28 September 2007

Elephants Never Forget

Elephant manuscript collage THE BIG DRAW. The Campaign for DrawingThis October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives - or by elephants! - scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We'll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won't use it for anything else. Above: Elephant. Submitted by A Diamond and P Todd: "No original documents were damaged in the making of this image..."

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Elephants Never Forget

Little Elephant THE BIG DRAW. The Campaign for DrawingThis October the Archives Hub is taking part in The Big Draw. We want you to make drawings inspired by archives - or by elephants! - scan them or photograph them, and then email the digital versions to us. We'll give an Archives Hub notepad and propelling pencil to everyone who sends us a drawing, and the first name out of the pith helmet will receive some paper made from elephant pooh! If you send us your postal address, we won't use it for anything else. Above: Little Elephant, Jacquelene Harris, 18 June 1977. Submitted by Paddy: "this is one of the drawings we found on the plasterwork when we stripped the wallpaper from the bathroom."

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19 September 2007

Good teaching wins over technology!

A news entry on Inside Higher Ed this week refers to students' use of technology. The fact that they are using 'more technology than ever' will come as no surprise, but a report by the Educause Center for Applied Research looks more closely at how students use information technology in college and how it can be harnessed to improve the learning experience. I was particularly interested in the conclusion that 'students appear to segment different modes of communication for different purposes.' The report suggests that e-mail, Web sites, message boards and Blackboard are viable ways of connecting with professors and peers, but this is not so for chat, instant messaging, Facebook and text messages, because students 'want to protect these tools’ personal nature '. So whilst social networking sites are increasingly popular, students may feel that their experience is spoilt by teaching staff trying to get in on the act! The findings of the report suggest that the utility of technology in a teaching environment depends upon how it it used, not whether it is used - students prefer good teachers who do not use technology rather than poor teachers who do. The suggestion is that 'as new methods of interacting with information become more ubiquitous...students will grow up with different expectations and preferences for acquiring knowledge and skills' and there will be a focus on 'active learning' that that 'comes from synthesizing information from multiple types of media.' The report does seem to conclude that technology is no substitute for well designed and executed, but at the same time proposes that teachers need to start thinking from different perspectives and not necessarily assume that technology will fit into their current ways of teaching.

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18 September 2007

EAD: your super flexible friend

I've just come across the Smithsonian Archives of American Art online collections. This is a wonderful source, with all the archives digitised and available to view. The navigation available on the site is great, with an image viewer allowing the user to scroll through images, enlarge them and navigate through the folders. It seems to me to be a very well designed site, with a clear information architecture enabling the user to drill down to different levels and get a good sense of exactly where they are. I like the way that they have used the mix of text, photographs and drawings. The site is not perfect though - it does fall down on the use of XHTML, which is not valid. I suspect that the Smithsonian have rather more resources available for this sort of project than many of us are lucky enough to get (although the project did receive external funding from the Terra Foundation for American Art). I was particularly interested in this site because it uses EAD, so it is a great example of the way EAD descriptions can be re-purposed. Whilst for many of us, simple EAD descriptions are all that we have the time and resources to create at present, this shows how using EAD means that we retain the flexibility to create more ambitious sites in the future. If you go to the 'finding aid' link you can see the more traditional EAD description. Image from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website, under fair use (for non-commercial purposes).

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16 September 2007

A diversion into Lakeland

Having just returned from a week in the Lake District, I can't resist digressing somewhat from archival themes. I always use the Wainwright guides to the fells, and this time in particular I really got into reading them. They are really quite an astonishing achievement - seven books covering all of the peaks, with detailed information, sketches, views and charming and amusing anecdotes. My favourite of the moment is a description of a route up to Pike o'Stickle, 'a continuously steep and unpleasant scramble in prickly, unstable scree, and of interest only to searchers after stone axes...In a buttoned up plastic mac, the ascent is purgatory.' (A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells: The Central Fells, originally published 1958). I wonder about this observation, as Wainwright wasn't the plastic mac type - more the tweed jacket and pipe type. I should say that in general he writes very movingly about the beauty of the hills - but if a walk is dull and lacks interest he is happy to say so! Anyway, the books are true works of art, and the astonishing thing is that right from the start he planned how long each book would take, decided that the whole labour of love would take 13 years, and he finished one week ahead of schedule! When you think about all the plans and charts and meetings and reschedulings and so forth that so often happen with work projects, I think it is a wonderful achievement that he just made a decision and carried it out so remarkably punctiliously and successfully. I did fall to wondering whether there is an archive of Wainwright's papers. I believe that the Kendal Museum have many of his ink drawings, but I don't know whether there are any papers in existence. That would surely be a great archive to have. Image taken from Jack's Rake overlooking Stickle Tarn

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07 September 2007

Data Creation Guidelines

A Brer Rabbit Yarn Here's a dull announcement livened up by another photo of the Woodcraft Folk: the latest version of the Data Creation Guidelines for the Archives Hub is now online. Illustration: Woodcraft Folk, 1920s, photo copyright © the National Co-operative Archive.

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05 September 2007

A perfect gift - passing on archives

I attended the Society of Archivists' conference last week where there was an interesting keynote by Brien Brothman of the Rhode Island State Archives. Brien started by acknowledging that in today's society we think in business terms and archives often become more like products. We need to seek to maximise our financial opportunities and justify what we do economically. The question of how much archives should be funded, their value compared to other commodities and services, is a difficult one, but Brien wanted to leave that to one side and think about a situation where we exclude the economic and business model. He wanted to think about archives as beyond value, and explore the notion of an archive as a gift. Brien looked at the concept of temporality in relation to archives. He referred to the Irish poet Louis McNeice as someone concerned with questions of time (I didn't have time to get the quotes from his poems down though!). Brien's argument was that temporality is intertwined with acts of giving and receiving - the past and the future. Whilst we assign a single date to a document, the reality is that the temporal identity of that document is more complex. It has an identity over time. Archives in a sense are located in the past and the future, and archivists are in a position to make a gift of archives to the future. Maybe this is the perfect gift, beyond economics? Gift giving may be seen as an exchange, a transaction, but a one-way gift expects no return. Yet is there always an element of future obligation? Jacques Derrida, the philosopher, felt that gifts give or buy us time - we receive a return on them after a delay. He argued that a pure gift is impossible as it would only be possible if the gift giver could forget that they had been in the act of giving. Archivists in a way form alliances with the dead and the not yet living, and so maybe archivists can make the perfect gift because there can be no expectation of return, of being rewarded. The question is, does the recipient have to be alive for the gift to truly be a gift? Brien made the point that expenditure on things that we don't truly need may be what fuels progress. Things that are beyond the expectation of return and utility. Archivists add value to the archives that they look after, so Brien concluded that they are like gift wrappers. If there is no such thing as the perfect gift then maybe the archive does represent a belief in principles, the importance of community, of sacrifice and giving where you are not certain of the return. I am not certain where this talk left me. I liked the notion of the gift, but it is maybe rather more fanciful than faithful to reality. Still, it is good to think about the importance of the role of an archivist from a more philosophical perspective like this - beyond the day to day realities of funding.