Archives of the people, by the people, for the people

American Archivist

Volumn 70, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 387-400

  Evans, Max J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67649428852     PISSN: 03609081     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17723/aarc.70.2.d157t6667g54536g     Document Type: Review

References (37)

1. U.S. archives and other repositories hold collectively at least 11 million cubic feet of records and historical manuscripts-roughly 33 billion pages. This is a very conservative estimate based on these data: The National Archives holdings of "traditional records" equal 3.3 million cubic feet. National Archives and Records Administration, "Performance and Accountability Report, FY 2006," 75, available at http://www.archives.gov/ about/plans-reports/performance-accountability/2006/nara-2006-parcomplete. pdf, accessed 11 June 2007.
2. "The combined holdings for all state archives in 2006 amounted to more than 2.7 million cubic feet . . . ," The State of State Records: A Status Report on State Archives and Records Management Programs in the United States (Council of State Archivists, January 2007), available at http://www.statearchivists.org/reports/2007-ARMreport/StateARMs-2006rpt-final. pdf, accessed 8 June 2007.
3. Vicki Walsh extrapolates data from twenty-two states to conclude that there were about 5 million linear feet of nongovernment records nationwide in 1998. Where History Begins: A Report on Historical Records Repositories in the United States (Council of State Historical Records Coordinators, 1998), available at http://www.statearchivists.org/reports/HRRS/HRRSALL.PDF, accessed 8 June 2007.
4. Email to author from Vicki Walsh, 8 June 2007. There are no good studies of the volume of records held by county and local governments. None of these numbers include the vast and growing volume of nonpaper records: microforms, audio recordings, video tape and motion picture films, and electronic records.
5. I use the word archives here to include archival institutions, historical records repositories, special collections, libraries, and museums that hold archives, personal papers, and manuscripts. See Richard Pearce-Moses, A Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005), 30-32, available at http://www.archivists.org/glossary/index.asp, accessed 7 June 2007.
6. "Most innovations are not radical breakthroughs, but creative recombinations of existing ideas." Christine W. Letts, et al. in High Performance Nonprofit Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), 79.
7. Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner, "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing," American Archivist 68 (Fall/Winter 2005): 208-63.
8. This phrase comes from the 2003 Exposing Hidden Collections Conference sponsored by the Association for Research Libraries and held at the Library of Congress. See http://www.arl.org/rtl/ speccoll/hidden/EHC-conference-summary. shtml, accessed 11 June 2007.
9. The word lean is used intentionally to refer to a discipline for industrial production of that name. I suggest that archivists can learn from private industries' commitment to reducing waste and unnecessary process steps. The seminal book on this topic is James P. Womack, Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World: How Japan's Secret Weapon in the Global Auto Wars Will Revolutionize Western Industry (New York: HarperPerennial, 1991).
10. More recent works include Womack and Jones, Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together (New York: Free Press, 2005)
11. and Mike L. George, Lean Six Sigma for Service: How to Use Lean Speed and Six Sigma Quality to Improve Services and Transactions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003). The latter work focuses on nonprofit organizations while introducing statistical methods of process improvement.
12. The National Archives of Australia has implemented digitization-on- demand. Ted Ling, "Why the Archives Introduced Digitisation on Demand," RLG DigiNews, no. 4 (15 August 2002), available at http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews6-4.html#feature1, accessed 12 June 2006.
13. Another version of this paper has a more telling title: "Taking It to the Streets: Why the National Archives of Australia Embraced Digitisation on Demand," available at http://www.naa.gov.au/publications/corporate- publications/digitising-TLing.pdf, accessed 12 June 2007.
14. The provenance-based method of describing archives receives plenty of criticism as being not sufficiently specific and requiring a knowledge of governmental (and other institutional) organization and functions not possessed by most potential researchers. See Richard H. Lytle, "Intellectual Access to Archives," American Archivist 43 (Spring/Summer 1980): 64-75, 191-207. Archivists struggle to provide subject and name access as a supplement to the provenance method using added entries in catalog records and by developing indexes. Online searching within and across archival finding aids reduces the need to navigate through the hierarchical structure. Word searching of the text of discovery tools does provide the kind of keyword-in-context anticipated by SPINDEX some forty years ago.
15. The exception is the quantity of contemporary documentation that is printed or typewritten and may be read and converted to character code by optical character readers (OCR). See, for example, the Governor Leavitt 2K2 Program records (Utah 2002 Winter Olympic Games) at the Utah State Archives, available at http://historyresearch.utah.gov/digital/26017.htm, accessed 7 June 2007.
16. The "more than 7,000 historical societies, libraries, museums, academic institutions and other organizations and groups who hold historical records in the United States. . ." benefit from volunteers who "contribute more than 17 million hours of labor to the cause of preserving our documentary history" and in "historical societies, unpaid volunteers outnumber paid professional staff by a ratio of 5 to 1." Vicki Walsh, Where History Begins: A Report on Historical Records Repositories in the United States (Council of State Historical Records Coordinators, 1998), available at http://www.statearchivists.org/reports/HRRS/HRRSALL.PDF, accessed 8 June 2007.
17. I use "access" throughout this paper to mean intellectual access because this is my focus. I acknowledge that there are critical distinctions among legal, intellectual, and physical access. Legal access is a matter of law in the case of federal, state, and local archives. In most other archives, legal access is a matter of ethics, donor agreements, physical condition, and institutional policy. See Mary Jo Pugh, Providing Reference Services for Archives and Manuscripts (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2005) for a more thorough discussion.
18. Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law Journal 112 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2006), 369-446
19. and Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Benkler is now a professor of law at the Yale Law School.
20. Yochai Benkler, abstract of "Coase's Penguin," available at http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html, accessed 29 August 2005.
21. Benkler, abstract, emphasis added.
22. Benkler, "Coase's Penguin," 386-90.
23. 21 "It has been commonplace for a long time to treat information as a perfectly nonrival good." Kenneth J. Arrow, "Economic Welfare and the Allocation of Resources for Invention," from Part VI, Welfare Economics and Inventive Activity, in The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity: Economic and Social Factors (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1962), 616-17.
24. Shalini Venturelli, From the Information Economy to the Creative Economy: Moving Culture to the Center of International Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: Center for Arts and Culture, 2001), 7-8.
25. See also http://www.culturalpolicy.org/pdf/venturelli.pdf, accessed 20 March 2006.
26. A proposal for creating digital libraries, and not just indexing their content, is found in Aaron Krowne, "Building a Digital Library the Commons-based Peer Production Way," D-Lib Magazine 9, no. 10 (October 2003), available at http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october03/krowne/10krowne.html, accessed 24 August 2006.
27. An archives-related research project is reported in Magia Ghetu Krause and Elizabeth Yakel, "Interaction in Virtual Archives: The Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections Next Generation Finding Aid," American Archivist 70 (Fall/Winter 2007): 282-314.
28. This idea is consistent with Amazon.com's method of soliciting readers' comments about books. There are a number of other examples on the Web. Its application for archives was introduced in a 2002 article by Michelle Light and Tom Hyry: "Colophons and Annotations: New Directions for the Finding Aid," American Archivist 65 (Fall/Winter 2002): 226-29, which is the source of this quotation.
29. GenWeb is an example of a loosely organized group of genealogists who independently select vital records, index them, and publish the indexes online. There is no quality control, true aggregation, or direct linking to the original. What you see is what you get: many separate online indexes, loosely organized under the USGenweb Project umbrella, available at http://www.usgenweb. org, accessed 20 March 2006.
30. The Ellis Island project is an example of a more organized effort to index genealogical records, available at http://www.ellisisland.org/genealogy/ ellis-island-search-tips.asp, accessed 7 June 2007.
31. See Adam Mathes, "Folksonomies-Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata," produced at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2004, available at http://www.adammathes.com/academic/computer-mediatedcommunication/ folksonomies.html, accessed 23 August 2006.
32. The term folksonomy is, according to Thomas Vander Wal, who coined it, "the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval. The tagging is done in a social environment (shared and open to others). The act of tagging is done by the person consuming the information. The value in this external tagging is derived from people using their own vocabulary and adding explicit meaning, which may come from inferred understanding of the information/object . . . . The people are not so much categorizing as providing a means to connect items and to provide their meaning in their own understanding," available at http://www.vanderwal.net/ random/entrysel.php?blog=1750, accessed 23 August 2006.
33. The Genealogical Society of Utah (GSU), as part of its effort to collect microfilm (and more recently, digitized) copies of vital records, developed an Internet Indexing System to manage work flow and provide robust tools for volunteers to carry out name indexing projects from the comfort of their homes. The resulting data goes not only to the GSU's cumulative database, but to each repository that owns the records for merging with its discovery system. This system varies from the work of the GenWeb in this important way. The Georgia Archives and the Ohio Historical Society have participated in successful tests of this system. For more information, see http://www.familysearchindexing.org, accessed 24 September 2007.
34. A scholarly study is Elizabeth Yakel and Deborah A. Torres, "Genealogists as 'Community of Records,'" American Archivist 70 (Spring/Summer 2007): 93-113.
35. American Archivist 66 (Fall/Winter 2003):235-47.
36. Benkler, "Coase's Penquin," 379. Find more on the General Public License at http://www.gnu.org/ copyleft/gpl.html, accessed 2 March 2006.
37. Venturelli, From the Information Economy to the Creative Economy, 8-9.