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A Cat’s Mark on History from The Hill

February 16, 2021/in Digital Collections, Digital Restoration, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

What do you do when tragedy befalls a one-of-a-kind document?

Accidents are bound to happen, but it’s devastating when they happen to rare materials. Birth certificates and diplomas can be reissued, but unique, antique, or otherwise precious pieces of history don’t always have a simple—or successful—solution when the worst happens.

Kelienne “Kelli” M. Miriani-Ripple was faced with a calamitous situation in the fall of 2020 when an invaluable piece of family memorabilia was damaged in a cat-related incident.

For Kelli, remaining homebound due to the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opportunity to go through her numerous boxes of family memorabilia.

Among other treasures, Kelli discovered a framed proclamation from the Mayor of St. Louis that celebrated the anniversary and community involvement of Kelli ’s grandparents, Helen and Anthony Colombo. Pleased with what she had uncovered, Kelli leaned the document against the wall in her family room, indicating to her husband where she would like it hung in her new family museum.

Enter Tommy the cat. The framed document was in a prime location for Tommy to take notice, and no more than a minute had passed after Kelli set down the proclamation when Tommy was there, marking his territory. There wasn’t any way to clean such a foul liquid from the document, and Kelli certainly didn’t want to display her cat’s contribution on the walls.

“I felt so stupid,” Kelli told Anderson Archival.

Protect your historical documents from cats and more. Learn the best way to preserve your documents in storage.

Anthony Colombo and Helen Negro on their wedding day on January 7, 1940. Image provided by Kelli Miriani, and used with permission.

The document in question not only commemorated a milestone in her grandparents’ lives, but also provided a vital piece of her family’s history in St. Louis.

Kelli’s great-grandfather, Emilio Negro, journeyed to America in the early 1900s. He settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and began to build a life for himself. Due to the way Italians were treated at the time, he started a house-building business under an alias. Many of those houses remain in the family today. Emilio raised his family in the St. Louis neighborhood The Hill, which is steeped in the history of its Italian immigrants. Emilio and his wife Luisa’s daughter, Helen, was born in 1917, and she grew up to marry Anthony “Tony” Colombo, who was born in 1918.

Tony Colombo, like his father-in-law before him, was an integral part of the The Hill’s closely knit community. Around 1946, he returned from WWII and opened Colombo’s Tavern, which still stands on Manchester Road today.

Tony became very active in politics and was well-connected in St. Louis. Though he only had an eighth-grade education, Tony had a reputation in his community for treating everyone with respect, from politicians and police officers to the downtrodden.

Whatever you need, Tony will take care of you,” Kelli recites.

Helen and Anthony. Image provided by Kelli Miriani, and used with permission.

The Tavern offered many services: financial aid, check cashing, and more. If someone came in needing help, Tony would use his connections in the community to do whatever he could for them. Tony prided himself on taking care of his community and his family. “They called me ‘Crash’ because I was accident-prone,” Miriani recalls. “Grandpa was always there to finance repairs.”

Helen was also involved in community politics and worked for the St. Louis Municipal Courts system. The combined influence of Helen and Tony contributed to the legacies of many local politicians still active today.

Following the tradition of families on The Hill, the Colombo family always had four generations living close together. Being a beloved granddaughter of Tony and Helen, Kelli herself contributed to the larger community by helping with political work and babysitting during community events.

When Helen passed away, Kelli swooped in to rescue what items she could and rummaged through them to pull out items for display.

The original Proclamation, bearing Tommy the cat’s mark on history.

After Anderson Archival’s digital restoration.

 

The wedding proclamation wasn’t the only one-of-a-kind piece of family memorabilia found in these bins. Seeking to restore the cat-sodden proclamation allowed Kelli to consider fixing another document. A resolution regarding the Colombos’ anniversary in partnership with the damaged proclamation had a typo in Helen’s maiden name.

Kelli’s husband was the one who found Anderson Archival online. He’s an avid researcher who takes his time to read reviews and evaluate potential vendors in all aspects of his life, so Kelli had high hopes that something could be done to preserve her documents. “The worst that could happen would be that they say no.”

Always eager to accept a challenge, Anderson Archival said, “Let’s see what we can do.”

Though the proclamation was discolored, blurred, and permanently damaged, Anderson Archival was able to digitally reconstruct the text at the bottom of the document. Careful scanning of the oversized document allowed for a clear, perfectly editable image. Digitally restoring the document preserved the original in its cat-branded state but also provided a clean replica that Miriani could reprint and display for posterity.

What is digital document restoration? It may be the best solution to returning digital scans to their ideal or original condition.

The resolution document was another challenge, because the typos in the original required digital replacement of several letters that needed to match the spacing and coloring of the document around them. This typically isn’t the kind of undertaking most digital preservationists on their doorstep, because most preservation projects emphasize protecting the original content of a document. But since Kelli was intending to use this digitally-corrected document for personal display, she wanted the replica to have the correct information.

The walls of Kelli’s family room tell the stories of family members no longer alive, her own small family museum. This collection highlights the personal impact of her grandparents’ lives to both their family and community. The Colombo-Miriani museum will continue to grow as Kelli discovers new family artifacts, and now has two more beautifully restored replicas that honor Anthony and Helen Colombo.

The original Resolution, typo marring the family significance.

After Anderson Archival’s digital restoration.

Do you have family memorabilia or historical artifacts you’d like to display but are stained, waterlogged, or otherwise damaged? Digital restoration may be exactly what you need! Contact us today to see what we can do for your special item.

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3 Ways to Make Your Historical Archive Impactful Today

February 15, 2021/in Digital Collections, Website Design /by Anderson Archival

In leisure time alone, the average human processes at least 34 gigabytes of information daily. On the internet, this looks like their newsfeed, the endless scroll of what friends and acquaintances are doing at any given moment, and the 24-hour news cycle. Even if a user is searching for something specific, they’re bound to be distracted because the Internet is built to monetize our attention. Only the shiniest, most intriguing, emotion-laden ads, sites, and headlines get the spoils.

In this high-competition virtual world, how do you make a historical archive or digital library stand out on the web? Here are 3 ways to make your archive impactful today!

  1. Connect Documents in the Collection to One Another

How can your archive invite users to spend more time on it to facilitate discoveries and new knowledge? Create your own rabbit hole of connected information for users to explore. History doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Add links between people, places, and key terms in your collection. This can be done in the text itself, on a helpful sidebar, or though metadata.

If your collection is displayed as text, adding links to other related documents or categories could look similar to what you see on a blog or online newspaper. When a paragraph from a historical diary names a location, that text can link to a category page that aggregates all content in the collection connected to that location. A name? The text could link to a short Who Is explainer to provide context, list additional appearances of that name in the collection, or connect to works that person has authored.

This text and metadata accompanies a painting by Raphael in Google’s Arts and Culture explorer. While it doesn’t provide a lot of interlinking, users can view more work from Raphael and learn about walnut as a medium.

If the collection is primarily image-based or layered with text, it might not be possible to integrate links into the content itself. In this case, a sidebar or section of content links below each page might be helpful. If this section displays linked metadata, users can easily see more from the same author, related to the same keywords or key people and places.

Many times, this metadata already exists in text within a collection. Curating a collection of related links takes care and time, but even one or two links can enhance users’ experience and encourage them to dive deeper.

Have questions about digital collections? Take a look at What Is a Digital Collection or Digital Library? for answers.

  1. Connect Documents to Their Time and Place in Culture

The contents of a single archive may not have all the necessary items to create full context of the time and place in which a person and their documents existed. Filling in the gaps for visitors of the collection can take a lot of dedicated time and effort, and may require partnerships with other organizations and collections. But the effort can produce greater user engagement and allow the collection to become a valuable resource for researchers or historians.

There are many ways to create a more interactive, user-focused collection.

Maps: Creating a map to track a person or item’s movement in history can provide the context needed to understand its importance. Users can orient the documents in the real world with familiar places that they can better connect with. Using historic maps can be useful, but online services, like Google Maps, can be just as effective and oftentimes more interactive.

Infographics: Creating infographics may take time and skill, but they are a great way to track or represent ideas. They are also easy for users to follow and can include links or pictures to allow more engagement. Want to show how events relate to one another or highlight main ideas with historical context without overwhelming the user with a page full of text? An infographic may be the way to go.

Historical Dictionaries: Not everything from two hundred, three hundred, or a thousand years ago will make sense to a modern reader, even with historical context. Linking text that may mean something different in its time or is no longer in common usage to a historic dictionary can give more value to items that would otherwise confuse more than illuminate.

  1. Connect Documents to Today

Blogs and articles utilizing an “On this day in history…” connection to the past can be a fun reminder of what the world was like throughout history. Articles that highlight past events on the date they occurred can be a great idea to help users connect to the collection in a new way. They can also be effective social media posts to engage your audience beyond the collection itself and keep interest even when there is nothing new about the collection to report.

What you share has a lot to do with why you want to share. We dive into many of the reasons to make your archive available online, and the benefits of doing so.

There’s no one way to build an archival flashback. The San Diego Union Tribune offers scanned images of their old edition along with a newly transcribed copy of the featured article, giving both easy reading and on-page context. On the other hand, the Library of Congress’s “Today in History” feature gives an overview of an event with images of items relating to the subject of the article. The Chicago Tribune goes a step further and offers not one event in history but many throughout the years.

However you choose to feature your collection’s place in time, a connection to the present, even if only by date, can be a great way to engage your audience and have them coming back again and again.

 

Anderson Archival helps build digital libraries and collections through high-touch digitization, OCR, metadata, and design. Wherever you are in your digitization journey, we can help.

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Hunting for History – And the Perfect Digital Archive

December 1, 2020/in Digital Collections, General, Preservation, Website Design /by Anderson Archival

For years, the city of Salem, Massachusetts has been collecting, preserving, and slowly digitizing historical records dating back 400 years. Salem, most notable to laypeople as the location of the infamous witch trials, is home to a rich variety of historical organizations. Many of these organizations have digitally shared their own collections, but in October 2020, this collection of official city records was made publicly available on the internet for the first time. For genealogists, historians, and city officials, this new resource provides easy access to data about the property, people, and town.

What is the best way to make your collection the most useful to the biggest number of people?

If you’re in the business of discovering and utilizing sources like the new City of Salem archives, then you know that not all digital archives are created equal. Searching a poorly-made digital archive can take just as long as rifling through cabinets of paper. Accurate, faceted search; clearly imaged documents; and remote access can mean the difference between a frustrating hunt and a satisfying find.

For archivists on the other side of this seek-and-find equation, it may feel daunting to look at piles of documents and wonder what is the best way to make your collection the most useful to the biggest number of people? The answer may appear so insurmountable that it halts the process of digitization and preservation before the first page is scanned.

The first step toward a digital archive, as with any historical project, is research. It’s best to come to digital collections from all directions. New and existing archives provide examples of what’s possible, and by looking at these archives with a critical eye, you can make note of what characteristics work and what doesn’t before beginning an archive of your own.

The Salem Archives

At first glance, the City of Salem digital archives pose an unassuming figure. Considering their focus on facilitating government access and research for those who already have an idea of what they’re searching for, this isn’t particularly surprising. Lots of color, graphics, and curated tours were never the goal here. For a researcher used to traversing digital archives, this might be refreshing. But for a casual genealogist or family historian just getting started, Salem’s stark entry may feel overwhelming and leave them turning to another source.

With thriving digital libraries in and about Salem already in existence, the City of Salem likely considered what audience was deemed most likely to utilize their site and for what purpose. This type of survey is one that should go into any preservation project, including digitization for public access.

In their new archive, the City of Salem prioritized powerful search tools over appealing design. Faceted, full-text search offers highlighted, detailed results in the primary source documents. A researcher or government official who comes to this library with a question within the collection’s scope, won’t need to look long before they find an answer.

Understanding the scope of an archive also helps the creators decide just how much post-scan processing is needed for a collection. The City of Salem archives feature impressively accurate OCR, but close examination of the results reveals that the searchable text layer was not corrected to match the original—some searches for exact numbers or phrases will not be fruitful. Handwritten text is also not recorded digitally.

Once a digital archive is live, it may reveal shortcomings as well as successes. Depending on how the choices made in its inception affect intended use or if the archive finds a new audience needing different features, the City of Salem may choose to revisit the collection to accommodate the new demands.

Interconnective Digital Libraries

Just as there is an art to building a digital collection, there is an art to finding the right resource for the answers you seek as a researcher. What answers does the collection provide? What is the scope of the documents included in a given collection? Who is the expected user of the digital library? There is an understanding, too, that no digital library exists in a vacuum. Each is piece of a virtual community, a web of information and sources.

Reviewing other Salem-focused archives brings this into focus.

PreviousNext

Even without drilling down into collections and search features, the home pages of these digital libraries provide a degree of instant understanding.

Historic Salem and The House of the Seven Gables, for example, would pair nicely with the City of Salem archives as deep dives into the architecture, ownership, and history of key locations. In addition to some full text historical works, Salem Public Library’s Local History section offers visual history that could go hand in hand with their Oregon Historic Photograph Collections. These, along with the more hyper-focused Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project, are all clear in scope and what they have to offer the curious researcher. Together, they provide a more comprehensive picture than any could separately.

Just as there is an art to building a digital collection, there is an art to finding the right resource for the answers you seek as a researcher.

Pondering these questions and investigating existing digital libraries will help your soon-to-be digital library take shape. And if you’re ready to move forward towards digitization and want a partner in your efforts, the experts at Anderson Archival are ready to help.

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Wikimedia Commons

Digitizing the Oldest Black Newspaper in America—One Photograph at a Time

November 16, 2020/in Custom Software, Digital Collections, Document Scanning, Preservation, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

When John H. Murphy founded The Afro-American newspaper in 1892, his goal was to combine three separate church publications into a single-page newsletter. Murphy was both a former slave and a Civil War veteran, and in the Reconstruction era, The Afro-American served to inform and unite his Maryland community. Little did he know, it would become America’s oldest running black newspaper. By Murphy’s death in 1922, the newspaper had grown to cover most of the Atlantic coast and expanded to thirteen regional editions.

At its heart, The Afro-American (now simply Afro-American, or colloquially, Afro) was a mouthpiece for black America. It documented everyday life in black neighborhoods that the mainstream white media didn’t cover. Wedding and funeral announcements, neighborhood restoration projects, feats of black artists and athletes, and local community events could all be found in an issue of the Afro-American. The editorial section argued against Jim Crow machinations, discussed black labor rights, and highlighted education advocacy. The newspaper also gave a voice to aspiring black journalists, like Murphy’s own daughter Elizabeth Murphy Phillips Moss, who became America’s first black female reporter.

Murphy’s children continued the Afro-American’s important work. Fourth generation relatives John J. Oliver, Jr. and Frances M. Draper manage the paper today. It’s been a cornerstone in representing black journalistic voices in their own words and social groups. Media of the time tended to focus only on exceptional members of the black communities. Unless a black person was a celebrity of national renown, they were unlikely to catch the attention of mainstream news publications. The Afro-American was a way for a black child in Baltimore to pick up a newspaper and see stories of citizens and communities that looked like them.

There was a whole culture, a whole way of life that was ignored by American society. It didn’t exist but in the black press.”—Asantewa Boakyewa, an administrator in the Center for Africana Studies, Unboxing History

Preserving Everyday History: A Daunting Task

An institution as large and old as the Afro-American is bound to have a lot of source material stored, but the reality is almost beyond imagination. In 1923 the newspaper’s staff began actively storing every document, photograph, and letter used in the publication.

One approach to digital preservation is to focus solely on material with the highest research and revenue value. This would, in theory, limit the scope of the project to photographs of famous newsmakers and the articles with the most recognizable headlines.

However, such an approach would fly in the face of the Afro-American’s mission. From its inception, the newspaper held the lives and experiences of everyday citizens in high importance. A digital representation of the Afro-American wouldn’t be complete without advertisements, local births and deaths, letters from around town, and images of black people who aren’t already found in the historical canon. Everything was important to the Afro-American, and everything would need to be digitally preserved in order to keep the paper’s rounded picture of its time and community.

Nearly seventy years of bound broadsheets live in the Afro-American’s archives, which takes up seven rooms of the newspaper’s headquarters. Four of those rooms boast floor-to-ceiling shelves of hundreds of archival boxes, containing over 150,000 labeled envelopes stuffed with artifacts. File cabinets encase folders of photographs, each carefully annotated on onion skin pasted to the back of each photo. With no way to find a needed source easily, indexing would require digitization.

Digitizing a collection of this size and composition would prove the Afro-American’s biggest challenge.

Materials that old and delicate (like the onion skin annotations) need to be handled carefully, and the variety of media types meant that care and cost would be required in the effort. Manual digitization wouldn’t be as simple as feeding documents through a scanner. Sorting, categorizing, and deciding on metadata factors for the digital end product requires intense planning—something that’s much harder to do when a collection fills seven entire rooms.

Into The Future

Enter Thomas Smith, a graduate student and young programmer, and his invention, Project Gado. In 2010, Smith worked with the Afro-American to win grant funding for digitization, but even with money, the effort faced a daunting task.

The archives of the Afro-American contained 1.5 million historical photos. When approaching the project, Smith took stock of the collection. In his Medium article about the project, Smith writes, “The standard approach to scanning a commercial archive is to focus on the most valuable 1% to 2% of the collection. Almost invariably, this means capturing images that cover famous people and major events. The everyday, being less profitable, is left out.”

Smith’s vision? Use brand new technology to digitize everything.

He built Project Gado, a scanning robot which, by Smith’s estimation, would shrink scanning time and man hours. Gado works through Python and Arduino coding languages and operates by lightly suctioning photographs and placing them, one by one, on a scanner. Supervised by a human, the robot was able to scan about 120,000 images in the first year.

Additional Challenges & Earning a Profit

A virtual folder of raw image files is just as useful for research or revenue as a folder of photographs, but it can offer superior search capabilities when set up properly. This can save significant time and resources that can be allocated to more important tasks than sifting through boxes.

In order to make the Afro-American’s newly-digitized image collection searchable and sellable, Smith and the digitization team knew they would need to employ metadata. Adding information by hand was one option, but being a technical expert, Smith wanted to try powerful AI tools. In 2010-2012, this kind of technology was still in its earliest days when applied to visual media, so Smith’s team started building what they needed from scratch.

For the text, though, a major tool was Google Vision’s OCR. This tool detects when text appears in a document and then attempts to read it. This is an impressive tool, but has significant limits that can only be mitigated by detailed, human review. Check out the results in the Afro-American Archives.

AI tools created by IBM and trained by Smith’s team were also useful in identifying themes, content, and historical figures. Where the AI fell short was around gender and age. Even in today’s AI, facial recognition is largely ineffective when presented with people of color.

All that time and effort resulted in a product that could be sold to media marketplaces, like Getty Images. Now, licensing these powerful images helps fund the Afro-American’s reporting. These tools also helped move the field of preservation forward and displays just how useful deep learning and AI can be to the future of digitization.

The Impact of Everyday History

Smith pinpoints the incredible impact digitizing everyday black history creates. “That experience—that personal moment of interacting with the past—is a unique engagement with history that the archive offers.” This connection between the modern, everyday person and their counterpart in the past only comes when attention is paid not only to famous figures, but faces in the background. “Digitizing a whole archive (or at least a massive sample of it) affords the opportunity to capture both the iconic, highly profitable images and those that document daily experience,” says Smith.

Today, this wide-spread preservation of all perspectives and identities throughout history is more feasible than even ten years ago when the efforts to digitize the Afro-American began. According to Smith, “Modern scanning tech like the… overhead camera can scan hundreds of images per hour, and sheet-feed scanners today can scan delicate materials without damaging them. For institutions that can afford the tech, there’s no excuse not to digitize everything.”

Digitization of the Afro-American’s archives is ongoing, and presentation of its contents remains in flux, but organizations seeking similar results now have an amazing success story to look to for inspiration.

History’s raw materials, like fossils, are embedded in layers of time. Consider a drawer in your office desk or a hall bureau at home: Its jumbled contents form a visual collage of your recent past. History gets written when somebody sifts through the remains and ponders how all the pieces fit together.”—Bret McCabe, Unboxing History

Our histories, our cultures, and what makes us one human community—these concepts are more than items displayed in museums or on library shelves. Our stories wouldn’t be complete without the everyday lives of the community. The Afro-American’s massive historical collection of journalistic ephemera illustrates a rich history of a side of American life that is often missing from narratives.

Seemingly-ordinary collections are often the truest pictures of history. This ideology is part of Anderson Archival’s mission, just as it powers Project Gado and lives on in the Afro-American’s archives. If you’re ready to make sure that your collection is available for future generations and even for profit-earning, reach out to us today.

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“More to Be Told”: Finding the Right Fit for Your Private Collection

October 30, 2020/in Client Story, Digital Collections, Document Scanning, Preservation, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

It’s finally time! You’ve decided to preserve that collection of historical family artifacts you have boxed up and collecting dust. Maybe they’re a little water-stained or faded from sitting in your basement for a decade, or possibly you’re considering offering your collection to a larger audience once digitized. No matter the size or condition, your collection is important and deserves to be preserved.

Once you’ve developed the scope of your digitization plans, it’s time to make some decisions about how to proceed. Do you tackle the project on your own with equipment you already own? Do you find an archival firm that specializes in your kind of collection? As with any hiring process, it can sometimes be difficult to find the right fit in a partner that meets both your needs as the guardian of a collection and the needs of the collection itself.

When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner.’”

Collection custodian Jim Surber found himself in a tough position when planning ahead for his digitization goals. “The collection’s been in my possession for about a year now,” says Surber. “I just wanted high quality images of the covers and the contents so they could be easily shared.”

The collection consisted of twenty-one bound journals given to Surber by an extended family member. The journals belonged to Surber’s great-grandfather, contained daily diary and travel entries ranging from years 1895 to 1925, and included a number of loose newspaper clippings. The journals themselves were each about the size of a small notebook, most of them no larger than 7” x 4”. Though some of the handwriting inside had faded significantly over the years, most of the materials had inked text that remained clear even after years in storage.

Despite being nearly a century old, most of the journals were in good structural condition. “[The collection] was stored in a house as far as I know,” says Surber, “probably just a box in the basement.” Storage is an important, oft-underestimated element of document preservation and can be a huge factor when it comes to the end condition. It’s rare that a collection stored in a basement is free of water or pest damage. This collection benefitted from not being overhandled, but the tradeoff of its diligent storage is that the information in the journals had never been carefully reviewed or studied.

Finding himself with a collection that was so important to him and his family, Surber began to explore his digitization options. “When I first came into possession of [the journals] I thought, ‘Maybe this is something I can do on my own time. Maybe I can get a scanner,’” says Surber. “Then I found out, ‘Wow, this is more involved than I thought it was. This is really going to take a lot of time, a lot of dedication.’”

Many caretakers of personal collections start out in the same position. The handling and imaging of delicate pages and bindings often don’t hold up well in the small flatbed printers most people have in their home offices. An archival firm has resources like cradle scanners and imaging software that would be impossible for the DIY digitizer to afford or access.

The Surber journals in particular presented an imaging challenge; the author had used as much of the page as possible in most of his entries, and the text reached the very edge of the inner margins on many of the pages. “I’d have to press [the journals] flat on a scanner, and not all of them should be pressed flat like that,” Surber recounts. “These are fragile and I don’t want to risk hurting them.” The narrow or, in some cases, nonexistent margins required a cradle scanner and careful maneuvering to capture the entire page. For historical artifacts like these journals, using a flatbed likely would have inflicted damage and provided incomplete scans, putting a frustrated collection owner back at square one.

If a collection requires the extra care and expertise that only an archivist can provide, what’s the appropriate next step? Finding a digitization partner that values a collection as much as the guardians do isn’t always an easy task.

Interested in learning more about what a digitization partner can do for your collection? Read about Historical Document Digitization.

“I called a couple [digitization firms] before I called Anderson Archival,” Surber says, “and it wasn’t really what they did. These companies basically told me, ‘I know what you’re getting at but it’s not really what we do.’” Surber’s collection was historically significant to him and his family, but the big digitization firms he reached out to weren’t willing to invest their time and expertise. “They just blew me off,” Surber recalls. “I wasn’t able to convince them it was worth their time.” Unless your collection is a truckload full of documents that can pushed quickly through a scanner with little or no processing, many digitization firms may not work with a private collection.

One benefit of family collection projects is that the audience connection is so much more immediate. Surber says, “My digging around the family history has led me to a lot of people my branches of family hadn’t been in contact with in many years. It’s interesting to hear people’s stories and reconnect with people.” In this way, Surber and Anderson Archival approach historical collections from the same perspective. “Everybody has a different story from those days, so we’re just trying to put it all together. It’s been so long but I think there’s more to be told.” Thankfully, Anderson Archival’s digital copies of the collection can facilitate that connection.

Not all collections are understood to be historically significant to the larger public, but just because they may never be viewed in a museum or gallery or aren’t easy to feed through a high-speed scanner, does not mean that they aren’t worth preserving. Digitization of family collections is important and necessary.

If your collection means a lot to you and you’d like it to be around forever so that anyone you choose can learn from and enjoy it, digitization might be the answer. Let Anderson Archival do the hard part for you. Contact us today!

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Is the Internet Forever? (Not Always!)

October 21, 2020/in Digital Collections, News, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

There’s a popular argument to think twice before you share on social media, because what is shared cannot be taken back.  Once online, it is online forever. While that is more of a precaution than a hard and fast rule, it is often something we believe.

But if you’ve ever read something and then tried to find it again a decade later, you know first-hand how content that is born digital can become unavailable.

The nature of born-digital content is as the name suggests—content built and published (or “born”) for a digital medium and meant to stay digital. Without conscious preservation efforts, born-digital content isn’t archived anywhere physically and can easily disappear.

Efforts by preservation organizations help mitigate the trickle or flood of material disappearing from the web, but they cannot capture everything.

What does it mean when born-digital content can simply disappear without much of a trace?

  1. Documenting Disappearances

In August of this year, a disturbing trend was revealed.

Over the course of the last ten years, a team of researchers had noticed that previously-available open access journals were disappearing from the web. In order to understand and document the full extent of this vanishing knowledge, they built methodology, compared databases, and tallied up the losses.

Information scientists Mikael Laakso, Lisa Matthias, and Najko Jahn identified a total of 176 journals that had disappeared between the years 2000-2019. These journals had been published all over the world and covered a variety of disciplines, meaning the problem was widespread and indiscriminate.

There are safeguards that act as a network of duplicate copies and preservation efforts for journals, but Thib Guicherd-Callin, acting manager of one such program, told Nature that digital preservation initiatives are “woefully underfunded.”

It is important to remember that this study wasn’t focused on how many journals had been successfully preserved and remained accessible thanks to programs such as LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), and PKP PN (Portico and the Public Knowledge Project’s Preservation Network). The Global LOCKSS Network preserves 11,000 journal titles! LOCKSS makes “use of the copies it manages, by enlisting them to validate integrity against each other, rather than relying uncritically on comparisons against a centralized fixity store,” keeping digital objects safe, accessible, and verifiable.

Matthias believes a true solution would need to be shared between publishers, authors, librarians, and preservation services, but that solution just doesn’t exist yet.

  1. Digital Excavations of the Future

Modern-day historians have a wealth of physical objects and documents (often preserved digitally) that they mine for details about events, track daily life, understand a variety of perspectives, and ultimately draw conclusions about the past. The tumultuous year of 2020 has provided an interesting thought experiment around a practical question: In one thousand years, what material from this year, created almost entirely online, will be available for study? And more to our point, what material will vanish completely?

The first question of what will be worth preserving at all is a difficult one. The answer typically only becomes clear in hindsight, but in the fast-moving world of the internet, decisions are needed now. University Affairs tracks collection projects by the University of Saskatchewan and Brock University Library, noting success in user submission and a hyper-local, person-focused scope.

Many countries, such as United Kingdom, France, and Denmark mandate their national libraries to capture a comprehensive digital record of life in that country at any given time. This may prove a future advantage to historians studying these countries’ culture in the time of COVID-19.

The United States has a more randomized approach. The Library of Congress has digital archives covering the first 12 years of Twitter, but now it acquires tweets on a selective basis “similar to [their] collections of websites.” The LOC’s Web Archive team of subject experts select sites in accordance with the Library’s (incredibly broad) policy guidance. There are also the efforts of the (non-profit) Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine project to snapshot the web.

But without a legal mandate to preserve a comprehensive digital picture of the world, gaps and perspectives are bound to be missed. When only one voice is remembered, history isn’t complete.

 

Within the field of digitization, there is often a feeling that what’s done is done forever. But in reality, website collections need to be managed and interfaces kept functional as internet standards and usage practices change. A collection easily accessed on a desktop, for example, may be impossible to navigate on a smart phone. Scans and images saved on floppy discs are now difficult to access from modern computers, and other save formats are nearly obsolete.

Anderson Archival tracks the standards and trends of digitization, ensuring that files are saved in a variety of formats that have been identified by experts as having the most digital longevity. These formats include archival PDFs (PDF-A) and are often saved on cloud servers along with physical backups. We, too, believe in the notion that lots of copies keep stuff safe.

Whether you want your collection to be accessible forever online, or want to pick and choose who is granted copies and access, Anderson Archival is the solution to your digitization needs. Don’t let your digitization decisions come back to haunt you! To start the discussion and keep your collection available for the future, contact us today.

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Learn: What Is the Best Way to Preserve Historical Documents in Storage?

August 26, 2020/in Digital Collections, Preservation /by Anderson Archival

Learn about the factors you need to take into account to safely store delicate or aging documents with minimal damage and how digitization can help preserve documents into the future.

 

What Is the Best Way to Preserve Historical Documents in Storage?

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Remembering the Suffragettes: Turning Your Online Collection Into a Narrative

August 12, 2020/in Digital Collections, News, Special Projects /by Anderson Archival

To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote, libraries and museums are showcasing the historical artifacts of the century-long movement. Looking at these collections, it’s easy to see how the stories we learned in school can leave out some of the most interesting bits of history. That is why historical collections, no matter how niche, are important to filling the gaps that history books leave out. In this way, a digital collection becomes more than a collection of papers or photographs; it becomes a narrative of history.

Library of Congress’s Suffragette Exhibit

In a year affected by COVID-19, online access to historical collections is more important than ever. Exhibitions that would usually be offered in person have moved partially or completely online to continue educating and inspiring those who can’t visit. The Library of Congress is one of the organizations turning to the internet to celebrate the women’s suffrage movement. In addition to in-person exhibitions, they’ve created an online exhibit for people to explore.

The “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” online exhibit does more than simply display digital versions of the items in their collection. The Library of Congress organized the exhibition to tell a story. Rather than just present the artifacts, it narrates the different eras of the suffrage movement. Visitors can explore the early, post-Civil War women’s movement; see the picket lines in front of the White House; and learn about the brave women of color who are rarely included in history books. Though often condensed, the women’s suffrage exhibit tells a larger story of a movement that survived and changed over decades.

Beyond the main exhibition, the Library also links out into more focused collections, such as Photographs from the Record of the National Woman’s Party and Women’s Suffrage in Sheet Music, to expand on their narrative. These collections are unique, and on their own don’t tell a story. But when combined with the main exhibition’s narrative, these smaller collections add humanity to the historical figures showcased. These were impressive and creative women who lived and fought for their rights.

Telling a Story with Your Collection

One of the most important parts of a collection is the story behind it. It could be the story of gathering the materials or the story behind the artifacts, but the larger narrative is what the audience connects with. Researchers or avid enthusiasts may be able to appreciate a collection with little more than the artifacts themselves, but if your goal is to share, inform, or educate people who are new to the subject or wanting to expand their knowledge, then building a narrative is essential.

Having a strong narrative to your collection not only leads the visitor to the most important or interesting artifacts, but it puts the collection into historical context. Even journals or detailed records need context in order to enrich the history they represent. Without context, the women of color highlighted by the Library of Congress’s More to the Movement section of their women’s suffrage exhibit are just pictures and names. It’s the context of their place in the story that explains how important the women were to the suffragette movement and why they were overlooked by history.

How Digitization Can Improve Your Collection’s Storytelling

An online collection has advantages over a physical collection, one being an improved opportunity for storytelling. When a person visits an exhibit in person, they can only see what is displayed at that time. In many cases this is only one part of a larger collection. Space, condition, and security can keep amazing artifacts from in-person viewing. People must also move through a gallery and could miss items meant to be experienced together.

By digitizing, the entire collection is at the visitor’s fingertips. No need to hide away the most interesting pieces in order to protect them from deterioration. Millions of people can see these rarely shown items whenever they want, and the inclusion of these artifacts will enhance the integrity of the larger story.

Instead of wandering a physical gallery, possibly missing items due to crowds or time limitations, an online collection has the advantage of linking items together. As visitors follow these artifacts through the story behind them, they can choose to leave the path and go down a side story through direct links to other artifacts or web pages. Once done, they can easily return to the main narrative without missing anything. Since a digitized collection is available 24/7 online, visitors can come and go when it’s convenient for them.

 

People don’t always remember names or dates of historical events, but a well-told story that brings those events to life is easy to recall. Artifacts and documents enhance that story. They give proof of what happened and voice to people long past. Your collection has a unique story to tell, if you let it.

Do you have pieces of history that you’d like to see displayed as a narrative that could impact the world? Anderson Archival can help. Give us a call at 314-259-1900 or an email at info@andersonarchival.com today!

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Learn: Why Choose Confidential Document Digitization?

July 28, 2020/in Digital Collections /by Anderson Archival

Learn about confidential digitization, and how the benefits of a private digital collection enhance the collection itself, even when that collection isn’t public.

 

Why Choose Confidential Document Digitization?

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Quotables: Launching Your Legacy: How You Can Impact the Next Generation (Just Luxe)

July 22, 2020/in Digital Collections, Digital Restoration, Preservation, Quotables /by Anderson Archival

Principal Farica Chang’s post in Just Luxe discusses the importance of conserving your legacy for the next generation. Whether that conservation is physical or done through digitization, ensure that family, community, and society members can access their history.

Click here to read the full article!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful? Anderson Archival uses proprietary methods to digitize collections so they are easily searchable, ultimately accessible, and even more meaningful to a wide audience. Let us help you preserve your legacy today! Give us a call at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com.

What are Quotables? This is a category in our posts to highlight any professional publications that benefit from our expert archivist experience and quote us in articles for their readers. 

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Did you Miss these?

  • A Cat’s Mark on History from The Hill February 16, 2021
  • 3 Ways to Make Your Historical Archive Impactful Today February 15, 2021
  • Inheriting a Collection: An Interview with Cape Girardeau County Archive Center Director, Marybeth Niederkorn January 20, 2021
  • 2020: The Time Capsule January 20, 2021

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