Winding down at Orcfax: a retrospective
With the recent announcement that Orcfax is heading into operational mode, it’s a bittersweet moment that means our adventure in…
Tag: GLAM
Digital dark times: Salaries in digital preservation
The Serpentine is one of the world’s most renowned art galleries. Their exhibitions as varied as Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst, and Marina Abramović. They don’t hold a permanent collection, instead, they provide a space for temporary collections and an annual pavilion, the pavilion designed by luminaries such as Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Ai Weiwei.
Given a recent job posting it looks like they are looking at maintaining their memory better and branching out into digital preservation.
Here’s the kicker — its salary band is GBP 35,000 to GBP 38,000. So it must be an entry level position, especially in London, right?
Well, let’s see what they want you to do for that price tag…
The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal
When you move country you have to be prepared to change quite a lot about your life. Back at the end of 2020, apart from literally everything else going on my partner and I also moved from Canada to Germany.
For me, this was my fifth or so international move (including shorter temporary stays) in as many years.
Being able to pick up sticks and move like that means living a drastically minimized life. Most of the things you have fit in a suitcase. Most of the things you have are small, and largely not overly whimsical. Sure, you can fit a few treasures into your bag, but you learn to value small ones, not things you might otherwise use to decorate an entire apartment!!
So, what do you do when you do have an apartment to decorate?
You ask the best known painter in your family to conjure some magic, The Painter Goblin!
Turning NASA Wake-up Calls into data
For a while back then I was into space flight again. Scientists, science communicators, and engineers were all excited for a new era of rocket launches and the potential unification of the human race as we look towards the future.
During that time I discovered Colin Fries’ work in the NASA History Division to document all NASA “Wake-up calls”. A wake-up call is simply a piece of music used to wake astronauts on missions, a different piece of music, daily, for the duration of the flight.
Take, for example, the last Space Shuttle mission (Space Transportation System) STS-135; it was in flight for 13 days, and the wake-up call on day one was Coldplay’s Viva la Vida, while on day 13 it was Kate Smith singing God Bless America.
As a huge music buff who has the radio or music television on 18 hours a day, I really wanted to delve into this further. While Colin’s work is great, it’s just a PDF file (@wtfpdf). A PDF is not an ideal file format for querying data and gleaning new insights. So, while I wanted to explore it, I first decided to turn it into a true dataset. The result was a set of resources, a website, a JSON, a CSV, and an SQLite database which are each more functional and more maintainable over time.
Lets take a look at the results and https://nasawakeupcalls.github.io below!
What we could do with a second life…
Cleaning up some posts today for clarity or for improving their appearance in ActivityPub instances I didn’t want to lose this quote introduced to us at Archives New Zealand in a visit from Verne Harris back in 2017. It represents the need for a second life to apply all of the lessons learned in this one – in the GLAM sector, everything we learn getting up to speed, to learn how to work within our institutional boundaries, to align with corporate strategy, or just to hustle to have our work recognized and valued.
My colleague Andrea references the quote a lot and I am often reaching to recall it.
We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. – Henry James, The Middle Years
Digital preservation at the coalface: or how I learned that glamping doesn’t always involve the vast wilderness
The last Friday of March this year, I was invited by Elizabeth Kata at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) to give a presentation at the Vienna Institute for Historical Research (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung). I don’t have a transcript for that day or a complete set of notes that I followed, but here is the essence of the talk. In it, Reflecting on community and self-development in digital preservation; I touch upon, among other things, community, recognizing privilege, and finding value and meaning in digital records.
I began and ended the talk by singing two Waiata, an important part of my previous role at Archives New Zealand.
Te Manaaki taonga
Te Manaaki taonga
E whakarauika ana I te tini e
E ranga ana I te tira
Hei huruhuru moo te manu ka rere
Hei Poutuumaaro mo te kainga
Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata
Manaaki taaonga manaaki tangata
(Tane chant: Tuituinga koorero tuituinga tangata.
Manaaki taaonga manaki tangata – Hi!)
(Last time Wahine join chant: manaaki tangata – Hi!)
The value/prestige in protecting treasures
They gather/connect the people like the gathering of fish
They weave the party/masses
To be like feathers of a bird that takes flight
To be a strong pillar for our home
The sewing of stories, the sewing of people
The protection of treasures the protection of people
My GLAM: Sitting at the Coalface
Back in October a good friend of mine at the Australian Society of Archivists Victoria Branch asked me to write a short piece describing ‘My GLAM’. I adopted the theme, “Sitting at the Coalface”.
GLAM stands for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. In the article I described where my focus in the digital preservation world has been for the last decade. I also suggested that one letter was missing from GLAM: ‘P’ for ‘people’.
The full text of this short piece is below.
Digital Preservation as a Thought Experiment
Back in 2017, I had an abstract accepted for a chapter in the ALCTS Monograph: Digital Preservation in Libraries: Preparing for a Sustainable Future. With my author’s copy now available, I take a look at the background and its genesis below. The complete monograph is a fascinating read with some great contributors. You can find it online at the ALA Store.
Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum
When I visited the Brooklyn Museum in February they were in the middle of their Infinite Blue exhibition. Surveying the entire collection, Infinite Blue collected museum objects that prominently featured the color blue. Part of their Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum.
A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum presents the history of feminism and feminist art while showcasing contemporary artistic practices and new thought leadership.
While not explicitly stated in their literature, Blue seems to have been selected by the museum’s curators for embodying core feminist values:
In cultures dating back thousands of years, blue—the color of the skies—has often been associated with the spiritual but also signifies power, status, and beauty. The spiritual and material aspects of blue combine to tell us stories about global history, cultural values, technological innovation, and international commerce.
The Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…
The work on the Painter Goblin is almost complete for now. The automation of their work is pretty much ironed out with regular tweets happening every night.
A recent favorite:
I just wanted to round off this series of blogs with some remaining thoughts.