Time to Archive!

The End-of-Term Harvest(EOT) project partners have been busy harvesting things before the
inauguration tomorrow. I'm also getting ready to add more content to the CyberCemetery, because who knows what website changes we'll be seeing in the coming days! I'll be on the watch for agencies or commissions that end with the Bush administration. I welcome any help other librarians (or interested folk) are willing to give--please let me know if you hear of a particular website that is being taken down and needs to be quickly archived.

I hope you are all able to watch tomorrow's historic ceremony!

Extra, Extra: .Gov Harvest!

Yep, UNT has joined the efforts to harvest the Bush Administration's "webstuffs." Not only can you read about it on the Washington Post (also on NextGov), but you can read a fun quote from my boss Suzanne:

"When Bush took over, the second that he was sworn in, the White House Web site went from being this massive collection of important links to a picture of Bush and his biography and a picture of [Vice President] Cheney and his biography," Sears said. "We don't want to see that happen again. . . . It's just very important for history's sake that this material is archived the way that the printed material has always been archived."

In other news, Murphy's Law states that any time the Washington Post calls about your Digital Collections, you will be out sick and your boss will be interviewed instead. Ah, well--such is life, eh?

The Growing Web

I started working on notes from the NDIIPP Web at Risk meeting last week, but it will probably be a few days before I finish. I've been distracted by training a student to do some metadata quality-assurance for our A to Z Digitization Project (and isn't that a gorgeous collection?). However, the meeting was great, so rest assured I'll report soon.

Related to the NDIIPP meeting, this morning I pulled some CyberCemetery web stats (to help the NDIIPP team predict collection sizes). It's amazing how the earliest websites in the CyberCemetery take up such little space, and what mammoths the websites I'm archiving now are. Currently, the CyberCemetery consists of 45 websites that take up 27 GB; I'm predicting that by fall this year, the CC will have about 55+ websites taking up closer to 45 GB.

Factors that appear to be playing a part in website growth:

• content (number of pages/links)
• design (images, CSS files, and other information used for layout/navigation purposes)
• multimedia (larger amounts of images, audio, video in websites)
• I guess you could even narrow this last point further, and say that multimedia files themselves are growing larger as images/videos become more refined in quality (resolution, number of megapixels).

I hope to have some time this weekend to edit/post photos from last week's trip, and will post images from Oakland and from San Jose's amazing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library as soon as they're up.

California Girl

I had a simply fantastic time in Oakland with the NDIIPP Web-at-Risk folks, and came out of the meeting not only with a deeper appreciation for the project and more feedback to give, but had one of the most productive, interesting, and companionable lunch hours of my career, exchanging ideas with a great group of (primarily Californian) govdoc librarians.

I'll be reporting about this in more detail later in the week. For now, I'll return to my sole activity of the past few hours: catching up all my email. (Shudder.)

In other news:
I've actually spent an entire week away from NPR... what is this world coming to? (No, really: what's going on in the world? I've been NPR-less, so I don't know!)

Silver Lining

The rewarding thing about getting up at 7am on a spectacularly gorgeous Saturday to go to work was that the first thing I heard upon starting my radio was NPR's Weekend Edition playing the CyberCemetery story. I turned the key, turned on the radio, and there it was--perfect timing.

CyberCemetery Story

Read the print version of the story here:
"UNT's CyberCemetery keeps dead federal agency websites alive." by Catherine Cuellar, KERA 90.1 Reporter

Or listen to the MP3 here.

(This story played on KERA 90.1's "Morning Edition" on 8:36am, 2.19.07.)

Web Archiving & Book Mooching

The Web Curator Tool (WCT) was just released by the National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ); it's a new resource for archiving websites (part of my job for the CyberCemetery and the NDIIPP Web-at-Risk project). I may be providing feedback on this project as part of my duties as a curator in the Web-at-Risk project. This news came shortly after I finished posting my first FDLP conference notes to my wiki on what topic but: Web Harvesting.

On a completely different track, I've been using Book Mooch for a few months now; I've sent three books (two more to send this week) for the lost MediaMail cost of $1-2.50 each, and in turn received two books, and have two more on the way! I highly recommend the service as a cheap, fun way to exchange books. It's particularly good for graphic novels, as these tend to be pricey at Half Price Books and the popular titles aren't usually available; Book Mooch has a bigger selection, and they cost only the media mail postage that you pay to send a book of your own to someone else.

The Burden of Information

It strikes me that I've recently been dealing with "archival" issues in my personal life.

Before I proceed, let me admit here: I am a pack rat. My husband is a pack rat. We were both born of pack-rat parents.

For the past few months, I've been going through our house, room by room, labeling things as "Goodwill," "trash", "eBay," or placing them in a location where--gasp!--they actually belong. (Maybe I should call it Personal Weeding.) Last week, I got to a box labelled "notebooks." I opened it and found it filled to the brim with the fodder of undergrad and graduate courses alike; the undergrad notebooks peppered with doodles and the grad notebooks carefully labeled with print-outs stating the course title, number, and date. All my digested knowledge, right there in one box.

Have I opened that box in the past decade? Yes--but only to determine what it was before moving it to another room. Do I plan to reread my notes--particularly my undergrad ones? As funny as some of those doodles are, are they worth the square foot of space that the box occupies? Are they worth transporting to another house in a few years? It was a surprisingly easy decision to toss them in the "trash" pile.

The grad notebooks were harder. They're recent, they're relevant, they're nicely labeled and organized (miracle of miracles). I hated to toss notebooks that I could easily line up in chronological order.

But then... when will I need to use these? If I'm working on art research, won't I be looking up actual articles and books? Will I really care what I thought about Whistler's "gentle art of making scandal" five years ago? Isn't this all just ephemera?

I made a historic decision, I who still have grade-school notebooks and mixed tapes from the early '90s stashed somewhere. I tossed the entire box. All of it.

As I drove home from my Digital Libraries course on Tuesday, I realized that I've experienced quite a shift in my archival tendencies. Just as I used to be a religious pack-rat, I used to believe that we ought to keep every scrap of information, to preserve the human record. This belief didn't come to me when I started library school; it was born of an education in the humanities that emphasized history. Every diary, every list of household expenses sheds some light on the historical record.

But library science is a practical discipline; that's the reason it's in the sciences. In my early classes, I panicked about how to save ephemera, how to save emails, how to preserve these scraps of information for centuries. And to some extent, being a digital archivist, I still have those concerns--how will we preserve information on CDs when our CD drives are gone, how do I adequately archive a website, etc. But, ironically, taking a course in preservation shifted my view (as you can see in this previous post). As I mentioned there, that class showed me that if we save every bit of ephemera, it's going to get awfully difficult to discover and to access relevant information.

And that's my new shift of thinking at home, too. If I don't get rid of a few of those boxes I only open once every few years, then I won't be able to reach my bookcases--because there will be a veritable wall of labeled boxes in front of it. Not that this is the current situation in my guest room. No, there are just a few boxes--it's the rows of paint racks that are really blocking the bookcases.

Notes on Travel & Blogging:

• Starting tomorrow, I'll be on the road for ten days, so I thought I'd give my readership a heads-up now. I'll definitely post irregularly, I may post infrequently, but I have not abandoned my bloginess. I'll be at the FDLP Fall Conference in Washington, DC until 10/25, then Abilene, TX for my alma mater's Homecoming celebration. Regular blogship should resume by 10/30.
• Also, you may or may not have noticed that I finally switched this blog over to my Google account--hence the fancy changes in the sidebar. If you have trouble posting comments, this may be the reason.

NDIIPP Update

Jill Hurst-Wahl recently posted about new books in preservation and digitization. One of them was Archiving the Web: A Guide for Information Management Professionals, about which she mentioned, "Hopefully this books conveys some of the lessons being learned from the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program." ...Which reminded me that I don't think I've posted an update on the NDIIPP Web-at-Risk project.

I'm the curator for UNT's collection in the project, and over the summer, my boss and I developed our Collection Plan (the CDL and ourselves were asked to provide plans early to act as examples for the rest of the group, who created their plans this month). So far, the first test release of the WAS (Web Archiving Software) was released a few weeks ago for us all to play around with it. It went pretty smoothly, and I was able to capture all the websites I listed in my URL seed list.

Unrelated Banter

• I found this article on Museum Visitor Studies quite interesting. Museum staffers follow visitors around the museum, taking notes on which exhibits they take time at, pass by, or talk about. I like that they notify the visitors, but still try to remain hidden. That would be a neat idea to implement in a library.
• The DLC Vision Document is final! You might want to read the FGI commentary on the document, as well.
• Now I've heard it all: a NORAD podcast! It details how to put together an emergency preparedness survival kit and have a plan.