Things have been cooking at NYPL ever since Josh Greenberg came to run our digital library. Earlier this year, he announced NYPL Labs, where you can get a peek at the library’s digital works in progress. Today, he and his crew soft launched a redesign of the NYPL Digital Gallery, which now provides access to more than 7,000 items from our collections.
Some Times coverage of our big event yesterday.
Some of our older, more experienced gamers, who are also members of the Library’s teen advisory committees, were a tad disappointed that we only had E and T games. Instead of moping, they jumped in and started teaching the younger kids how to plan.
I couldn’t have been happier with the event. Go, Jack, go.
Arggg. Edward Rothstein slams one of the best things we are are going to do all year.
The following text is taken from our announcement:
Whaaa!!! Teens @ Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street Friday, March 21 @ 4:30 p.m. Game On @ The Library! You want games? We got games! Check out the very first big-screen Game On @ The Library event in Astor Hall! Challenge your friends to Guitar Hero, Wii Sports and Naruto on Playstation 3, Wii and Xbox 360! For ages 12 & Up!Astor Hall
Humanities and Social Sciences Library
The New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue & 42nd Street
New York, New York 10018
For additional information: (212) 930-0605
Admission is FREE
The first Rogue Librarian appeared in this film from 1986.
I am, honestly, a good cook. In a past life I regularly turned out apple pies with perfect crusts, three-cheese macaroni from hand-made pasta and shortbread with my own lemon custard. Ask my husband and three-year old about my cooking, however, and they will tell you that I dial with the best of them. A few weeks ago the kid said, “Mommy, I am going to get you some dinner from my kitchen.” She dashed to her bedroom, picked up a toy phone and parroted the previous night’s dinner order, including out area code and telephone number.
Rebecca Federman’s Cooked Books, All Things Culinary at the New York Public Library, makes me want to change my wicked ways. Federman is our cookery bibliographer and her blog digs in to NYPL’s vast food collections. This fall I am going to follow her lead and make her Swiss Macaroni and Melted Gruyere and Apple Compote recipe.
My new colleague, Jacob Nadal, points out an important difference between the preservation and prservability of blogs and other objects.
Helping someone make their blog (or anything) preservable is a matter of using well-documented and doggedly implemented standards, and creating effective safety nets against catastrophe…
He then goes on to outline the requirements for truly preserving a digital object.
Nadal, who just came to NYPL from Indiana University, and I came up with a question/thought exercise that might help define some of the requirements for documenting and preserving (aspects of) the early web. If you were to create an exhibition about the history of web design, what objects would you want to include, and how would you want to display them?
I would start the show by talking about the introduction of internet protocols and hypertext languages. The show would begin in the 1960’s and quickly sweep through the70’s and 80’s. I am not sure if I could tell the story by presenting significant correspondences and articles on paper, or if I would need to find a way of presenting early digital work on forgotten-platform emulators.
Later, in a discussion of the professionalization of web design, I would want to display books by people like Linda Weinman and Roger Black. Digital representations of those books would not do; I would want to show the physical book.
So, in addition to web browsers and pages, my show would certainly contain paper and other pre-web technologies. It would be a hybrid show about a hybrid era.
What would you want to include in this exhibition, and what do your curatorial instincts tell us about the nature of the web?
Thanks to Josh Greenberg, Alison Headley, Colin Wells, Mike Linksvayer for participating in the Digital Preservation and Blogs panel.
I’ll leave the description of the talk to more objective minds. Let me instead tell you about my two big SXSWi takeaways:
My new favorite shoes are a pair of bench-made cowboy boots from Mexico in bone, brown, mint, rose, and coral. They are surprisingly well paired with my pearl Stam bag.
I started the panel with a story about the durability of paper and traced a Malcolm X manuscript collection from a Florida storage locker, to an online auction site, to The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture. To learn more about the details of this particular collection see articles by the BBC’s Tony Phillips and Race Matters’s Emily Eakin.
I used the history of this collection to demonstrate the durability of paper. It turns out to be possible to haul a box of tree bark from state to sate, home to storage locker, cold to heat and humidity, without incurring much damage. Zeros and ones are not as tough. Had Malcolm X’s collection been created on a personal computer rather than paper, it likely would not have survived decades of neglect.
The Malcolm X story also demonstrates the importance of the individual (sometimes unwitting) collector in the preservation of our cultural heritage. Many great library and museum collections come from individuals with the foresight or good luck to gather objects and records that will tell future generations what life was like in their time.
On our panel, I think it was intellectual historian Josh Greenberg who asked about the personal history of president of the United States in 2040. She certainly will have had a had a rich social life centered around text messaging and email. She may have had a blog or have been influenced by a blogger. She will have participated in online communities like myspace or flickr. When she completes her second term in office, will her personal digital collection have survived? How will her presidential librarian collect the documentation of her early life? What primary source materials will her biographer use to uncover the story of her coming of age?
We don’t know who this teenager is now. We don’t know who among her contemporaries will rise to prominence in politics, the arts, the sciences, and so on. Because these people are not known yet, no agency is preserving their output.
Unless individuals are given the tools to preserve their own digital collections, future historians will have only secondary sources like textbooks and newspapers to tell them about the past. Our sense of history will be spotty, flat, biased, and unverifiable.
Here are a few URLs for my Digital Preservation and Blogs panel. See some of you in two hours.
My SXSW panel, Digital Preservation and Blogs, will take place on Monday, March 13 from 10:00 - 11:00.
Josh Greenberg, Alison Headley, Colin Wells, Mike Linksvayer and I will be presenting at SXSW this year.
The Short Version
The web is a fragile medium, subject to digital decay. A new blog preservation effort at The New York Public Library shows how librarians might save our digital heritage.
The Long Version
How will tomorrow’s historians understand the development and impact of blogs? What evidence will future researchers turn to when they want to examine the influence that blogs had on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, or how a blog post disgraced 60 Minutes by revealing that what was believed by Dan Rather to be a legitimate memo about George W. Bush’s military service was a forgery? What primary source material will show that it was a blogger who filed a Freedom of Information Act request and posted 361 snapshots of coffins of solders killed in the US war in Iraq?
The emergence of the early web, and of blogging, stands to be like early film; if the preservation of blogs does not begin soon, most of the initial output of this new medium and genre will be lost, and future understanding will be limited to the scraps that survive.
This fall, a group of students in the Library and Information School at Pratt worked on a small project to preserve a handful of blogs. SXSW will be hosting a panel discussion with to discuss this project, and the larger set of technical, social and legal problems posed by the preservation of blogs.