Page History

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Ferrante – discrepancy between reference staff's staff’s concern about born-digital material, but not about digitized material.

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Wilson – in the UK if you grant access, you grant access to everybody.  Example – MPs papers can't can’t be closed to one biographer.

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Schmitz – interesting to see the various types of institutions deal with access and rights issues.

Daigle – If you're you’re not providing access to the content of the materials, can you provide the metadata to that content?

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Westbrook – we make the metadata publicly available, if the content is not (pictoral).

Shaw – question of student's student’s dissertation papers – accessibility vs. promiscuous accessibility. Uses  the same Creative commons license with an embargo for a certain amount of time, if desired.

Kirschenbaum – Publishers will consider an electronic dissertation to be the first publication and could be a detriment to the graduate student. Farr said it's it’s the same with the Rushdie papers, where Rushdie's Rushdie’s memoirs were restricted while he's he’s still working on it. Other examples with a Duke donor photographer, who doesn't doesn’t want his raw or "bad" “bad” photographs open to the general public.

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Shaw – there are tools, such as "findssn" “findssn” that can scan for PII'sPII’s.  But the discussion should begin with the donor during the interview, to ask if there is personal credit card numbers or other information that should be redacted or just to look for. Other argument is the disk image which includes private information like financial (Quicken) information.

O'Meara O’Meara – appraisal of disk imaging is an interesting, but Matienzo we need a type of tool because the issue is scalability. 

McKay – better and more practical to do it at the point of request, although it means the archives and reference staff don't don’t have the skills to do the imaging and determination of private material at the point of request. Has to go back to the digital archivist.

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Schmidt – for Rorty, about half of the users are archivists or librarians, but have anecdotal information about use of the files.  They've They’ve used full-text searchability and find that very useful.  Mining the digital data is extremely useful. 

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Schmitz – were lucky in that the formats are very simple and consistent.

Matienzo – until you're you’re faced with the body of work and see the unintended consequences of migration, it's it’s difficult to anticipate these problems.

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Wilson – encouraging sharing of plans – so that every institution isn't isn’t reinventing the wheel. It starts with a mindmap where you put in all your criteria, wish to

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Shaw – initially, researchers want the quickest access to the content, even if it's it’s not the most complex

Farr – early feedback at Emory. "Rushdie “Rushdie is our Cadillac." ” Not every collection is going to be getting the same treatment. Different tiers of presentation.  Also, the feedback with Rushdie is they like to start with the emulation first and then go to the searchable database.

Kirschenbaum – we seem to be dependent on whatever emulators are available; there's there’s no permeability between different virtual environments. Emulators seem like an underripe technology.

Broderick – is anyone involved with researcher training?  Worry is that the researchers aren't aren’t equipped to use the workstation.

Farr – one particular researcher couldn't couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of an emulated environment. Another had never worked with a Mac and was so frustrated he went back to paper.

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Redwine – worked with five different researchers. Just because they're they’re not comfortable with technology doesn't doesn’t mean they don't don’t dream big. There has to be a balance – building tools for all levels of researchers, but how.

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Watterworth-Batt – if you have a writer who is composing in various places (blog, twitter, email), that's that’s the kind of context that needs to be captured as best we can.  Crucial to have the interview with the donor.

Shaw – that's that’s because part of the context is the provenance.  Donor example has two blogs, two facebook accounts, and two twitter feeds. Archivist has to have several solutions but base arrangement by the platforms on which it's it’s based.  Attempt to use EAD finding aid to describe how these different platforms differ from each other.

McKay – sometimes the donor's donor’s information during the interview is not correct – you have to take it for what it's it’s worth.

Schmitz – there's there’s a precedent in archival theory about defining series by format (blog different from other formats) and to let the researcher do the work to make the connections.

Matienzo – there's there’s a tyranny of archival description that tries to shoehorn records into a prescribed form.  Hierarchical arrangement starts to fall apart. We can identify a primary arrangement, but digital materials don't don’t fit well

Catherine – can create lateral arrangements within a collection, doesn't doesn’t necessarily have to be hierarchical.

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Daigle – researchers are taking XML files and using them for data mining. They get a data dump from various repositories to data mining and then do analysis on the content.  We're We’re the facilitators of the data, and pushing the access threshold.

Matienzo/Gueguen/Chan – depending on who the scholar is, we can really work on reaching out to the creative scholar and encourage use of the metadata for different uses. In terms of email and other large data sets, it is necessary to talk to scholars. It's It’s hard, though to have the time to come to this balance. How does one get the institutional buy-in to allow them to get the time to devote to this kind of work?

Laudeman – the SOLR / blacklight/ fedora people are interested in file-level granularity, so groups in the UVA scholar's scholar’s lab can go through and harvest huge quantities of stuff.  Wait for mashups to occur. An example is Google Maps, which was open to all and proliferated in the business and other communities.

Broderick – don't don’t have the same community as those in academia.

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Gueguen – at ECU there was a faculty member who was interested but she didn't didn’t have time to help. Interested in how UVA / Harvard got a community started

Kirschenbaum – organization called CenterNet, a consortium of 200 digital humanities centers. They do outreach, have a listserv.  It's It’s a good place to start.  What is worrisome is the extent to which scholars will and won't won’t be able to do is driven by the idiosyncracies of the institutional environment.

Hinderliter – small institutions that can't can’t handle these collections might be making themselves irrelevant

Schmitz – consortia and partnerships are possible solutions for those who haven't haven’t the right amount of infrastructure.

Laudeman – how to bring the smaller institutions on board?

Daigle – it's it’s not a technical but an administrative question.  Feelings of ownership / relationships between large and small institutions is a question of trust.