so as not to lose it completely

I'm going to take some time and write some happy thoughts. Or I'll vent.

Last night my professor changed our assignment. The one thats due today. I already had it completed the first way, so I hurried up and changed it to match the second set of criteria I had been unaware it was supposed to fill.

I sent it to myself this morning so that I could go over it at work. Apparently I sent myself a really old version. I have my laptop with me, but it cannot connect to the internet, so I cannot resend the correct version, or, for that matter, hand in the paper, as it has to be submitted electronically.

Fun times. Awesome. Love it.

Damn you digital content!

i spent all this time compiling a spreadsheet and *someone* tried to migrate and it totally messed with all the data and ruined it. i almost got yelled at until *someone* realized that it had nothing to do with my ineptitude.

damn you technology!

on a brighter note, i had a great day o' referencing. no one can stump me!

Someone please take my credit card

I've been doing something really terrible today that I have one and one way only of rationalizing.

I've spent the morning at work finding rare photo types on E-Bay and bidding on them. Its bad. Really bad.

There is one silver lining. Its the most interested I've been in a particular type of archives since school began. So maybe thats the kind of thing I should look for when I get back on the application horse. Which I can pretty much guarantee will not be any time soon. But still. Its nice to find something specific that I really dig.

It does bother me that some people selling these things have no idea what they're selling and label them as three completely different types. I hate to break it to you, but one picture is not a daguerreotype, ambrotype AND tintype. I am officially logging out for the day. I want to have some beer money for the summer and if I keep going....

Really?!?!?!?!

"Nitrate is turning out to be a historically durable medium that, if stored properly, rivals paper -- and well-made paper -- as a storage medium for image and sound,"

so says the motion-picture curator at the Eastman in this article.

It then goes on to explain some of the best features about nitrate films, like its uncanny ability to burst into flames, burning at the rate of 16,000-17,000 per SECOND.

"It has that disturbing quality of producing its own oxygen, so you can't put it out with water."

Sounds totally durable to me....

ooooo pretty colors!!!

Why is it always that something looks so interesting and cool the first time you see it, but a couple of months down the road if you have to read and article on it you want to gouge out your eyes?

I'm writing a paper on theft and repatriation of cultural objects. Its an incredibly interesting and controversial topic and I'm fascinated by the reasoning and rationalization that people and institutions use to justify their actions regarding it.

I know that by the time I turn in the paper I will think it is the most tedious subject I've ever come across. I hate that.

I also have issues spelling repatriation. It doesn't roll off the fingers so smoothly.

Rules

So the other day I was going through some invitations and found one sent to AW inviting him to join a commune. The invitation listed several rules that must be followed including (and I quote):

1. no drugs
2. no alcohol
3. no balling chicks under 18 years old.

now far be it from me to criticize, but whats the point of having a commune with rules like that?!?!

ARGH: categorical categorizing for categorization

Its a tongue twister and mind screw all at the same time.

I sometimes wake up dreading my internship. I really love what I do, but I know that by the end of the day (a day where lunch is really early, making the afternoon interminable), I will be a pile of mush. After a nice nap and a shower, I'm ready to explain why.

Take a box full of...stuff. This stuff could be anything. Literally. Now place everything in the box into a specific category. Not so specific that it'll be on its own, but not so vague as to be difficult to find later. Easy enough? Freaking no.

Our software allows for a finite number of categories and subcategories, and given the terms of the grant, each individual item must be accessioned and categorized.

Say you have about 20 large categories with each of them averaging 3 subcategories. While some items you come across are so weird that they can only go one place, and some are so common that they're easy to deal with, the majority of the material could fit into at least 2-3 larger categories and any number of subs. If the same person were doing the project by themselves, no worries. But there are about 15 people, each with a different idea of what category is best for what item.

So today I had a mind-numbing (I'd say blowing but once I tell you what the items were, it'd seem like such a bad joke) conversation about where a number of postcards fit. There is a correspondence postcard category. There is also a printed material postcard category, and an exhibition postcard category. Faced with a group of postcards written by one man to AW, I thought it was an easy correspondence postcard fit. Yes? No.

Why? Because the postcards each contained business information. Business information in this case meant that the author wrote a number of postcards stating that he was a 22 year-old virgin and wanted to be part of an orgy scene that AW was known for filming. According to my boss, this was a business proposition.... But it only had one sentence and the man didn't seem to want reimbursing beyond the sensational loss of his virginity.

Anyhow. That was just one. The box had hundreds and hundreds of things in it, mostly letters. To be able to see where they fit, you have to read every one. Sometimes I feel like a peeping tom cause I'm reading someone's mail. There was one that also went into the business pile where a man wrote that he needed to be filmed soon cause his body was starting to sag.... Its amazing what people will send on a postcard!

I also am wondering why dirty magazines offer no table of contents to the articles. I thought there was a huge part of the population who only read them for the intellectual content. Thats what I was doing! I did, however, get to learn what a Spanish Fly Swindle was, so I guess my two hours of looking at people doing it wasn't completely for naught....

Anyhow, it was an interesting day. My brain is mush and really all I can see when I close my eyes is pictures of naked people...

My conservative grandpa would be proud....

So I'm about as liberal as you can get. I thought. But then in class a few weeks ago, we were discussing some ethicky stuff and I left feeling like an old man who voted for Bush in 2004.

Access to information is fantastic, and really, its come a long way given the internet. But at what point, in order to open papers that may be closed for the wrong reasons, do you forsake your own ethics? (Forsake seems such a dramatic word, but I couldn't think of anything better)

Take this case: the tobacco papers.

There was information being hidden that affected peoples' health. The archivists decided to smuggle the papers out and release them. Go you! Seriously. Good job!

Here's where I get squeamish though. The Dead Sea Scrolls were closed off to scholars for a really long time. Any they shouldn't have been. It was stupid. But thats how it was.

So someone microfilmed them, signing a contract that it was for preservation purposes only and then decided that they wanted to release them, thus sacrificing their own ethical practices.

They should be open, yes. But is it something that drastically affects the well-being of mankind? No. So I dont think it was okay for them to go about it in the way they did.

Anyhow, I think I was the only person that thought so. People were talking about having collections of papers with private information and "accidentally" leaving them open to provide access. I don't agree.

And while I think Executive Order 13233 is a load of horse-shit and that the over/re-classification of records our government is partaking in is stupid and dumb-headed, there really is some information that does not belong in the open.

I went and saw the guy who writes the blog 'Secrecy News' give a talk (Steven Aftergood). He had a lot to say about the pros and cons of whistle-blowing/classified information that was interesting. He's been in some high-profile trouble himself. I always listen to trouble-makers more for some reason. Its a pretty interesting blog and he never seems to back down from a conversation, which makes me like him even more.

My brain is fried.

Digital Archeology: Starting from Scratch

I'm lucky to have incredibly interesting classes this semester. Interesting does not equal easy. Digital preservation is blowing my brain out of my ears.

While its becoming more and more important to understand and plan for, its also laden with problems and a lack of evidence as to what really works.

An alarming amount of literature on the topic calls for no action; a sort of wait-and-see and maybe there will be a cure-all. But in the meantime, what happens to the information that gets lost until this magical cure appears out of the mist?

But on the other hand, there is no tried and true method we know will work. So for now, we're saving imperfectly. We're altering the bit-streams, therefore not saving the document, but saving a representation of the document. So how much is okay to change? Do we use emulators to save the "look and feel" of each item (still altering the bit stream), or do we migrate and save the content, albeit altered content? And on and on and on.....

So anyhow, my project for the semester is to reconstruct as best as possible, with whatever digital archeology techniques we can find, with a small group of peers, a website that has been lost. The Pittsburgh Project established a model for electronic record-keeping. Ironically enough, it was lost due to a server glitch, having not been backed up. Whoops!

I like the idea of doing this, from scratch, and figuring out what works and what doesn't, cause I think this is going to become a huge obstacle/common problem in the near future. At the same time, its a big undertaking. Since this was a project that happened in the mid-1990's, none of us have ever seen the original site, and here we are, trying to make an as-exact-as-possible replica. So along with the actual doing of the project, we're tracking our methods and results and trying to get them published.

Its gonna be a hectic semester. See everyone in April.

Setting feminism back 50 years....

I've been reading a lot of stuff for school lately and have become increasingly annoyed with pronoun choice.

Yes women should have the right to vote. Yes, we should get paid at least 2/3 of what our male counterparts are making (kidding....), but really, do you have to type he/she, his/hers every single freaking time?

Just pick one!

You can argue that I'm (as the title implies) reverting to a male-dominated society and mindlessly throwing however many years of feminism down the proverbial drain, but really, what is so freaking wrong with some writing 'his'? And if you have that big a problem with it, write 'her.' That simple!

The only issue I've come across was in a book I read last week, Why Read, by Mark Edmunson. Its possible that the occurrence was due to his wish to please all by picking switching between the two. However, he picked some convenient times to switch to 'her.' It seemed every time there was a general question of intelligence, he went with the feminine. I dont have the book in front of me, but it would be something like this:

"When a student is done and he goes to follow up on his impenetrable research, he looks into the multitude of literary criticism and is awestruck by its intrepid tower of incredulity." (yeah, i thought the book was a little pretentious if you cant tell..."

versus

"When a student is unsure of her overall tenacity in the face of doing anything remotely involving intelligence whatsoever, she cannot but grasp at straws, hoping somehow to maintain her sense of ignorance."

No, these are not direct quotes, and its possible that my perception was bent by the bad taste of academic snobbery that the book emanated, but it seemed that there was a pattern to his pronoun choice.

AAAAAnyhow, use 'his' use 'hers' I dont care, as long as you're consistent. My eyes are just getting too tired from all of the unnecessary backslashes./////////////////

Thats all he/she wrote.

Not so secret I guess....

So this is the new blog. Wee-haw! While I find I have lots to talk about concerning what I do, I think that my other blog is not quite the place for it. Although I have worked on some thesis ideas there.

So the world of archives? Not so secret. But pretty confusing! And full of scandal and intrigue. Thank god!

I've been doing my best to keep up with it all, and have come across an interesting theory. In a posting on his/her anonymous blog, the Annoyed Librarian, whomever its author might be, discusses the concept of careers in the library field. While I'm not technically a librarian, I think this can easily transfer to archiving.

He/she bemoans the desire for young professionals who are too keen on having prestigious careers, refusing to work their way up the ladder and willing to settle only for top positions.

I wont deny that I want to be good at my job. I wont deny, either, that I want a job that interests me and that allows me to further my knowledge. Yes, I'd like to publish material. Yes, I'd like to do a lot of things. And I'm a driven person, so I don't doubt that I will do them.

BUT

When it comes to the idea of competition, the AL seems to assign it to only a certain group of bratty librarians. I think the competition is, at least in part, forced on us.

I am in a program that is about 20 + people too large. After a semester that I worked my ass off on, I still am known by name to only 1 professor. The others notice me with a vague recognition that they've seen my face before. These professors are the ones who will be writing my recommendations when it comes time to go out into the big, bad world.

How do I make myself 'known' without being competitive? And I'm not talking about being competitive in the way that demeans other students or is in any way snobby, I'm just talking about, a couple months down the line when the recommendation forms come rushing in and someone sees my name on it, will they know who I am and what I've done in my time here?

So yes, I'm choosing to be vocal about my opinions, even if they are not the commonly held, just saying them aloud so I sound smart ones. I am spending time that I would normally spend reading fun books taking charge of group projects and revising papers. And while it might look like I'm some competitive, cut-throat person willing to do whatever to be in a higher position than others, I think I'm merely trying to ensure that I have a chance to do something that I love and be good at it.