Archon at SBTS

Yesterday, I presented to the Kentucky Council on Archives‘ User Group for Content Management and Open Source Archival Software on our use of Archon at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Archives. I gave my presentation just prior to the group participating in the SAA’s “Archon…making it work for you!” webinar that was led by Archon creators Chris Prom and Scott Schwartz. I am very thankful to the user group for inviting me to talk about Archon, and I was really excited to do so because we have had a great experience with the product. Our Archon installation can be found here. I would recommend Archon to anyone who wanted to manage and provide access to archival collections.

The user group asked that I discuss why we decided to use Archon and how we use it. Below are my ever-so-brief notes on the topic.

Why we selected Archon

1. It had a really nice web interface (both public and administrative)
2. Chris Prom’s user interactions articles in American Archivist gave me hope for the project at its earliest stages
3. It was easy to train student workers to use (contextual DACS help)
4. It runs on LAMP stack (No Java, XSLT)
5. It makes the migration of the types of legacy data we had relatively easy (MARC, EAD, CSV)
6. It is fast (my initial tests with Archivists’ Toolkit reports were somewhat slow)
7. It is free (no cost, license allows for adaptation )

How we use Archon

1. We provide web access to finding aids for collection
2. We keep track of accessions
3. We process collections (We feel that it facilitates MPLP and processing large collections)
4. It allows us to describe yet hide closed collections (visible to us, not the world)
5. It provides us with smart searching (records are returned in a hierarchical context, so it’s not just Google style searching)
6. It allows us to supply virtual arrangement
7. We use it to keep track of our offsite collections  (user defined field mapped to EAD UnitID)
8. We use it to export to our online catalog (MARC, EAD)
9. We use the digital library for some digital objects

Downsides

1. It has no real reporting suite
2. Accessioning seems more robust in Archivists’ Toolkit
3. It does not support OAI
4. It does not support Premis
5. It does not support a multi-site or collaborative setup (in the way I would envision it)
6. I am unsure of what the final ArchivesSpace product will be like
7. The user community does not seem as active as some OSS projects

Hiatus

It goes without saying, I’ve been on a bit of a blogging hiatus. Other pursuits have kept me from writing on the blog for nearly a year. I plan on continuing the hiatus for the foreseeable future. I may get back to this blog in the future. I may repurpose it. I may just retire from it. But, for the present, I will happily leave it up for whatever use it may be to anyone. For those who have read and commented here, thanks for stopping by.

Christmas Book Giveaway

Trevin Wax, an alum of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (the institution for which I work), is giving away 10 free books during the Christmas season. One of them is the stellar history of SBTS written by Dr. Greg Wills and published by Oxford University Press. Dr. Wills was a frequent user of our archives as he was writing. In fact, He worked here so often, I considered purchasing a cot for one of our storage areas to name “The Greg Wills Cot of Historical and Archival Dedication.”

All that to say, if you would like to win a copy of Wills’ superb institutional history, stop by Trevin’s blog and register to win.

Using the HTML 5 Video Tag in DSpace

I posted the following today on the DSpace wiki as a proof of concept for using the HTML 5 video tag within DSpace using Manakin. The original post can be found here.

Files:

• [manakin-source]/themes/[theme-dir]/template.xsl (The theme’s stylesheet)

• [manakin-source]/themes/dri2xhtml/DIM-Handler.xsl (The theme’s stylesheet)

[edit] Instructions:

• Caution: This is really just a proof of concept for adding support for the HTML5 video tag to xmlui. It’s based on the Classic XMLUI theme, so some things may be different for your application.

1. Add the OGV to the metadata registry using the instructions found here —> Add a new format to the bitstream registry
2. Create an OGV video. If you have Firefox, you can use Firefogg to do it.
3. Upload your video to your DSpace install.
4. If you haven’t already, you need to Create a new theme (or don’t, if you don’t want to).
5. To modify the header, locate the section of DIM-Handler.xsl that begins with <xsl:template match="dim:dim" mode="itemSummaryView-DIM">

. Copy this section into your theme’s local template.xsl and modify the XSLT as noted below.

1. Immediately following the line that reads <table> add the following code:

            <xsl:choose>
                <xsl:when test="ancestor::mets:METS/mets:fileSec/mets:fileGrp[@USE='CONTENT']/mets:file[@MIMETYPE='video/ogg']">
                        <tr class="ds-table-row odd">
                                <td><span class="bold"><i18n:text>xmlui.dri2xhtml.METS-1.0.item-preview</i18n:text>:</span></td>
                                <td>
                                        <xsl:attribute name="href"><xsl:value-of select="@OBJID"/></xsl:attribute>
                                        <video>
                                                <xsl:attribute name="src">
                                                        <xsl:value-of select="ancestor::mets:METS/mets:fileSec/mets:fileGrp[@USE='CONTENT']/mets:file/mets:FLocat[@LOCTYPE='URL']/@xlink:href"/>
                                                </xsl:attribute>
                                                <xsl:attribute name="width">
                                                        <xsl:value-of select="320" />
                                                </xsl:attribute>
                                                <xsl:attribute name="height">
                                                        <xsl:value-of select="240" />
                                                </xsl:attribute>
                                                <xsl:attribute name="controls" />
                                                <xsl:attribute name="autobuffer" />
                                        </video>
                                </td>
                        </tr>
                        </xsl:when>
                        <xsl:otherwise>
                        </xsl:otherwise>
                    </xsl:choose>

1. Of course, stop and start DSpace for good measure.
2. Visit the Item Summary View for the item you uploaded with a Firefox 3.5 or greater browser, and you should have pseudo-streaming enabled.

Retrieved from “http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/Add_HTML5_pseudo_streaming_(Manakin)“

Installing xpdf on RHEL 5

Recently, I had reason to install xpdf on RHEL 5 for use with DSpace. I had already installed freetype, but for some reason, the xpdf configure file was not able to find the freetype2.

I finally got this configured after running the following

freetype-config --cflags

This gave the output of -I/usr/include/freetype2

Next, I used that path with the configure command as follows:

./configure --with-freetype2-includes=/usr/include/freetype2/

After that, it configured perfectly.

Archon and Archivists’ Toolkit to be integrated

It was announced today within the Archon forum that Archon and the Archivists’ Toolkit will be integrated in order to combine the best features of both. I will be watching this project with much interest. I have tried both applications, and I have a definite preference for Archon. I sincerely hope that this strengthens Archon, rather than weakening it.

I can think of strengths that could be gained from this integration. A GUI could be a nice addition. The folder view in Archivists’ Toolkit is nice as well. I also hope that these development efforts will also lead to a new platform that supports union catalogs from the outset.

There are dangers in the combined efforts as well, in my opinion. I  hope that the nice, clean PHP code used in Archon doesn’t get mucked up with some sort of integration with Java, which I hate with a passion. I think using a great deal of Java would slow development and reduce the ability of many to do customization. Did I mention that I hate Java? I also hope that development isn’t stymied due to a lack of competition. Competition is always good, even when it’s between open source products. I also hope that Chris Prom’s influence on the project is undiminished. Chris’ two American Archivist articles on the EAD Cookbook and user interactions with finding aids set up a solid research foundation for the entire Archon project. Without his research, the project would not have been as good as what it is.

Still, this project holds promise, and I think the outcome will probably be good for archivists.

Baptist Church Minutes

I often work with genealogists who are looking for information about their Baptist forebears. Back in March, I spoke at a Second Saturday Workshop in Frankfort, Kentucky that was jointly sponsored by the Kentucky Genealogical Society and the Kentucky Historical Society. Below is a brief handout that I created for the occasion. It offers a few tips about finding and using Baptist church records for genealogical research.

View this document on Scribd

Open Source Solution for Converting Video and DVD

Are you thinking of starting a video conversion project? If so, you may be interested in taking a look at the newest release of an older video conversion tool.

Handbrake has been around for quite some time. It is a free and open source video conversion tool that is available for Windows, Apple, and Linux. In previous releases, Handbrake was merely a DVD ripper that many people used to convert DVDs for use on their iPods, PSPs, or cell phones.

I have used it before, but I never really considered it a good candidate for use in an archives because it just converted DVDs. However, the latest version (0.9.3) of the software makes it an ideal solution for using in an archives, because it now supports video format conversion. In other words, Handbrake will allow you to convert videos between formats. Their developers state on the wiki that “HandBrake can accept almost any sort of video file you can throw at it, although with exotic fare, things can sometimes be a little rough around the edges.” It is able to encode videos as MP4, MKV, M4V, OGM, and AVI.

Handbrake also includes a nice set of presets for encoding to devices like iPhones, iPods, and gaming consoles. Do you want to add an iPod friendly copy of some historical video you’ve converted to DVD to your institutional repository? You don’t want to take the time to learn what all of the different audio and video encoding options are? That’s not a problem, because Handbrake has them baked right in.

One other nice feature Handbrake offers is a command-line interface. What this effectively means is that with just a little bit of script-fu and a spare workstation, you can convert a whole mess of video files. Of course, you could also do this the easy way, because the graphical interface has a nice queue available as well.

The need for archiving social media illustrated

This morning’s Twitter outage illustrates the reason that social media archiving is needed. Notice also in the article updates that both Live Journal and Facebook were having problems as well.  No one knows when this type of outage could be catastrophic and result in substantial data loss. And that can happen. Even organizations that generally take data preservation seriously are susceptible to data loss and serious downtime. For example, LFPL was pouring water out of their servers just yesterday.

Now, today’s outage appears to be caused by a denial-of-service attack, so data loss will probably be minimal. But other types of digital catastrophes can cause data loss, and the data lost may be culturally and sociologically significant.

By the way, if anyone needs ideas for what to do while Twitter is down, here’s a few suggestions. They beat working on a Twitter archiving app right now. Can’t connect to the API.

What Bloggers Think about Preserving Blogs

My friend Robbie Sagers addressed the topic of social media preservation in a post on Justin Taylor’s excellent blog today. In light of Robbie’s post, I thought I would point out a poster on Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation that was presented at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries back in 2007. Some of the more interesting data from the poster includes:

• Over 43 percent of the respondents attempt some self archiving of their blogs
• Nearly 71 percent of the respondents believed that their blogs should be archived
• Nearly 50 percent of respondents believed that preserving the audio and video embedded in a blog was important
• Over 30 percent of respondents believed that archives and libraries had an obligation to preserve blogs in general