Flailing through the Archives

http://bottledmonsters.blogspot.com/2008/03/history-of-medicine-viagra-10-years.html

Is Viagra part of history now?  Yes, yes it is, in my opinion.  Just think of the cultural changes since 1998.  Now think of the political changes.  And the economic changes.   Yes, 1998 is history now.

 http://www.archivesnext.com/?page_id=124

Nominate movers and shakers in the archive community.  Due date is April 30th.

http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/ 

Want to learn new and interesting things that may or may not have to deal with Feminism and law?  Here’s the spot for you!

http://boingboing.net/

You’d be surprised how many times records and documents come up here.  Speaking of which:

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/04/01/libraries-and-the-oc.html 

Someone’s written a dissertation on how library cataloging systems marginalize the occult and make books about it difficult to find.  How cool is this student?

OpenLibrary.org  is so effin’ COOL.  It has a lot of potential, and it’s an incredibly ambitious project, but it is made of awesome.  I hope it works out really really well, because just think of the access people can have.

I’m going off to happily nerd now.

As the archival assistant here, I tend to get old video tapes chucked at me a lot.  This is both interesting and frustrating.  Interesting, because it turns shelving into a puzzle that involves moving vast numbers of VHS tapes around and frustrating because I don’t know if the tapes are important or if we have any paper description of them anywhere.

Today, I transcribed a tape at the 2002 Student Service Awards.   It was a speech given by Late Senator Paul Wellstone.   Seeing that he was kind of a big deal here, I decided to search for the text of the speech.   Alas, Sen. Wellstone gave two speeches that day.   One was two the DFL convention, and the other was at this awards ceremony.   The speech did not appear anywhere online.

So, I called up the state archives.   I talked to a lovely Reference Librarian who informed me that while the text of his speech probably exists in their archives, it has possibly not been accessioned yet, and, 6 years on (and this is just my understanding), they have not come to an agreement with the Wellstone family on how much should be released to the public.  Being a member of the public, it’s tough luck for me.

So, this morning was spent infront of a TV that has no remote control running back in forth, pausing it, rewinding it, playing it, and trying to type it out at the same time.  But we now have a paper copy of the text.

Over the weekend, between work and a bike race and eating far too much, I have been getting overly gleeful about various open source things. My dad installed Ubuntu on a computer he’s been trying to configure for ages, and had fantastic results. I was all rarin’ to go on the Archivist’s Toolkit for this morning, only to discover, ALAS, that the database program we’re using doesn’t use MARC XML.

There’s an option to export the data into an XML format, which would be fine and dandy, if it actually worked. According to the database manual, “XML is a new way to code…” Obviously, they didn’t think it would last, so they made the bloody thing export slower than molasses. No support of new technologies here. Bah. After about 45 minutes of waiting, 0% of the database has been exported into XML, so I’ve given up for now. The database will be down for all of Tuesday and Wednesday morning.

And then, there’s no guarantee that it will even work. Hopefully the database doesn’t explode and take my computer with it.