Well this is exciting: A year and a half in the making, the scanning process for the City College of San Francisco Guardsman Digital Archive, 1935 – 2001, is at long last complete!
Right now, I’m finalizing the physical and digital inventory lists, to make sure everything is where it’s supposed to be. For the most part, it is.
Stay tuned for some final thoughts on how the project progressed. For now, most volumes are accessible online, at The Internet Archive.
After two-point-something semesters, my work here at the Internet Archive is almost complete. The volumes from 1935 – 2001 are nearly all scanned and online. And another bit of good news, I am also embarking on a new job as Digital Content Writer at Pacific School of Religion/Graduate Theological Union, part of the famous “Holy Hill” complex in Berkeley, CA.
Many thanks to the people who made this site and my professional progress possible: Chris Kox, Chair of the Library Tech Program at CCSF and supervisor of this project, Jesse Bell, my supervisor at archive.org; professors Erika Gentry and Beth Cataldo of CCSF’s Multimedia Studies Program; Eliza, Foldout Table Master at the Internet Archive, and the support and professional camaraderie of the gifted Anna Colibri/Anna Y Kelleher, who has always made my brain work better in her unduplicatable way.
I’ll follow up this post with something more substantial when all’s been said and done, but I just wanted to give that shoutout to kick off the new year and wrap up the work.
It’s been a very productive two weeks in Archiveland. This semester I was faced with a conflict: to digitize or not to digitize. There was an item in with the Guardsman archive physical volumes with a different title and different but related publication history to the newspaper. It was one of those “in real life” questions that held implications for the “digital life”: when in question in real life, then what of an item’s digital life?
Thinking as an archivist, my position regarding this item, a publication called The Free Critic, has been that I’m the archivist, not the curator. So to axe or not to axe, it’s not my call. It came to me in this set, indicating that it’s indeed part of the set. So it goes up on the web as part of the set.
The other issue was technological. Does The Internet Archive have the means to publish archive sets containing different titles? Well, this is just what the Internet Archive does. See the Media History Digital Library for examples. This collection contains hundreds of different magazine and trade publications geared towards silent and sound era Hollywood and other facets of American entertainment.
I can’t wait for The Free Critic to come online right alongside the rest of the Guardsman digital archive, which is moving right along. It was a renegade publication from 1969-1975 with experimental layout/design. It’s a true gem that I’m privileged to be able to make accessible to the entire planet.
And that’s thinking like a librarian.
Data, encoding, storage, memory, recall. Sometimes, things don’t go as well as you think they might, like last week when a volume I’d scanned went up onto the Archive with a bunch of unanticipated misalignments. (Unanticipated misalignments, isn’t that a life story right there.)
A poor workman blames the tools, yes, but for our friends in Bookbindery Land, my dilemma was the result of a book too tightly bound.
Archive.org is known for its nondestructive method using it’s homegrown Scribe and foldout table systems. This Slideshare presentation by Martin Kalfatovic of the Smithsonian gives an idea of the Archive’s and other systems it uses for its image capture needs, in the same way the Rosenberg Library is utilizing them for this project. That means no cutting up books, no removal of bindings, no X-acto knives taken to pages. It also means an editorial policy of what-you-submit-is-what-goes-up on the internet, warts and all.
Where I come from, if someone is running around half crazy, we say they ain’t bound up too tight. Well, this 1982-1983 volume truly was, resulting in poor image quality. We I.T. people call this “data loss”. This edition of Online Finds is about the kind of loss that can make you crazy and look all misencoded. Sometimes, you cannot win for losing.
First, an online find for a friend:
Tag Archives: Joan of Arc
At Medievalists.net. They run a lively community on their Facebook page. I think I’ve even stumped them for the past several “Stump the Librarian” Sundays, with my repeated requests for materials on Churches in Medieval Antioch. They’ve been sports and taken up several other my questions of interest, though. Love them.
Tag Archives: Joan of Arc
@Medievalists
Data Loss, Mobile Malware among Top Threats of Mobile Computing, Cloud Security Alliance
Another kind of data loss, but by consumers and the enterprise (as well as campus IT.) Happens every day. Be kind to your local IT Department: keep those BYOD Droids, iPhones, and Galaxies close.
Data Loss From Missing Mobile Devices Ranks As Top Mobile Device Threat
CFP: Trauma and Social Transformation, Univ. of TX, Austin
Catastrophes– whether war, genocide, mass rape, enforced disappearances, or environmental disasters –inevitably leave their mark on the social fabric. Civic trauma is an unavoidable, and yet little-explored, element and consequence of such tragedies. For the Institute’s 2013-14 theme, we seek proposals that analyze trauma as a transformative historical experience for individuals, families, communities, and nations.
Trauma and Social Transformation, Institute for Historical Studies, UT Austin
See also: Online Finds, No. 4, Descilo’s “Understanding and Treating Traumatic Bonds”
See also: Should We Be Triggered? NeuroGovernance in the Future/(Tense), Kim Cunningham, SocialText Periscope, 1 Apr 12
Rage is the Subtext
Rage Is the Subtext charts the internal shifts of Holocaust survivors who tell their stories of suffering, loss, and endurance. Susan Derwin locates the healing effect of literary testimony in its capacity to represent the reactions of survivors to traumatic experience, while concealing other more unsettling responses from view. Beneath the explicit concerns of works by Primo Levi, Saul Friedländer, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Imre Kertész and Liliana Cavani, Derwin uncovers unspoken reserves of rage, which then become legible as formal properties of the text.
Prof. Derwin was also my undergrad mentor.
Readings in Holocaust Literature and Film [Hardcover]
Encoding (memory), Wikipedia
Memory has the ability to transform into any encode, store and recall information. Memories give someone the capability to learn and adapt from previous experiences as well as build relationships. Encoding allows the perceived item of use or interest to be converted into a construct that can be stored within the brain and recalled later from short term or long term memory. Working memory stores information for immediate use or manipulation which is aided through hooking onto previously archived items already present in the long-term memory of an individual.
Encoding (memory)
Another semester, another stint at The Internet Archive, finishing up the Guardsman newspaper digitization project.
If you’d like to see scans, check out the archive.org reader version of a volume from 1993 here.
Speaking of readers, I’ve got some of my own stuff up in Google Reader form, right here on the blog. My latest is “Paris is Not Burning” for History and Aesthetics of Photography, taught by Erika Gentry (who also taught the Multimedia Studies course for which I originally started this website.)
It’s a short reflection piece on Baudelaire and his photography problem. PH 50A is providing some great context for my archive.org work, which is the reason I’m taking it. Veracity in representation, reproducibility, mimicry, longevity, implications of the mechanical for the artistic…these issues have been with us in the West since ordinary people got a hold of a printing press, and aren’t going away with our 24/7 always-on, representation-driven lifestyle. We were given license to think and respond, so I did.
Read more of LB’s Writings at The Guardsman Digital Archive Blog.