archivemati.ca

I have had this discussions with colleagues several times over the past couple of years. Somebody is getting ready to prototype a digital archives at their archival institution and the first question they ask is, “which open-source repository system should I use? Dspace? Fedora? Greenstone? Eprints? ”

However, as a system analyst, I believe “what are my requirements?” is the more appropriate question to ask before selecting technology and tools.

In many instances these requirements might be much simpler, in a first iteration prototype, then what is offered by repository systems. Or worse, the repository system doesn’t really support the necessary requirements and instead leads the implementors down a frustrating, time-consuming path of installing, configuring, tweaking, shoe-horning, customizing, re-designing, and re-integrating to meet the design constraints and quirks of the given repository system. All of which, in the end, is to meet some simple archival storage and/or metadata management requirements.
[Read more →]

Exactly one year ago today, I launched this Archivemati.ca website and posted my first blog entry.

According to a survey conducted back in 2004, 66% of all blogs are abadoned after two months. This means that Achivemati.ca has beaten the odds and is already in middle-age by blogging standards (time to buy a Porsche or, in the case of the blog middle-age crisis, time to add a Google map mash-up or Jabber IM server).

Of course, that survey was conducted in the very distant blogosphere past of 2004 when having a blog was as cool and complicated as having a mobile phone was in 1990. [Read more →]

I have just ‘hopped’ backed home to Vancouver from Edmonton, Alberta where I delivered a presentation called ‘Digital Preservation: An Overview’ at the Managing Information Assets in the Public Sector Conference. I’ll be taking the short flight straight back Monday next week to work on a digital archives analysis project for the City of Edmonton.

I’ve posted a webcast version of my presentation in the Papers and Presentation section of this website. In the presentation I tried to give an introduction to the problem of digital preservation, the various initiatives and tools that are attempting to address this problem, and outlined how the OAIS standard can be used as the basis of developing an institutional digital preservation strategy.

I’ve also posted the list of 50 citations and references that I used in the presentation.

Check it out if you would like a general introduction to this very interesting and timely topic or if you are simply curious how I managed to get Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Mad Max the Road Warrior and the Sesame Street muppets into a presentation on digital preservation.

I haven’t had a chance to post to this blog much over the past month. Firstly I moved office. More significantly, I have been working day and night to complete the first alpha version 0.1 release of the ICA-AtoM open source software for archives.

This version of the ICA-AtoM software is being used to manage a preview release of the HumanRightsArchives.org website which hosts a searchable guide to archival sources related to human rights violations.

The alpha release provides basic archival description, search, browse and website management features (menus, user accounts, static page editing). The archival description component is fully compliant with the International Council on Archives’ standards for archival description (ICA-ISAD(G)), archival authority records (ICA-ISAAR(CPF)) and the forthcoming standard for institutions with archival holdings (ICA-ISIAH). The subject access points are populated with terms from the UNESCO Subject Thesaurus.

This is a very early alpha release and therefore it is subject to any unforeseen hicups and it is still limited in features. However, I am pleased with the performance and flexiblity of the open-source software stack (MySQL, Apache, PHP5, Symfony MVC) and I am very optimistic about the ongoing enhancement of this software with new modules and features over the coming months.

Check out the brief (7min) screencast video which introduces the humanrightsarchives.org website.

Last month I moved the office for my consulting practice (Artefactual Systems) to a new location which is bright, spacious and most importantly, air-conditioned! My last space had single-pane, south-facing windows and was located on the second floor above the kitchen of a Greek restaurant. The heat was unbearable.

My new office is located in the heart of uptown New Westminster (British Columbia, Canada), in the Sixth and Sixth building, just a few minutes from home. Now that I can regulate my body and room temperature I hope to have many productive years of consulting and research from this new location!

I had the pleasure of attending the BarCamp Vancouver (un)conference this weekend. A BarCamp is an open, participatory workshop-event, where the meeting logistics and the tech-oriented content are organized collaboratively by the attendees. BarCamp Vancouver was part of the worldwide BarCampEarth, a series of simultaneous BarCamps taking place around the world between August 25-27, 2006.

I sat in on some great sessions on Search Engine Optimization, Digital Identity, User Authentication, Social Music Services, Tagging, Improving Presentations and Tech Activism. I think the most representative photo of all the shots that are now posted over at Flickr is the one above (taken by John Bollwit who has some good session summaries over on his Audihertz.net blog).

In the foreground is James Sherrett giving a presentation about AdHack, a recently launched d0-it-yourself advertising community, while behind him Sarah Pullman is leading a Yoga for Geeks session. I love the Vancouver tech community!

[Read more →]

In a previous post, I announced that the consulting project that I am working on this summer is the development of ICA-AtoM, an open-source archival description application for the International Council on Archives. In the meanwhile, two other open-source archives application projects have recently cropped up.

For the past 8 years or so, I have been talking with colleagues and clients about how a decent open-source archives application was sorely lacking in the archives community. Then within the span of half a year, there are suddenly three projects!

Although I had begun to hear about both of these other projects over the past few months, the SAA conference in Washington, DC last week was the first opportunity to learn more about these projects, meet the developers and see demos of their applications. [Read more →]

I am on the plane home right now, flying back from attending and presenting at the Society of American Archivists’ 2006 annual conference in Washington, D.C.. There was a great turnout (about 500 people) at the “Finding Aids: The Next Generation” session in which I participated along with James Sweeney from the University of Michigan’s Polar Bear Digital Collection project and Merrilee Proffitt who presented on RLG’s finding aid user studies.

I’ve posted my own presentation on ‘Web 2.0 and Archives Access Systems‘ as a screencast on the Papers & Presentations page of this website.

It was great to run into and catch up with old colleagues and classmates at the SAA as well as meeting some new people who share my passion for information technology and its applications in the archives field. One of those was Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, who prepared an excellent poster presentation that analyzed the usability of archives access system interfaces in relation to how they presented original order and provenancial context information. She promised to post her presentation soon to her SpellboundBlog. Also, Dan Cohen from the Centre for History and New Media had an excellent presentation that showcased their work on the September 11 Digital Archive and demonstrated some great Google maps mashups. [Read more →]

On the plane ride to and from the ACA 2006 conference in St.John’s, Newfoundland I finally got a chance to read Peter Morville’s much lauded book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005).

In this book, Morville studies the latest Web trends and technologies from the perspective of findability, which he defines as the “the degree to which a particular object is easy to discover or locate.” He notes that the Web is changing how we live, work and interact with each other and that the findability of information on the web has a profound impact on who we are and who we will become.

Ambient Findability provides a timely overview of information retrieval and its role and relationship to the Web. I was familiar with many of references and concepts but the book does an excellent job of acting as a “boundary object” for these various ideas and practices while stringing them together into a cohesive and very readable narrative.

A number of the discussions in the book are applicable to my research into web-based archives access systems. I have summarized the most relevant in a list called, 10 Ideas I Found in Ambient Findability:

1. The Web is about human cooperation
2. The Noosphere is real…dude.
3. Information flows through us, and changes us
4. This is your brain on information overload
5. Too much is not enough is too much
6. Ignoring ignorance is bliss
7. Information systems are not irrational enough
8. Words, Meaning and Scale: The problem with Information Retrieval
9. A Folksonomy Is Better than No-onomy
10. Semantic Web and Web 2.0 Are Not Mutually Exclusive
[Read more →]

I have just returned from delivering a presentation on ‘Web 2.0 and Archives Access Systems’ at the Association of Canadian Archivists, 2006 annual conference in St.John’s, Newfoundland.

I was expecting some objections to the ideas that I was putting forth on the basis of protecting professional standards, preserving authentic context or budget priorities. However, my talk was well-received and I only had discussions with archivists who are very keen on applying the Web 2.0 concepts of open architectures, open content and community-input to their collections.

I have posted a screencast copy of my ACA 2006 presentation in the ‘Papers & Presentations’ section of my blog.