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.