their studies, to each other and to us and some of the other CAIS tutors.

One of the sessions that got the biggest response this year was on the fragility of digital information and how the rapid pace of change creates incredible challenges for record keepers. There's a post about the session here and Chris, who helped lead the session with Philip Lord, Susan Thomas and I, posted his impression of the afternoon here.

Susan and Philip used a variety of old media to emphasise the points around rapid change and obsolescence and the students were presented with a Fortran program on punched paper tape, disks of various sizes and vintages (3", 3.5", 5.25" etc), a variety of usb keys, minidisks, backup tapes and compact cassettes. (Those of you old enough to remember the C64, Amstrad CPC and Sinclair Spectrum will nod approvingly and remember that those humble C60s and C90s could, and did, contain digital information).

The discussion prompted me to think about the variety of different platforms and operating systems I've used at various stages, as opposed to the media on which the information is stored. With the help of Wikipedia I've come up with the following list and, to be honest, given myself a bit of a shock. Admittedly, some of this dates back to my school days and I don't have digital information from all of these systems lying around, but my experience does illustrate how far we've come, how quickly and the multitude of computer platforms that record keepers may have to cope with.

General

Amstrad CPC 464
BBC B
Acorn Archimedes running RISC OS

PCs

MS DOS 5 and 6
Windows 2
Windows 3.1
Windows 95
Windows NT
Windows XP
Windows Server

Macs

(For the purposes of this post I'm interested in the generations of the OS rather than the machines)

OS 9
OS 10.3 'Panther'
OS 10.4 'Tiger'
OS 10.5 'Leopard'
OS 10.6 'Snow Leopard'

I may have forgotten some of the iterations of the different operating systems and I'm not including platforms I have used belonging to friends and family (but that would expand the list with mentions of C64s, Atari STs, Amigas, a MMX MSX, and PCs running OS/2). What strikes me is that I am by no means a power user, yet I have used at least fifteen platforms fairly regularly at various times.

Whilst many of the platforms noted above are backwards-compatible (to a point) and can read data from their earlier iterations, that backwards-compatibility is not infinite and the capacity to read information created on older systems is dropped periodically. Similarly, each new version of platform brings changes. Some are obvious, like Apple's recent move Snow Leopard dropping support for Power PC hardware, but some are more subtle. This article from Ars Technica examines the way that Apple's move to Snow Leopard changes the way that the system controls the metadata that governs application binding.

The point of all this? That every change compounds the problems faced by record keepers in attempting to ensure that our digital memory is not lost. Arguably, this has become and remains greatest challenge faced by our profession.

Oh, and I didn't mention the different iterations of the software running on all these different platforms.

EDIT: I meant MSX, not MMX (which was an instuction set on a Pentium processor). I also forgot the Acorn Electron and the Amstrad PCW. Gordon Laing's Digital Retro is a great source for this stuff and something I should have looked at before writing the original post!

SoA conference '09

The following is an extract from a recent post on our deparmental blog. I'm reproducing it here as a handy note of where you can find information on the conference of the Society of Archivists (SoA) this year. You can read the full post here. I'd like to emphasise the reuqest that those at the conference tag their posts and tweets to make the event easier to follow online for those of us who aren't in Bristol.

The SoA have made an effort this year to make information about the conference available online. The conference blog is available here and the official conference twitter feed is available here or by following @SoAConference09 from your own twitter account. [My colleagues] Pat and Caroline, like many other delegates, will also be using twitter to share their thoughts as the conference progresses via our twitter account, @CAIS_Archives. The agreed hashtag for the conference is '#soa09'. You can use twitter search to look for that, or there's an account that's been set up on twapperkeeper to store all the tweets with that tag. We would like to encourage anyone attending or commenting on the conference to use 'soa09' as a tag for blog posts too so that information about, and responses to, the event can be aggregated later.