The Life of a Solo Archivist - The Lone Arranger

P.S. - Never Enough Velcro

2008-05-09T11:45:40Z

Oh yes, I am officially claiming the rights to the book title Never Enough Velcro for use on some future book about how to survive the Lone Arranger Lifestyle.

S.N. - A.F.U. (And A Disaster Recovery Idea)

2008-05-09T11:43:41Z

Back from MARAC in Chautauqua and I've already got the tracks of the 8-Ball having rolled over me back and forth a few times this week. :)

We have a new Director who is interested in beefing up our technology. Could be a good thing, probably more non-archival work on my plate. Too many responsibilities to fit into a 32-hour week. Of course, email stopped working and the server seized up yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to prepare for my first real meeting with the new boss (about everything).

Just a note from one of the MARAC sessions, because I don't want to forget it later. In a preservation discussion section (which was cleverly titled -- I thought that it was going to be about time management for Lone Arrangers), it occurs to me that the best place to store Disaster Recovery / Continuation of Operations (DRCOOP) would be on an online document store ... for example, Google Documents. There are two big problems with actual DRCOOP situations -- keeping the documents updated and disseminated (meaning -- getting the people who need to know where the docs are and how to get to them and actually read them before a disaster happens), and having access to the documents in an actual disaster. One disaster planning workshop I've attended recommends having "the briefcase" for each facility site. That briefcase contains all the plans, contact information, flashlight, etc. and you're supposed to keep it near an exterior door of your facility ... or at home, or both. A good idea in theory, but if you have a catastrophic disaster at 3 AM, you've lost the facility briefcase. If the fellow who has the home copy can be contacted and the briefcase is up-to-date, that is great... but why not just put all the documents somewhere where multiple people who will be called upon to respond can access and update them? Yes, you still should keep a hard-copy at home, and update it often. However, by using an online document store, it should always be possible to get to the documents (If you can't get to them at home, go to the library. If the libraries are all closed, go to a 24-hour Kinko's [perhaps I'm a bit big-city-centric here]). If the entire city gets cratered, or is quarantined (more likely to be a recoverable scenario), someone in the organization can carry on without having to don a Haz-Mat suit.

What's Wrong With Pirates, Anyway?

2008-04-27T15:30:32Z

LJ doesn't support trackback (yet?) so we have to do this the hard way.

In "The Pirate Problem," Dan Cohen wrote a posting framed around his surprise that the
Piratz Tavern failed to go out of business immediately after opening because there are more pirates in the Greater Washington D.C. area than he anticipated. There has been a strong pirate community in the area, and it has been here for decades with pirate feasts and gatherings. Some pirate just recognized the business potential of catering to an underserved community.

Dan characterized himself as the pirate, relative to the "old school humanities researcher" who fears that all this new digital magic mumbo-jumbo will make their comfortable way of doing research a thing of the past. I don't see Dan is the pirate here -- I think that the historian, who described himself as a crab being lowered into the pot of boiling water, is the pirate in this scenario. As archivists, as systems designers and implementors, we tend to forget about the pirates living among us (even if they wear a suit and tie and lobby on Capitol Hill by day). There are others who would like to be pirates, perhaps just for a day, but don't know how to get past the expectations of our "Very Serious Professional" community.

When we digitize, index, data warehouse, slice and dice the intellectual content of our archives, that there will always be pirates ("old school" historians) out there who will want to study the collection using the old collection/box/folder/document metaphors. The systems we build need to do more than merely retain the contextual information, but also make it available if desired by the researcher. We can do a better job of presenting the opportunities of the technology to make their work easier. The historians in the survey were asked how they would use the digitized collection. Were they presented with a laundry-list of potential tools or views into the collection and asked "would this be useful to you too?" The old-school researcher can't imagine what can be done with a digital repository because he hasn't been properly introduced. The new technology is all about choices and opportunities. Someone has to remind the historians that we are not out to cook the crabs ... we want to give them a nice comfy habitat where they can do their thing in peace. We shouldn't care whether they want to wear pirate garb or a propellor-beanie ... we just want to help them make use of our resources.

Meanwhile, back in the so-called real world, I had a researcher visit yesterday who eyeballed the stacks and said "You must have an awful lot of stuff that is digitized now, hmmm?" My response ... "Nearly nothing is digitized here. Digitization costs money, and guess what we don't have?" [sigh]

Anyone Interested in Ride-sharing to Chautauqua?

2008-04-19T12:15:54Z

I will be heading up to the Spring

Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference
in Chautauqua, New York by car. I can take one or two riders who are interested in
saving on transportation costs. If interested, please contact me directly.

I'm planning on driving up on Wednesday afternoon and driving back on Sunday morning.

Finding Space Without Moving

2008-04-16T23:24:05Z

For the past few weeks, I have lost the use of about 49 square feet of the stack space in one of my repositories. They were doing load-testing of the floor above and had to shore it up in my space. So, I moved ten stacks and five pallets of unprocessed materials out of their way. I had thought that I would have to close down the Archives, since there is no other space in the building to move boxes to -- I upended the patron tables and stacked up furniture in columns to the ceiling in order to make room for the boxes. I also disassembled the ten stacks of shelves and moved them into space out side the "Zone of Doom" that I had to clear.

I discovered something in the process -- if you set aside some aesthetic considerations, there is a lot of space to be squeezed out. For starters, the pallets are not effective use of floor space. a pallet can only have boxes piled, at best, five high, and that tends to damage the boxes. They (the Divine Predecessor Archivists) could have put in another bank of shelves instead of putting down pallets for the backlog. I was able to reassemble all ten stacks outside the Zone, which means that I should be able to add at least eight stacks when I get the space back. That's 144 more c.f. of records off the floor.

The building I'm in has tall, deep window sills. In fact, the window sills make very nice shelving space. I use it primarily for material that is scheduled for deaccessioning, and backlog material (it's off the pallets on the floor), but I can store between fifteen and twenty-one boxes in each window sill. Before putting anything in there, I sealed the windows up with cardboard and masking tape. The windows have been leaking light into the Archives for years and I had plenty of cardboard from non-archival boxes that were used to transfer records into the Archives. I'll leave one window undarkened for looking outside, but using the other six will get me between 90 and 126 more c.f. of records off the floor. I can get rid of all the pallets, which are made of wood.

Finally, it is possible to arrange stacks of shelves in non-traditional configurations to get more shelving space, at the expense of a little convenience for the archives staff. The current layout ran rows of shelves in parallel the length of my stack space. Two rows have back-to-back shelves, two are against the walls, and one more is a single row because a double row would block the door. So, in my emergency configuration, I've put some stacks perpendicular to the existing rows -- at the ends of the rows, or in between. Now, the result of this is that approximately 1/3 of one stack might be blocked by the perpendicular stack. In order to access a box out of the blocked area, you would have to remove one beside it and slide the box before removing it. This would be bad for a part of the collections that are handled frequently, but certainly the backlog materials, which have been sitting on a pallet for ten years, are not bein g handled much, and I'm willing to do a little bit of extra work in return for an extra 36 c.f. of records off the floor.

Now to find some more shelves to scrounge.

Writer's Block: Coffee Or Tea?

2008-02-07T02:00:24Z

What method do you use to prepare your coffee or tea?

View 500 Answers

Tea, brewed to a NISO standard that has yet to be written:
1. Obtain a new tea pot made from non-reactive, archives-safe materials. I'm sure there is something available from the Gaylord catalog.
2. Open a new bottle of distilled, deionized water. Pour an appropriate amount into the water boiler, and discard the rest of the bottle.
3. Select a tea bag. Carefully lay it on the processing table on top of a piece of archival buffering board for further work.
4. Remove the tag and photocopy onto acid-free cardboard. Discard the original tag.
5. Remove and discard any staples from the tea bag, and open it up.
6. Carefully transfer the tea with a clean micro-spatula into a piece of folded acid-free onion-skin paper.
7. Fold up and seal the new tea bag with a safe (archival and food) adhesive.
8. Use the same adhesive to attach a piece of unbleached cotton tying tape to the tea bag and the new tag. Place in tea pot with optional sweetener.
9. Pour boiling water over tea bag and steep for a few minutes.
10. Get distracted by co-worker with some crisis that can't wait until the tea has been tasted.
11. Return to a cup of cold nasty tea. Discard and start at step #1.

Well, the last three steps are definitely typical for me. :)

RIP Michael Jackson

2007-08-31T15:25:51Z

Michael Jackson, "The Beer Hunter" has died. I wonder whether his personal papers, including his beer tasting notes, will end up. This is a sad day for beer fans.

One Tired Tourist - One Limping Laptop

2007-08-29T02:41:16Z

The flight was amazingly painless -- an MD80 that was about 1/3 full -- everyone boarded at once -- first boarding call was final boarding call. We taxied out -- we took off immediately -- we flew to O'Hare -- we landed early -- our baggage was on the carrousel just as we got to it. So far this trip must be a dream (a really good one). I was worried about cancelled and delayed flights and everything else that can go wrong at O'Hare (and usually does), and zoop - everything was perfect. We got to the hotel and the room is splendid and the view is stunning and it's all good.

... until

I unpack my laptop, and I have a mess. The collapsing hinge on the case has given up the ghost. I opened it up and up pops the button cover, exposing the guts of the chassis, and out fall a couple of pieces of plastic and metal, and the monitor is hanging precariously off one of the two hinges. I managed to put it back together mostly, but it is not going to be portable until I get the chassis repaired. I called around to try to find a shop that has the pieces I need, and got no positives, but one smart fellow suggested that I call Dell. It turns out that I have a couple of weeks left on my "Next Day" service and "Complete Care" plan, so they will be sending out a technician tomorrow to rebuild my computer chassis, in my hotel room here in Chicago. I am very very happy with Dell service (or I will be tomorrow if the tech. gets me up and running). In the meantime, I picked up a 500 Mb USB disk drive to back up everything ... just in case the tech. touches something wrong.

That being settled, we took a Lake and River cruise, which was pleasant, and walked about a bit. Unfortunately, my brand new sneakers seem to be collapsing as well.

I've been thinking a little more about the use of computer forensics tools and techniques, or customized versions of same, in order to archive "electronic personal papers." There are privacy issues: like, are the unwashed surfing log traces part of the record of an individual's activities? What about the interludes at recreational web sites in between serious research? Someone would have to sanitize (or to use the proper terminology - restrict access to) anything that is personal, or proprietary -- then assess what parts of the trace of activity is relevant for posterity and then arrange that into a context that is meaningful and usable.

Chicago -- Here We Come

2007-08-27T03:35:06Z

This blog has been a fine candidate for Boring Magazine's "Best Blogs of 2007" so far. Perhaps I'll do better at SAA2007 in Chicago.

They have set up an Unofficial SAA 2007 Wiki. I'll be posting and updating my tentative schedule under my profile if you want to meet up at the conference.

lonearranger @ 2007-03-11T22:35:00

2007-03-12T03:35:15Z

As I may have mentioned, one of my repositories is full to the gills. The stacks are full, the map cases are full, and there are 130 boxes of records on pallets between the stacks. About 2/5 of the total volume is unprocessed. We don't have the resources to process the backlog -- our funding is earmarked primarily for providing access and maintaining the existing collections (as best as can be done in 8 hours per week). But there is something I can do to free up some space ... in my copious spare time:

So, space is a big problem, and anything that can reduce it is "A Good Thing (tm)." There are multiple accessions of printed materials(PM) that have come in over the years from different sources. There is much duplication, both among the accessions, and with the existing collections. Over the course of the past few years, I and several volunteers have created preliminary inventories listing all the titles and dates of the PM in all the boxes (those that had not een inventoried by the Divine Predecessor Archivists). Right now, none of that material is accessible to patrons unless I run a search on the disk drive -- definitely not available on a web search. So my excess professional time project has been to reconcile the lists of PM, first against the processed collection, then against each other; Keep one copy of each PM for the collections, arrange it into a temporary collection of PM to be interleaved and arranged properly with the existing collections, and put the list up as a "temporary" finding aid on the web. The PM that I'll keep will be moved to archival boxes and arranged in a way that they can be easily found -- the duplicates/triplicates/quadruplicate issues will be reboxed (in the non-archival storage boxes) and offered to other area repositories that might want them -- or recycled if there are no takers.

I've been working this now for the past month in bits and pieces, fifteen minutes on the Metro, half an hour before bed. All the lists are in my computer, as are the finding aids, so it's completely portable. So far, the list of keepers is roughly forty pages long. I don't know how long the list of discards is because it will be compiled as I physically sort the two piles. The original material is approximately 96 c.f. of PM. It will be interesting to see, when the physical sorting is finished, how much space I have bought with the time. I hope to get back about half. That will get some stuff off the floor.

A couple of lessons I've learned so far in this effort:
(1) More detail in the PI helps, a lot, to ensure accurate matching. Minimally, the document title, the agency and department that generated it, and the date published. Different PI's done at different times (or by archivists with different methodologies) did not have the same level of detail, and consequently I had to go back to the boxes in order to figure out what the docs were. If you use volunteers to do the PI, give them templates for format, and also give them some written instructions of which details to gather and how to record them for different types of material.

(2) When recording the disposition of something moved from one box to another -- or to be moved from one box to another, be sure to record the source in detail -- accession number and box number. If you have to find out where it came from later, or if the contents of the boxes don't match the PI when you get to them, or if you have to undo what you did, you will find it much easier to work with your lists.

(3) Save early, save often, when your working on a computer. Most programs have an "autosave" function to back up your work automagically every few minutes. Five minutes is a reasonable number, and about as much work as you want to lose if your computer crashes.

(4) Do as much on paper (or in electronic surrogates for paper) before you start tinkering with the materials. This holds true for preliminary processing too -- don't pull the document out of the GBC or ring binder until you're sure that it's not going to be deaccessioned -- debinding and foldering saves space and helps preserve it longer, but until you've verified that you will keep it, don't process it down.

The "Mack Truck" Rule for Archivists

2007-02-15T15:53:20Z

My first exposure to the "back room" of an archives was a bit of a shocker. We had agreed to continue to provide access to a local government archives that had been managed well when there was funding available, and ignored when there wasn't. Funding was never consistent, was inadequate, and in some cases, it ceased for years at a time. The archives staff turned over very frequently -- annually, and sometimes even more often, as this was not a "plum" posting or contract for the company that provided the professional services. The result of this staff/funding instability was a great deal of chaos that persisted from one year to the next. When we took over, all three processing tables, and the archivist's desk, were buried in boxes, piles of folders, papers, etc. After several months of inventorying and storing the mess, it became very apparent to me that this was not the work of one tenure of staff abandoning their work without annotation at the end of a fiscal year -- it was a collection of small messes that were left, without identification or annotation, that had accumulated over the course of many years (perhaps, since the first funding cut). New archivists came into the institution, had no information or notes about what the state of the previous unfinished projects were, and made the sensible decision to work with known materials (new accessions ... or backlog accessions that had not been partially dismembered and left strewn on the tables). They kept on going until their tenure abruptly ended.

Regardless of the decisions made that led to this scenario, there are proactive steps that can be taken by professionals who work on long-term projects and have multitasked and interrupt-driven responsibilities. This is true of archivists as much as of any other profession. In the best of circumstances, the work done in an archives is rigorous and formalized -- accessioned materials are in properly-labeled storage; a preliminary inventory is completed before any processing takes place; you have a written processing plan; etc. However, there is still the matter of the "stuff" that you're working on currently. If you are a "lone arranger" then you know what all the stuff in a particular pile is -- you put it there.

What if you don't come to work tomorrow? People get sick, often unexpectedly. People die, often unexpectedly. If everything you have to document the historical context connecting the accession/donor paperwork and the collection materials is the grey mushy stuff in your head -- you might have a problem. Actually, you probably won't have the problem. Your successors and/or your co-workers or team-mates will have the problem, if anything happens to you. I've been thinking about this for a while, and maybe there is a paper to be written here -- in the brute methodology genre, not the heavy theory area ... about documentation and policy/procedure that can help the archivist maintain that day-to-day continuity, just in case she does get run over by a Mack Truck on her way to work in the morning.

I'm probably thinking about this a bit more right now because I am recovering from a mild concussion. My brain is not quite right yet, but I think everything will go back to normal in a few weeks ... but what if I had not been so lucky? I've spent the last seven months bringing a lot of order to two archival collections (three if you count my consulting work), but a lot of the interconnections and details are still either in my head, or on one of my computers (which would defy interpretation without my head).

"Just Visiting"

2007-02-12T18:28:17Z

On Thursday, I spent three hours in the County Jail, along with two very brave volunteers. At some point, before my employment, my institution chose to accept a donation from one of the local newspapers, which was remodeling their office space. I had been hearing about "65 file cabinets" and "digitizing project" and "you are the archivist -- tell us what we should do" for the past six months. Apparently, the County has a program for digitizing paper materials using prison labor, and the thought was that "we" could do a preservation project by digitizing the lot somehow and getting it from the image storage/retrieval system later ... then throw away the newspapers.

For months I have been trying to get into the jail in order to do some kind of assessment of the scope and condition of the collection. I had received somewhat nebulous specifics from my superiors who had been there when the donation was received. I received all kinds of pushback about actually getting in to see the collection, although I was being asked to estimate the time to digitize, costs, provide details to write a grant proposal to pay for it all, etc. The fact that we've just learned that we'll have to clear the stuff out in 2 months, instead of "at least a year" has changed the urgency some, and I got it.

I did not have an infinite amount of time, nor could I count on my volunteers to be willing to spend days locked in prison to actually inventory the newspaper editions or drawers. Our assumption was that the file cabinets were in approximately the same order that the newspaper used to research their past runs. I did not even know whether they had a numbering scheme, so we went in loaded for bear -- we brought everything we could possibly need except flashlights [that was a mistake]. I preprinted labels with unique file cabinet drawer numbers on them, and we would number using our own scheme. I also preprinted blank forms for doing a survey sample of file drawers. Data fields in the heading were: File Cabinet Number (ours), File Cabinet Number (donor's), Number of Drawers in Cabinet, Dimensions of Drawers (width x height x depth in inches), and initials of the survey person (in case I needed clarification of the writing or meaning of marks). Beneath that, the blank space was partitioned into 4 sections (should have been 5) with a heading for each section of the letters A, B, C, D, E.

Verbal instructions were given that we were going to do a random sampling of drawers in each file cabinet -- each volunteer was given a set of labels and inventory sheets, and they were to label all their cabinets, and then begin to note the size, condition, and details of each file cabinet. However, we would not be looking into every drawer, other than to verify that there were newspapers in them (if they could be opened). One drawer of each cabinet was to be inspected more thoroughly, looking at the dates, how full it was, what condition the newspaper was in, what issues they saw (apparently, we got anywhere from 19 to 30 different local issues for a given date), etc. They were not to spend more than 5 minutes to a file cabinet.

From this, I have a pretty good picture of where all the issues are, what they gave us, how much order there is, and most importantly -- how many boxes I will need and what size storage facility will be needed to get the newspapers out of the jail. We can then design a workflow for sorting and arranging the papers, filtering out the ones that we will not be imaging, and also determining whether some have already been microfilmed. Crunching the numbers is very easy, once I have some reliable data to plug in. I can now present the exec. director with some reasonable estimates like: Assuming 15 minutes to empty a full drawer, it will take 72 person-hours to box up the whole collection, presuming that we have at least 463 15"x15"x10" boxes available; There is enough space for up to eight people to work simultaneously although bathroom facilities are limited; there are 3 file cabinets that are locked or jammed and we'll need to either get some tools into the jail, or bring the file cabinets out and tear them open where we don't have to worry about sharp objects; Assuming we fill all those boxes, and that we don't want to stack them more than six high, that we'll need either a 10' x 14' storage space, or a 9' x 18' space, etc.

I really hope that, if we get nothing else out of this exercise, that my co-workers and director perhaps learn that I can give them a very nice plan if they will just let me have access to a few facts, preferably that I have gathered first hand.

Ugly Lesson of the Day

2006-12-17T00:29:27Z

So, while patchinig and cleaning up our corporate server of tons of extra cruft, and trying to ensure that our disk drives were being backed up, I found that
Past Perfect, which we use for almost everything, was installed on the server. Now, we all use PP4 for almost everthing -- museum collections, library holdings, keeping track of donors and memberships and mailings and everything. Eventually I'll start cataloging our accessions and archival collections into it as well. It's a great piece of software for small museum/library/archives organizations that have to use Windows [ick]. We are pretty much out of business without it. So, thinking to myself: "Nobody should ever log onto the server to use this software" and "All the data, binaries, etc. are on the network drive" ... I uninstalled it. Then I rebooted the server, started the backups, and went home for the weekend.

Tuesday, when everyone came to me complaining that they couldn't get into PP4 (I am the I.T. guy since I took it upon myself to dismiss our former I.T. consultant for "total lack of a clue."), I looked at the network stuff, completely forgot about uninstalling, and told them that it wasn't anything I had done. When our PP4 admin talked to Pastime Software's tech. support, all of a sudden I remembered. Doh! Double-Doh! That was a Bad Thing to Do! Fortunately, we had good backups of our PP4 system, and with some help from tech. support, we got everything back eventually.

I offered to dismiss myself as our current I.T. guy for "utter carelessness" immediately, but nobody will have that until I hire someone with a clue to do the I.T. stuff.

In Morristown for MARAC.

2006-10-26T14:16:09Z

I have arrived in Morristown, N.J. for the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC). Having scanned the pre-registered list of attendees, I find that I can count the number of attendees whom I've met before on two hands -- a much smaller proportion than I've experienced with SAA conferences. I guess that means that I shall have to get out there and meet new people, no?