Magnificent Metadata

Recently, my digitization life has been ruled by metadata. I suppose most of my work with the Bexar Archives has revolved around metadata from the start, but only in the past few weeks--in class and at work--have I begun to glimpse the absolute power of this data about data...and to fear it.

In his lecture at the iSchool a couple of weeks ago, Professor Howard Besser spoke about the crucial role of recording metadata throughout the life of a project--specifically in reference to his preserving digital public television project. During our class photo digitization work, we attempted to do just that. Populate a few fields in a Google doc spreadsheet with some basic info about a handful of photographs--piece of cake. Wait, these photographs document the Texas Oil Industry? Um, what's that right there in the photo? A drill? A rig? A derrick? Come to think of it, what's a derrick, anyway? Frantic google searches for oil industry imagery provided some assistance in my metadata quest, but it was definitely a challenge to try to describe something outside the scope of my knowledge--particularly visual materials, for which dictionary and authority searches are tricky to perform. When will image-recognition technology enable us to start performing image-based Google searches?? I'm ready.

Okay, so I'm pretty sure those are cowboys in silhouette, but what on earth do you call that oil thingy in the background? (Image courtesy of http://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2009-06-12/792744/)

And then there was the Bexar Archives Y2K moment. So, the Bexar Archives consist of thousand and thousands of documents, but they're being digitized slowly over time. I'm taking part in what is only the second phase of the digitization effort, and we're slowly realizing ways to streamline the project workflow. One problem: the identifiers in the schema from the first phase limit documents to 99 pages in length...but there are lots of 100-plus page docs in the collection. The identifiers also cap the total quantity of digitized documents at 9999. Begin freak-out-moment. Take deep breath. Develop solution: the savvy webmaster will update the database code to allow for documents with three-digit page numbers and a collection maxed at 999999 docs. Hooray! Enter additional solution: a handy free download called "File List," which is empowering me to add digits to thousands of existing identifiers with one click.

I suppose these encounters offer a few lessons: keep your metadata as you go, read up on your subject in order to ensure accurate metadata, think ahead about what you'll need from your schema as the project grows, and, in general and most importantly...never doubt the magnificence of metadata.

3-D(igitization)

In-between battles with ABBY FineReader's spell checker and debates about copyright in the digitization sphere, I've been musing about another area of digicreativity that sparks my imagination: the digitization of 3-D objects. The whole challenge of representing a 3-D object in two dimensions--and using digital technologies to somehow make the viewer's experience of the digitized object even richer (or rich in different ways) than the viewer's experience of the original object--strikes me as a delicious challenge. But also an insanely expensive one, and maybe, depending on the object, an unnecessary one. But, if done right, could the digitization of 3-D objects enhance access in a genuinely satisfying way? In digitization scenarios, how can we mimic tactile sensation by enabling users to explore texture and dimension in unprecedented ways? So much of the museum experience is about the do not touch. Could we break this barrier through digitization?

One of Khrushchev's treasures in the Kennedy Digital Archives.

The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum's Digital Archives offers one model of 3-D object digitization. Click here to zoom in on the 19th-century drinking horn that Nikita Krushchev gifted to Kennedy (hmm...what was the political backstory here? that seems to be missing from the metadata). The close-up visual tour is aesthetically pleasing, but does it take you beyond the experience you'd get when peering through a glass case at the Museum?

According to this blog post, the digital folks at the Smithsonian Institution are actively pursuing 3-D digitization plans for their collections. The idea of using digitization and 3-D imaging to enlarge an object visitors have trouble seeing with the naked eye seems promising and particularly useful, but I'm not sure about this "Infamous Blue Beetle," who has crawled to a new digital home on Facebook. The concurrent rise of the digitization of 3-D objects with the soaring popularity of born-digital 3-D modeling and 3-D printing may bode well for the affordability of such digitization efforts in the near future.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History manages to approach the concept of "touch" in their 3D Collection: by holding down the left-click button on the mouse, you can "touch" and rotate the objects to make them mirror the movement of your cursor--even this little 27,000-year-old Fired Clay Bison, unearthed in the Czech Republic. Being able to manipulate the object with your finger would take the "touch" experience even further: I wonder if these images are viewable on a touch-sensitive tablet computer. Has anybody made a Please Do Not Touch! app for iPad?

When I stumble upon further examples of digitization projects involving 3-D objects, I'll add them here.

Digital Repository Case Study: Google's Art Project

A neat example of new innovations in digital museum exhibits--"United Nations-like," as the NYT reporter calls it, referring to the way you can "hop" from the Palace of Versailles to MoMA to the Uffizi Gallery, and back again, with a few clicks.

The Work of Art in the Age of Google

Interesting how Google was able to convince several major institutions to collaborate on this project. And also interesting: the copyright obstacles that prevent institutions from including recent works in the experiment.

Super-zoom, van Gogh's "The Starry Night"

Digitization for Preservation vs. Digital Preservation

From Paul Conway's "Preservation in the Age of Google" (The Library Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 1, pp. 61–79). I want to remember this:


When approaching the dilemmas of the cultural heritage preservation community in the context of digital technologies, it is important to establish clear distinctions between the terms “digitization for preservation” and “digital preservation.” Digitization for preservation creates valuable new digital products, whereas digital preservation protects the value of those products, regardless of whether the original source is a tangible artifact or data that were born and live digitally. Digitization for preservation and digital preservation are intimately related, but the underlying standards, processes, technologies, costs, and organizational challenges are quite distinct. (64-65)

Archives Wars and Digital Duels: My History with Digitization

Comanche raids. Royal proclamations. Ransomed captives. Processions of gifts to appease native tribes. Amnesties for prisoners granted in honor of infantas’ births. Suits over the herding of wild cattle and the branding of slaves. Treatments for small pox and, of course, chiggers.

These are the characters, the dramas and heated histories that inhabit my encounters with digitization. They are the residents—friends and enemies—of the Spanish province of Texas in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and their stories spring to life in the pages of the Bexar Archives, a collection of over 250,000 manuscript pages that resides at UT Austin’s Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

I began working as an intern on the Bexar Archives Online digitization project just a few short months after moving to Texas, when I was just beginning to formulate a vague impression of life in this new state and Austin was still an exotic land of BBQ and vegan taco trucks, burnt orange football swarms and guerilla knit graffiti.

Despite my complete lack of Spanish language skills (thank goodness for the Center’s decades of work on translations!), assisting with the Bexar Archives project soon confirmed for me that Texas history is a chronicle of clashing and conflating cultures, pride and passion and vengeance. Above all, it’s a tale of archives wars.

Fire away, Angelina! (But don't singe the records!)

There was the infamous episode in 1841, of course, when Sam Houston declared Austin to be "the most unfortunate site on earth for a seat of government" and attempted to abscond with the Republic’s archives in hopes of reinstating his namesake city as the rightful capital. Just try it, Sammy! Didn’t take long for archival hero Angelina Eberly to fire her cannon and alert the Austinites to the attempted raid.

Over a century before that cannon fire, however, there were residents of the same land—Spanish, Mexican, Native American, French—making records and battling for their own territorial rights, their own namesake cities. Fighting their own archives wars.

Digitization has shown me these layers of what I am learning to love, what I moved here to understand—records.

Courtesy of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.

In honor of that, I have selected a document from the Bexar Archives as the background for this blog: “Inventory of records for 1778-1779 received and filed in the Archives of Béxar,” by Governor Domingo Cabello, December 20, 1779.

Through this course, I look forward to confronting the “digioverload” that dominates our lives today and exploring the questions and conflicts that inspired me to pursue this degree:

What special value is contained in the actual object versus a representation of the object? Could we develop a digital format capable of capturing the profound authenticity unique to the physical artifact itself, freeing precious archival space and making a new, uniquely rich experience of that object available to more people than ever before? How might we use digitization technology to expand access to physical materials—not only to replicate but to enhance the magic and the power of the original object? As born-digital becomes the norm, how will our definitions of provenance and authenticity evolve? How might the appeal and accessibility of digital formats serve to increase awareness and appreciation of archives? Can we ensure that the benefits of digitization outweigh the conundrums of metadata standards, data security, emulation, and migration? How might digitization function as a tool for both preservation and reinvention, stability and creativity?

Sound like it’s about time for another archives war: let the digioverload begin!