America's Next Top Information Professional

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I was in Portland last week for, among other things, the Public Library Association conference. I went to a couple of great presentations, but I have to say, it was the free stuff that blew me away. It was my first national conference, and I was floored by the richness of the exhibition hall.

Free is a very good price.

We trained down and back, so I didn’t have room for quiiite all the books I picked up. Some remain stashed in my parents’ house, but I had to bring back the new Nick Flynn and David Mitchell (!!!) so I can get reading. Oh, and the Harlequin bag to carry them all in.

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On the recommendation of my buddy Kathryn, I’ve been reading Michel Gondry’s odd little book, You’ll Like This Film Because You’re In It: The Be Kind, Rewind Protocol. Gondry is a filmmaker, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Be Kind Rewind and others. I say it’s an odd book because he writes things like this:

And my utopia was once again tickling my brain. Utopian Tourette’s: That is my precise condition – utopias burst out of my imagination without warning. (14)

The book is, among other things, a guide to a particular approach to community engagement and collaboration. Gondry organized a gallery space into a set of film sets, and brought individuals and groups in to create films using the protocol laid out in the book. These guidelines are intended to maximize collaborative creativity:

I believe in systems. Well, not the big and vague entity that seems to run the world against everyone. The system to which I am referring is more like an ensemble of imagined rules that allow a participant to achieve a certain outcome. The rules let people focus on a single moment, while simultaneously ensuring that all the efforts produced add up to the desired result. (15)

and

When people are given a chance to achieve something fun, they don’t need the hassle of authority to stay focused. They always rise to the occasion, which is the easiest way to get the best of people: no management required. (59)

Gondry is particularly interested in how people create together, and ensuring participation and equality between contributors. He describes with great detail some of the specific groups he observes going through the process. His distress when teachers interfere with their students’ collaborations, or when professional filmmakers attempt to circumvent the protocol are tender and authentic. He also acknowledges the ambiguous value of the products of the — these films are not great art, and may be limited to the enjoyment of the persons who worked on them. He alludes to individuals who have since gone on to other projects, but the goal is not . The goal is to make and watch a movie with a group that then becomes a community.

This sort of meaningful collaboration can develop through all kinds of activities, not just film. The creative problem solving that Gondry describes reminds me of my own dorkalicious time on Odyssey of the Mind teams as a teenager. In this creative problem-solving competition, a team works together to write and perform a skit that incorporates certain requirements. Though I doubt I’ll ever have to make another apron out of paper bags, OM taught me team work and brainstorming skills that I use on a daily basis. These kinds of skills are at least a bonus effect of projects like the films Gondry is proposing.

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“The first-ever film version of Lewis Carroll’s tale has recently been restored by the BFI National Archive from severely damaged materials. Made just 37 years after Lewis Carroll wrote his novel and eight years after the birth of cinema, the adaptation was directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow, and was based on Sir John Tenniel’s original illustrations. In an act that was to echo more than 100 years later, Hepworth cast his wife as the Red Queen, and he himself appears as the Frog Footman. Even the Cheshire cat is played by a family pet.

With a running time of just 12 minutes (8 of which survive), Alice in Wonderland was the longest film produced in England at that time. Film archivists have been able to restore the film’s original colours for the first time in over 100 years.

Music: ‘Jill in the Box’, composed and performed by Wendy Hiscocks.”

Yesterday was the second annual symposium of the UBC chapter of the Association of Canadian Archivists. This year’s theme was Preserving the Memory of the World and featured folks from a variety of institutions all over the world. I enjoyed hearing about UNESCO initiatives the World Digital Library and the Memory of the World Programme, as well as a presentation about the MotW Jikji prize winner, the National Archives of Malaysia. Issues of translation — both linguistic and cultural — and recordkeeping and heritage initiatives in the developing world kept coming up. In Brian Thurgood’s talk about international standards, he noted that a lot of interest in recordkeeping standards has been coming from developing nations. Malaysian national archivist Dato Sidek, when asked about his optimism in a famously complaining profession, simply stated that you have to stay positive in the archives. Things are gonna be bad, so you just have to figure out the best way to make things work.

Social media came up repeatedly throughout the day. Johanna Smith’s presentation on recordkeeping in social networking environments focused on Library and Archives Canada’s initiatives looking at social media in government. It struck me that a lot still comes back to John MacDonald’s Wild Frontier: as long as recordkeeping occurs on the desktop — or the BlackBerry or the mobile phone — archivists are always going to be chasing down records from many steps behind. Babek Hamidizeh mentioned that the World Digital Library has some focus on creating formats available to mobile devices, because in many parts of the world, that is simply the way that people get online. What seems like a gimmick in Canada may be a necessity in other places.

The most provocative speaker of the day was George Blood from the Safe Sound Archive, whose talk had a last-minute change in its title to “METADATA: Gallactic Domination is Just the Beginning.” I’ve spent part of the last week sweating over the data dictionary for the digital library I’m working on, so it was very gratifying to hear Blood ask some hard questions about resource description. Like: how much metadata is enough? (He joked that the only answers are: “I don’t know!” or “More!”) Is there such a thing as too much metadata? What about if the metadata is bigger than the object being described? (This reminded me of Umberto Eco’s essay about “On the impossibility of drawing a map of the empire on a scale of 1 to 1” in How to Travel with a Salmon.) Blood pointed out that we don’t really know how much it helps users to add more metadata. One recurring joke all day was that standards are like toothbrushes: everyone agrees they’re important, but no one wants to use someone else’s. Blood pointed out that even when metadata standards get used, they are rarely applied consistently: what happens when an institution uses a field in a different way, or adds their own elements? We really don’t know. He drove this home by noting that, for a field that professes to avoid proprietary solutions, we use metadata in a generally incompatible way.

I had to duck out before the last few speakers, but it was a great event. Props to the ACA student chapter, faculty, and speakers who made it happen. I can’t wait to see what they come up with for next year.

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Just in case you haven’t seen this elsewhere, the winners of the Copus Year of Science Zine-a-thon have been announced.

Here’s the lovely grand prize winner, Meeting a Giant Octopus, by Chen Dou of Gaithersburg, Maryland:

Giant Octopus!!!

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(Via Douglas Coupland)

My post yesterday mentioned my love for my Google Reader, but I didn’t mention that I have been avoiding a particular folder in my Reader for the last two weeks or so. I haven’t been ready to read through all my Books feeds just because I know there will be a bucketload of postings in response to the passing of J.D. Salinger. I’ll admit: I was one of those kids who loved Catcher in the Rye. It was my favorite book for a long time after I first read it, in seventh grade. I used to read it at least once a year, although it has been at least five since I last picked it up. (More recently, I also love Frank Portman’s book King Dork, which laments Catcher’s role in the development of angsty, pretentious teenagers.)

I still have a lot of feelings and thoughts to sort out about Salinger, and I think I’ll probably pick up Catcher again sometime soon. However, his passing has raised some interest in certain archival issues. This brief article from the New York Times article has the provocative teaser “J.D. Salinger’s death could be archivist’s trove” but it at least raises some important questions. Salinger was famously private and effectively squelched attempts at biography, including a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. (This hinged on the “fair use” of Salinger’s unpublished letters by biographer Ian Hamilton. Quick note being: the copyright of correspondence belongs to the writer, even if the ownership of the physical object belongs to the receiver.) The NYT piece speaks with “veteran archivist” Stephen Ennis from Emory University about the possibility that Salinger’s personal papers will appear.

I groaned a few times while reading this article, because it certainly reinforces some misconceptions:

a) Archivists are vultures, waiting to swoop in and take records wherever we can. This always creeps me out, although perhaps it is sort of true in the cutthroat world of literary papers. All your fonds are belong to us!

b) Archivists = librarians. To quote the article, Archivists don’t usually enjoy public acclaim, but they are indispensable to anyone who delves into the lives of the great, the near-great and the not-so-great. Librarians “know how to keep the goods,” said Nancy Milford, the discussion’s moderator. Sigh. Another lost opportunity for distinguishing between two intertwined but separate professions.

c) Digital is forever.While it is true that many writers have purposefully destroyed their paper documents, it is completely misleading to imply that email is a more permanent medium. You don’t have to burn email to get rid of it. I would love to see more media representation of the contradictions of digital preservation, the complexity of how fragile digital objects are, even while they are easily replicated and distributed. Is that so much to ask?

Nonetheless, it’s always good to see archives mentioned in a major publication, especially associated with a famous person. It would be delightful if a collection of Salinger’s records appeared. Let’s hope they end up in a public institution, though, rather than getting snatched up by a private collector.

As a related note, I’ve been meaning to pick up Laura Millar’s new book, The Story Behind the Book: Preserving Author’s and Publisher’s Archives. Has anyone checked it out yet?