JHU: First Impressions

The Eisenhower Library (top), and the Brody Learning Commons (bottom)

Johns Hopkins University is home to several libraries, many of them specialized research libraries that are used for groundbreaking medical researchers. This being the case, they use a balance of physical and electronic materials to meet the needs of their patrons. They have found that many students prefer the physical print book to the electronic e-book, so their main building still holds the air of a traditional academic library with its labyrinthine stacks, but their recent addition has brought a distinctly modern lift to the architecture. The library is largely open and has areas that contain natural light as well as providing students darker and more secluded areas for long-term studying - these even feature natural cell phone signal blockage to promote concentration (yes, these spots are underground).

Near the front doors to the campus is a large digital screen with a Microsoft Kinect perched on the top, which students can use to play a round of games while waiting for their friends to arrive (when I was there they were playing a Tron game), and when there are no students in front it shows library news and updates. This integration of technology is seen repeatedly in the building, from digital displays on the walls to special projectors which project onto white walls in the collaboration rooms for students to connect to their computers and share their work.

The entire library has robust wifi throughout, and almost every table I saw sported a surge protector for students to charge electronic devices, and there are many pockets set up for collaborative learning. One of the first things I noticed in the library was that it was packed full of students. Some were in the stacks, others had their books and laptops spread out on tables, and others were puzzling over intense problems which floated on the walls like something from the future. For all the flash and dazzle, though, the students seem remarkably at home with their laptops and coffee cups. It's a building that invites a long study session as well as social interaction, a lifeline to knowledge as well as the thrill of independent discovery.

preparation for an on-site visit

Several months ago I began to brainstorm libraries I wanted to visit. One if my first choices was Johns Hopkins Library. As both an academic library as well as a research library, I was incredibly curious. For one of my classes I completed an assignment that involved comparing library web portals, and upon looking at the JHU library, I was struck by their... openness. Many academic libraries I've seen online tend to lean towards campus accessibility rather than public transparency, but JHU had social media out the ears, and each one met their high standards and uplifted their reputation. At this point, I thought that maybe I could talk to their person in charge of social media or outreach and talk with their electronic services librarian to knock out this assignment at the same time, so I sent an email to their general inquiries email address.

Within a few days I had an email which gave me three names to contact, and their responses were swift, polite, and enquiring. As we emailed back and forth, I supplied the assignment questions to give them a more specific idea of what I was hoping to learn. I was invited to visit the campus on March 8th and speak with a few librarians and the women who ran their social media accounts, and I eagerly accepted.

I want to take a moment and reflect on the fact that four women who work at a prestigious library took the time out of their busy schedules near midterms to speak with a student from a different university. This humbles me deeply and makes me so grateful for the kindness that seems to run through the library community. There have been many instances where I've experienced it, and it's both encouraging and inspiring to know that I'm beginning a career in which I may be surrounded by people of this sort. Hopefully we'll all adopt their characteristics and practice them daily.

Movin' Right Along

It's been a while! Apologies, dear friends.

My work here has been shifted into overdrive, and for the first time I am creating metadata rather than simply recording and curating it. To say that it is nerve-wracking is an understatement, and I find myself wondering if archivists have existential anxiety. Again, Patrick's words come back to me: "Don't let what you don't know stop you. Just do it. You'll get it." So I stop worrying and overthinking and begin doing, knowing that with practice comes experience. No amount of book learning will prepare you for putting forth your own mark - even if it's just two sentences into a database. Just do it.

Recently I surveyed the Ron Hull Papers. Emails between he and his colleagues, memos, notes, scribbles, doodles, and little pieces of insight into what the construction of the collection must have looked like. I imagine that my anxiety over two sentences must have seemed like small potatoes compared to his burden. This project holds the essential ambassador programs of PBS to the world. Each program shares some aspect that has inherent value. Surely the selection process must have been harrowing to say the least.

Having respect for these materials seems to be central to this project - and archiving as a whole. Inflicting my own perspectives, opinions, and beliefs does no service to anyone, least of all the creator. Much like the rest of life, it's best when I try to set myself aside and do my best to see things as they are. It will take (again) time and practice, but it's a good exercise and something that I should start doing more often.

#ItsAProcess

Apologies for my absence last week! Much of what I did here was technical research and doesn't translate to an exciting blogpost. One thing that I did which needs to be written about was organizing keywords into a hierarchy. Keywords, as most (if not all) of my readers know are different from subjects. Subjects are the overarching concepts that the material concerns.

adorable

For instance, a documentary about koalas entitled "The Lives of Koala Bears" might be considered about marsupials, while a keyword search would pick up the following words: lives, koala, bears. If the justifiably curious user was looking for information about different species of bear would find the aforementioned documentary in their results. However if the newly-cautious user searched for 'brown bear' in subjects they would find the proper related materials to their desired godless killing machine.

terrifying

At PBS, their behind-the-scenes keywords are somewhere between the above definitions of 'keyword' and 'subject'. Most of the searchable videos on the web site actually have captions that are searchable, so even if there's a passing mention of 'bears', they'll come up in the results. This works for animals, but let's switch to a different scenario.

Barcelona

A high school student has an assignment due about Barcelona. A visual learner, they decided to search the PBS website for episode segments that contained the keyword 'Barcelona'. Only one result in three pages of material is actually about the city Barcelona. The other results concern the Olympics, Wood Allen, and Javier Bardem (who is from Las Palmas but starred in the former's film 'Vicky Christina Barcelona'). Keywords! Oh, you...

not Barcelona

So I think we can all agree that subjects are important and generally (there are exceptions, to be sure) better than keywords. From my perspective, the PBS web site has some optimization to do (in all their spare time). Behind the scenes we have the ability to sort by subject, but all too often there are inconsistencies. A few weeks ago my supervisor e-mailed me his keyword list and asked me what I thought. While browsing, I noticed that while some capital cities (like Barcelona) were listed, but others (Buenos Aires) weren't, even though there was content that demanded it. I spent the day creating a hierarchical keyword list that could be resorted and reorganized, edited, and generally tweaked to our needs. What's a hierarchical keyword list, you ask? I'll show you!

Rather than appearing as:

World Geography

Barcelona

It would look like this:

World Geography
	Europe
		Spain
			Barcelona

With each term becoming narrower and narrower. This makes it easier to organize and guarantee consistency. If created in Excel or a proper taxonomy management program it's also easy to collapse and hide columns, sections, and useless words.

The downside?

When it comes to consistency, providing every capital for every country in the EU isn't practical. While there are three results for Chisinau (two of which are about the Moldovan capital), there are precisely zero for Slovenia's capital Ljubjana. It is therefore pretty useless to include a keyword with no content attached. Furthermore, we don't have time to go through and create a new keyword list that would match everything in the extensive PBS collection. Therefore we must simply narrow down terms that are most likely to be relevant to our current and forthcoming material.

The upside?

I am learning about managing taxonomies in special libraries, especially one that deals with both current events and culture. It's fascinating, challenging, and no one's life depends on it. What we do is optimize and make as many resources accessible to the public as we can. This is a mission that both archives and libraries share, and largely use similar techniques. It's great to be able to talk to archivists about these challenges and have educational conversations. On Tuesday I visited University of Maryland's archives (Public Broadcasting Archives), and while I was there I had the privilege of speaking to Chuck Howell, one of their archivists. Speaking with him about their archives and their descriptions taught me a lot and opened my mind to some other possibilities (and future opportunities). I was surprised to learn that they used MARC21 to ensure that their archives are included in the OPAC. Just one record for each collection to ensure that they're accessible by the curious researcher. Each record had descriptions, a brief summary, and applicable subject headings as well as the name of the collection in the 650 tag. I look forward to going there again to visit and see their collections.

metametametadata

This week my internship has definitely gone from normal mode to hard mode. Tuesday I began to dig into different types of semantic web languages and spent a lot of time searching the Society of American Archivist site for articles about Encoded Archival Description (EAD). Despite the articles that told me what it could do for me, I couldn't find too much on how to get it to work for me. There's a lot of information out there about it, but not many tutorials that a student can get access to. I don't have $650 to attend a seminar on it in June.

This, my friends, is where networking comes in. Several months ago I began to attend a professional meetup for digital archivists hosted by Library of Congress. For the last two months I've started talking with someone who works at LC, and while talking about using Web 2.0 tools in networking we started following each other on Twitter. At the time it occurred to me that it was nice to meet someone at LC who seemed human rather than overwhelmingly intimidating. While I cognitively know that everyone at LC is human, I still find them rather daunting. Because, you know, Library of Congress. While looking into EAD, I thought it might be a good idea to see if anyone on their sub-committee could point me in the direction of learning materials. Whose name do I see on the list but the very man from the meetup! Long story short, I now have a list of web sites, groups, documents and other resources as well as general encouragement. Networking doesn't help you hurdle difficulties, but it can give you the ability to ask for tools with which to hurdle said hurdles.

Today I spent time learning about PBCore, which is a language that uses XML to make sense of metadata. While I haven't spent any time coding in the last ten years apart from a web design class at UMA in 2007, I can still decipher the language. It's been a while, to say the least. My supervisor has provided me with some printouts to study, and as I like to deconstruct and piece things back together, I'm glad to have something I can write on and mark up (no pun intended) as I like. As I get a better grasp on PBCore I'll write some more about it, but at the moment I don't quite have the understanding to do too much explaining. If you're curious to learn more, I recommend checking out the official training materials. For those in my library program - it's like if MARC and HTML had a really detailed metababy. Essentially it's a different way of expressing the information that would normally be shown in MARC.

I didn't expect to be getting into coding during my internship, but I couldn't be happier. In my classes it's becoming more and more evident that these tech skills are important to have, and I'm thrilled to be in a place that gives me reason to learn them.

We're blowing right through lunchtime, aren't we?

This week at my internship have had a factor of time due to the fact that our entire floor will be moving sometime soon, so we've been prepping the project materials for the move and empty out the room they're currently in as soon as possible. This means scanning and filing the papers that hadn't been processed and performing a basic inventory of the videocassettes to see if they have or have not been digitized. Once we've checked that we move them into their new room, which is rather cramped and doesn't give the material space to breathe - but it will hold them and allow us to work with them, which is the important thing.

Tuesday I spent my day scanning program listings from the late 90s. While much of the 90s had been scanned with OCR, it appeared that many of the shows listed 'Generic' (or other repeating shows that are on a constant loop) had been edited out of the files. While the reasons for this is unclear, the listings have to be rescanned to best preserve them. The program listings give a vision of what PBS was showing on TV during a given month, year, and season, and show the balance of topics - and therefore reflect the interest of viewers. So as you can see, the program listings are an insight into topics and concerns of the age. PBS shows that deal with ethnicity largely seem to be an effort to normalize family life and show what minority families' experience in contrast to a middle-class white household. There are also several educational, crafting, exercise, home improvement, and cooking shows. These are familiar to almost everyone with attached names like Bill Nye, Julia Child, and Levar Burton. Overall these program listings are valuable even in this current day and age, let alone in the next fifty years to look back and see what issues we were struggling with as a culture.

Given to me to scan in addition the the 1990s were the years of 1980-1982, which hadn't been digitized in any sort of form, so they were of special importance to be done. These years are essentially some of the first in PBS history, involving a shift in name and focus. Today I took a step back even further to 1973-1978, where I did not scan but simply organized and separated the programs alphabetically. We don't have program listings from this era, so we're simply dealing with the program descriptions and agreements themselves. Much of this is sorting and making sure that nothing was mixed in, so I turned to podcasts to keep my mind occupied.

Ultimately I turned to Stuff You Missed in History from HowStuffWorks.com (a subsidiary of Discovery.com), one of my favorite educational podcasts. Sarah and Deblina choose different topics (Brontes, Brownings, the real Indiana Jones, and so on) and delve into them in a way that is accessible, enjoyable, and straight-forward. Highly recommended. They managed to engage my interest without distracting me from my task at hand. Most of them are PG-rated, so they're workplace and family friendly.

Next week I'm getting into the actual metadata and programs rather than the paperwork. Should be a change!

"Archives support "pure" research, of course, and this usefulness cannot be overlooked. Those who search the past for understanding the present find in archives the raw materials with which to construct their narratives and analyses."
-Anastasia Weigle

This is from my first week's lecture in my class on archives & preservation, and it perfectly sums up why I love archives. No matter what corporation the papers belong to, the profession is not dedicated to writing history but recording it. It makes me want to hug every single person at my archives Meetup and bake them a pie.

On Thursday, my supervisor Glenn handed me several folders old papers regarding individual shows that had been on air in the 1980s. One of them was entitled 'World Without Walls', a documentary about the life of Beryl Markham. My mother had read her memoir aloud to my sisters and me as children, and certain characters from the book became household names. Bombafu made appearances on white boards throughout the house as my sister Anna would artistically render the foolhardy parrot in erasable marker. The papers contained in the folder consisted of memos and letters back and forth about the time slot, the topic, and one note in which someone remarked about the joyful surprise of seeing the exceptional overnight ratings. Further notes suggesting airing more showings were followed by a newspaper clipping advertising the showtimes and West With the Night.

The rest of the folders contained information on other documentaries from the same time period, but this one captured my interest. The notes showed individual's responses to the material and gave insight to the relationships between the producers and the network at the time. Maybe someday a historian will want to see how Markham continued to be perceived after her death, or see how her documentary was received by the public. These papers will provide that, and my internship will be to that end.

YAY for meaningful productivity!