Sisterhood in the archives

Sister archivists from the CSJ Provinces in front of the Charles Willard
Coe Memorial Library on the Chalon Campus.

WE WERE PRIVILEGED on Wednesday to host seven VIPs from our venerable profession – the province archivists of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet.

The CSJs are facing the same issue as many, if not most, religious orders in the United States: dwindling numbers. The post-World War II years saw a tremendous run-up in vocations to religious life and monasteries and convents bursting at the seams. That phenomenon is now viewed as a "blip," and these days things have returned to something more normal.

This presents a challenge for the current members, though, in the form of large facilities and fewer people to take care of them. (See Carondelet Center, below, home of the Los Angeles Province. There are about 325 CSJ sisters in the province today.)

Many religious orders are consolidating operations in their larger facilities, including archives. Archives are possessed of a couple important features: They're bulky, they cost money to maintain and sustain, and they're irreplaceable.

The archivists of the provinces of Los Angeles, Albany, St. Paul, St. Louis, and Hawaii (a vice-province) are meeting at Carondelet Center this week to discuss the logistics of consolidating their physical archives, a topic that has been front and center for the archivists for the last few years. Already the archives of the Congregation headquarters in St. Louis (what used to be known as the motherhouse) have been consolidated with provincial archives at Avila University in Kansas City, KN. Hawaii is preparing to transfer its archives to Los Angeles.

In a situation like this, the subject of digitizing the CSJ Archives is bound to come up. We can say without exaggeration that the combined collections of the CSJs comprise a historic resource of national importance. Religious sisters were a vital, and often overlooked, resource in the founding of the United States. Their schools and hospitals were frequently the first such facilities in the new territories. The provincial archives hold priceless communications and records that tell these stories, and they don't end with the settlement of the frontier. Scholars will be studying the history of religious orders for decades – centuries – to come.

Digitization offers the promise of broad access, but it comes with a host of problems of its own. It seems like a no-brainer solution on the surface, but digitized archives demand money, stable management and continuity that virtually all institutions will be hard-pressed to provide when one considers the availability of the data in 100 or 200 or 500 years.

It made for some lively conversation among this sisterhood of archivists, the CSJs with their 365-year history and we Mount folks with our 90. We at MSMU have some experience with mass digitization to offer them, and are proud to be asked for our counsel.

Archivists are colleagues in this business of history, but for the Mount Archives, helping to usher the CSJ Archives into the future is a privilege and a solemn responsibility. What better way for us to demonstrate "the Spirit of the Founders," one of the key components of the University's strategic plan? The brains, good cheer and enthusiasm of our sister archivists are beyond inspirational – their mission is our mission.

Once referred to as the House of Studies, Carondelet Center was
built in 1955 to house and educate hundreds of young CSJs. Above to the
right is the Chalon Campus.

A day in the life of the digital archivist

Hot pink. Not our favorite color for a lit anthology.

PRESERVING A 75-YEAR-OLD pope cap is one thing, but ensuring access to a three-year-old PDF is quite another.

We'll take old silk and kid leather any day.

In the process of writing our next "From the Archives" piece for the Mount Magazine, we needed to grab PDFs of our literary anthologies from our digitized collections on the Internet Archive.

Here is an inside page from the 1937 poetry collection First the Blade. Obviously, this is not what it is supposed to look like. The colorful display is a good indication that the integrity of the PDF has been compromised. (Don't worry -- we would never get rid of the original. It's safe on a shelf.)

Keeping an eye on our digitized treasures is part of the job of the archivist. Fixing this issue will require some testing and the complicated prospect of locating a good copy of the PDF and re-uploading it to the Internet Archive.

Three years, or 75? Physical objects are much easier to preserve than digital. Three years in the digital world is a very long time, and we're never surprised by the number of CD-ROMs that come our way that can't be opened. On the other hand, we have 800-year-old parchment in Special Collections that looks good as new.

Postscript: This week our colleagues around the globe are contributing day-in-the-life photos and tweets to a shared website called "5 Days of Preservation." The variety of tasks and materials is amazing. Look for these and our own hot-pink contribution at http://5daysofpreservation.tumblr.com.

'Scarcity in abundance'

The Mount website captured by the Wayback Machine
at one minute after midnight on June 1, 2005.

WE CAME ACROSS A COUPLE OF EXAMPLES recently of disappearing web content, a common problem for archivists and one that is going to leave a big hole in history. It's sometimes known as the conundrum of "scarcity in abundance," the phenomenon of overwhelming amounts of information in electronic form, very little of which is being retained, preserved and discoverable later.

A staff member recently needed access to the important "Diversity Statement" written during the first years of her presidency by Dr. Jacqueline Powers Doud, 2000-2011. It was posted on the Mount website, taken down at some point during a web update or redesign, and not archived.

In a similar case, a UCLA doctoral student recently wanted to see our "Diversity Timeline," which was also posted for many years on the MSMC website. It too was removed and not archived.

Our preservation fallback.

Thank goodness for the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine. The computers of this nonprofit organization periodically take snapshots of websites and preserve them in a meaningful way -- they can be located and even searched up to a point, and although the pages are often incomplete or missing some content, at least some material can be found.

The Diversity Timeline shows up in snapshots in the mid-2000s forward. (MSMC home page snapshot shown at top), including the Diversity Statement. December 16, 2008, marks their final snapshot nearly five years ago. In the snapshot of January 31, 2009, the "Leadership in Diversity" pages have disappeared from the Wayback Machine.

You can see them by accessing this link, shown in its entirety:
http://web.archive.org/web/20081216073240/http://www.msmc.la.edu/pages/404.asp.

We're lucky with this content. As the frame capture below shows, some content doesn't make it into the Wayback Machine. Another thing about Wayback is you have to know pretty much exactly what you are looking for, or have a complete link, and not count on ordinary searching.

Handing responsibility for keeping our web pages to a set of algorithms owned by a third party isn't a long-term model. Always in need of more funding, what would happen if the Internet Archive went under? We're both glad it's there, and worried that we're all starting to count on it. Unlike paper, once this stuff is gone, it's really gone.

A blank rectangle frames some white space where a photo gallery
on the MSMC home page was not captured by the web snapshot.

Preservation Week @MSMC, Part 6

Logs of research requests, each query a learning experience.

WE'VE BEEN LOOKING THIS WEEK at how preservation "happens" at the Mount, the entirely ordinary, prosaic techniques that archivists everywhere use to try to ensure their collections stick around as far as possible into the future. Cool, dry, acid-free, boxed, sleeved, digitized: these just about cover the gamut of options.

There's one more essential technique that has nothing to do with environment or equipment. It's called usage. Archives in most cases are meant to be used, to be referred to, to be cross-checked against other evidence. The archives that aren't used won't be preserved. 

Usage also means that the stuff has to be accessible. Creating what's known as intellectual access is just as important as keeping things cool and dry. Users have to be able to find what they're looking for without having to dig through (in our case) about three dozen four-drawer filing cabinets plus a couple hundred feet of shelf space, not to mention all those 1s and 0s in the Cloud. Creating access is a gradual process, and it often comes about as the result of a search for a tidbit of information. 

The College Archives averages at least one request for information a week, or over 50 a year. Some can be resolved quickly, while others take days or even weeks. But every foray into the "backfiles" turns up some additional knowledge about the whereabouts of certain documents, pictures or other historic material. This is added to the inventories, lists, finding aids and other descriptive material, and the requests themselves are logged, because some questions get asked more than once.

(Here's a test. What is the most frequently asked question in the College Archives? Answer: When were men admitted to the Mount? Here's another test. When were men first admitted? Answer: Fall 1960, to the Music program.)

Archives truly  have a life of their own. They're static and yet dynamic, historic and yet new – depending on what you're looking for. But the important thing is to be always looking. This is especially true with digital archives. Just think about that old laptop in the garage that hasn't been powered up in 10 years.

As soon as archives were invented (in Sumeria, not long after writing was invented about 3500 B.C.), someone came along and asked, "Do we really need that stuff?" Preservation has been a challenge ever since.

We're not arguing for a spot on "Hoarders," but if you're not careful history will end up in the dumpster. We're here to make sure that doesn't happen. Happy Preservation Week, 2013.

Preservation Week @MSMC, Part 5

If you think it looks a little
insubstantial, you're correct.

IT'S THE END OF THE SEMESTER, and from the look of them a lot of the students' heads are in the clouds. The seniors are just a few days from Cloud 9. And these days, all of us with pads, pods, desktops and smartphones are in the Cloud constantly, whether we know it or not.

We hear about it everywhere: Cloud computing, Cloud storage, in the Cloud. It refers to the vast tracts of cyberspace where our digital lives live and move and have their being (to paraphrase St. Luke). The applications we interact with on our smartphones, our online picture collections, games, communications and even historic archives are kept in the Cloud. (This blog is written in the Cloud and you're reading it from there... where ever "there" is.)

Without inducing glazed eyes, we should explain that the Cloud merely represents a whole bunch of interconnected computers all over the world with extra computing capacity that would otherwise go to waste. Amazon started the movement around 2000 by leasing this unused capacity to companies and individuals, and now all kinds of third parties offer Cloud-based storage and applications. 

Not much better, but you can at least hold it in your hand.
This holds 750 gigabytes of Mount Archives data.

The problem with digital documents and pictures and audio and video is that they're all really only teeny on-and-off switches (the 1s and 0s, respectively), and "preserving" them means a whole lot more than sliding them into a polyester sleeve and putting them in an acid-free folder. CDs, DVDs, flash drives and external hard disks like this one are quickly going the way of the floppy disk, so it's only appropriate to speak of JPEGs in terms of maybe 15 or 20 years (5 to 7 if you're not careful), not 100 or more like plain paper or a good black and white print.

The Cloud actually helps with this because it gets around one serious problem, the rapid obsolescence of storage media. But the Cloud then raises a raft of preservation issues of special concern to archivists, like, oh, where is it, who owns it, how do you know it's the real thing, and will you ever get it back of the Cloud provider goes under – "it" being any digital item you happen to stick in the Cloud. Remember, "it" is just a bunch of 1s and 0s. 

In spite of these problems, we're forward-looking at the Mount – and do we ever have a lot of stuff in the Cloud these days. If you want to create access for users (tomorrow's blog!), it has to go somewhere digital – and somewhere is that vast network in the sky. If you haven't seen them, take a look at the Mount's collections in the Cloud, thousands upon thousands of individual blobs of nicely arranged 1s and 0s. 

• Our photo and publication repository: http://stmary2.sdlhost.com
• Our mass digitization collection in the Internet Archive: http://archive.org/collection/mountstmaryscollege

Preservation Week @MSMC, Part 4

Teatime at the Mount, a lace-collar event in the Student Lounge. Photo
is from the 1944-45 academic year and includes the Classes of '45 and '46.

THE MOST POPULAR TREASURES in the College Archives – at least in terms of requests to use them – are the historic photographs. They exist in many forms, rich black and white prints, color snapshots, slides, color transparencies and for about the last 10 years, digital pictures in the form of JPEGs. They're a problem, which we'll get to in a minute.

With a little TLC, the black and white prints will last for a really long time. They get the white-glove treatment to prevent fingerprints and a crystal-clear poly envelope that is as close to lasting "forever" as we talk about in the profession.

A 1994 photograph is ready for scanning.
This is Sr. Annette Bower, CSJ, the Mount's
legendary Physical Sciences chair emerita.

Slides, transparencies and other formats get their own special sleeves. If anyone needs to reproduce one of these historic images in a publication or brochure they go onto a scanner. The resulting JPEG can be sent virtually anywhere – with the proper copyright permissions.

Unfortunately, you can't put JPEGs into a sleeve and talk in terms of forever. The best we can do to preserve the JPEGs is upload them our online repository and keep a couple of backup copies on external hard drives.  And if worse comes to worst, we've still got the hard-copy originals to rescan.

Our photo archives sort of come to a stop around 2003, the year College photographers switched from film cameras to digital. There are a few sets of snapshots, but the really good ones – professionally shot and processed - are elsewhere, or nowhere. If they're not in the archives, they can't be archived or preserved. Will we have today's student events to look at 70 years from now, as we do the tea party from 1945? Cross your fingers.

Preservation Week @MSMC, Part 3

Folders come in many dimensions and shapes, but the
standard color for acid-free is a nice, dull tan.

TOOLS OF THE PRESERVATION TRADE are showcased in glossy catalogs from a short list of manufacturers, including Brodart, Gaylord, Hollinger/Metal Edge and University Products. (For consumers, there are Family Archives and Light Impressions, which have the same items but can be purchased in smaller quantities.) For the retail maven, they're like a fabric and crafts store, hardware store and stationery store all rolled into one thick mailer. Shopping is fun.

Archives are expected to keep their contents for a long, long time -- or forever, depending on whom you ask. We are always seeing news tidbits about a fabulous discovery in an attic full of old papers. While much more orderly than an attic, an archives is pretty much the same idea; you file things away carefully and list them on an inventory of some kind, and much, much later someone makes a fabulous discovery and ends up in the news. (We recently made such a find in the Chalon Campus archives pertaining to the Doheny Family. You can read about it here on page 29, "From the Archives.")

But as we mentioned yesterday, old paper can be very brittle and crumbly because of the acids embedded during manufacture and aging. Unfortunately, this will quickly be true of the brand-new paper on which we printed out today's email (yes, email -- but that's another story!).

We can prolong the life of our archival files on paper for hundreds of years if we keep it cool and dry and away from additional acids. Like the book boxes, this is done with special folders similar to the manila variety in size and shape, but made of buffered board with a neutral or slightly alkaline pH. We buy them by the hundreds and have been gradually replacing the old manila folders in the College Archives.

It's sometimes a tedious process, but it's the history of Mount St. Mary's College we're talking about here. It's well worth it -- and we're sure there are many other treasures yet to be discovered.

Preservation Week @MSMC, Part 2

Bryant's Mythology, ca. 1805. Each volume is sadder than the last.
There are many such battered books in libraries everywhere.

A BUNCH OF OTHER LIBRARIES are piling on the blog bandwagon for Preservation Week. We archives and special collections librarians are proud of the service we provide and have lots of company! PresWeek also has its own Facebook page, so you can check out what's going on at institutions big and small.

Yesterday we shared an inexpensive device for measuring the all-important temperature and humidity in the Frank H. Spearman Room here in the Coe Library at Chalon. It works for anyone with treasures they want to hang onto -- cool and dry probably doesn't describe the garage, so keep your good stuff in the house.

A beautiful handmade book of poetry in Spanish,
dated 1866, with its protective box.

Another handy-dandy technique for protecting books are pre-cut boxes made of special cardboard. Not only are they free from harmful chemicals that may further damage brittle paper, but they also filter out gases that may be present wherever there is carpeting, furniture and human beings -- gases that can add acidity to the books and bindings.

When the books are as beat-up as the ones pictured above, boxes also add a physical barrier that will protect the contents from getting dented or bent. Throw a length of unbleached cotton tape around the book and the covers (called boards in the biz) won't become separated from the pages (the text block) even if the hinges are already shot.

Figuring out what to do to help a book is as much art as science. To restore old leather bindings costs into the hundreds of dollars per book, so it had better be a pretty special book to begin with if you're going to go to the expense. For those books of lesser or unknown value, a neat row of light-blue boxes is perfectly adequate. With luck we'll get at least a couple hundred more years out of treasures inside. In our next post, we'll look at the same approach for plain old paper.

A row of 18th-century journals, secure and happy in their special homes.

Preservation Week @MSMC, Part 1

A little too warm today -- 74 degrees.
Relative humidity just right at 40%.

THE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES WORLD is marking Preservation Week, an annual reminder that without a certain amount of tender loving care our books, papers, manuscripts, photographs, yearbooks, magazines and other treasures will gradually disappear.

Preservation Management also happens to be something we teach in the San Jose State University School of Library and Information Science (SJSU-SLIS), so it is a subject near and dear to our archivist's heart.

Keeping the Mount's treasures safe in the Coe Library is an interesting and challenging job.That there are archives and special collections in the library today we owe to our CSJ predecessors, who did what they could in the face of fire and flood, mold and bugs, and everything else that puts our "stuff" (the official archival term) at risk.

We thought we'd observe Preservation Week with a daily look at our favorite tools of the trade. And since it is Earth Day, the topic of the environment is a good starting point. We battle climate change -- right here in the archives. But not the kind that causes sea levels to rise and upsets polar bears. We mean in that cool, dry place where it's safe to keep books and paper.

Stability is the name of the game: a narrow temperature range around 70 or 72 degrees, and relative humidity around 40%.  Too much fluctuation breaks down the chemical bonds in paper and causes them to become brittle. Like most college and university libraries, we have lots and lots of brittle paper.

Above is the little hygrometer we check daily to keep an eye on our first-floor environment. There are more sophisticated models, but this $20 piece of equipment pays big dividends. If we keep the books cool, dry and happy, we don't have to spend money stabilizing them and restoring them later on.

Tomorrow we'll look at another fave tool -- acid-free boxes. If you're on the Chalon Campus this week, stop by and see these goodies in person!

Digital frustration

PRESERVATION STUDENTS and others are often surprised to find that we archive mostly on paper, even digital stuff. It's the least expensive, simplest solution for the Mount. It will take a college-wide commitment to the kind of technology infrastructure that can handle formal digital archives, and right now that doesn't exist.

Screen capture of PDF.

The college has a fascinating series of public lectures lined up for this academic year, Women in China. Most of the information about it is strictly what's on the college website. It is possible to create a PDF of a website to a specified number of layers of hyperlinks, so we pointed Acrobat Pro at the URL and watched the screen merrily processing all the bits and bytes. The results (top image) looked pretty good.

Scanned laser print of PDF.

Good, until we printed it out. For reasons known only to our web designers, Adobe (makers of Acrobat) and Hewlett-Packard (makers of our laser printer), many of the letters were replaced with rectangles. (bottom image).

Yes, yes, we know that there are workarounds and that it's possible to include these website PDFs in our growing photo archives online.

The problem is time. For "lone arrangers" like us, the time it takes to normalize, tag, catalog, upload and quality-check a PDF in a repository takes about 10 times longer than hitting the "print" button and placing the results in an acid-free folder. And we don't have to worry about backup, migration, or bit rot with our paper document.

We'll go digital eventually, but for now it's yet another exercise in frustration. At least the email promoting the lectures has been looking fine on paper.

The perilous life of pictures

ANTICIPATING THE INAUGURATION next week of Dr. Ann McElaney-Johnson, our 12th president, I've been assembling historic photos from the inaugurations of Nos. 9, 10 and 11: Sister Magdalen Coughlin (1976), Sister Karen Kennelly (1990) and Dr. Jacqueline Powers Doud (2000).

Before Sister Magdalen's, inaugurations must have been quiet handoffs among the CSJs, because there are absolutely no photos to be found. I found several of Sisters Magdalen and Karen but I came up empty for Dr. Doud. Uh-oh, I thought... they're digital. I don't receive digital photos in the archives and have no easy way to keep them if I did.

After a fruitless search of hard disks in the PR office, I was starting to get thoroughly depressed when I walked over to a stack of old binders I knew had negatives and contact sheets from PR in the '90s. Miracle! Eight sheets of jewel-like color slides - not labeled, of course, but easy to squint at and identify. I had 20 digitized at DVD Your Memories in Culver City and will add them to the display.

I chatted with the DVD-YM technician about the period of transition we're in between fully paper and fully digital photography. It makes archives a major challenge. The former are fragile, but the latter disappear if you're not paying attention.

My colleague Pia Orense and I now know that PR has digital photography almost exclusively after 2001. That means these slides of Dr. Doud's inaugural on Oct. 17, 2000, are among the very last of the physical images in the College.

We have a lot of work ahead if we're going to keep them around through three more inaugurals.

I [heart] email

LOOKING FOR INFORMATION about a former development director, I'm browsing old campus publications. This note from Faculty and Administrative Bulletin, Vol. XXI, No. 17, May 7, 1990:

MATERIALS FOR THE ARCHIVES -- Many thanks to those who have sent information about programs/activities/records of the 1989-90 academic year to the Archives. As you clear your desk for the summer, the Archives could use records of committee meetings no longer needed, as well as other materials pertinent to the progress of the college.

A few years earlier, we detect a more plaintive tone.

During the past few years there has been a gap in the flow of ... information [to the Archives]. To assure a continuity of of source material please send from your office or department notification of events in which you are involved... (Vol. XXII, Issue 17, May 5, 1986)

I'm sure my honored predecessors, Sisters Margaret Lynch, Germaine McNeil and Mercia Louise Zerwekh, would have loved the flood tide of electronic announcements, agendas, minutes, flyers and even photos that arrive in my in-box every day. No more relying on other people to remember to send their stuff. In fact, the big challenge is keeping up with it. I've got a couple hours of filing ahead -- just as soon as I find my mystery man from development!

First draft of history - digital edition

ONE OF THE MOST VALUABLE COLLECTIONS in the Mount Archives is the run of campus newspapers, starting with Inter-Nos in 1927 (typewriter to mimeograph), and running more or less continuously through The View 1945-1992 (ink on newsprint), The New View 1993-1995 (same), The Oracle, 1995-2007 (newsprint, then color photocopied) and now (deep breath) ...

... The Oracle on the internet.

The digital Oracle debuted last week and can be viewed at http://www.oraclemsmc.com. It's nice looking, full of articles and images, easy to navigate, and entirely virtual. How does a format like that fit into 65 years of print copies in the archives? How do I preserve it?

This lone arranger cannot/should not/will not do digital archiving. (If you want to know why, you'll have to sign up for the 15-week graduate class I teach each semester at San Jose State University.) Suffice it to say, I will probably end up trying to print it out screen by screen.

I pointed my one preservation "tool," Acrobat Distiller, at the Oracle website and ended up with 67 fragmented and duplicative pages. (It could be worse--I did the same with the MSMC online catalog and ended up with over 1,200 before my computer crashed.)

Newspapers are the historian's lifeblood; just this week I had a visiting postdoc in from Rutgers going through all the old newspapers and yearbooks of the Mount. I am honor-bound to capture Mount journalism for the archives. But here's the great conundrum: Even as technology makes it easier and less expensive to publish a campus newspaper, the same technology dooms it to oblivion if left alone.

Oh, those digital assets

By day, I'm a paper archivist. By night, I teach online graduate students about digital preservation. Well do I know the pitfalls of going down the digital imaging road -- the unforeseen costs, the migration issues, the burden that metadata places on an institution, the permanent patient-on-life-support issues.

I am vigilant about keeping the Mount archives on paper as much as possible. To do otherwise would be fiscally risky behavior, since digital costs can go from zero to n times a factor of magnitude with the sky being the limit. (Note: that only applies to stuff we plan to actually keep for a long time, of course. If we don't care, zero remains a nice, round number.)

However, this Lone Arranger also knows that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of "archival quality" digital photographs of "enduring value" to the college parked on a mishmash of hard disks, servers, and portable media. (How about this photo of our statue of Mary getting boxed up by the crew of "Beverly Hills 90210: The Next Generation"?)

From a preservation standpoint, our digital photography assets are undeniably at risk. Physical media like CDs and DVDs are temporary solutions (< 7-10 years) at the most, so the alternative is a database. Can a Lone Arranger do a COTS (common, off-the-shelf) database? How much technical support do I need? How much time can I reasonably spend on any of it, let alone customizing the software? Who, besides me, will be able to do data entry? My digital asset management colleagues have opinions about Lone Arrangers in this arena, and at this point my own is one of doubt. However, I'm about to find out. We can't just leave those photos running around loose... gotta corral those puppies! I'm about to embark on a side-by-side evaluation of two packages (I hope) and will post my thoughts as I have them. Meanwhile, I have a pile of archival photos to scan.