For this class, find someone who has extensive experience in home canning; in water bath and in pressure cooker techniques. One of the best resources to find an instructor is the community itself. A resource that is not always utilized is the Master Food Preservers for your county or state. Masters are required to give at least 20 hours volunteer time per year to public outreach. Check with your state’s Extension program. Chances are there is a Master Food Preserver in your area.

The class should go over the specifics of how to preserve your garden harvest using the hot water bath method, pressure canner techniques, drying, and freezing. Bring in a variety of pots and other equipment that can be used for canning. Outsource your books: utilize your library system’s collection and bring in books on canning, preserving, fermenting, and homesteading for a table display. Offer your patrons who can’t make the class, or those who attend further reading.

There are online resources available for the novice preserver or the experienced one.  YouTube has many videos from reputable sources. One resource that can greatly improve a class is the Ball Canning’s website. Their Canning 101 video and pdf printouts are invaluable. It will help you save time writing out your own notes and, as the video is in the public domain, your presentation is already set. This is a virtually no cost class presentation, perfect for adult continuing education.

If your library has its own seed library, this is a great program to help promote it. For those libraries that have one, or even a community garden, the best way to promote growing is by showing patrons what they can do with their harvest. Cooking classes or demonstrations are also effective ways to show people what they can grow in their garden and what to do with it when it’s time to harvest.

The post Anyone Can Make Homemade Pickles: Teaching Canning at the Library first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Some libraries have automatic approval orders. Those are the kind of orders in which the publishers, jobbers, or distributors send everything, and someone at the library decides whether or not an item is kept or sent back to the publisher or distributor. Many of these returned books end up at bookstores and elsewhere as ‘remainders’ at a very low price.

Recent information from the book world tells us it is currently likely that only 250 copies of a given nonfiction title will ever be sold, and only a 1 percent chance it will show up at a bookstore. Yet, with around 119,500 libraries throughout the U.S., if libraries are really in the business of preserving and giving access to what has been written, it seems strange there wouldn’t be more sales. With 725,000 self-published books available each year, and around 300,000 books published by the big 5 houses, it becomes a gargantuan task. Should libraries try?

Contemporary composers’ alliances and groups are now trying to organize and preserve new music, scores, and recordings of productions. Some collectors are still trying to collect all of the output of some artists’ works and recordings. One has to wonder what the library world is doing to preserve the printed published word. Yes, libraries do have options and opportunities to preserve some things, manage what’s best for their particular audience or customers, and within constraints of budgets, get to preserve some things. And yes there are digitization preservation programs going on to format such printed material in order to have space for it all.

We don’t know what happens to all those returned remainders when no one buys them. Although I know bookstores dump the returns in the dumpsters (after tearing off the covers for returning and getting credit) when they might have been preserved elsewhere. At one point a prison library was able to get a bookstore to donate its unreturnable books, with the library realizing full retail price tax deductions. While the prison was not in the business of preservation, it did in a way, keep the books available if only through Interlibrary Loan. One inmate at the prison wrote to the Detroit Public Library seeking a book, thinking it wouldn’t be in his small prison library; DPL did not have it, the prison library did.

Libraries are doing what they can, but discoverability is becoming increasingly difficult with OP books and OBP (out of business publishers) and M&A (mergers and acquisitions publishers). At a forum of the 66th Frankfurt Book Fair, deputy editor of The Bookseller’s Futurebook, summed it up nicely when he said: “It’s a great thing that everybody can publish a book today, and it’s a bad thing that everybody can publish a book today.”

Mostly, it falls to our national libraries such as the Library of Congress to collect all the books. This works if everyone registers for copyright, as a book or books are to be placed in the LC as part of the copyright process. This kind of preservation won’t work any longer now with eBooks and the cost of changing an address for single book authors. It will be up to consortia to figure out who collects what. Some years ago, the libraries of Wales, United Kingdom had developed a cooperative program to collect all recordings from all labels produced in the country. Different libraries would collect everything in a specified genre, then share (interlibrary loans) when the need required. There are some consortia for cooperative collection development such as ALA’s Transforming Libraries goal and objectives strategic plan of 2010 and the book “Shared Collections: Collaborative Stewardship”. Each group has some documentation of progress in their respective groups, but will there be a central organization to tell us who has what?

We have had Gap Analysis projects for training, diversity, and electronic resources, but in my very short bit of research, I see no Gap Analysis project which tells us what books,genres, and resources libraries don’t have. R. R. Bowker, The Library of Congress, OCLC, Hathi-Trust, WorldCat, and FirstSearch databases are helping, but finding a library with the work one wants and actually has available, is pretty daunting. Will we find a way, both of discovery and retrieval, and for preserving contemporary works? We may need very large initiatives of state-wide and national projects to even come close.

There are of course arguments for and against preserving all information in any of the formats. Is leaving it to the collectors a good plan?

The post Book? Book? Do You Know Where This Book Is? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

A preconference workshop regarding preservation and digitization of recorded sound was a highlight and while not part of the conference, there were presentations about the program within the conference program. The university’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative was shut down for two days for conferees to see and learn what and how things were being done. Presentations were based on the ARSC Guide to Audio Preservation created in collaboration with the Council on Library and Information Resources published in May 2015. Conferees were shown the process of the massive digitization collaboration project between Indiana University and the Memnon Corporation of Brussels, which required a whole new building with three power sources for the building, the equipment, and the recording playback equipment.

This fiftieth Conference returned to the place of the first annual conference of the group in 1967. This first conference occurred after several 1965 steering meetings initiated by Kurtz Myer, director of the Detroit Public Library Music Department, Frank Davis, curator for the Communications Section at the Ford Museum, and me. An exploratory meeting was held with audio experts and archivists at the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan after the Detroit ALA 1965 conference. The group met again in early 1966 at Syracuse University at the invitation of Walter Welch, director for the SU Audio Archives and author of From Tinfoil to Stereo, and the group was founded.[1]  Now with a name, ARSC met again in 1966 at the Library of Congress to decide on bylaws for incorporation.

Originally one of the questions to solve was, “Record, Record, Who’s got the Record?” Many libraries were struggling with that question from patrons. Solutions to finding recordings came slowly, but a bulletin and journal were started, and a directory of collectors and collections was produced early, offering some help as finding aids. Since, ARSC has given out grants for more research and publications, including the production of several membership directories.

While the focus seems now to be on preserving much of what was actually going on before 1965 and now, what happened in the ’60s fifty years ago, the questions still remains. Can we document enough to set up databases common to all collections which could then be searched to find what is needed, whether for more research, more writing, transcribing music lost in paper shuffles or just for a particular celebration of life for an individual library patron?

For now, ARSC, the American contingent of the International Association for Sound Archives are in collaborative efforts to build the largest searchable international collection of bibliographies of discographies of recorded sound. More information can be found here.

References

[1] Paul T. Jackson, “Record, Record, Who’s got the Record?” American Record Guide, April (1966): 676–678.

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Courtesy of Troy Lambert

With a little searching, I was able to find a link to the same study on the American Society for Information Science and Technology^[1] website. Still it raised the question: what happened to the other article? And how did I have to structure my search to find it?

A simple Google search of “knowledge management” would not work. The article didn’t rank high enough according to Google to appear on the front page, and most users (including me) don’t look past page two, so I needed more information for my search string. Since I looked at the article recently, I knew what university and program the professor was affiliated with, and I remembered her last name. So a search of “knowledge management Rutgers Library McInerney” brought me to the information I was looking for, but the result was still on page two. This example highlights one of the many problems with proper preservation of digital content.

On November 20, 2015, Meredith Broussard of The Atlantic stated similar concerns in an article titled The Irony of Writing Online about Digital Preservation: “The Internet archive will allow you to find a needle in a haystack, but only if you know approximately where the needle is.”^[2]

Imagine me trying to find the same Rutgers article, only a year from now. I’m likely to have read hundreds of other articles by then, and probably won’t remember the university the professor was from, and certainly not her name; I’d just have a vague notion of an article about knowledge management I would like to reference, and maybe a loose timeframe of when I read it, which has no real world relation to the date the article was published.

Not to mention the haystack is constantly growing.^[3] The number of articles, like this one, regarding similar concerns over the preservation of knowledge, will be created and archived somewhere, maybe. That’s where the irony comes in. We are writing in a digital media about the difficulty of preserving digital data, and our thoughts themselves are challenging to preserve.

It’s a vicious circle, and an ongoing problem, one that libraries are ill-equipped to solve; however, these concerns have many sources and possible solutions.

Content Management

“The challenges of maintaining digital archives are as much social and institutional as technological,” said a National Science Foundation and Library of Congress study^[4] from 2003. “Even the most ideal technological solutions will require management and support from institutions that in time go through changes in direction, purpose, management, and funding.”

Each website is hosted on some kind of platform designed to manage how the content looks to an end user, and many have unique themes. These vary from Drupal (used by Time magazine) to WordPress (where the content on my website is hosted), and dozens of others, some custom created for large media organizations. Media outlets that also create print materials have yet another Content Management System (CMS) for print content. All of this should be easy to preserve, right?

Not as easy as you think. Large archival organizations like LexisNexis or EBSCO scoop up digital feeds, bundle the information in a database, and license those packages to libraries, who can then search them by title, author, keyword, where and when they were posted, depending on what the feed is able to gather. But comparing EBSCO searches with searches in Google reveals a stark difference in the quantity of articles indexed, revealing one of many data gaps.

Gone are the days of print material being converted to microfiche, but there is a hazard: organizations that switch CMS or have several, with decades of information to preserve (i.e. The New York Times), all of it in different formats, face huge challenges, all of which can be costly.

User Expectations

User expectations have changed as well: researchers expect nearly instant results and unlimited access to information. But putting and keeping it all on the web just isn’t practical, and experiments searching for specific articles show just how challenging that is.

Such searches also raise the question of how necessary such preservation is. Unless a user is looking for a specific quote by a specific person, the proliferation of material on any subject means similar information will be found in any search. In the example above, if I hadn’t been trying to find a specific article to prove it could be done more than anything else, I could have used other sources discovered in the search string discussing knowledge management containing nearly the same information.

Social Media Interactions

Not yet included in library based searches are Tweets, Facebook posts and comments, and other online interactions authors have with their audience. These are also a source for relevant quotes and information, but social feeds are difficult for libraries to capture, archive, and preserve, let alone make useful. The Library of Congress has made an effort with Twitter, but has no idea (yet) how they will make the huge amount of data they’ve collected available to the public.^[5]

The primary reason is cost, a constant issue with both preservation and public access. It’s not just about the hundreds of terabytes of storage, a number that grows daily, but about having servers fast enough to handle even the simplest search. Searching one term in a small portion of the tweets gathered, say from 2006 to 2011, would take twenty-four hours using the library’s current technology.

There are also privacy issues, even though technically each Tweet published or Facebook update posted is already in a certain portion of the public domain, depending on the user’s privacy settings. However, this is a different method of acquisition than anything libraries have done previously, and a system has to be in place to remove deleted Tweets and posts in order to comply with the same user agreements that make them public information.

Data Gaps

Even news sites struggle with shrinking budgets, migrating CRMs and changes in IT staff. A Newspaper Research Journal article reveals major data gaps.^[6] “Not one publication has a complete archive of their website,” the article states. “Most can go back no further than 2008.”

So when you look for this article in a few months, how easy will it be to find? Even if you save it to your Twitter or Facebook feed, will the link still work? For how long? Fast forward a year. Two. Will our concerns even be the same? If you can find the article, will it be relevant? How quickly will it be lost in the haystack of other articles about digital preservation?

I don’t know how this site is being archived, or when Public Libraries Online will switch content management systems. I can save this article on my computer, or even in the cloud, but while that protects my access, at least for now, it doesn’t preserve it anywhere else. It’s likely the article I write today on digital preservation will not be preserved beyond a couple of years, whether it is of scholarly interest or not.

But with a little searching, maybe someone will find this needle in the haystack of information. At least, if they have some idea of where it might have been in the first place…

Sources

[1] McInerney, Claire. “Knowledge Management – A Practice Still Defining Itself.” American Society for Information Science and Technology 28, no. 3 (February/March 2002).

[2] Broussard, Meredith. “The Irony of Writing Online About Digital Preservation.” The Atlantic, November 20, 2015. http://theatln.tc/1Qyguv2.

[3] Fridman, Alan. “3 Ways Big Data Has Changed the Digital Age.” Inc.com, July 19, 2015. http://bit.ly/1fgNYho.

[4] Hedstrom, Margaret. “It’s About Time Research: Challenges in Digital Archiving and Long-Term Preservation.” Report presents to Workshop on Research Challenges an Digital Archiving and Long-Term Preservation, Washington, DC, April 12-13, 2002.

[5] LeFrance, Adrienne. “Library of Congress has archive of tweets, but no plan for its public display.” The Washington Post, January 13, 2013. http://wapo.st/1mTDBUJ.

[6] Hansen, Kathleen A., and Nora Paul. “Newspaper archives reveal major gaps in digital age.” Newspaper Research Journal 36, No. 3 (2015): 290–298. DOI: 10.1177/0739532915600745.

The post A Needle in a Haystack: Writing Digitally about Proper Digital Preservation first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

On an international level, former librarians in Tokyo, Japan are collecting and preserving historical maps that plot out U.S. air raid damage from World War II. One of the former librarians, Gen Yamazaki has both a professional and personal connection to these maps. As a library professional during the war, he was responsible for guiding patrons to safe locations during air raid strikes. On more than one occasion, he witnessed death, tragedy, and loss of land and personal property due to these air raids.

In an effort to preserve these rare documents, he also hopes that young people will “see the discovery of such maps as a ‘milestone’ toward peace and a ‘lesson’ about the misery of war.” [1] Throughout political and social changes, history is being created within our very communities and within our library collections without even realizing it. Future generations of patrons will form their own conclusions of their community’s history based on these documents.

In my own library, we are currently working toward organizing and preparing documents for digitization so that members of the public can have equitable access to newspapers, maps, photographs, and other documents that give insight into their collective history. As anyone who has performed genealogy or local history research can attest, there are often realms of the past that we did not know about, have forgotten, or simply do not understand. Nevertheless, it is imperative to determine how this type of local-level information can be stored and made accessible.

While my library’s local history collection clearly differs from the local historical map collection that Mr. Yamazaki is preserving, it is important to for professional librarians to understand the significance of community stories and histories, as well as determine where the public library fits into the conversation.

^[1] Iwakiri, Nozomi. “Ex-librarians Collect Tokyo Air Raid Maps in Effort to Promote Peace.” The Japan Times. (2015). Web. 22 Nov. 2015. http://bit.ly/1I8l63

The post Preserving History first appeared on Public Libraries Online.