ALABI 2007

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.

Preserving Wet Blogs

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.

Hootie and the Blowfish at USC

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.

Thank God for Eddie Robinson

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.

A Very Confused Desktop

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

OCR, Open Source, and Archival Materials

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.

Digital Imaging Workshop

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.

Hint on Configuring the Archivists’ Toolkit on Linux

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.

More on Archon

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

New Tool for Archivists

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!