This has nothing to do with archives. It has everything to do with trusting those who claim to serve.

My wife and I have lived in Louisville for the past six years, but we used to live in the Cherokee Springs area of South Carolina. The area is between Spartanburg and Boiling Springs. We still have friends there, and we are still interested in the area. I still like the area, and I hate to see the people there taken advantage of by entities designed to serve them. That appears to be what’s happening according to a new blog, VoteCherokeeSprings.com. It appears, if the blogger is correct, that the Cherokee Springs Fire Board is trying to sneak in a new referendum in order to raise the property taxes by 7 mils. The referendum will not appear on the ballot for the general election. It will occur on a different date in order to hide its existence from the general public. Classy.

I used to vote at CSFD, and if I still did, I would oppose this type of thing vehemently. I detest property taxes anyway, but I really detest them when people work to sneak them in. If the blog above is the whole story, it sounds like someone (ie. WSPA, Spartanburg Herald Journal) really needs to ask some serious, public questions of Commissioner Easler — like this week!

Recently, I tried for a day to set focus on a field within a form that I had created for a Rails application. It was more difficult than you might think. So, here are my instructions for anyone else who may be trying to do this.

Rails usually comes packaged with several Javascript frameworks that can make life much easier. One of these, prototype, allows us to set focus on a field.

Here’s how you do it. In your application_helper.rb file, include the following lines:
def set_focus_to_id(id)
javascript_tag(”$(’#{id}’).focus()”);
end

In your layout either for the application or the controller, include this line in the meta section:
<%= javacript_include_tag "prototype" %>

If you wanted to include all the javascript libraries, you could include this line, but it hogs bandwidth:
<%= javacript_include_tag :defaults %>

In your rhtml file that contains the field you want to set focus on, include this line:
<%= set_focus_to_id 'password' %>
Note that your id is to be the id of the field you want to set focus on. If you are using this with a form, a fine place to insert the line is right after the end tag for the form.

That’s it. If you’ve done all that, you should have focus on the field.

HT: Wolfman

This is just a FWIW in regards to Capistrano. Capistrano is a piece of software (a Ruby Gem, to be more specific) that I use to automatically deploy applications to web servers. I recently upgraded to version 2.1.0.

Previously, to set up an application under Capistrano, I would run the command cap -A .

That period at the end is part of the code.

In the new version of Capistrano, that seems to be deprecated. You now have to run capify .

So, now you know, and now I have a way to remember it.

Just today, I was working on converting a Proliant ML350 G2 server from running Windows Server 2000 to a Linux distribution. I noticed several people had this same problem with various flavors of Linux, and I did not find a legitimate workaround that did not involve a noapic option. I was getting an error that involved this line: MP-BIOS bug: 8254 timer not connected to IO-APIC.

I did find a workaround. It’s not that creative. I went to the HP/Compaq website and ran all the BIOS and firmware updates. The install went through without issue after that.

This post is just an FYI for those trying to use Capistrano on Ubuntu Feisty and running into the same problem I had. I had trouble finding specific information on the topic, thus this post.

I recently tried to use Cap on Ubuntu, and it would not work. I already had ruby and gems installed, having installed them using apt-get. I installed capistrano using the gem install capistrano. I could run gem list and capistrano was installed. All of my other gems worked fine.

When I checked the status of Capistrano using cap -h, I go the error bash: cap: command not found. After doing some searching, I found out how to fix it. Open ~/.bashrc using your favorite text editor. At the end of the file, add these lines:

#The following sets the path for Capistrano
export PATH=$PATH:/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin

Save the file and reboot. Capistrano should work now.

I just wanted to mention a couple of things in relation to preserving blogs. First, I wanted to thank Marty Duren, formerly of the influential Baptist blog SBCOutpost. Marty now blogs at ie:missional (I’m not sure what ie stands for, but I hope he’s not endorsing the web browser that dare not name it’s name.) Marty was taking down his SBCOutpost blog, and he graciously provided me with a full digital copy of the blog. I like to think of it as SBCOutpost 2.0, because Marty used to have a Blogger blog before he was converted to WordPress. SBCOutpost is now at version 3.0 as a collabroblog.

Second, I think I am getting closer to an answer on how to grab blogs and store them in a way that will ensure that their arrangement remains intact. I also think that I have a solution for how to ensure that various iterations are distinctly recorded. In other words, I believe that I will be able to do for blogs what the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine does for regular sites. Better yet, I believe I can do it with entirely free software. I also think that this solution can be used for other web resources. We will see how it turns out, but at this point I have reason to be very hopeful. At this point, I am more concerned with preservation than access. I need to preserve all these “wet blogs” before they dry up.

On last Wednesday afternoon, we had session 2 of the ALABI meeting. What follows is my summary of the second session. But first, I want to mention to talk about the disaster preparedness forum that I forgot to mention in my last post.

Disaster Preparedness Forum

The forum involved Bill Sumners of the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, and Jeff Griffin, the director of the library at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. It was interesting hearing Jeff’s perspective on the subject due to the disaster issues they had to deal with in New Orleans after Katrina. After all, how do you prepare for being away from your collection for over six weeks while it languishes in the New Orleans heat and humidity because your HVAC system is down? Jeff talked a great deal about leadership in such situations, and he offered that when you go through disaster, leadership is key. Some workers may not be able to give orders to people or make decisions for a variety of reasons. They may be effective in day to day operations, but they may not be very creative, and that is exactly what you need in a time of crisis. Jeff also talked about the benefit that the Southern Baptist Convention was to NOBTS. He said that the Cooperative Program really came in handy. Over 5000 volunteers from the SBC have helped there at one point or another. The volunteers laid over 100 tractor trailer loads of sod, so NOBTS is now the most identifiable piece of land in their parrish. Bill also talked about numerous small disasters that they have had over the years at SBHLA.

Session 2– Decoding the Mission Statement of the Baptist History and Heritage Society: Helping Baptists Discover, Conserve, Assess, and Share Their History

Yep. That is a long title, but it is not as long as An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to Use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens in which the Religious State of the Different Nations of the World, the Success of Former Undertakings, and the Practicability of Further Undertakings, are Considered. Baptists tend to do you the courtesy of telling you exactly what they’re going to tell you about directly before they tell you about it. The original title of this post was “ALABI 2007–Session 2 Summary, in Which Is Presented the Previously Overlooked Contribution of Jeff Griffin and Bill Sumners to the Subject of Disaster Preparedness via a Forum on Said Subject, as well as an Explanation of the Mission Statement of the Baptist History and Heritage Society with Particular Attention Given to Discovery, Conservation, Assesment, and Sharing.” I was afraid the title would break feed readers all over the place, though, so I relented.

Charles Deweese, director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society, presented the second session, and I really did find it very informative. This is only my second year in ALABI, and I never had the privilege of attending an SBLA meeting, so I knew nothing of its history. I was somewhat familiar with the historical relationship between the Southern Baptist Historical Commission, the Southern Baptist Historical Society, and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, but I really knew very little about how the SBHS became the BHHS following the defunding of the SBHC. I also did not know anything about the relationship between ALABI and the BHHS. I knew that the ALABI meeting always took place directly proceeded BHHS meeting, that the two meetings usually met in the same general location, and that many of the members of ALABI also attended the BHHS meeting, but I never really knew why all this was the case. After listening to Dr. Deweese and asking a whole bunch of questions during the meeting, I think I understand now. I appreciate Alan Lefever’s patience in explaining much of this to me. In short, the two groups are independent. SBLA originally sprang out of a breakout session for librarians at the SBHS meetings. I will add more about the relationship and history in a later post.

Deweese talked briefly about the fact that the BHHS is moving to the Atlanta campus of Mercer University. He then began to unpack the mission statement of the organization. He said that the BHHS is unapolegetically Baptist. While he believes there is enormous value in all Christian communities, he claims that the Baptist approach to the New Testament is a good approach, and worth talking about. He himself was raised to “think, feel, and do Baptist.” He said that he believes it’s important to lay out one’s distinctives.

He offered that the BHHS is a true society. They have to raise a lot of money to keep it going. Fifty five percent of his work is raising money, and contributions come from many different groups. Dr. Pam Durso is in charge of operations. The society has close to 900 members comprised of both individuals and libraries. He claims that the membership is becoming more representative of the name. I suppose that he means that there is an increasingly larger number of members coming from outside of the South, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the United States.

The primary thrusts of the organization are publication and communication. He noted that they are not a library or archival organization. He talked about several upcoming meetings of the BHHS, and several upcoming publications that they have in the works. I won’t go into detail about all of these since the information will be available on their website later.

For those who have been waiting for reviews of the sessions, I apologize for the tardiness of this review of session 1. I have been pretty busy over the past week. I will try to get the others done as soon as I can. I am a very bad blogger.

This year’s meeting was not as well attended as last year’s but I think the members that attended really enjoyed it. The Campbellsville University community was very welcoming. The food was good, and the conference room in the new chapel was extremely well suited for the event. I especially enjoyed the tour of the library and special collections that Dr. John Burch, the university librarian, graciously provided for us.

During the first session, Elizabeth Wells of Samford University played a YouTube quality video about disaster preparedness that the library staff at Samford developed for instructing patrons about their disaster plan. It was one of the funniest library related videos I’ve ever seen. Not to be a hater, but Lizz’s vid was much funnier than “The OPAC Sucks.” Following that, Becky Ryder of the University of Kentucky presented a helpful session on disaster preparedness. She described the way that the entire UK library system worked together to create a disaster plan that would cover the entire system. She also told us about several helpful tools that can be used for disaster preparedness. One of the most helpful things she told us was her “top 6 things you need in case of disaster”:

1. Rolled Plastic
2. Cut Plastic
3. Fans
4. Dehumidifier
5. Towels
6. Disposable Camera

Dr. Ryder also demonstrated the proper technique for drying wet photos, damp books, soaking wet books, and muddy soaking wet books. All in all, this was a very helpful session. In the future, it would be nice if we could record either audio or video for some of these sessions. Recording could cause a drop in attendance, but I think the more likely scenario is that when librarians hear the quality of some of the sessions, they will be likely to attend.

In my previous post on wet blogs (ie. Baptist blogs), I noted that I would be doing a series of posts dealing with preserving wet blogs (and blogs in general). I just wanted to point out a couple of people that seem to have similar concerns.

First, Marty Duren posted today about the relationship between blogs and traditional denominational media outlets. He argues that media outlets such as Baptist Press should be more open to publishing blogs and bloggers on their sites. Marty rightly recognizes the influences of blogs on denominational life.

Second, Timmy Brister, Owen Strachan, and Tony Kummer have developed a collaborative blog project called Said at Southern Seminary. The project aggregates blogs from many bloggers related to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and publishes content on a variety of issues. Appropriately enough, you can find out more about the project at its About page. While this project in no way guarantees the permanence of blogs or blog content, it demonstrates the concern of some bloggers for bringing together blogs related to a common object of love.

Yesterday’s meeting was pretty informative. I will post a more detailed report of all sessions sometime this afternoon. During the business meeting today, I will be presenting the report for the communications committee. Our report will propose some fairly major changes to the web site. If it passes, we will probably have constantly updating content on the site. Hopefully, more content can generate interest in the organization and can be a medium for encouraging the type of wider participation that I suggested yesterday.

I am at ALABI 2007 today. Thankfully, it was near to home this year. Last year was Richmond, and me and my buddy Andrew had to make that long haul through KY, WV, and VA in order to go. This year it’s at Campbellsville University.

The meeting will take place in the chapel here at Campbellsville. This year, their will be four sessions. The first session will address disaster preparedness, and there is a panel discussion following it. This afternoon, Charles Deweese, the director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society, will talk about the mission statement of the Baptist History and Heritage Society.

Tomorrow, there will be a section entitled, “ALABI — Who We Are, What We Do, Where We Are Going.” I think these are all important questions for an organization that is in a transitional stage. Finally, will have the business session tomorrow, and after that we will have a tour of Campbellsville’s archives.

This is my second year being involved with the organization. It was encouraging to see the camaraderie that existed within the association last year. Of course, many of the members have known each other for a number of years through their participation in the now defunct Southern Baptist Library Association. I am thankful that the new association has a different name for several reasons. First, as an archivist, I am glad that the name includes us. A tip-o-the-hat is always appreciated. Second, I think that the association has a name that is able to bring together Baptists of various stripes. As a Baptist archivist, I am not only concerned about the records of Southern Baptists, even though those are the records with which I primarily work; I am also concerned about the preservation of and access to the records of American Baptists, National Baptists, and various Baptists from other nations besides the United States. And that’s another positive about the name of the organization: it’s not regional. Now the members of the organization are mostly located in the South and mostly have ties to institutions that are presently or were formerly related to the Southern Baptist Convention. But with a name like ALABI, the organization can serve many Baptists from many regions, and that’s a good thing.

I need to go register. I probably won’t live blog because I probably won’t have access, but I will try to type up some notes later.

For Baptists, especially Southern Baptists, it’s been a busy year. If you don’t believe me, one Baptist blogger has been keeping a log.

Ironically, it was about this time last year that I struck up a conversation with another Southern Baptist archivist about Baptist blogs while attending the ALABI meeting in Richmond. I mentioned that the whole idea of Baptist blogs and how to preserve them really troubled me, and I asked if his organization was doing anything in the way of preserving blogs. He confessed they were not, and he mentioned that he had not really thought much about it. I told him that our strategy was not the best, but that we had been trying to select, print, and file representative posts from a various important Baptist blogs. Admittedly, the selection criteria is highly subjective, and the original context of the item is destroyed, but at least something of the conversation is preserved.

At that time, I mentioned that several Baptist blogs were creating quite a stir within the denomination. One blogger in particular had criticized new policies that affected the appointment of international missionaries, and bloggers on all sides of the issues blogged, commented, and trackbacked their opinions for weeks on end. Seemingly, the whole denomination was at odds. Some bloggers accused denominational officials of nepotism and favoritism. Other bloggers clashed over theological and social issues, such as the use of alcohol by Christians and the relationship between baptism and church membership. Perhaps most importantly, the outcome of the impending SBC presidential election looked like it could be affected by bloggers. We parted that day, agreeing that we should talk about the problem later. We both got busy with our lives and jobs, and we have yet to finish the conversation.

Less than a month later, the SBC Annual Meeting was over, the dark horse presidential candidate that many of the bloggers endorsed came away with the victory, and newspapers such as the Washington Post and Raleigh’s News and Observer took notice. In less than a year, a group of loosely organized individuals helped shape the face of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States–and they used one of the most volatile mediums ever created to do it.

Here’s the rub; for many Baptists, blogs have replaced denominational newspapers as the default source for theological and denominational information and engagement. Those 19th century Baptist papers, however, seem to be much easier to preserve because of their fixed formats. Will 22nd century Baptists be able to read the “newspapers” of 21st century Baptists? Perhaps, but are we willing to chance it?

For the past year, I have maintained my current preservation strategy for such blogs, but I have continually been thinking and reading about the problem of archiving blogs. It’s the kind of thing that keeps me up at night, and that’s probably why I’m writing right now.

My present print-and-file strategy works…sort of. It does what Gerald Ham recommended in that it provides an accurate record of human experience–the experience of those humans called Baptists, but it does it at the high cost of losing the context. I can’t help but think that there has to be a better way to accurately preserve these “wet” blogs in an electronic format that does due diligence to their context before their content evaporates.

Over the next few posts, I want to explore my ideas on how best to ensure that the next generation of Baptists (or any other group for that matter) have the benefit of being able to read about the issues that are relevant to groups in our day. Some solutions have been offered for this problem, and I will try to assess as many of those as possible. And I promise, I plan to offer real suggestions for a way forward before this series is over. If there’s one thing that irritates me, it’s reading articles that amount to nothing more than glorified hand wringing. That’s the last thing that I want this series to be, and hopefully, before it’s finished, some suggestions, and possibly even some code, will emerge here.

My wife and I traveled to SC over spring break to see family and attend South Carolina’s annual Garnet and Black game. This year, we had a special treat in that Hootie and the Blowfish played before the game and at halftime. Here’s a brief video I took while they were playing. The songs from Cracked Rear View are timeless. They’re as good today as they were ten years ago.

On Tuesday, the world lost one of the most important sports figures of the twentieth century, Eddie Robinson. Eddie Robinson coached Grambling State University from 1941 to 1997, and when he retired, he was the winningest football coach in NCAA history, having won a staggering 408 games. In 57 years as a head coach, Robinson only had 8 losing seasons. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1997.

Despite having coached his entire career at Grambling State, a historically black college, Robinson should also be remembered for his quiet contribution in helping to fully integrate the National Football League. It’s somewhat ironic that Eddie Robinson, a man whose name was unfamiliar to most sports fans in the U.S., died in the same month that we remember another Robinson, Jackie Robinson, for breaking the race barrier in Major League Baseball. Yet it’s also ironic that Major League Baseball gets so much attention for integrating when the National Football League, and the Los Angeles Rams in particular, beat them to the punch. In 1946, over a year before Jackie Robinson would walk onto the diamond for the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Rams signed two former UCLA standouts, Kenny Washington and Woody Strode.

So how does Eddie Robinson play into all this history of integration? Robinson was instrumental in making certain that athletes who chose to attend historically black colleges had an opportunity to play in the NFL. In his book, America’s Game: The Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation, Michael McCambridge describes Robinson’s role in making sure that Grambling State’s Tank Younger, the first NFL player from a historically black college, was successful enough in the NFL.

In July, before Younger left for the Rams’ training camp, Crambling coach Eddie Robinson sat down with him and methodically explained what Younger might expect: a cold shoulder from many of his teammates, late hits and dirty plays from opponents, and likelihood of racial slurs wherever he turned.”You have to let it go in one ear and out the other,” Robinson implored, looking into Younger’s eyes. “You have to make the ball club.”

In this, Robinson was unusually adamant, emphasizing that the stakes went beyond Younger and a professional football career. “Tank, if you go up there and you don’t make it, there’s no telling how long it’ll be before somebody gets a chance,” said Robinson. “They’ll be able to say, ‘We took the best you had to offer, and he wasn’t good enough.’” (57)

When Younger was first scouted by the Rams, full integration was by no means a finished work, and there were only five black athletes in the league. Robinson was certain that black athletes and black colleges depended upon Younger’s success, and he was willing to do whatever he could to help Younger achieve success. McCambridge describes how when Younger arrived at the Rams’ training camp, he struggled to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible play calls developed by the team’s slightly unbalanced technical adviser, Clark Shaughnessy. To be honest, Younger was probably not alone in finding such jibberish as “Brown Stash Mutt Purple Jack Shuffle Right Wheel Left,” nearly incomprehensible (62). Yet when Younger did struggle early during Camp, it was Robinson who carefully explained the system to Younger over the telephone, and who encouraged the future five time Pro Bowler to endure. In doing so, Robinson paved the way for many other athletes from historically black colleges. So for the next few days, while sports news outlets are reminding us that without Eddie Robinson players like Tank Younger and Doug Williams might never have made it to the NFL, let’s also remember that without Eddie Robinson, players like Walter Payton and Jerry Rice might never have played on Sundays. Shudder the thought. Thank God for Eddie Robinson

Notice anything funny about this pic? Are Fedora and Windows living together on a Desktop in harmony? Nah. Just a funny looking VNC connection.

While in the workshop today, I started wondering about whether there were open source OCR software options that could be used in conjunction with the GIMP. There is one piece of software that I found that does it. I also found this article, and I can’t wait to try it out sometime.

I am spending today at a Solinet workshop in Lexington, KY. The workshop deals with digital imaging. So far, it’s been fairly informative. Probably the most helpful aspect of the workshop thus far has been the discussion of the scan once methodology for digitizing images. We also received some pretty helpful handouts that have some nice tables that describe the file formats, resolution, and bit depth that you should use for master, intermediate, and access files. I may try to reproduce the tables on here later as it is pretty common information, but the way it was arranged was helpful. I am sure I will be using these tables in the archives.

I finally got the Archivists’ Toolkit configured on a Linux machine for testing. I installed the Linux version of AT with Java VM built in. It was a hefty download, but it seems to work well so far.

I did notice one small peculiarity. When I tried to install using the sh ./InstallArchivistsToolkit.bin command from a terminal, the install would break, and I would get an error that began with awk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2.

I did a little bit of searching and came across this post. Apparently, when using SUSE (I am using OpenSUSE) and sometimes Fedora, one encounters problems because of a line in the binary file. To quote the above post,

export LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5
should read
#xport LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.2.5

The problem is, when you try to open and fix the .bin file in a text editor such as vi, it somehow mangles the code.

To fix the program, here’s what I did. First, I backed up my installer to make sure that I didn’t have to redownload. Then, I installed GHex, the Gnome Hex editor. If you’re using SUSE, you can install it with Yast. If you’re using Fedora, you can probably install it with Yum.

After you install GHex, start it. Click on File, then Open, and open the InstallArchivistsToolkit.bin install file. Left click on the right panel (ie. the one with characters that make sense.) Click on Edit, then replace. Type export LD in the right panel of the find section and #xport LD in the right panel of the replace section. Click on replace all. Cancel out of the replace dialog and save the file.

You should be able to run the file now. However, if you have to make this modification, you will also have to modify more of the Archivists’ Toolkit files in the exact same manner. I had to enter my Archivists_Toolkit directory and change both the Archivists_Toolkit and the AT_Initialize_Database files as well in order to get the program to run correctly. If in doubt about any part of the program, run that part from the command line, and watch for the results. If it fails because of this error, you will see awk: error while loading shared libraries: libdl.so.2 when it fails. If you see that, you know you need to edit the file.

For those interested in finding out more about the Archon Project, the project’s website now has a listserv and better documentation.

I mentioned earlier that the Archivist’s Toolkit had been released. Tomorrow, the Archon Project is scheduled to release version 1.10 of Archon. I played with version 1. It was easy to install and a very powerful tool. The digital library function was particularly promising. I noticed a couple of bugs in version 1 while testing it, so I didn’t put it into production. I am fairly certain that these bugs will be remedied in this latest release, and I cannot wait until I get the time to install and test it. All the folks at UIUC who were involved in this project need to be congratulated for their vision and vigor because they brought such a project into being. What an interesting and exciting time it is to be an archivist!