Photography is My New Hobby

I have taken up photography as a hobby. Because I stay home with my daughter three days a week, I needed some diversion to keep me sane, but also that would let me keep an eye on an active baby. My wife also likes to see new pictures of our baby during the work day. So what started with casual snapshots of "baby sleeping" and "baby picking up a toy" has grown into carrying a camera with me throughout the day.

My wife picked up on my interest and enrolled me in an online photography course for Father's Day. It was a great gift idea. I love seeing how much I have improved as a photographer; already I have reached a point where I manually adjust my aperture and shutter speed for every shot. So long, flash photography!

I am still an amateur--I use a digital point-and-shoot camera, and I have not sold a picture anywhere--but I enjoy it for the act itself. For me, the gulf between casual, unplanned photography and careful shot composition makes for a good challenge. Not that I am an especially artistic photographer yet, but I cannot take a picture without at least thinking about how to angle the shot, whether to over- or under-expose it, and what my depth of field should be. Photography is like writing in that it does not require much skill to begin and to produce some content, but the more effort I put into polishing my work and improving my skills, the more I enjoy what I create.

As yet I do not have much of a plan for photographic series to post online, but I have been adding some of my photos in a public forum. If you are interested, you can follow my Flickr page.

Is My Garden Overrun?

I have not written a post on this blog in four months. In that time, however, I have agonized over not writing anything on a regular basis. A blog, I think, is a great way to flirt with madness.

On the one hand, I figure that writing here is a way to be informal and still sort of publish something, a "business casual" outfit, as it were. It gives me a chance to play around with ideas, and to write about things that pique my interest, without feeling the tension that comes with deadlines.

At the same time, a blog also triggers all the anxieties I have about writing, like "What if the things I write are completely boring to everyone other than me," or "What if I run out of ideas?" And this is on an informal platform for writing. So it builds the idea that I really cannot write anything interesting--if not a simple blog post, how will I ever write a script, story, or article worth reading?--which in turn makes me shrink away from writing that much more, and on and on.

So after a four-month absence, I decided to squinch my eyes shut, scream loudly, and run back to my blog to see how badly I messed everything up by not writing on here for so long. And, it turns out, it's not that bad. My posts are not overrun with spam comments for sex pills; in fact, it looks like I've had at least modest pageviews in the intervening time. People find the articles that interest them, which is all I could ever want.

And though I feel compelled to write something about why I was not writing on here for a while, I don't think that's a good idea. I suspect the Internet is lousy with blogs that are about five posts, four of them apologies. And the only people who would take any interest in why I've felt too busy to write would be close enough to me that a blog is poor choice for informing them. And really, what needs to be said? "I intend to write, shit comes up, and I get lazy."

One thing that I really like about a blog is that I can fill it with assorted information, and audiences will find their way to whatever they like. Someone might like my entries on pulp fiction, someone else might like my entries on the archives world. Few if any people probably want to read everything I write on here. And while it would be awesome if I could write brilliant things all the time, that's not going to happen. So I will keep writing things that catch my fancy as they come to mind, try to go easier on myself for not turning my blog into a literary masterpiece--and therefore giving myself permission to write more--and not apologize when I let it go.

...Except for this apology. Sorry about that.

The Archivist's Utility Belt

In the comics, Batman wears a belt stocked with all the tools he might need on a case. Batarangs, gas mask, grappling hook--whatever the situation, he is prepared.

I like to pretend that archivists are the superheroes (or at least the masked vigilantes) of the LIS world. So we need our own "utility belt," with the tools to manage any information gathering emergency we might face.

What would go onto the Archivist's utility belt? That is what I am still working on. I welcome suggestions, either for general tools (a ruler, a portable scanner) or for product recommendations. I hope to have more updates as I go, explaining why each tool is important and where to start.

The Value of Finishing Tasks

Yesterday I managed to wrap up 4 projects at the film archive. All of them had been on my plate for at least a month--in some cases longer--and they were causing me a fair amount of stress, even in my off hours. (It's no fun to have a hard time sleeping because you're worried about when you can get a reference scan sent off to a patron.)


I can see several useful lessons from this experience, but probably the most valuable is: If something causes you stress, figure out what you can do about it and do that. (And if you cannot do anything, learn to say "There's nothing I can do" and shrug it off.) To use one project as an example, I wanted to try out an electronic deliverable for a reference scan. That's a great (and necessary!) goal for the archive, but in the meantime, I have an actual patron who wants some materials for a book he is working on. After lots of trial and error in getting the materials ready, I finally decided that for now it is best to just make photocopies (like I used to) and ship those to the patron, then continue to experiment on my own. And I felt much better after I did that, even with the frustration that something I'd worked on for weeks was otherwise accomplished in, say, fifteen minutes.

If I have one weakness as a worker, it's that I am always eager to take on new tasks, but I frequently take on too much, and then I wind up stressing out over all the things I haven't done. I try to remind myself to make task lists and set a small number of goals each day. If I finish 3 significant tasks per day, I can feel like I'm making progress. Especially if I have not at the same time added 4 or more tasks in the same day!

Film Archiving: The Importance of Enlightening Those Audiences Sitting in the Dark

Here is an excellent article by Lynnette Porter for PopMatters about film archiving. It interviews BFI archivist Jo Botting and provides a great overview of the kind of work film archivists do.

Film Archiving: The Importance of Enlightening Those Audiences Sitting in the Dark

Does Digital Piracy Hurt Sales?

After a recent conversation with a friend about digital piracy--and its alleged negative impact on sales of music albums and movie tickets--I found myself wondering how exactly a distributor could prove that piracy really is to blame for a decline in sales. That is, how could they prove that the rise of digital piracy wasn't just coinciding with a time when people no longer felt that the cost of purchasing entertainment was justified by the product they purchased?

I can imagine two points groups like the MPAA and the RIAA could try to prove, but both would be difficult. The two points are:

1. A significant number of people who download an illegal copy of a work would otherwise, if they had no other choice, purchase the work at full price; and
2. A significant number of people who download an illegal copy of a work do not then go on to pay for a legal copy of the work or purchase some equivalent works.

To the first point, let's suppose the record labels found a magic switch that, if pulled, would definitively end all digital piracy.  Would sales of albums then increase, or would it stay the same? I think the tendency is to suggest that this point is proved by looking at what record sales were before file-sharing sites became popular, and then looking at the overall decline in sales. However, this could be a coincidence. It is possible that many music downloads are more like impulse purchases, and if the means of impulsively downloading them did not exist, those users would not feel like it was worth the cost to buy the albums. And if that is the case, piracy is not really hurting record sales. And it might even help them.

Which leads me to my second point. It would be interesting to see how many consumers who purchase an album first became aware of it through an illegally downloaded copy. (I don't have a strong feeling with regard to how often this occurs, it is just an idea I had.) What if it turns out that many record sales come about because someone "samples" an album for free, decides he likes it, and then wants to pay for a legitimate copy? Additionally, suppose someone downloads an illegal copy of a popular new album, likes it, and then buys other albums by that artist? In these cases, piracy might actually be stimulating record sales. I have seen some of this in action in the world of Japanese movie fandom; otaku in the US have been known to download an illegal, fan-subbed version of a movie because it is not otherwise available in the US, but then when it does get a US release, those same people get excited to buy a copy.

In my points I used the phrase "a significant number" because these points would have to apply to more than just a few people, but obviously would not apply to everyone. If only a small number of people who download an album for free would instead buy it if they had to, it would not be a strong argument for the negative effects of piracy.

LIS Freelancing: Arrangement

I recently talked with a potential client about a contract job to arrange part of his private library. He is an avid photographer and has built a significant library of photography-related books and magazines. These range from technical guides on photographic skills to art books, and also such things as travel books for planning photography trips. His interest is in having someone with a professional eye for arrangement organize these books in a way that will make sense to him and improve the usefulness of his library.

My strategy for a project like this is to first build a small but comprehensive controlled vocabulary for his books, according to their use. (As I explained to him, a public library would arrange books by subject because its arrangement is independent of how any one user might use the books, but a private library can afford a more personal arrangement schema.) Then I would inventory the books and assign each the most appropriate term(s) for its use. I could then use this information--and a spreadsheet--to organize the books and develop a sensible shelving arrangement.

This was not really a project I had considered before, but it is actually a great use of LIS skills in the freelance world. Many people have sizable collections of books, movies, CDs, and such, and they feel that their collections are haphazard and possibly that some things are lost. And while the average person probably would not want to pay a professional to organize their home DVD collection, many other enthusiasts, professionals, and perhaps small businesses would be inclined to do a simple arrangement. In fact, an added bonus of this kind of work is that the client not only gets an organized bookshelf, he winds up with an inventory of his materials, indexed by a use schema that he helped design.

Have any of my other LIS colleagues worked on a similar project?

Do Archivists Share More Online?

One question I have wondered about recently is whether younger archivists--and related LIS professionals--are inclined to share more information about themselves online. Not in the sense of being careless with security information, of course, nor that archivists are more likely to post stories of drunken exploits. (Although we can sometimes accession more beer than we currently have the resources to process....) I wonder rather about building detailed and organized bodies of information about ourselves online, where others can see.
I think that people from Generation X onward are more comfortable with the online component of their lives in general, and use a range of public sites (social networking sites being a good example) frequently. These are sometimes for staying in touch with friends and family, sometimes for networking, and sometimes just an expression of creativity. And when the person doing all this is also an archivist, he or she might be more inclined to organize and describe the materials they are sharing. I for one love to fill in as many details as I can about each photo I share on Facebook, to use one example. I think the impulse to make as many be-metadated photos as possible available online is a combination of eagerness to share ("open access for all") and eagerness to create an organized and detailed collection. I wonder whether other online archivists feel the same.

Recommendation: Practical Archivist

For the person looking to do right by his or her family photos and other memorabilia, consider the website Practical Archivist. This is a site run by a friend and colleague, who offers best practices and detailed advice about the best ways to scan, organize, and preserve family treasures. Her insights are invaluable and her blog makes for great reading. And she is high on my list of archivist role models. If you find my (sparse) posts interesting, I highly recommend you look at her site.

Archival Ideas: Nursing Home Database

Archivists do not only wait for records to arrive on their doorstep, passively accepting whatever comes their way. More and more, archivists feel a responsibility for seeking out records to broaden and deepen our pool of knowledge about the world around us. I think that these proactive measures are going to become even more of archival work in the near future. Many young archivists have ideas for seeking out historical materials, and for finding ways to build an archival record before the records ever have to arrive at an archive. One of my ideas ties together oral history, community involvement, digitization of paper materials, and maybe even some therapeutic help for a community in need. 

My idea is for a comprehensive database for nursing homes, to capture a range of data about their residents. This would be paired with a template for a nursing home website. The website would allow for something similar to a social networking platform like Facebook or Google Plus, but with a greater emphasis on compiling photographs, letters, and oral histories. In so doing, it would create detailed accounts of the lives of the people who stayed at the home. It would also build the history of the nursing home, and contribute to our local histories.

Each resident of the nursing home would get a page. He or she would then be encouraged to work with a staff member--or perhaps a volunteer, like an oral historian--on adding materials to the page. The staff member would scan old photographs and letters, and would ask the resident about each one. Who is in the photo? When was it taken? Who was writing the letter to whom? These interviews could be recorded and added to the database as well; in the course of identifying people in a photograph, each resident is bound to remember interesting stories that are unrelated to that specific task of identification. Bit by bit, each resident gets to build the story of his or her life.

The residents are then active participants in building their stories, and in ways that could be done by anyone. They do not need, for example, the literary skill to write their own autobiography. Only the eagerness to reminisce and share stories with someone else. And the residents might find that it brings them together, which is where the social networking aspect fits in. A resident might learn that a co-resident served in the same military unit, had the same kind of job, or grew up in a nearby town. They might soon start helping each other fill in the gaps in their recollections.

They might also keep healthy in the process. Though I make no claims of expertise on mental health, my understanding is that keeping the mind active later in life is a therapeutic activity, and one that can perhaps help prevent certain mental illnesses, like Alzheimer's. Keeping residents engaged in remembering their lives would then have the added benefit of being a sort of therapy. It might keep their minds sharp. It might also help them feel good about their life, to have a chance to share these stories.

In the end, everyone wins from this. The residents get an activity they (hopefully) enjoy, and some socialization and mental challenge along the way. The nursing home gets to build a more comprehensive picture of its identity, which is surely shaped by its residents. (And this might in turn make the home more attractive to other prospective residents.) The staff or community volunteers who get involved learn about building the historical record, get to feel that they have contributed something meaningful to the world around them, and probably get to make new friends along the way.

Should You Digitize Home Movies?

Many of us have them, lurking somewhere in the house. A shoe box full of 8mm film reels. One of those fake-wood-paneled cassette cases full of VHS tapes. Footage of childhood birthday parties, summer vacations, playing in the snow, goofy hairdos. They sit around because we do not have the means--or, let's be honest, the inclination--to watch them, but we also feel like throwing them away is somehow a repudiation of our past. Like a high school yearbook, they inspire us to ask "Why is that still here," but also taunt us with the idea that we cannot get rid of them.

Fortunately, we have a choice these days. We can digitize those old home movies, and then we'll have them in a way we can view, and forever! (Well, not really forever; the average shelf life of a DVD seems to be somewhere around 10 years, just like a VHS cassette. But far, far less than a film reel. Though making a raw video file and storing it in several locations would offer greater security, sort of.) A range of products and services exist to transfer those films and tapes to digital formats, to suit differing budgets and needs. You don't need to write a grant to have high-quality digital restoration done by professionals for your 16th birthday tape; but a VCR-DVD combo machine could do it quite cheaply, and suitably for personal use. So the question is: Should you digitize them?

From an archives perspective, this is a question of how valuable the record (the birthday tape, let's say) might be. Archives describe many different types of value, but the key ideas for a home movie are "intrinsic value," "informational value," and "evidential value." Each of these indicates why an archive might take an object, and how they might deal with its "digitization." (And, spoiler alert, why I think you might or might not want to keep the home movies.)

1. Intrinsic value is the value of the object itself, based on its physical characteristics. Often this comes across for handmade, crafty items like scrapbooks. Of the three, this is the least likely to apply to your birthday tape. Which is good, because it's also the hardest to fairly reproduce in a digital form.
2. Informational value is the value of the information the object contains. I would make the claim that the overwhelming majority of items archives keep are considered to have substantial informational value. The tricky thing about informational value in the world of film, videos, and photos is that it is not always the same as the value the creator saw when making the object. For example, your mom probably recorded your 16th birthday because she thought it would be kind of neat to watch later and remember your special day. But let's suppose this tape went to an archive. The archive probably is not interested in remembering your special day (no offense to you!), but maybe the tape has informational value because of how the people in it are dressed, or how your family celebrated your birthday. Maybe an enterprising archivist sees in your birthday tape useful information about American teenagers in the 80s-90s, outside of the more common fictional or staged representations of teens. In other words, your tape might have all kinds of informational value, to the right person. And, of course, the information on your tape is the easiest thing to reproduce digitally.
3. Evidential value is the value of the object as evidence of a human activity. In this case, the birthday tape is evidence of home video recording. This kind of straddles the physical object (how the tape was labeled has evidential value) and its content (how your mom handled shot composition, even if she does not know what "shot composition" is). An archive with an interest in collecting amateur film and video recordings is likely to see evidential value in your tape. Digital reproduction, therefore, can preserve some evidential value, but not all. To use a paper analogy, you can scan an author's notebook and recreate most of the evidence of how he composed a story, but you will probably lose some details about how he handled the notebook, whether he paper-clipped newspaper stories to pages, and so on.

With these three types of value, you can make an informed decision about whether (and how) to digitize your home movies. In fact, you can assess why you should keep them at all. So here are the three questions to ask:

1.  Is this birthday tape valuable to me because the tape itself looks cool? (Remember, if the only cool thing about the tape is the drawing your mom made on the label, you can just scan that and be done with it.)
2. Is this birthday tape valuable to me because I want to watch it and remember how exactly my birthday happened? Alternately, is it valuable to me because in the ensuing years I have become an armchair cultural anthropologist and now I find myself saying things like, "The sartorial habits of the late-20th century American adolescent are quite illuminating"?
3. Is this tape valuable to me because I love making home movies and want to use it to see how home movies used to be made?

How did you answer these questions? If you said yes to any of them, you now have articulated why the birthday tape is valuable. Accordingly, you know what to do with the tape. If the tape as a physical object is valuable, keep it. (And probably buy a display case for it.) If the information on the tape is valuable, transfer it to a DVD. But if none of these values really jump out at you, you really don't need to either digitize or keep the tape, and you can let it go with a clean conscience.

But, as a professional courtesy to me: If you are going to throw away that tape, consider contacting a local historical society or archive and offering the tape. They might not want it, they might tell you about someone else who would. You can give them complete ownership of both the tape and its content and it might be really useful to others.

Of course, if on your 16th birthday you had a really crazy hairdo, maybe you don't want to risk becoming a research tool for others.

Pulp Magazine Digital Archives

Many different groups are working on digitizing and collecting pulp magazine materials. For the modern pulp fan, these resources are ideal for exploring the pulp world. The Pulp Magazines Project is one such source. It has a great collection of magazines, digitized and available in PDF and FlipBook formats. It also has an Archives Hub page you can use to explore some deeper areas of the pulp world. Spend some time there enjoying their great work!

Lovecraft Anime

I recently stumbled across a 2007 anime film that anthologizes three of H. P. Lovecraft's stories: The Picture in the House, The Dunwich Horror, and The Festival. The film--titled The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories--was produced in Japan in 2007 and was directed by Akira Shinagawa. Sadly at present it does not look like a Region 1 DVD exists, but it seems probably that the American otaku community has set up a grey-market copy somewhere, possibly fansubbed for the non-Japanese-speaking viewers.

Here is the Ganime page for the movie. The text is all in Japanese, but it does include a small movie file for the trailer. It looks like the film is a stop-motion affair along the lines of Jan Švankmajer's animation. I am very excited to see this.

Pulp Fiction Recommendation: Planet Stories

I love a good reprint of a classic science-fiction or fantasy novel. As much as I like finding used paperbacks in bookstores--in part because they're easy to leave behind when I'm traveling or to give away to friends--there is something about a high-quality edition of a rare genre work that I cannot resist. And the Planet Stories line (produced by Paizo, they of Pathfinder RPG fame) are the best.

You can buy individual books in the Planet Stories series, but you can also subscribe to their ongoing collection, in which case you get a new book usually every two months. The subscription works by charging you for each book when it is ready to ship; books tend to cost between $15 and $20. I am a fairly recent subscriber, having received only the three most recent books this way. But it was a great idea for me, as it has brought me to authors I did not previously know, like Robert Silverberg (whose novella The Planet Killers is a must-read).

I especially appreciate the good quality of the books in their series. They are printed on sturdy paper, the font is good, and the works have been carefully spell-checked. As much as I love small print booksellers for this market, not all the publishers take the same level of care with their publications. Planet Stories is simply the best publisher of pulp sci-fi and fantasy novel reprints. Everyone who loves these genres should check them out.

Paizo.com - Planet Stories

Digitizing filmstrips

Some of the collections I've worked with recently at the archive have included filmstrips, those classic teaching aids that combined still images with a tape recording and jarring beeps to supplement our lessons. Because I have been working with digitizing strategies for film and video--as well as still images--I am of course thinking about how best to digitize filmstrips. Most of the content available online is either for professional transfer services--which probably are best but would be costly--or for DIY projects that assume a lack of access to, say, a scanner. These are probably aimed at persons who want to transfer their slides without investing in any special equipment. My interest is how an archive could digitize filmstrips on a budget. (Because pretty much everything archives do is "on a budget.")

I assume that I have three basic steps to undertake:

1. Scan each frame of the filmstrip as an individual file.
2. Transfer the tape recording to an audio file.
3. Create a movie file that synchronizes the images to the audio track.

For each of these, I would want to employ the same digital preservation standard that is recommended for general files of that type. The images might be 400-dpi TIFFs, for example.

The newly made video files could then be burned to DVDs for access, with the original files stored on a server, or they could be hosted online, depending on the archive's website. But filmstrips are a useful artifact to digitize and disseminate. They have a nostalgia factor for anyone my age or older because they were so common to our student days. They are also interesting as a pedagogical tool; the way the information was presented is always interesting, even as the content might grow outdated. And think of the fun trying to explain to History Day students what those beeps signify.

Goals for 2012

Last year, I set out several goals for myself, and I did not really accomplish any of them. I feel somewhat guilty about this, but more so because I feel like I could have done more with my spare time in 2011, and instead I spent a lot of time doing non-productive things. And I know I shouldn't feel too guilty about that; everyone needs down time and a chance to just relax. Also, the curse of New Year's resolutions is that they almost always seem to go unfulfilled, leaving the resolver to feel bad if he or she even remembers them.

So what can I do differently in 2012? Well, I am trying a different approach this year. I have two goals, and they're pretty general. But I think I can use them to make better informed decisions about how I spend my free time. My two goals for 2012 are:

1. Be more creative.
2. Do things that benefit others.

These are pretty general goals, but then planning one's goals for an entire year should probably be pretty general. I might come up with specific projects during the year, but I want to use my goal-making to orient myself a certain way. I want to feel more productive, more helpful, and more creative. So if I pick goals along those lines, it will be (theoretically) easier for me to look at my options for free time and ask, What will help me feel more productive and creative: writing something or playing a video game?

At the same time, I also don't want to make any unreasonable promises, like, "I will not play video games in 2012." Obviously I will. I love video games, while I'm playing them. But I should play them sparingly, so the experience of playing them can remain enjoyable without consuming all my time and making me feel like I'm wasting time.

Even harder than video games, I think this means I have to consider what I read more carefully. I spend a lot of time reading fiction, but I find that much of what I read feels forgettable shortly after reading it. And reading a book is a pretty big time commitment. On the other hand, almost any non-fiction book I read leaves me with ideas for things to do, new information I find interesting, or just a general sense of accomplishment. So I should scale back what fiction I read to only things I really enjoy, and instead read more non-fiction.

More ideas will come to me, I'm sure. But I wanted to write something down so I can look back at this as January starts out.