Practical E-Records

As you may have noticed, my new graduate assistant/colleague Angela posted some thoughts earlier today regarding her experiences installing Archivematica (this was a task/learning experience I inflicted on her as a training exercise).

What can we take away from her experience? Basically, that even the simplest possible tools require a level of knowledge that will likely confuse all but developers or those who have ‘power user’ type IT experience. Over the past year, I’ve come to firmly believe that every practicing archivist and archivist in training needs to get a grip on basic IT concepts at both a conceptual and also a practicing technical level.   I’d like to suggest a two ways to do that:

• It is important that any digital preservation/curation curriculum include some training in basic IT skills.  Maybe “Information Technology for Archivists” should be a required course in every archives education program.   Angela is a fairly skilled computer user (in spite of her protestations),  but some of the conventions used in the Archivematica documentation threw her for a loop, at least until  I explained them.  .  Otherwise, “you literally don’t know what you don’t know,” as Angela put it to me this morning.  And, as I’ve discovered over the years, one thing that holds many graduates back from getting jobs is a sophisticated knowledge of technology.  A few years ago, I read a book (unfortunately I can’t recall the title or author) that systematically walked through every basic computer concept from input/out put, microcomputer hardware, networking, and programming concepts at a conceptual level.  Something like that is needed for archivists, in today’s idioms and expressions.  If you can’t take a class, Exploring the Digital Domain by Ken Abernethy and Tom Allen looks like a good place to start.
• The best way to begin making headway in preserving electronic records is to dive into software testing.  When you do so, and when you report your results back to a project, you do two things.  First, you begin to build your own competence. But more importantly, you provide critical feedback to developers, who have no way of knowing about problems, unless someone points them out.  In this respect, Angela’s post show me that she will have much more to contribute over the upcoming months, as she continues to work on projects to refine and implement my recommendations.

I have been very busy over the weeks between SAA and the start of the semester.  Among other things, I’m working on a big ‘think piece’ blog post which I’ll be posting later this week, based on some ideas that occurred to  me after a session I attended.

At the same time, I’ve been training a new set of graduate assistants, including Angela Jordan, who will be working 20 hours a week for the University of Illinois Archives. Angela will be posting occasional updates over the next year, as she works with me on several project related to electronic records.

One of the top recruits in our Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Angela comes to us via Pacific Lutheran University (BA in Philosophy) and the University of Wyoming, where she earned an MA in American Studies.   She had some great work experiences in Montana as an AmericaCorps volunteer at the Northern Rockies Outdoor Center.   She also has great archival experience, having worked at the Southern Illinois Regional Archives Depository in Carbondale for two years.  More recently, she worked as a Reference Librarian at the Parmly Billings Library where she was in charge of the Montana Room, a special collection devoted to local and state history.

Angela’s interests in Library school include archives and special collections, management of libraries/archives, and digital curation issues.  She’ll be working on all of these issues with me quite a bit over the next year, and has already penned some thoughts regarding the Archivematica installation process which she’ll post later.

In her off hours, Angela enjoys the outdoors, cooking, and music: she is an accomplished pianist and vocalist. Please join me in welcoming her to Illinois and as a contributor to the practical e-records blog.

David Wheeler, in “How to Evaluate Open Source Software/ Free Software Programs” provides a thorough outline of how to “compile the short list”  of top candidates and perform comparative assessments of the software. Notably, Wheeler’s article includes a summation of many recent OSS resources, including papers, websites, research projects and articles.

Wheeler addresses the issue of comparing OSS and proprietary software and explains that the methods set out in his paper can be used to evaluate OSS, whose outcomes can then be assessed next to traditional proprietary software evaluations. The particular aspects of OSS that make it difficult to compare to proprietary software are exactly the characteristics that might sway an implementer to use one over the other. That is, as comparing apples to oranges, one might not even desire to compare OSS/FS to proprietary software with the same evaluation methods and score weightings.

Wheeler explains that OSS/FS programs make much more information publicly available than proprietary software, such as source code, and forums for discussions between developers and users.

Like most of the other resources examined in this review, Wheeler’s guidelines are primarily aimed at evaluation for selection, as opposed to evaluation as a continuing best practice approach to OSS project management. Wheeler does note that implementers “need to be able to evaluate OSS/FS programs, because you will always need to know how well a given program meets your needs, and there are often competing OSS/FS programs.”

Many of the attributes Wheeler suggests to examine are helpful to consider when developing any software assessment model: functionality, cost, market share, support, maintenance, reliability, performance, scaleability, useability, security, flexibility/ customizability, interoperability, and legal/license issues.  Some of these attributes differ greatly in OSS/FS versus proprietary software.  For example, in assessing functionality, one might consider the opportunity  to alter the OSS/FS directly, by editing or adding to the source code.  Wheeler examines each of these aspects in-depth and provides an analysis of what and how an OSS/FS evaluation model might use the criteria.

As I noted a few weeks ago, Emily Brock and I are reviewing formal evaluation methods for Open Source Software (OSS). We’re doing this because I would like to get a handle on what worked or didn’t work with the Archon project.  Having an objective understanding of that project’s strengths and weaknesses will be critical as the ArchivesSpace project moves forward.  The article that Emily and I hope to write will complement Sybil Shaefer’s excellent Code4Lib piece.

The evaluation tools and methods that we found help users select software.  While they may may facilitate project improvement or self criticism, that is not their primary purpose.   Therefore, Emily Brock and I will be putting together a new method for OSS project evaluation/self criticism, then testing whether it works.

All this is just to say, by way of introduction, that over the next few days, Emily and I will be releasing some posts based on the initial literature review we completed.  Before getting to that, Wikipedia contains a helpful overview and comparison of existing open source software assessment methodologies.  It lists the Open Source Maturity Model (OSMM) from Navica, the Qualification and Selection of Open Source software (QSOS), and the Open Business Readiness Rating (OpenBRR).  Look out soon for more in depth reviews of these, and other methods!

A few weeks ago, I developed an email preservation guidelines template for distribution to records creators.  The document aimed to assist them in managing email to make it ‘archives-ready’.  Looks like I’ll need to add a new recommendation, specific to MS Outlook.

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Over the past few days, I worked on and submitted a paper for the 6th International Digital Curation Conference.  Among other things, working on this paper provided me the opportunity to think about more about how the archival community is or isn’t involved in datasets and data curation efforts.  I’ll spare you my thoughts on that subject for the moment, but point instead to a related issue:  technologies that people at small archives might use to migrate and preserve relational database data in a system neutral format.  (This is also weighing heavily on my mind, since a colleague sent me a query today from someone who wanted supporting data for an early 1950s University of Illinois Engineering Experiment Station publication.)

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This past weekend, I had the opportunity to present some of my ideas at the National Archives Conference for Fraternities and Sororities, organized by my colleague Student Life and Culture Archivist Ellen Swain.  The audience included about 25 archivists (some formally trained, some not) employed either full or part time by the national offices of college fraternities and sororities.  In almost all cases, the materials are managed by the organizations themselves, as internal archives.

I really leaned a lot by presenting to this group.  They have strong interest in preserving ‘born-digital’ records created by fraternities and sororities and are very tech savvy, that is, very comfortable using and applying all kinds of software on their desktops.  However, most of them would have difficulty implementing digital preservation tools that currently exist, and really have no awareness of the projects or of issues like metadata standards.  Also, they have to manage digital materials for online access within the bounds of whatever software a webhost supplies, in other words, a pretty basic technical package.  Nor would I have expected otherwise.

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