{"id":1376,"date":"2012-05-29T14:00:07","date_gmt":"2012-05-29T18:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=1376"},"modified":"2013-12-17T13:04:34","modified_gmt":"2013-12-17T18:04:34","slug":"shieber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/05\/29\/shieber\/","title":{"rendered":"Processing special collections: An archivist’s workstation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
\"Houghton<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
John Tenniel, c. 1864. Study for illustration<\/a> to Alice’s adventures in wonderland<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0Harcourt Amory collection of Lewis Carroll<\/a>, Houghton Library<\/a>, Harvard University.<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

We’ve just completed spring semester during which I taught a system design course jointly in Engineering Sciences and Computer Science.\u00a0The aim of ES96\/CS96<\/a> is to help the students learn about the process of solving\u00a0complex, real-world problems \u2014 applying engineering and computational design skills \u2014 by undertaking an extended, focused effort directed toward\u00a0an open-ended problem defined by an interested “client”.<\/p>\n

The students work independently as a self-directed team. The instructional staff provides coaching, but the students do all of the organization and carrying out of the work, from fact-finding to design to development to presentation of their findings.<\/p>\n

This term the problem to be addressed concerned the Harvard Library’s exceptional\u00a0special collections<\/a>, vast holdings of rare books, archives, manuscripts, personal documents, and other materials that the library stewards. Harvard’s special collections<\/a>\u00a0are unique and invaluable, but are useful only insofar as potential users of the material can find and gain access to them. Despite herculean efforts of an outstanding staff of archivists, the scope of the collections means that large portions are not catalogued, or catalogued in insufficient detail, making materials essentially\u00a0unavailable\u00a0for research. And this problem is growing as the cataloging backlog mounts.\u00a0The students were asked to address core questions about this valuable resource: What accounts for this problem at its core? Can tools from computer science and technology help address the problems? Can they even qualitatively improve the utility of the special collections?<\/p>\n

The\u00a0clients were the leadership of Harvard’s premier\u00a0Houghton<\/a> and Schlesinger<\/a> libraries. The students received briefings from William Stoneman<\/a>,\u00a0Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library, and Marilyn Dunn<\/a>,\u00a0Executive Director of the Schlesinger Library and Librarian of the Radcliffe Institute; toured both libraries; and met with a wide range of archivists and librarians, who were incredibly generous with their time and expertise. I’d like to express my deep appreciation and thanks to all of the library staff who helped out with the course. Their participation was vital.<\/div>\n

The students’\u00a0recommendations\u00a0centered\u00a0around the design, development, and prototyping of an “archivist’s workstation” and the unconventional “flipped” collections processing that the workstation enabled. Their process involves exhaustive but lightweight digitization of a collection as a precursor to highly efficient metadata\u00a0acquisition\u00a0on top of the digitized images, rather than the conventional approach of \u00a0digitizing selectively only after all processing of the collection is performed.\u00a0The “digitize first” approach means that documents need only be touched once, with all of the sorting, arrangement, and metadata application being performed virtually using optimized user interfaces that they designed for these purposes. The output is a dynamic finding aid with images of all documents, complete with search and faceted browsing of the collection, to supplement the static finding aid of traditional archival processing. The students estimate that processing in this way would be faster than current methods, while delivering a superior result.\u00a0Their demo video (below) gives a nice overview of the idea.<\/p>\n

The deliverables for the course are now available at the course web site<\/a>, including the final report<\/a> and a videotape of their final presentation<\/a> before dozens of Harvard archivists, librarians, and other members of the community.<\/p>\n

I hope others find the ideas that the students developed as provocative and exciting as I do. I’m continuing to work with some of them over the summer and perhaps beyond, so comments are greatly appreciated.<\/p>\n

Archivist%20Video.mov<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Tenniel, c. 1864. Study for illustration to Alice’s adventures in wonderland.\u00a0Harcourt Amory collection of Lewis Carroll, Houghton Library, Harvard University. We’ve just completed spring semester during which I taught a system design course jointly in Engineering Sciences and Computer Science.\u00a0The aim of ES96\/CS96 is to help the students learn about the process of solving\u00a0complex, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[380,2780],"tags":[62103],"class_list":["post-1376","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-libraries","tag-shieber"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s5pLfN-shieber","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2110"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1376"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1411,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1376\/revisions\/1411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}