[Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement

Wed Nov 18 05:51:26 EST 2009

Hi Michael,

Great to hear some more about the Beinecke's experiences. 

In answer to your first question, not all of the Paradigm collections
have been fully processed. Those exemplars acquired from working
politicians were generally quite recent in date and would not be
suitable for full processing because we could not yet provide access to
much of the material. The archive that has been most fully processed is
that of the politician Barbara Castle (those not familiar with Castle
might like to take a look at her obituary in The Guardian at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2002/may/04/guardianobituaries.obituaries
). Castle formed a rather different case study for the project; her
papers were at the Library before the project began, but her computers
and disks were transferred in the first year of the project, once the
Library had already appointed a cataloguer - Matthew Neely - to
catalogue her archive.  The catalogue is complete and our curator of
modern political papers is currently determining what may be released
and when, and 'open' material is gradually being made available to
researchers through this process. One of futureArch's developers - Pete
Cliff - has been working to develop a researcher interface for the
'open' component of Castle's digital items. While we have made some
digital materials accessible to researchers in the past, we have yet to
do this via a proper interface. Once Pete's work goes into reading
rooms, we will have our first real opportunity to see how scholars
interact with this kind of hybrid archive and I hope to feed this
interaction into the development process for refining our researcher
interfaces.

Question number two. Yes, we did make a number of snapshot accessions
during the project and the final report made to our funder (JISC)
provides some information on those case studies (see
http://www.paradigm.ac.uk/projectdocs/jiscreports/ParadigmFinalReportv1.
pdf). For one creator, this amounted to three snapshots in just over a
year. In practice the Library would be unlikely to take snapshots quite
so frequently, but this is what a project timeframe produces. The
Library is now working with the literary press Clutag, from which we
also take snapshot hybrid accessions - these come in roughly annually
and the timing tends to be tied to the publication of the Press'
Archipelago magazine. Under our current futureArch project, we are
processing many of our legacy hybrid archives for access and Clutag is
one of those we're working on. As part of that process, we have recently
captured* all the Clutag digital material received in the past three
years and will be surveying and cataloguing this alongside the papers
received with it. 

For surveying born-digital material, we are making more and more use of
'digital forensic'  techniques, more typically associated with the
police, FBI, fraud office, etc., rather than archives and libraries. The
individual who has pioneered their use in the context of personal
archives is Jeremy John, of the British Library, who has been a terrific
collaborator (see his 2008 iPRES paper at
http://www.bl.uk/ipres2008/presentations_day1/09_John.pdf). Forensic
analysis software is designed to discover relevant evidence among vast
quantities of data and supports a number of techniques useful to
archivists and curators. So, how is it useful? Well, it helps with a
number of things:

1. Provides an infrastructure within which to explore materials while
maintaining authenticity - these environments have to produce evidence
that can stand up in court 
2. Identifying duplicates across different media or snapshot accessions
3. Identifying similar files (not something we've tested much yet, but
could have huge potential for literary drafts)
4. Availability of bookmarking and annotation tools to support
arrangement
5. Ability to preview a wide range of file formats
6. Ability to filter data, including the option to ignore non-archival
data (such as clipart or application software) 
7. Ability to recover 'deleted' data (yes, there are ethical issues here
that need to be addressed)
8. Ability to export files and metadata in CSV format
9. Pre-configured data filters that allow discovery of certain file
types that might be in unexpected locations on a hard disk drive  

Moving away from the issue of appraisal and analysis for a moment and
returning to the issue of transfer. I'm pleased to hear that the
Beinecke has been able to adapt the Paradigm survey and transfer
protocols; are you able to say some more about what changes you made,
what the experience was like, and perhaps tell us something about the
email system you encountered, and how you acquired the email from it? If
others have experiences of 'digital transfer' that they are willing to
share, I'm sure many of us would find that useful.

Best,

Susan

* By 'captured' I mean we have created 'disk images' of the material
given to us on CD and floppy disk. These disk images can be used by
forensic tools and can be mounted on computers as if they were the disk
in question.

Susan Thomas
Digital Archivist/Project Manager
Bodleian Library

Web:  http://futurearchives.blogspot.com
<http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/> 
Tel:    +44 (0) 1865 283821
Post: Oxford University Library Services
         Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES

________________________________

	From: personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu
[mailto:personal_archives-bounces at mailman.yale.edu] On Behalf Of
Forstrom, Michael
	Sent: 17 November 2009 20:37
	To: Personal_archives at mailman.yale.edu
	Subject: [Personal_archives] Literary types and Arrangement

	For starters, I'd also like to publicly congratulate Susan and
her colleagues on the Workbook. 

	I'll respond to Susan's call for "other experiences" with
personal archives containing digital materials and move on to discussion
relating to arrangement. At the Beinecke Library we've been acquiring
manuscript collections with what I've indentified as fugitive digital
content (small numbers of disks) for roughly a decade. At Beinecke these
disks tend to reside in the papers of writers and in the records of
small presses and literary journals and they tend to contain word
processing files, such as drafts of writings or letters. 

	We've processed several personal archives containing disks and
discovered that, in general, small numbers of disks and files lend
themselves to item-level analysis and arrangement by content and larger
numbers of disks and files lend themselves to arrangement by format.
There are of course other considerations, but these are the two models
we've pursued to date. 

	We recently acquired our first real hybrid archive--a writer in
mid-career. We made a macro/functional appraisal and a snapshot
accession, copying files, incuding email, directly off two working
machines in the writer's home. In doing so, I should add, we tested a
revised Paradigm records survey and transfer protocol. We may be able to
respect the original order in arrangement, though processing will be
complicated by the fact that there is duplication between the machines
and variations in the directories. Assuming additions to this
collection, a preliminary proposal is to leave well enough alone and not
integrate the digital and paper components at this time. We need to
revisit this, but there is an argument for tackling this now, doing some
additional appraisal, testing appraisal tools, in general, doing more so
that some of the complexities of the accession, say, context provided
through dialogue with the author, isn't lost or difficult to interpret
at the point of future processing.    

	So, a couple questions for Susan. First, whether any Paradigm
project collections have been fully processed? And second, if you
conducted any snapshot accessions as part of the project, what if any
additional work was  done on them in house. Other comments welcome of
course. 

	Best,

	Michael Forstrom

	Manuscript Unit

	Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

	New Haven, CT   06520

	203.432.7215  

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