I had the pleasure last week of attending the meeting of the Society of North Carolina Archivists last week at Duke University.

I attended an all-day session led by Stephen Fletcher of UNC Chapel Hill to learn about preserving photographs in archival collections. To preserve them, one must first know what kind of photograph one has. Especially in the nineteenth century there were a variety of types, all using different chemical processes. Each one breaks down in its own way and so requires its own preservation strategy. The whole morning was given over to a quick review of photographic history with examples of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes de visites, early Kodak snapshots, and early experiments in color to name a few. I found the historical part fascinating and the technical challenge of conservation daunting. Photographs and prints require cool temps and low humidity, both maintained constantly. Color photographs, I leanred, keep best at temperatures below freezing.

I and another participant in the session carried on the discussion over wine and snacks at the reception following. Stephen Fletcher did not regard digitization as a form of preservation. My interlocutor, a small businessperson who digitized images for a living, maintained that advances in scanning technology had made it possible to scan a negative without losing any information. The digital version could even be used to print a new negative if necessary. Is it preservation to lift off the information perfectly or is something lost if you can't handle the material that the original photographer handled?

Things fall in place

I have worked in the Carolina Room long enough now to have gone through an annual review (which went fine, d.g.).

When I began I knew the broad outlines of Charlotte history, but not the names and personalities of historical figures or the characteristics of particular places now changed, changed utterly. My colleagues' familiarity with old Charlotte still impresses me. I don't say I've acquired it myself, but at least I begin to see how it is acquired: by patient accumulation of knowledge.

A single fact without context requires the effort of memorization in order to be retained. If it sticks, though, another fact will come along sooner or later that connects to it, and then one has the beginning of a narrative. For instance, I was at the Mint Museum for a party last week and looked up at the names of the original benefactors who had moved the old Mint to its current location (with labor from the WPA). I recognized a name or two and made note of others, resolving to learn the stories behind them, too. In the following week a caller asked about Mellanay Delhom, whose ceramic collection was donated to the Mint in 1968. Looking up her story led to some info about Mary Myers Dwelle, (pictured above) whose name I had seen on the benefactors list. Another caller in the same week asked about Heriot Clarkson, a lawyer and judge with a long career in Charlotte from the 1890s to the 1940s. Clarkson's name came up tangentially as I was researching a query about the Blue Ridge Parkway: he was a developer of "Little Switzerland", an early resort in the region. The separate queries led to separate answers, but the incidental data connected to each other.

The difference between knowing isolated facts and appreciating the bigger picture is like the difference between finding an address on a map and knowing the landmarks and neighborhoods. A literal illustration of that difference occurred this week. A visitor to the library wanted to know the precise location of a spot depicted in an old photograph. With the aid of a city directory we established it and connected it to another photograph. Today a fruitless search for an image of a particular shop that had once stood on West Trade St nonetheless obliged me to fix in my mind the appearance and spatial relation of the hotels, the train station, and the church on that street sixty years ago. As I told one of my colleagues, I'm beginning to feel like I'm from here.

The Shifted Librarian and the Free-Range Librarian have both mentioned a new product called "Summon" that promises to revolutionize searching within the library. It provides a Google-like interface to all a library's online data. Results of a search may be drawn from catalog records, announcements of upcoming events, or online texts. Libraries already use meta-search engines that can look for results in various databases. This, if I understand it correctly, promises to be more seamless and rapid.

American Historical Association, 2009 meeting, New York, NY

What a privilege to attend the AHA convention! It provided some opportunities for professional development, which I hope to chronicle here, and some for personal rewards, which I can talk about elsewhere.

January 3

American Association for History and Computing, Session 1

"Old Stuff, New Tricks: How Archivists are Making Special Collections Even More Special Using Web 2.0 Technologies"

Jean Green, Binghamton University
Mark Matienzo, NYPL
Amy Schindler, College of William and Mary
Jessica Lacher-Feldman, University of Alabama

This was a roundtable discussion with each participant displaying and discussing examples of how his or her library had made use of blogs, micro-blogs, photo- and video-sharing, and social networking.

Blogs
Blogs expand the display space.

The "Cool at Hoole" blog (coolathoole.blogspot.com) helps market the special collection of the University of Alabama by letting readers know what's new or what's the library has on a topic or person that's in the news.

The blog of the special collections library at SUNY Binghamton highlights certain books or useful websites.

William and Mary special collections launched a blog with a life span. It was only meant to cover the anniversary year of coeducation at W & M.
Photo-sharing
flickr Commons
- is a public photo collection
- accepts metadata, but is designed for "tagging"
- partners use flickr API to upload batches of photos
- photos must have "no known copyright restrictions"
Hoole has used flickr as an online exhibit tool, W & M uses it to highlight the collection and to make "friends" for the library
"archives on flickr" - group name
Libraries send low-res images to flickr, then may still charge to share high-res copies.

Ditto for YouTube and iTunesU, where institutions may share content.
Facebook
Will facebook page overtake or replace the library website?

"archivists without a cause" - facebook group
Wikis - use for FAQ's, knowledge management

A post in another blog last week gave me new insight on a subject I had commented on in a previous post.

The author, Derik Badman, Digital Services Librarian at Temple University, addresses the question of balancing text and image in presentations. I had seen the question as one of balancing slides and speech. If the speaker is dynamic enough, he or she can carry the presentation, and the slides are simple and static so as not to distract from the real business of talking (and hopefully, listening and synthesizing).

Well, if something's worth doing, it's worth doing right. If a speaker is going to use visual aids at all, they should make a unique contribution to the presentation. As Badman puts it, the tools of a presentation are there to "convey information in a complete manner" - through all available channels of communication. Visuals for a speech-centered presentation serve merely as attention-getters. Not bad in itself, but not as useful as they could be.

Badman is a graphic artist as well as a librarian, so he speaks from experience of crafting words and images. "When visually appealing slides complement the speech, the presenter can engage multiple senses of the audience members." An aptly illustrated and captioned slide would serve the speaker's needs and even make sense for asynchronous review of the presentation, when the speaker isn't there to expand on the idea.

Wow, what a challenge! I thought I was on the cutting edge by reducing the content of my slides to just one heading and images. Maybe I liked that approach because it put the spotlight on myself as the live presenter. As good as a single speaker can be, hoever, the point is to serve the other participants. Minimal slides are better than boring slides, but effective slides are best of all. Now I have to think visually.

The downtown public library where I am employed has unveiled a new point of service in the building. Just inside the front entrance is a small, curved countertop with a high-seated chair and a sign suspended overhead saying, "Just Ask Me". The idea is to answer people's questions right away or direct them to another desk as needed. The Just Ask Me - or "JAM" - desk is occupied by professional and paraprofessional staff who are assigned to cover an hour at a time.

I put in an hour on the first day of this new venture yesterday and it was pleasant duty. I answered a few questions but the biggest part of the job was the exchange of greetings with persons entering the building. This new desk creates a useful first impression, I hope. I didn't mind smiling and saying a few words to each person for an hour, though it would get to me if I had to do it all day.

First-time visitors would get the most out of this service, I imagine. At our location we get a lot of out-of-towners, and they need orientation. The regulars know where they're going.

Three cheers for GIMP!

We get a lot of requests for obituaries, photographs, and other items from old newspapers. We have over a century of Charlotte newspapers preserved on microfilm. It used to be we would look up the article, print it out and put it in an envelope to go out in the mail. Sometimes we would place it on a flatbed scanner to create an image we could attach to an email. This process took many steps and produced images several generations of reproduction from the original.

Lately the library bought a microfilm reader that was also a scanner. It could send out images to a laser printer and could in theory send them to our branch laptop as well. Scanning, saving an image to our hard drive, then attaching it to an email promised to be much easier and greener and to produce results of higher quality. Following the salesperson's instructions I downloaded the appropriate drivers from the manufacturer's website but could go no further. I needed image manipulation software that was "Twain-compliant" and so could use the drivers to communicate with the scanner. I didn't want to ask the library to shell out the bucks for Acrobat or Photoshop, so I turned to Martin House- an erstwhile blogger. He is too busy to blog now, but not too busy to give good advice when asked.

He recommended GIMP - "GNU Image Manipulation Program" - freely available from download.com among other places. (Which is more than the salesperson did for us, btw.) Long story short - it worked! Staff will be saved labor, researchers will get results faster, the library will get more out of its investment in the new reader/scanner.

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful for freeware.