|
Laurielfrodo
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Laura
Birthday: 6/16/1981
Gender: Female
Interests: My Lord and Savior - Jesus Christ, being with friends and family, The Marion E. Wade Center , books by: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, J.K. Rowling, Jasper Fforde, and Laurie R. King, reading in general, Celtic music, and anything else having to do with the British Isles.Present goal in life: Be the best archivist this world has ever seen, and serve God while doin' it!
Expertise: I can make a great stir fry!
Industry: Nonprofit
Message: message me
Member Since:
3/26/2004
|
|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| Now you might naturally wonder what all this "digital era" archival scuttlebutt has to do with the Wade Center since none of its authors produced anything digital. (And I thank God daily that Chesterton never got his hands on a computer. The man produced hundreds of books and articles as it is...) Digital items can have 2 origins: 1) things can be "born digital," meaning they have existed from their inception in a digital environment - like this blog post for example, or 2) things can be "digitized" - taken from a non-digital format and somehow migrated to or represented in a digital one. In the case of the Wade Center, our collections that we select for digital access and preservation fall mainly in the second category.
 Prime candidates for digital migration are items which can no longer be accessed without getting a makeover, like this dandy little record with singing by Hilaire Belloc (buddy of Chesterton's) that I found in the John Sullivan Collection. We just had it professionally transferred onto an audio CD so people can actually listen to it since we don't have a record player on hand. We've also transferred our extensive oral history recording collection to CDs, DVDs, and server back-ups since those interviews were done by the Wade Center and are not available anywhere else. If those audio and video tapes go bad - they're GONE; you can't hit amazon.com and purchase replacement copies. And if all our digital copies fail us (which they might), we've taken time to transcribe them as well with printed and digital copies of the transcripts.
Besides audio-visual digitization, the Wade has also been working on getting a good portion of its photo collection (which includes pics of our authors, their family, friends, etc.) scanned and digitized. Publishers contact us frequently to use our images in new books, articles, and videos. Check out the extra features on Disney / Walden Media's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe DVD sometime and you'll see our name quite a bit in the credits. Having a digital scan to send to publishers is much easier than peddling photo prints through the mail! An added bonus is that patrons will eventually be able to browse our photo collections on our website without even being at the Wade Center!
And ah yes - the internet. Now all archives are being called to make their websites not just a pit-stop to figure out what the open hours are, but a magical portal to the archival collections themselves. The Wade is not in this category yet (Remember that pesky "copyright" comment in the previous posting? It's back.), but we've made some big strides over the past few years to get digital copies of our collection listings and policies, information about the authors, our journal (VII), and a myriad of additional information on our website to help our visitors really get a feel for who we are and what we can offer to both the general public and to researchers. That may seem standard these days - but hey baby, it's DIGITAL!  I'm also thrilled to pieces that we just put up our first digital exhibit which was created from a physical exhibition in our museum area. The museum exhibit is now dismantled, but the digital one will live on and reach far more viewers than its original counterpart.
Most of the above projects are all focused on making these items accessible to the public, but access is very different than digital preservation. Preservation aims to keep items intact and pristine forever, which is not a small task and is, let's face it, impossible in the long run. When you get into the digital realm, it can be a nightmare. If you have a piece of paper it is either there, or it isn't. It can burn, get torn up, get wet, the dog can eat it, but it is either there - or isn't. That and you only need a pair of eyes to read the paper. Got that?
Digital files on the other hand can suffer all sorts of other ailments. They can become corrupt and only partially readable, they can mysteriously disappear, or seem to be there but unreadable, their hardware can malfunction, or get damaged, their software can be "incompatible" or just downright outdated ... need I go on? Oh yes, and the dog can still eat them. If you're only babysitting one file this isn't so bad, but think about thousands, or (in today's day and age) BILLIONS of files that are on different media and require different software and hardware to stay alive. All those binary babies are depending on you to keep them going, or as a previous employer of mine called it: "receive care and feeding." Folks, this is why I am a traditionalist and prefer paper when it comes to long-term preservation, and it is also one of the many reasons why I'm very happy to work at the Wade Center. 
So in wrapping up this 2-part blog epic we can conclude that the blessings and benefits of the digital age are definitely promising and abundant in the world of archives, but must be executed with care and intention to best serve the needs of both the patrons and the archival materials themselves. (And no, I didn't steal that sentence from one of my old grad school papers, but realize it might sound that way.) Technology is not perfect, but it's pretty cool and is helping folks learn, discover, and do some pretty amazing things these days. It's a tool that can be used for good or ill depending on the motives of the hands that are using it. Remember people, the only inherently evil object is the One Ring. Every other tool depends on the state of the human heart behind it.
| | |
|  "Digital" is quite the buzz-word today, as many of you have probably noticed - and the information science field is no exception. Now "archives" and "digital" may sound like they have no business being in the same sentence together, but archivists are called to be techno-wizards these days on top of every other super power they possess. Many new acquisitions (a.k.a. new "stuff" - see how many archival-ese terms you're learning?! ) that come to archives are now stored on hard drives rather than boxes filled with paper. Tell me, how would you permanently preserve a document that was created in an antiquated word processing program from 1987? Or how about millions of emails? Or sound and video files that need to be digitized from LPs, or reel to reels, or BETA, or WAX CYLINDER?! Mighty archival warriors are pondering these very questions and have made brilliant headway in recent years, but as technology continues to change, steaming locomotive of innovation and capitalism that it is, more track has to be laid and FAST if we're not to have billions of bites of data becoming inaccessible orphans and eventually disappearing in an anti-climactic digital *puff* of smoke.
And let's not forget the expectations of patrons these days that would like everything you have in print available right at home on their computers, full-text searchable please. Projects like Google Books and Gutenberg are tearing up the turf with getting millions of texts scanned, OCR'd (optical character recognition), and fully-searchable for the instant-gratification-hungry populace. Great progress has been made to get this system somewhat manageable with printed text, but that doesn't touch the zillions of handwritten letter and manuscript pages out there that researchers also want to see. W-O-W. That there is a lot of work, people! And then there's copyright considerations, but we're not GOING there right now in this post.
Once the product is achieved in all its digital glory, the debate continues in the archival kingdom: do you keep the original physical item (if it wasn't destroyed already while it was being digitized?) How do you make sure the files you just made stay readable? (oh shoot, our server just crashed....) What do you mean there are .wav, .mp3. mp4, .aac, [ad infinitum] file types to choose from? Which ones do we use?! Which will be readable in the year 2045?! [run away screaming into the hills] Actually it's not quite that bad, but it feels that way sometimes.
These discussions have caused me to not only wonder about how to practically apply such theory to my own archival work, but have given me some good philosophical fodder to chew on as well. Why is it that many people still desire to hold a book in their hands rather than a Kindle or that digital book on their cell phone? What causes people to feel "let down" (I'm not kidding, I've seen the sulking) when they are face to face with a perfect digital scan of a C.S. Lewis letter printed in brilliant color reproduction - just because it isn't the ORIGINAL letter? Some archivists and librarians would call these physical purists silly. All the content is there, what's your problem? I even had one professor in grad school say we shouldn't be spending billions of dollars to preserve the original Declaration of Independence since we have so many copies of the dang thing. I mean, it's not like there's an invisible map on the back of it or anything!
But how do you know when you've gotten all the content out of an item? A reproduction lacks the texture, the paper grain, the smell, and above all the physical link to the past that the original piece embodied. A materialist historian would argue that every atom has some meaning to someone (I'm not one of them, but that's another issue). We're physical creatures, people. For one reason or another, myself included, we get a thrill out of putting our finger on something that somebody else important to us once touched, or was in a place where something cool happened. If we only wanted content, or things worth great monetary value, then grandma's diary, or your baby's lock of hair, or a bullet from a WWI battlefield, or a personally annotated book from Tolkien's library is just as good as 0's and 1's on a hard drive as it is in your hands. Go home Indiana Jones - nobody wants the Holy Grail unless you can sell it on eBay. We have it already as a high-resolution .TIFF file, or even a hologram. Spirit and physicality mingling? As if! Get out of town! My friend Rachel would here accuse me of being a sacramentalist - haaa.
And so the digital battle continues to rumble on. Book spines are chopped off daily so that the pages can be disassembled and made easier to scan - yet the scanned pages are made available to thousands more people as a digital image than they would have been as physical text. Who can say which is the greater evil? What archivist will have to make that decision? [da da duuuum!]
So what do all of these conundrums amount to in day to day work at the Wade Center? Tune in next time to find out! [seriously, I had not thought I would get as verbosely passionate as I did in this post and it would be far too long if I said anymore today. ]
| | |
|  No, the title of this post does not mean there is a psychological problem going on with the brain cells (although some of you may disagree after reading this post). The significance of the title is how the records can speak, sometimes literally, to those who have the ears and heart to listen. (that sounds vaguely Biblically familiar, doesn't it? )
I recently had a conversation with a biographer and she shared with me her real sense of knowing the subject she was studying (in this case Joy Davidman) extremely intimately. Almost as if she had known her in life. This knowledge and sense of relationship came from reading her letters, tracing her life path to geographical locations, speaking with those who knew her, etc. etc. All the sorts of things one hopes a good biographer will do in sketching the fullness of a human life with depth and, in an ideal world, accuracy.
I was struck by how similar this sensation is in archival work as well. When you are faced with the scraps of history that have survived their creators, you learn quite a lot about the hands that once held them. At first the stacks are just heaps of paper, bits of metal, some plastic cassette tapes. As you work to organize these objects so that others can access their content, you must study their context, their existing order (if there is any), how & why they were created, who created them, and ask them to reveal themselves to you bit by bit. That's when the paper gets a voice. A battered book with water stains tells the story of how G.K. Chesterton read it while walking in the rain. Flurries of notes on single sheets of paper reveal how a member of the Oxford University pastorate with an eager mind to learn processed her thoughts chaotically - just like the order of her papers. A box opened after decades of forgetfulness shares the pungent tobacco scent from its previous owner.
Two recent experiences at work brought these thoughts to mind. One was a voice coming to life, the other is of voices fading. Now that I'm drawing to the end of organizing the papers of John Sullivan (I told you I'd mention him again), I have come to admire his passion for Chesterton (only passion could drive such an avid collection), and the great pains he took to organize both his own and Chesterton's work with a detailed typed catalog of his collection and a myriad of handwritten note cards with citations (he was a bibliographer after all - those are very detail-oriented personages). What was he like to meet as a person? Well, when I was working with his audio tapes there was his voice speaking to me through the speakers of the cassette player -- alive and well even though it left the earth in 1982. Certain qualities of his voice made me feel like I had almost guessed what he'd sound like, proper British gentleman as he was, but there are other intricacies that could never be fully known until you've heard them, or known the man himself. The moments with child voices on the audiotapes made me wonder about his family life. Were these his grandchildren? The papers were silent in his archive on this point, but the tapes spoke.
 The observation of voices fading came from the recent celebration of Walter Hooper's visit to the Wade Center and the presentation of the Clyde S. Kilby Lifetime Achievement Award. I was there watching him lecture on his work with C.S. Lewis. I saw him receive the award with its calligraphy and gilt lettering. I heard his friends stand up and honor him with words, and some tears, as they shared how his work and relationship had touched their lives. Those events have now been stored as digital video and audio binary bits, still photographs, stark black print from a laser printer on white copy paper, and publicity materials. The voices of the presenters, the murmurs of the audience, the smell of the room where these events took place, the taste of the catered food (which was awesome, btw) - are either now only accessible through imperfect copies or are gone forever. Yet the fact that even some semblance of them was saved is, amongst the ravages of time, nothing short of a miracle.
Moments fade even before you can fully grasp them. Archives help prolong them - maybe just long enough to glean some treasures from them that were missed in their original moments of experience. They'll stay silent though if there are no ears listening. What do you hear?
| | |
| One of the many things I love about my job is the task diversity I'm exposed to on a daily basis. Whether it's the unexpected arrival of 50 students from Georgia who show up in 2 coach buses, or some alarm in the building going off for no apparent reason - life at the Wade is guaranteed to keep you on your toes in a good way. I'm also convinced that the nature of archival work is full of problem-solving. "What do I do with *this* [insert object here]?" is a popular archival question.
Humor aside though, the challenges involved in creating order from chaos, preserving all items in your care well enough to survive whatever comes their way (short of a nuclear explosion), and making those items accessible physically and intellectually to the public can be both an engaging and humbling experience. Almost daily, I encounter questions I've not been formally "taught" how to answer immediately. That might sound rather frightening, but isn't that how life works in general? Just like my liberal arts education from Wheaton (go Thunder! ), my archival training taught me not how to answer every question, but how to think, how to learn, and the tools necessary for finding out how to solve problems. That kind of preparation is priceless, and works great both in archives and the world at large.
 These thoughts came to mind at the end of last week as I was faced with 15 mysterious audiocassette tapes from the current archival collection I'm organizing (which in archivalese is called "processing"). (it's the John Sullivan Papers - a Chesterton collector. More on that in another post - I promise.) It wasn't just the thought that I'd be sitting with my finger on the fast forward button of a tape player for several hours that gave me pause here. The earliest recording had a date of 1958 on it, so these tapes are OLD, and might be on their last legs. One play-through could be the death knoll and the recording would then be lost. Normally, if you have something valuable to move from an analog to a digital format, you let the pros handle it and send it off to a high-tech audio preservation lab. But why pay the money to get that done when we didn't know if we even wanted the content on these tapes? Nope - it would be up to me to figure out what these tapes were and try to keep them alive in the process. Some piece of history could either live or die in my hands. And you thought archival work was risk-free and boring?
Things were going well for the first eight tapes. I heard some Chesterton poems set to music, some lectures, some BBC radio broadcasts about GKC, and by the end of the run I also got to hear some random British school children giving mini talks on atomic power and the joys of fishing. Let me tell you - THAT was fascinating. I was looking forward to hearing the next tape because it had something to do with Kingsley Amis (a big name) on the BBC (an authoritative source) honoring the works of GKC (our person of interest). The tape went in, the play button was pushed, and then - nothing. I saw that only one hub on the cassette was spinning and immediately popped the tape out. The magnetic tape had snapped and was no longer even visible on the bottom of the cassette. Drat.
Since giving up was not an option, I commenced in figuring out how to perform surgery and see if I could at least get the tape to play through if I was careful with it. The cassette had 5 screws and all our screwdrivers were too large. I nabbed my mini screwdriver for my eyeglasses out of my purse and it worked perfectly. After examining the inside of the cassette and seeing that the tape had torn right at the beginning, it could then be attached to the empty hub easily enough as long as it was lightly adhered, and treated gently. Enter the Scotch tape. I managed to feed the tape through the cassette again with a clear cassette next to me as a guide, taped the loose end to the hub, and screwed the case back together. Voila - Kingsley Amis's voice was coming out of the boom box speakers and the recording was sterling quality to boot. A winner. The tape will most likely be able to be played at least one more time, which is long enough for us to get it transferred to a CD on our beautiful cassette digitization drive. A happy ending.
The next day did bring one tape that did not survive, even with an attempt at surgery, but life and death are constant presences in archives and these things happen. It's good when you can keep life going a little longer, using all your wits about you, and hopefully that life can continue to impact the world for the better. That's what it's all about.
| | |
| 
This photo is the new exhibit in the Wade Center's museum: "Before there was Email: The Letters of C.S. Lewis," featuring original letters by C.S. Lewis for the public to view. Did you know that most museums only exhibit 1-2% of their entire holdings? That really blows my mind when I think about the size of NYC's Met or London's British Museum since their exhibition space takes days to absorb and walk through. This little guy to the left may not look very large, but much love and planning went into it and I've learned so much since I've been in charge of exhibiting original materials at the Wade Center.
The first step is always figuring out a theme or topic for your next exhibit and developing a "thesis statement" for it, if you will. Even that can have different angles since its interaction with the public can be used to educate, inspire, provoke questions, just show off "cool stuff" - or all of the above. Lewis as a letter writer might sound cut and dry, but figuring out how to represent him as brother, friend, teacher, spiritual mentor, accomplished author, and academic in the space of 64" x 21" with about seven original letters out of a horde of hundreds was downright challenging. It often takes quite a bit of research to not only select your theme and objects, but then figure out how to accurately present and contextualize those objects to the public.
Once the letters were selected (based on content and physical appearance), I got to start asking fun questions like: "how do I take a priceless and fragile piece of paper and stand it up vertically for 3-6 months, keeping it physically safe while making it look visually attractive and accessible?" It's great to have the letters out for people to see - that's why we have them after all, but you want them to last for future generations to view as well, so their well-being is of supreme importance. All original letters in this case had to touch archival-quality mounts so that no dyes, chemicals, or other untouchables would cause damage to the paper. Terms like "acid free," "lignin free," "PVC free," pH balanced, etc. come into play here. It's like that childhood game of placing pillows across the floor and pretending you're avoiding a lava flow by jumping from pillow to pillow. If your heel touches the ground, or the Lewis letter touches black foam core - you're TOAST. hehe Much of display work simply comes down to trial and error, arriving at what DOES work and what DOESN'T work. Funny how similar that is to creative writing.
Besides the physical preservation of the objects, the visual presentation of the display has a score of questions to answer as well: what colors should be used and how will they promote the content of the exhibit? What fonts should the captions have to creatively promote the content while also remaining readable? What other objects or images should go into the display to further its absorption by the onlooker? Pull those artistic talents and design skills out of the closet of high school knowledge and put them back to work!
Once all of that is decided, then comes the work of arranging everything, mounting captions onto foam core and colored backings, cutting all the cardstock with nice, crisp and straight edges or else face the penalty of starting OVER again, etc. In this case we also needed to make transcripts of the letters since Lewis's handwriting can be difficult to decipher. Those have been typed up and placed in a binder off to the side so that people can easily read content like Lewis's hilarious letter to his brother in 1932 (which nearly made me burst a lung the first time I read it), and then see its beautiful original self in the case. One of the letters also required tracking down some Greek translation for the viewers who can't read Greek, which I expect is most people. (sad, I know)
The final elements often require a touch of flair, and this display had me choosing international stamps from my personal stamp collection for accents, popping Lewis's ballpoint pen in the case, and digging out a charming Chinese Christmas tree ornament from my stash of Christmas decorations that I got from a friend in elementary school.
And there you have it! A full-blown display that hopefully is enjoyable and informative for all and sundry! I often think that the work of archivists is like special effects artists. Your strivings are most successful when they melt into the background or become invisible to allow the materials you're preserving to have the full spotlight. Get out there and shine, guys - that's what we're preparing you to do! But like any other tool, it's the user (scholar, student, enthusiast, etc.) who gets to CHOOSE how these materials should be used to influence themselves and the world.
So the next time you walk into a museum, take a moment to look at HOW as well as WHAT you're looking at. And if you think the letter display above is neat, then you've got to see our Oxford skyline which has just appeared in another corner of the Wade museum - assembled and hand-cut by my talented (and much more patient than I am) co-worker, Shawn.
| | |
|
