Number 78 • November/December 2010
ISSN 1944-7639 (online version)
Contents
Register Now for CLIR Sponsors’ Symposium 2011
CLIR to Increase Focus on “Macrosolutions”
Report Examines Use of Digital Forensics Tools and Methods in Cultural Heritage Sector
CLIR Announces Hidden Collections Awards
CLIR Board Welcomes New Board Members
Announcements
• Chuck Henry Named to Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee
• CLIR Partners with Library of Congress on Preservation Symposia
CLIR Issues Now Paperless
Since the January-February 2010 issue, CLIR Issues has been produced in electronic format only. To receive the newsletter electronically, please sign up at https://www.clir.org/pubs/issues/signup.html.
Register Now for CLIR Sponsors’ Symposium 2011
CLIR sponsors are invited to register now for the 2011 Sponsors’ Symposium, “Collaborative Opportunities Amidst Economic Pressures,” to be held April 6 in Arlington, Virginia.
The program will examine how institutions are engaging in deep collaboration to share resources and expertise with the goal of improving services and realizing benefits that extend beyond the individual organization. A morning panel, “Redefining Our Environment through Deep Collaborations,” moderated by University of Virginia University Librarian Karin Wittenborg, will focus on the Blacklight/Hydra Project, the Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative, and Germany’s TextGrid. The afternoon will begin with a session on the Digital Library Federation Program, and end with small-group discussions that will enable participants to exchange experiences and ideas on collaboration. The agenda is available at localhost:8888/wordpress/activities/registration/11sponagenda.pdf.
For registration information, go to https://www.clir.org/activities/registration/11sponsymp.html.
CLIR to Increase Focus on “Macrosolutions”
In his opening message to CLIR’s Annual Report 2009-2010, CLIR President Chuck Henry addresses the need for new partnerships that create interdependences and deep collaborations that could redefine our academic environment. He notes that CLIR will increasingly focus its work on identifying viable consortial models and supporting the emergence of deep collaborations.
“As currently conceived, neither libraries nor universities are structured, organized, or funded to achieve the kind of federated and collaborative enterprise that the digital environment can provide,” he writes.
“In light of, and in response to, this reality, CLIR will devote considerable time and talent in the coming years to identifying consortial models that can effectively reduce costs while enhancing the infrastructure and services for scholarship and teaching. Common to these efforts will be developing strong regional coalitions that bring together diverse institutions within a national framework; federating shared resources and interests, including collections, technology, and expertise; and creating a genuine, volitional dependency on other participating institutions for the provision of what was once a locally owned and managed asset…. We are calling these collaborative projects macrosolutions.”
CLIR’s Annual Report 2009-2010 is now available at https://www.clir.org/pubs/annual/annual.html.
Report Examines Use of Digital Forensics Tools and Methods in Cultural Heritage Sector
A new report from CLIR examines how the cultural heritage community can benefit from methods and tools developed for work in digital forensics.
Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections was written by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Richard Ovenden, and Gabriela Redwine, with research assistance from Rachel Donahue.
While the purview of digital forensics was once specialized to the fields of law enforcement, computer security, and national defense, the growing ubiquity of computers and electronic devices means that digital forensics is now used in a variety of circumstances.
Because most records today are born digital, libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions increasingly receive computer storage media—and sometimes entire computers—as part of their acquisition of “papers.” Staff at these institutions face challenges such as accessing and preserving legacy formats, recovering data, ensuring authenticity, and maintaining trust. The methods and tools that forensics experts have developed can be useful in meeting these challenges. For example, the same forensics software that indexes a criminal suspect’s hard drive allows the archivist to prepare a comprehensive manifest of the electronic files a donor has turned over for accession.
The report introduces the field of digital forensics in the cultural heritage sector and explores some points of convergence between the interests of those charged with collecting and maintaining born-digital cultural heritage materials and those responsible for collecting and maintaining legal evidence.
Kirschenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and associate director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Ovenden is associate director and keeper of special collections of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, and a professional fellow at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. Redwine is archivist and electronic records/metadata specialist at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin. Donahue is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s iSchool and a research assistant at MITH. The authors conducted their research and writing with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections is available electronically at https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub149/. Print copies will be available in January for ordering through CLIR’s Web site, for $25 per copy plus shipping and handling.
CLIR Announces Hidden Collections Awards
The Council on Library and Information Resources has announced the following recipients of the 2010 Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards:
American Museum of Natural History Library
For the People, for Education, for Science: Web Access to the American Museum of Natural History Archives
$117,600
Arizona State University Libraries
Labor Rights Are Civil Rights/Los Derechos de Trabajo Son Derechos Civiles
$155,600
Eleutherian Mill-Hagley Foundation, Inc., on behalf of the Hagley Museum and Library
Z. Taylor Vinson Transportation Collection Processing Project
$246,100
J. Paul Getty Trust on behalf of the Getty Research Institute
Open Plan, Open Access: Increasing Researcher Access to Modern Architectural Records
$154,600
Northeast Historic Film
Moving Images 1938–1940: Amateur Filmmakers Record the New York World’s Fair and its Period
$186,900
San Diego Historical Society
Enhancing Access to the History of San Diego and the Border Region
$162,100
Smithsonian Institution, on behalf of the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
Islamic Arts of the Book at the Smithsonian: Providing for Research across Disciplines
$82,500
Stanford University
Documenting Mexican American & Latino Civil Rights:
Records of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund & California Rural Legal Assistance
$349,300
Syracuse University
Grove Press and a New American Morality
$143,100
University of California, Berkeley, University of California Museum of Paleontology
Cataloging Hidden Archives of the University of California Museum of Paleontology
$236,200
University of Chicago, on behalf of the Black Metropolis Research Consortium
The “Color Curtain” Processing Project: Unveiling the Archives of Chicago’s Black Metropolis
$499,500
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Major Railroad Archival Collections
$208,500
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Pruitt and Shanks Photographic Collection: The Life of a Southern Region in 140,000 Images
$78,400
University of Pennsylvania
Promoting Research through Rare Book Cataloging Partnerships
$490,700
The University of Texas at Austin, Harry Ransom Center
Revealing Texas Collections of Comedias Sueltas
$137,100
WGBH Educational Foundation
Exposing Unknown Boston Local TV News Collections
$311,000
Yale University, Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History
DNA to Dinosaurs: The Globalization of Science in America and the Development of a University Natural History Museum
$409,300
More detail on this year’s funded projects can be found at https://www.clir.org/hiddencollections/awards/index2010.html.
Created in 2008 with funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Cataloging Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards program supports the identification and cataloging of special collections and archives of high scholarly value that are difficult or impossible to locate. Award recipients create Web-accessible records according to standards that enable the federation of their local cataloging entries into larger groups of related records, enabling the broadest-possible exposure to the scholarly community.
As part of this program, CLIR keeps a registry of hidden collections and archives, based on information supplied by applicants.
CLIR Board Welcomes New Board Members
At its November meeting, the CLIR Board elected new members David Rumsey and John Vaughn.
David Rumsey is founder of the David Rumsey Map Collection; president of Cartography Associates, a digital publishing company based in San Francisco; and chairman of the board of Luna Imaging, Inc. The David Rumsey Map Collection includes more than 150,000 maps, focusing on rare 18th- and 19th -century maps of North and South America but also including other regional and world maps. More than 21,000 of the collection items have been digitized and made freely available to the public on the Web (www.davidrumsey.com), an accomplishment that earned Mr. Rumsey the Special Libraries Association Honors Award in 2002. The Web site, developed in conjunction with Luna Imaging and TechEmpower, also won the Webby Award for Technical Achievement in 2002. Mr. Rumsey serves on many boards, including The Long Now Foundation and the Stanford University Library Advisory Board. He has lectured widely and has contributed to several publications on cartography and geographic information systems. He holds B.A. and M.F.A. degrees from Yale University.
John Vaughn is executive vice president of the Association of American Universities. In this capacity, he serves as deputy to the president and chief operating officer. He also serves as director of policy studies, supervising the association’s work in developing national and institutional policies that support the missions of the member universities. Mr. Vaughn has specific responsibility for association activities in the areas of intellectual property, information technology, research libraries, and scholarly communication. In promoting national policies, he works closely with government relations representatives to advance federal legislation and regulations in the support of academic programs and activities. Mr. Vaughn holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Minnesota.
Other Board Updates
In November, CLIR Board members Michael Ann Holly (Clark Art Institute), Herman Pabbruwe (Brill), and James Williams, Jr. (University of Colorado) retired from the Board after nine years of dedicated service. Mr. Pabbruwe had also served as CLIR treasurer; he is succeeded by W. Joseph King (National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education). Mr. Williams had served as secretary and is succeeded by Stephen Rhind-Tutt (Alexander Street Press). Stephen Nichols (Johns Hopkins University) remains chair, and Wendy Pradt Lougee (University of Minnesota) remains vice chair.
Announcements
• Chuck Henry Named to Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee
CLIR President Chuck Henry has been appointed to the steering committee for planning a Digital Public Library of America. The library is envisioned as an “open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that draws on the nation’s living heritage to educate, inform and empower everyone in this and future generations,” according to Sloan Foundation Vice President Doron Weber. The Sloan Foundation has provided funding for initial planning. The Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research program at Harvard Law School, will administer the planning effort.
The steering committee will coordinate a series of meetings and workshops to examine strategies for improving public access to comprehensive online resources. Among the first meetings will be a plenary session hosted by United States Archivist David Ferriero in early summer 2011.
A news release on the Digital Public Library Planning Initiative is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/newsroom/digital_public_library.
• CLIR Partners with Library of Congress on Preservation Symposia
CLIR is partnering with the Library of Congress’s Preservation Directorate on three conferences in its Future Directions Symposium series. Titled “The First Decade of the New Millennium—Preservation Roadmaps for the 21st Century,” the conferences will look at the field of preservation past, present, and future. The conferences are intended to aid decision making for managers at libraries, archives, and other collecting institutions as they transition to the fiscal and stewardship realities of the 21st century.
The first conference, “Understanding the Physical Environment,” was held October 20, 2010. Attendees reviewed 25 years of research by the Image Permanence Institute that have produced resources and recommendations now widely used to preserve a broad range of media.
The next conference, “Assessing Options for Large Collections,” will be held in March 2011. Senior preservation administrators, scientists, digital collection experts, and conservators will describe options for managing large collections in the context of environmentally controlled remote storage, mass-deacidification bulk treatments, and digitization.
The third conference, planned for October 2011, will focus on the road ahead, as cultural agencies work together to devise strategies for providing broad and long-term access to the mixed collection formats of the 21st century. Emphasis will be on the most vulnerable collections.
CLIR will post registration information for the March conference when it becomes available. An overview of the conference series is available at http://www.loc.gov/preserv/symposia/schedule.html.
At the October conference, CLIR President Chuck Henry announced that CLIR will annually award a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship to an individual who wishes to work with the resources held by the Library of Congress, in partnership with the Preservation Directorate. “We hope to attract young scholars who are interested in the confluence of preservation techniques as a means by which to better understand and interpret these primary sources,” said Mr. Henry.
Library of Congress Associate Librarian for Library Services Deanna Marcum added, “We welcome this partnership with CLIR, as the Library’s preservation programs for research and collections care strive to address the changing nature of the human record, ensuring accessibility to the full content of legacy and new media collections, for current and future generations of scholars and other users.”
