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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]

Tags: access, archives, digitization, historians, pirates, researchers