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Archive for category: Preservation

Quotables: Q&A: Mark Anderson on how organizations can preserve their historical documents

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Co-founder of Anderson Archival Mark Anderson recently interviewed with Karen Dybis of Corp! Magazine.

All organizations, whether they are families, nonprofit groups, or businesses, have documents that are important in telling their story. These historically valuable papers should be preserved—but what are the best ways to do it?…

“Every business has a story to tell,” Anderson says.

Corp! Magazine provides “excellence in reporting important economic, growth, trend information, and resources” to businesses. Dybis’ interview with Anderson delves into the reasons why an organization or business should preserve their history by preserving their documents.

Click to read the article at Corp!

Do you have a historical document collection that you’d like to make more accessible, relevant, and impactful?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 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. 

Transcription from the Crowd: Three Success Stories

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The cost of paying for expert text recognition, proofreading, and quality assurance do not need to be prohibitory barriers to the completion of a digital library, recent stories show.

Projects ranging from preserving digital records of the stars to documenting the civil rights and suffrage movements have employed volunteers to transcribe historical documents. Whether dedicated researchers with a vested interest in the final product or a stranger offering a moment of time and effort, volunteer transcribers provide an essential service that ensures collections are accessible and searchable without a huge price tag.

Crowdsourcing volunteers is not new, not even for transcription work. Since 2012, the National Archives’ Citizen Archivist program has utilized a nearly unlimited workforce of internet users to transcribe historical documents, add metadata tags, and review changes made by other volunteers.

Part of what Anderson Archival offers is the integrity of treating your collection as our own – and for some collections, crowdsourcing the text recognition process can be an incredible solution to a lack of funding, or desire to involve the public.

Three such crowdsourced digitization and transcription projects already prove the capabilities of a large group of volunteers.

Involving specially-trained volunteers in some cases or strangers around the world also directly ties the public to the welfare of the collection.

Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH)

Not long ago, Anderson Archival wrote about the digitization of this spectacular collection. Since 2014, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has asked digital volunteers for help transcribing material related to Harvard observatory’s glass plates. This collection, known as Project PHaEDRA, includes logbooks and findings related to the DASCH glass plates analyzed by notable women in science history, such as Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and Antonia Maura.

Transcription will allow the collection to be fully text-searchable and provides crucial contextual data about the 500,000 glass plate photographs of the night sky taken from 1885 to 1992. Without transcription of these data sets, accurate digital modeling of the scanned plates is not possible.

The collection of glass plates along with notebooks of findings will provide an incredible look at the history of our sky and of astronomy.

#TranscribeBond with University of Virginia

In August of 2018, and again in 2019, residents of Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, and digital volunteers met for a “transcribe-a-thon” of civil rights activist Julian Bond’s writings. Previously, the papers were available only to students in person at the university library, but digitization efforts aim to make this collection available online.

Transcription efforts for this collection are ongoing. Digital volunteers can join the work at From the Page. At the time of this posting, more than three thousand of the 7,797 pages of Bond’s writings are transcribed.

The Library of Congress: By the People

The Library of Congress’ By the People project proves that a few minutes of your time can impact future historical research and reference. By the People was launched in 2018, and collections relating to Abraham Lincoln, women’s suffrage, and the Civil War continue to be featured.

The digitization and transcription of these collections mean that countless pages will be available digitally and fully searchable for the first time, ensuring that the history they contain is accessible to all.

For volunteers fascinated with history, By the People has enough variety to keep anyone entertained and learning while they transcribe.

Crowdsourcing Saves Costs and Enriches the World

A solution like one of these might be possible for your collection. The cost of expert handwriting transcription, proofreading, and quality assurance may feel too high for some collection owners. A volunteer workforce can save money when this is the case!

Involving specially-trained volunteers in some cases or strangers around the world also directly ties the public to the welfare of the collection.

Crowdsourcing does have its downsides. As illustrated by the three examples above, even with millions of potential volunteers, the time taken to process documents greatly increases. In addition, a digital transcription framework may need to be purchased or developed. If a digitization project has limits on timeframe, or if leaving the accuracy of your collection to the public is a concern, crowdsourcing may not be right for you.

As with any project involving the public, your success may vary, and this is something to consider in the planning process, but crowdsourcing transcription provides an interesting alternative to the traditional model.

 

Anderson Archival provides all aspects of historical document digitization, including expert transcription, proofreading, and quality assurance. Are you looking for a digitization company that will treat your collection as their own? Contact Anderson Archival today.

use cases venn diagram

Who Will Use This Collection and How? All About Use Cases

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Use cases. It’s simply a term for capturing the functional requirements of a digital library. Each use case is written from the user’s perspective, defining who they are and how they want and expect to use the digital collection.

Understanding use cases is essential for determining how a collection will be best delivered, and what functionality needs to be built in.

Let’s imagine a collector owns a Sears, Roebuck, and Co. personal library of catalogues* that spans nearly 75 years, and they want to digitize it. Right now, they’re the only person using it in their study of American history to provide the cultural context of what people were buying, using, and interested in at particular points in time.

Currently, the magazines in the collection are physically arranged by date—this is how the collector imagines they will organize the collection digitally. They have already done a lot of physical work to categorize the collection, including making notes of what is in which volume.

The collector wants to make their collection of catalogues available to other historians, schools, and individuals, so they decide to employ a technical archival company to help develop the digitized collection and figure out the best way to showcase it.

When the collector talks to an archival company, one of the questions a digital archivist asks is, “What are your use cases?”

In other words, who will use this collection? In this imagined case of a digitized Sears catalogue collection, the collector works with the archival company to make estimations of these categories of users:

  • Historians and collectors
  • Students
  • Librarians and researchers
  • Historical Fiction Writers

Next, a sample of potential users should be interviewed about how they would like to use this collection. It’s important to talk to users directly because the quality of requirements will be better if they come directly from the users. Assuming how a group would utilize the collection could mean missing something crucial.

Read more about how Anderson Archival builds digital collections!

Discovering the use cases for these specific groups will help determine how the collection will operate, how it will appear, and how it will be accessed.

The first interview is with a researcher of Western Expansion. She wants to do specific research on the homes available for purchase in the catalogue. She plans to compare the results found in this collection to others she has found in scholarly work. She mentions that she would like to use search to narrow results by date, model number or name of the house, and price range. She wants to be able to search for exact phrases found in scholarly work, to verify that it appears in the collection.

The second interview is with a university student. He informs the interviewer that he does much of his electronic research on his phone. He mentions that he usually sends interesting articles or pictures to himself to later reference.

And the interview process continues.

The collection will need to accommodate the needs of all of these interviewees. Some key points of the interview findings might look something like this:

Historians and collectorsNeed a way to save pertinent documents or quotes easily. Want the ability to print historically accurate pages.
StudentsWant a fast, accurate search of keywords, mobile access, and the ability to share pages electronically.
Librarians and researchersKnow what they are looking for and expect to be able to search dates, volumes, and issues. Want to search exact phrases and verify what they know is in the collection.
Historical fiction writersWant to page through issues to get a sense of the era and need to search by date, category, or item type.

Once interviews have concluded and use case scenarios have been compiled, a technical archival company can then recommend the best tools, and in some cases, a custom software solution for the collection.

For Anderson Archival, this step is utilized in the development process. Knowing the current and potential users of a collection helps to determine how best the digital library should be delivered. Options can be as simple as using a PDF viewer to access a private library for only a few users, to as complex as custom online software with logins.

Technology is constantly evolving. If the collector wants to invest in digitizing right the first time, the collection should be optimized for cutting-edge technology so it will easily adapt to the new and better software and hardware developed every year.

Of course, each collection will be different and have specific needs for digitization, tagging, and its interface, but the goal for anyone digitizing their collection and defining use cases is to make their collection accessible and functional for as many types of users as possible.

Here are a few more tips for building your use cases:

  • Consider how your collection is different from others. What features could this collection offer that others do not?
  • As you think about use cases, focus on users’ functional needs and not software design.
  • Often, collectors think they know how users will use the collection, but actually interviewing potential users will uncover needs for critical functionality that otherwise is likely to be lost.
  • Developing detailed use cases, taking the time to learn from users, will make the final product of your digital collection much better!

Whether you’re developing use cases for a private collection or because you want to share your collection with the world, once your collection is digitized, you’ll have peace of mind. Your digital library will be preserved for generations to come and now others will be able to interact with it easily and share it.

If you want help developing a use case for your collection, contact Anderson Archival at 314.259.1900 or email us today!

*This theoretical collection is used purely for example purposes. Sears has a portion of their catalogue available online here.

magnifying glass over stack of papers

How Do You Build Effective Search? (Hint: Metadata and Tagging!)

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Does your digitization partner know your collection?

Search results, whether too broad or broken, often reveal how well archivists know your material. Proper use of metadata and tagging, from general information to specific facets only relevant to your collection, make all the difference.

For a company like Anderson Archival, the digitization process is only the first part of your digital collection’s story. Before beginning each project, we sit down with the owners and have a series of discussions to determine why this collection needs to be preserved digitally and how researchers, readers, teachers, learners, and the casually curious will interact with the digital library.

What is a digital library?

We dig deep into use cases. Who wants to access this collection and who do you want to provide access to? How and when will the collection be accessed? Do the majority of potential users use browsers, or are they on the cutting edge of technology, wanting something to work seamlessly on desktop, tablet, and phone? Will you require a subscription for access, keeping some of the collection behind a paywall? And, most important to this step, what information should be included in metadata and tagging?

What is Tagging?

Metadata is data about the collection, such as author, date, title, section, topic, era, etc. Tagging is a technical means to mark up the collection with this metadata.

Advanced or faceted search is built upon tagging. Metadata tagging breaks documents into pieces of information that the search engine utilizes to allow the user to refine their results. For example, in a collection of periodicals, most of the metadata is already present in the text of the first pages.

page of the New York Times from 1918

If this New York Times page was part of a digital library, it would include at least three data layers:

  1. The visible image.
  2. Searchable text.
  3. Helpful metadata tags.

Where HTML tags instruct a system how to display a certain document, XML metadata tagging tells a search engine what it is looking at, and where on the page search terms, topics, authors, and any other information can be found.

What is Faceted Search?

Generic, bulk search does a decent job finding exact text matches within documents and providing those documents as results. Advanced faceted search takes these results to another level.

advanced search options

If you’ve ever worked with a search page that looks something like the example above, you know the power of faceted search! Building the information and commands into the documents makes a search like this function.

Take the New York Times example above. This page, along with every article on it, would be tagged with the date, volume, and number of the particular issue. That way, if a user were to search for the word “armistice,” but limited the results to 1918, the main story on this page would appear in the results. If use cases indicated that users would benefit from being able to search by subject (WWI, Kaiser Wilhelm, etc.) even if the referenced term did not appear in the original text, tagging that information in the metadata would make sure that it appeared as a result of those searches.

The author is important to many collections. But what happens when that author is published under a married name, or a pseudonym? Most users would want complete results, regardless of how a name is printed on a page. This takes research, time, and care.

The terms and searches themselves vary depending on the collection and the users accessing it. Identifying these categories takes ongoing discussion and collaboration between the collection owners and digitization team. Because of the flexibility of tagging, almost any value can be marked. For example, a collection of Shakespeare’s plays may benefit from tagging each line, and encoding it with the line number. A user could search Act 3, Scene 1, line 61 in Romeo and Juliet and get the same result, “Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch,” regardless of printed version referenced. Tags can identify where a sentence starts and stops, or, for something like Romeo and Juliet, the start and stop of lines of text, or when characters start and stop speech.

Your digitization company needs to know your collection inside and out in order to create metadata that powers an effective and comprehensive search.

What Does This Process Look Like?

When working with a digitization company, the process of building metadata and tagging the collection is ongoing. Once the process has started, you and your archival team may need to go back to the beginning to review your goals and refocus based on new findings.

Common steps in the process are:

  1. Define Use Cases. How is the digital collection going to be used, and by whom? Who is going to use the digital collection? How can search cater to the broadest number of potential users? What tags and information would benefit searchers and users?
  2. Build Data Dictionary. Also known as a metadata repository, this living document will hold all of the potential tags that will be employed in the collection.
  3. Accurate and Comprehensive Tagging. With the full knowledge of your collection, archivists spend time tagging and checking one another’s work for quality assurance.
  4. Implementation of Search. Once tagging is complete, archivists conduct thorough testing on whatever platform you choose to house your collection, confirming the quality of the user experience.

At each stage, your digitization company should grow to know your collection better. In the end, the accurate search and clear display of your collection will be a testament to how dedicated your team has been, providing an incredible return on your investment in digitization.

Are you looking for an innovative search solution for your collection? Contact Anderson Archival by phone at 314-259-1900 or email (info@andersonarchival.com) today.

Fires Rage, History Fades

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Physical structures may feel like safe, permanent homes for humanity’s history, but they are also fragile, vulnerable to human error and malice alike.” – Andrew Lapin, NPR

If you saw our recent article about the Karpeles Museum fire in St. Louis, you’re well aware of the dangers that threaten physical historical manuscripts. Flood, flame, and fallout can surprise archivists with a severity that has the potential to wipe out entire collections. The local incident we reported about did minimal damage to the Karpeles Manuscript Library’s collection, but this is not the case for all fires.

It can be easy to dismiss natural disasters as a threat of days past. You might think the infamous burning of the Library of Alexandria or other world-altering events can’t happen in this age of technological advancements. However, in the past year alone, two major institutions of cultural history experienced significant fire damage.

Brazil’s Museu Nacional

Museu Nacional (or the National Museum of Brazil), located in the country’s capital Rio de Janiero, housed artifacts of Brazil’s natural and cultural history since the founding of the Royal Museum by King João VI in 1818. Since its establishment as the crown jewel of Brazil’s cultural and economic progress, it was adopted by the Federal University of Rio de Janiero as a research center and hosted a variety of natural history exhibits from around the globe.

On September 2, 2018, a fire began in the Museu Nacional main facility, which held most of the museum’s exhibits. Onlookers spent the night watching as flames consumed the core of the building and threatened its approximately 20 million artifacts—including the first fossil found in the region, the oldest human skull found in the Americas, and a one-of-a-kind collection of historical indigenous works that “included audio recordings of indigenous leaders who died several years ago, and writings about languages that have long become extinct.”

Because of the construction of the building and lack of public awareness and funding, the fire spread quickly. The New York Times reports:

Chronic underfunding left its halls with jury-rigged wiring, infiltrated ceilings and bat droppings along walls and shelves. A termite attack forced the closing of a dinosaur exhibit in late 2017. At one point there was not enough money to pay the cleaning crew — much less to install a fire suppression system.”

Investigation into the fire and recovery efforts are ongoing. Some 2,000 artifacts have been saved, but an estimated 92.5% of the museum’s total collection was lost to the blaze. Thankfully, a small part of the museum’s experience has been preserved through the Google Arts & Culture app, which creates photo galleries and virtual walkthroughs of museum exhibits around the world.

Notre-Dame de Paris

In very recent world news, on April 15th fire destroyed much of the roof and interior of the 850-year-old Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, France.

Notre Dame was home to many relics of French and Catholic history, such as treasured stained glass windows, a Medieval-era organ, and the iconic gothic spire. The cathedral has stood in the center of Paris since 1345, and its construction took an astounding 182 years to complete. The cathedral has been a character in the backdrop of France’s history for most of the country’s cultural history.

Read more about preserving collections through cloud backup and storage through Anderson Archival!

Thankfully, many of the artifacts housed inside the building had been removed the previous week for the building’s renovation, a project that sought to restore some of the building’s wooden structure and spire that were a known fire hazard. Nearly $700 million of privatized funding has been pledged to future rebuilding efforts, though the total damage and cause of the fire is still being investigated.

More Than Ashes

Unfortunately, comparing these two tragedies highlights how important communities, funding, and other proactive measures are to protecting preservable culture. Notre Dame is a global household name, as the landmark’s fame has been highlighted in many pop culture and artistic works for centuries—Victor Hugo’s classic novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and the 1996 Disney adaptation being some of the most noteworthy.

Museu Nacional, on the other hand, isn’t a location many people around the world have heard of. Even Brazil’s government struggled at times to assert the significance of the cultural institution. Before the fire, Museu Nacional curators had just received a grant of a meager $5 million from the government, part of which was dedicated to fire prevention efforts and training:

“The staff had just gone through fire training and arranged for flammable items, such as animals kept in bottles with alcohol and formaldehyde, to be removed from the building. ‘The most terrible irony,’ [Vice director Luiz] Duarte reportedly said.

He also told the newspaper that the fire destroyed frescoes of Pompeii, language collections and the entire collection of the Empress Tereza Cristina, who was nicknamed ‘the Mother of the Brazilians.’”

Funding will soon be granted in small chunks by various government and nonprofit organizations for the repair of the museum.

An entire language died in the Museu Nacional fire. While your collection probably doesn’t contain the last recorded utterings of a dead language, there’s no telling how its contents can have a profound effect on the world. If disaster struck before you could safely digitize or otherwise preserve your historical materials, it is unlikely that restoration could bring them back to public use and knowledge.

Anderson Archival is dedicated to digitally preserving historical documents and manuscripts. Call 314.259.1900 today or sign up for a free consultation to protect your collection before it’s too late. More information on how to help the Museu recover is located at this blog.

The Path to Funding Your Archival Project

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You have big dreams and your organization has a big impact on communities, but sometimes you run into big roadblocks when funding your projects. Some of your projects include protecting and preserving documented history, which is our mission as well, so we know how important it is to be able to fund those projects. Asking for money can be hard, and can be a daunting task, especially when you need to raise a substantial amount.

However, you aren’t alone in this process! When you partner with a trusted archival company, they will be with you every step of the way. Here’s the three-step path we recommend for funding your archival projects.

  1. Tell Your Story

This is the single-most important foundational factor when funding your project. Telling your story establishes who you are and why you exist. What problems are you solving in your community, and why can’t it thrive without you? What resources do you make available? What collections are you preserving for historical research and future generations?

Don’t just tell your story. Share it in such a compelling way that your readers will want to jump on your band wagon, hail their friends, and enthusiastically dive into the work you’re doing. For this, social media can be incredibly productive. Creating videos, online events, groups, and pages will help capture interest and followers. Many archival companies can also assist in creating a web presence that matches the upcoming project or archive!

Part of telling your story is listing your goals for the future. When you ask for funding, make sure you explain why you need money and how it will be used, which is something your archival company can help you with. Be specific. Why do you need it to impact the community? And don’t forget to tell why your partnership is important.

  1. Ask for Donations from Private Donors

Whether it’s time or money, people are more likely to give when asked directly. Review your donor list and identify a handful of friends or donors who align best with the goals of the project. These are the donors who are moved by your mission and purpose. Use the old-fashioned method of mailing personal letters. Call potential donors on the phone and set up a meeting. Tell your story, explain your need and tell them why you thought of them, how their values align with yours, how they can help, and that they will directly impact a need.

People want to be needed. If you can outline exactly how a prospective donor can help, they will be more likely to invest, and personally asking people and being prepared to answer their questions will establish a foundation of trust.

Historic works are always at risk of damage due to accidents or simply handling the documents, which makes digital library preservation imperative. Explaining that preserving these documents is of utmost importance, and laying out exactly what will be lost if these documents aren’t preserved digitally will paint an honest picture of why you need the help of donors.

Partner with a trusted archival company who will help you communicate with those outside of your organization. They will help educate and energize your key donors on the possibilities and benefits of your digital archiving project.

You are not alone in this process. Your archival partner can provide demonstrations, presentations, and education. They will explain the importance of archival quality and doing your project right the first time.

  1. Apply for Grants

Did you know that both the private sector and the government have grants available for library preservation?

Applying for grants might be a little intimidating. A grant proposal is involved, and there are so many, many grants to apply for. Where should you start? How does receiving funds from foundations work?

Applying for grants takes more specialized expertise than marketing. In fact, it might be helpful to hire a grant writer. Again, you may have to spend money to make money. Charitable requests, whether government or not, aren’t just for giving away free money. Your mission must be aligned with their mission, and a grant writer will help you apply in a way that appeals to this connection. If you still want to go through the process yourself, you can find many guides, including this simple step-by-step guide.

Grants can be worth incredibly large sums, and there are a surprising number of grants available for nonprofits and libraries.

Don’t stop there!

You can use any or all of these strategies. Some build on each other, and each compliments the rest. Now all you have to do is continue to build your relationships. Make sure you thank your donors and invest in working relationships with them. This will remain important for future projects. You want your donor to take ownership of projects and be just as dedicated as you are. Don’t just use their money. Show them how they’re directly helping, which can be as simple as sending out regular newsletters or taking time to have personal conversations.

At Anderson Archival, we know how important preserving historical collections is for future generations, and we want to help you create the best digital collection possible. On occasion, our customers ask us to meet with significant donors to explain the benefits of creating a digital library and we have found this to be effective. Call us today at 314.259.1900 or email us at info@andersonarchival.com for more information on ways to fund your archival project and how to build a digital library!

Anderson Technologies

How It All Began: The Start of Anderson Archival

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Before Anderson Archival, there was Anderson Technologies. It might seem strange that an IT company would branch into digital archiving, but the story behind this expansion showcases what clients of both firms know about us: integrity, dedication, and client focus are core values at the heart of all we do. Our hallmarks include expertise and quality service because your satisfaction is how we define our success.

Anderson Archival came to fruition because we learned the hard way that sometimes to do a job right, you really must do it yourself.

The First Project

As Anderson Technologies, we provide far more than managed IT services support. When a client approached us years ago to digitize a large collection of documents for research purposes, we utilized our technical management capabilities to facilitate the project.

Identifying appropriate partners in the required disciplines to properly execute the project was harder than we anticipated. We eventually teamed with a local vendor to scan and restore the images and handle the optical character recognition (OCR) to convert pictures to text before we performed the document data tagging, software engineering, and quality assurance.

As the vendor delivered data to us, we identified numerous quality issues. They produced work that was not up to the high standards we needed for the collection. Missing pages, poor scan quality, and inaccurate conversion to digital text caused us to double check everything and send a great deal back to be redone. As the project continued, we realized we could have done things correctly the first time by bringing the tasks in-house.

The Problem

The experience taught us a great deal about digitization services, and we learned it takes more than technology to create a quality digital library. Anyone can get the best scanners or software on the market, but without dedicated employees, efficient systematization, the proper work environment, and an unflagging commitment to quality, the end result suffers.

For example, we later discovered the vendor only required a high school education for its staff. The goal of these workers, who were crammed together elbow-to-elbow in a conference room, wasn’t to produce the best product they could, but to push pages out the door as quickly as possible.

We also learned they didn’t have the necessary tools to facilitate the detailed quality control needed for the images. Though their scanners and software were excellent, their monitors were too small to display the entire page without being zoomed out so far that the image became useless for a quality check.

By the time the project was complete, we learned many lessons on how not to digitize historical documents for quality search results. When another client approached us with a project to digitize historical documents, we knew using traditional scanning vendors would produce inaccurate results. This time, we were going to do it ourselves and do it right.

More Than Just Scans

There is far more to digitizing a precious collection than simply scanning the pages. Our clients want extremely accurate search results, which means the images must be converted to text via OCR and labels (or tags) need to be inserted to guide the search engine to produce relevant feedback. This requires not only the correct software, but a great deal of time and attention to detail by those transforming the data. It is important to select a firm who will treat your collection with the same focus and enthusiasm you do.  Working with a third party who doesn’t cherish the opportunity to preserve your documents causes the end result to suffer dramatically.

Keep an eye on our blog to see how we applied these lessons and expanded into the business of historical document digitization. If you want to turn your collection into a quality digital library with the most accurate search results, contact Anderson Archival today at info@andersonarchival.com or by phone at 314.529.1900.

Karpeles Manuscript Library2019, Anderson Archival

Firefighters Save Historic Documents Amid Museum Fire

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A St. Louis museum was compromised by a fire this week, but thankfully most of the collection had been digitized!

Late Tuesday night, March 26, 2019, a four-alarm fire broke out in the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in South St. Louis. As a St. Louis-based company dedicated to digitally archiving historic documents, this almost-tragedy hit close to home, and we waited for news of how much of this unique collection was left.

The 107-year-old Greek Revival building, originally the Third Church of Christ, Scientist, housed a portion of David Karpeles’ manuscript collection, the largest private manuscript collection in the world, as well as an exhibit by the St. Louis Media Foundation. Some of the items on display included France’s approval of the Louisiana Purchase, Columbus’ handwritten letter describing the coasts of America, documents about revolutionary Che Guevara, and a number of historic St. Louis-related documents. The loss of any one of these items would be a devastating blow to both world and local history.

Yet, thanks to the hard work of nearly eighty firefighters, none of the documents were lost to the fire. The exhibits were set up on the first floor, and the fire began in the back of the second and higher floors. This not only allowed firefighters to try to contain the blaze away from the collection, but gave them time to remove as much as they could from the path of destruction.

While some items did receive water damage from putting out the fire, it’s amazing that nothing was lost in the two-hour blaze. If the worst had occurred, though, not all would have been lost. Part of the collection had already been digitized, so even if the original document was destroyed in the fire, its contents and the meaning behind it would have been preserved through digital archiving. These backups were appropriately stored offsite, so were completely safe from the hazard.

Here at Anderson Archival, we’re happy that both the physical and digital copies of these documents are still here, but this serves to remind us of the importance of digitizing historical collections for both their short- and long-term preservation. We hope that Karpeles decides to reopen the library in St. Louis, and continue to share this amazing manuscript collection in our hometown.

blockchain

More Than Bitcoin: Taking Blockchain Technology to Preservation

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What do Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies have to do with archiving? The technology cryptocurrencies are built on – the blockchain – is drawing attention from those who seek to innovate within all industries, including archival.

This is especially relevant for the future of the archival community, as blockchain holds a potential solution to problems of impermanence and authorship. Many institutions, such as the UK government’s National Archives and Civil newsrooms, are considering and advocating the merits of blockchain-based repositories. While these proposed repositories do not yet exist, in theory they could ensure continued, unalterable preservation through embedding full text or original image scans into the fabric of the blockchain.

As purveyors of archival collections know, there are potential problems that can plague digital and physical archives. Blockchain technology provides a theoretical answer for two of those problems: integrity of authorship and permanence.

What is the Blockchain?

The simplest explanation is that blockchain allows for the average person to trust the authenticity of the digital world.

The blockchain is a collection of transactions. “Each new block references every block before it—so changing one block corrupts the whole chain,” says Blockchain for Grandma. Powerful computers perform randomized math to build the blockchain, and each block in the chain is permanent, immutable, and static.

In the case of Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency on the blockchain, a transfer means another entry on the chain, which keeps a record of its creation and every transfer in its history. The massive network maintains its own integrity, confirming and double-checking every creation, or transfer.


A short blockchain explanation from Real Vision. “Each new block that is written contains something called a cryptographic hash, a small mathematical fingerprint of the blocks that came before it in the chain, making it extremely difficult to tamper with the data that resides inside the blocks.”

Blockchain embeds authentication into the document itself, and protects against tampering and modification. In essence, this works similarly to file-sharing services like DropBox or OneDrive, where local copies synchronize changes across all those with access.

Permanent digital records offer an enticing solution, especially in a world where records may easily be accidentally or maliciously deleted.

Integrity and Permanence Built into the Blockchain

Consider this scenario: A student writing a paper on Chaucer cites what is stated to be the original text reprinted in a textbook. Another student is able to present another instance of the so-called original text in an anthology, but that excerpt has changes. Obsessing over the disparity, the students track down other versions of that same “original text” to compare them. They discover that in one early printing, a comma was added and the spelling of a word modernized. Some textbooks reprinted the text prior to this printing, and some used the modern printing – all claiming to contain the original text.

Had this scenario unfolded on the blockchain, clear record would exist of the creation, editions inserting changes, and where copies originated. However, in the physical world, it is often unclear just where words have come from.

According to the Chicago Manual of Style, when conducting research, multiple sources should be used to confirm facts. Whenever possible, it recommends going back to the original source. How do you know you have an original? Aside from consulting an expert, signals of authenticity in the real world include watermarks, signatures, and embossed seals. This recommendation is intended to circumvent the type of error-introduction shown above. But when this vigorous research is not conducted, how much print and research is then tainted by incorrect publication of facts or text?

When a digital library offers original pages with searchable text, the integrity of that text is placed implicitly in the hands of the archivist.

Many times, historical documents only exist physically as single-copies that are inaccessible to researchers. Digital scans can easily introduce errors or inaccurate information if an archivist’s agenda strays from true preservation. Ultimately, there is very little beyond trust that guarantees a digital library is a valid source, displaying the original.

But when dealing with important topics, trust and integrity might not feel like enough. Blockchain-like records or blockchain itself could provide a solution.

Case Studies

Until now, blockchain has only been practical for ultra-simple archiving processes, such as embedding text into a cryptocurrency transaction. The technology and means for widespread use in digital archives simply doesn’t exist. However, that may soon change.

ARCHANGEL

In a strictly archival sense, the UK National Archives is testing how blockchain might create a way to verify the accuracy of archived documents through a project called ARCHANGEL. The project is intended to directly combat the problem of digital storage becoming obsolete and inaccessible, and is currently in development stages.

Civil

Focusing more on the journalistic side, Civil newsrooms propose utilizing blockchain technology in two ways. The first ensures that published content in approved newsrooms is permanent and maintains a permanent link to authors and facts. The second uses CVL token transactions, owned and transferred by members of the Civil community, to indicate which newsrooms are trustworthy and eligible to remain on the Civil platform. The biggest barrier to entry with Civil and CVL is the learning curve. If the public doesn’t understand the process of utilizing blockchain in journalism and digital archives, the worth of that technology drops, and a failed first launch attempt has proven that.

Because blockchain has such a steep barrier to understanding and entry, it isn’t likely to take the world by storm any time soon. And because one of the purposes of creating digital archives is access, blockchain isn’t a feasible solution yet.

While blockchain may be the solution for the future, Anderson Archival understands and provides the current methods and standards of preservation. However, we do explore myriad methods of keeping data and originals safe from deterioration. If you’d like to explore the options that future technology could hold for the integrity and preservation of your collection, contact us today at 314.259.1900 or info@andersonarchival.com!

Casanova Confidential: Harding’s Letters and the Ethics of Preservation

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How do we balance our responsibility to accurately record history and our dedication to preserving it ethically?

Experienced archivists know how to separate their personal feelings from the materials they set out to preserve. They aren’t always tasked with endorsing the material, but simply preserving it. Dedicated archivists feel obligated to document the past, regardless of their opinions about the material.

The Society for American Archivists (SAA) first established an official code of ethics in 1980. It emphasizes both the need to make collections accessible to its audience and limits that audience in ways that protect “the donors, individuals, groups, and institutions whose public and private lives and activities are recorded in their holdings.”

In order to examine the role of ethics in digital preservation, consider an interesting case study from SAA’s research.

Controversial Correspondence

President Warren G. Harding first served in the US senate from 1915-1921, and then in the Oval Office from 1921-1923. Before his time in politics, he owned and operated a local daily newspaper, The Marion Star, with his wife Florence. He eventually became an active and well-known Republican due to his influence in local media, and his air of refinement and confidence led to his rise to national leadership.

The illusion of success didn’t last long into his presidency, however. Harding built his political platform on restructuring the government after the havoc of WWI, and this national inertia left a door open for corporations to corrupt the government from the inside out. Under-the-table deals like the Teapot Dome Scandal happened behind Harding’s back. His term as president was cut short when he passed away in 1923 before he could witness the extent of his cabinet’s infractions.

Our twenty-ninth president was also quite the Lothario, as White House rumors suggest. Only some of the transgressions during Harding’s short presidential term have been proven, but an affair before his time as president serves as the cherry on top of a less-than-stellar reputation. Before his days in the US senate, Harding befriended an acquaintance of Florence’s named Mrs. Carrie Fulton Phillips, and they began an affair that would last the better part of fifteen years. A closer analysis of Harding’s letters to Phillips reveals the explicit nature of their relationship, as well as hints that Phillips may have been a German spy, though those rumors are yet unfounded.

Clandestine Preservation

Nearly forty years later, an archivist named Ken Duckett became the curator of manuscripts for the Ohio Historical Society (OHS) from 1959 to 1965. The Harding family was fiercely opposed to any facts coming to light that might affect the former president’s reputation, which complicated negotiations with the Harding Memorial Association’s (HMA) materials. The HMA was carefully filtering the materials and removing anything that painted Harding in a negative light.

After Phillips’ death in 1960, Duckett managed to procure a collection of 240 letters and other correspondence between Harding and Phillips. When the box full of letters came into his possession, Duckett protected them in a safe deposit box until the Harding family agreed to hand over their historical materials. But still he worried about their safety and the validity of the historical record. For this reason, he made the controversial decision to secretly create microfilm copies of the letters and hide the originals in an OHS vault. Had the HMA known about these letters and their subsequent copies they would have immediately been destroyed, even though the love-letter-less collection they eventually presented to the OHS left significant gaps in Harding’s political legacy.

“On July 22, 1964, he wrote to Oliver Jensen of American Heritage ‘I have heard the words “burn, destroy and suppress” so many times since I acquired the papers, that I am determined that extraordinary precautions must be taken to insure their preservation and use by historians.’ Included with the letter was a copy of the microfilm sent for safekeeping. By taking this action Duckett was fully aware that he was placing his job at risk.”

After the release of a revealing Harding biography, a law suit from Harding’s family, and the resulting media circus surrounding the letter scandal, Duckett was forced to surrender all four known copies of the microfilmed letters—but secretly kept one copy for himself. This guaranteed that Harding’s marks on American history could never be erased, even if those marks were less than dignified.

The Harding family then donated the letters to the Library of Congress in 1972 after being assured they would be kept private until fifty years from the date the case was officially closed. The Library of Congress opened the letters to the public in 2014, mere days after Duckett’s death at age 90.

What Moderates The Test of Time?

Duckett’s choices raise some important questions about the ethics of documenting history. How does one determine what should be preserved? In a perfect world, all material with cultural significance would be around forever for future generations to learn from and enjoy. The act of preserving any material implies that it has inherent value—otherwise, why bother preserving it at all? But should sensitivity or, in this case, public image, override value?

At Anderson Archival, we respect the preferences of our clientele, and within those preferences we maintain utmost accuracy, confidentiality, and precision in preservation. Importantly, the SAA doesn’t draw clear lines to define accessibility and restriction for every collection because every collection is different. The job of each archivist is to preserve with these ideas in mind, and the preservation of the Harding letters serves as an exercise in ‘what would you do.’

Whether Duckett is a hero or an outlaw is up to each reader to determine. Striking a balance between accessibility and restriction is what Anderson Archival strives to do with every collection we work on. In fact, the majority of our projects thus far have been private, and kept confidential. At what lengths should archivists go to preserve history? We leave that decision up to you.

Do you have a collection that needs to be digitized, even if it’s only for your eyes? Need help determining the scope of its audience? Contact Anderson Archival today for a free consultation, or call us now at 314.259.1900.