Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Archives and institutional memory (for lack of a better title)

I had an interesting conversation with a student who was researching public spaces on campus. Specifically, she was researching The Heart, a central place on campus that students use to respect and not walk on, taking detours if needed to get where they were going. Now everyone walks on it and it is not a sacred space. The student lamented this, and told me that through her research, and the research of other students in the class, she believed Earlham to be a better place in the past than it currently is. She believes that students were more into academic pursuits outside the classroom, more engaged, and more active in the organizations they founded. I found her perspective very interesting and confirmed that one of the best parts about working at Earlham is being able to interact closely with students.

But from an archives standpoint, I posed this question to her: if you are finding evidence that students were more interested in academic pursuits in the past, are all voices heard? Are the records accurate? In what sense are you taking your own wishes and needs and projecting them into the past? Because we might not have records that discuss students lack of engagement, is it easier to assume that they were engaged? On the other hand, we do have controversial issues files and some student organizational records that may suggest a troubled past in many areas, whether it be race relations or alcohol problems. How do we acknowledge that our archives are not close to complete, or tell the entire story of the school? How can we better capture the entire reality of campus life? Or do we focus on institutional memory through official records and assume people will capture the many other sides of life through their own photos, diaries, memories, and so on.

Just some ramblings during my evening reference shift.

Current Projects

Within the next few weeks, I hope to complete or make significant progress on the following projects:

--Digitization of selected items from the Pennington Research Association Archives, housed in the Friends Collection at Earlham College. The association has paid us to digitize, create metadata, provide full text of the documents, ensure quality control, post images and host the collection through PALNI.

--Completion of processing of the Louis and Mary Ruth Jones collection, a significant collection of genealogical material. Thanks to an industrious student worker, I am almost done with this collection.

--Moving collections around in our climate controlled space in order to provide more room for our expanding collection. This process included moving supplies out of the climate controlled area, which gave us another free range of shelves. The downside? This free range of shelves is closest to overhead pipes. Do I wish there were no overhead pipes? Yes, I do, but we are not going to be making any changes in the HVAC anytime soon, and thus we must make do with the original system built long before my arrival here (although of course I might have built it in same way considering constraints on cost and the building itself). So, the question is what goes under the pipes? We did have a leak once, though not over the shelves. I have decided, in consultation with Tom Hamm (head curator), to place the Friends Serial Group (FSG) in this space. FST is a burgeoning collection of Friends pamphlets from around the world. These are available elsewhere and thus are in this sense replacable if they were to sustain water damage. The collection also needs expansion room and currently has no room to expand where it is shelved. Thus, FSG will be in better shape with room for expansion, and we will have room to expand our manuscript collections and growing collections of Earlham donor records in better space. And I'm going to be looking for other ways to maximize our space.

--Continuing work on processing the Friends United Meeting collection. This is one of our largest collections.

--Beginning work on electronic records management at Earlham. I'm convening a committee to look specifically into managing our institutional records. This will be a long process, but I'm looking forward to getting started.

Of course, there are a number of smaller projects going on, and many researchers to help! Reference questions take up part of every day. Some smaller projects include smaller collections I work on as I have time, with help from the students of course; adding images to the new Earlham Digital Archives; and various surprises that come up every day. The surprises often are related to reference questions, of course.

I will talk about my long range goals in another post. As I think about these short term projects, and projects nearing completion, I see an emphasis on genealogy and prioritizing based on donors. The Penningtons paid us for the project, we have many genealogical researchers, and the Friends United Meeting is an organization with which we have close ties. Improving relations with donors is very important for future gifts of collections, and for financial donations as well. There is nothing startling in this observation, but I do believe it suggests we are focusing on helping the current users of our collections and those who know about our collections, especially Quaker organizations. Many of my long range projects concern bringing more people into the archives, by providing more information about our manuscript collections through online searching, meeting the standards of the archives profession, and outreach. Our core group of researchers is likely to remain genealogists, Quaker organizations, and students; but I hope with other projects to encourage other types of researchers to use our collections when appropriate. (more on our hidden collections later...)

Monday, February 16, 2009

Google Scholar: Boon or Bust

I'm giving a presentation on Google Scholar today for a faculty technology workshop. Besides demonstrating how to use it, I'm discussing the pros and cons and the murky areas in between. I'm a big fan of all things Google, but am not entirely sold on Google Scholar. Yet. I love this idea however: University of Michigan Book Printing Machine

In the session I will cover how to set scholar preferences to show SFX links from Earlham. It should be noted that exactly how this works is not understood, and I discussed this with our resident techy librarians.


Why might you want to use Google Scholar?


--For quick access to open access articles.

--One stop shopping; Google Scholar, or something like it, may very well represent the future of searching. Instead of having to search multiple databases, researchers could go to one place.

--In theory, Google Scholar provides a way for people without access to scholarly databases--public library patrons, for instance--to be able to find citations, if not full text, of scholarly resources they could then acquire via interlibrary loan. It is free to search, and some items are available for free. Note, however, that of right now an interlibrary loan link is not available from the Google scholar link

--Once you recognize its current limitations, Google scholar can be a useful tool and a place to start research.

Why Might You Hesitate to Use Google Scholar?

--As of today, a significant amount of scholarly material does not seem to be available. Not all publishers have reached an agreement with Google.

--Confusing display: articles and books may come up several times in the search and it may not be obvious which one to choose. How the items are ranked is not entirely clear. Without going deep into the search, researchers may miss an important item.

--Unlike databases such as PsychInfo, there is not a clear editorial policy or explanation of what it is included. The items generally are scholarly, but books for children sometimes come up in the search as well.