GLAM Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

Does the future look bright? Or are we entering digital dark times? Image is a photo of a poster taken in Ravensburg, September 2021. The original image is from Benni Erbsland from the Erwegung fur Radikale Empathie (Movement for Radical Empathy) based out of Stuttgart: https://bewegung-fuer-radikale-empathie.de/benni-erbsland/

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 becomes corporeal by having its prints converted from digital to canvas in real life. In this image, the Painter Goblin canvases arer bathed in sunlight provided by a west-facing window around sunset. The grid used to display the Painter Goblin in a salon style shadowed by the window frame onto the wall. The light in this image has been enhanced to increase its saturation to mirror the vibrancy of The Painter Goblin's original image.

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

Header for my talk at the Vienna Institute for Historical Research, 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.

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.

A photograph of a blue neon sign with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations: "276. “But don’t we at least mean something quite definite when we look at a color and name our color impression?” It is virtually as if we detached the color impression from the object, like a membrane. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)"

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:

Maria Krzymuska — Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28727544

I just wanted to round off this series of blogs with some remaining thoughts.

Dynamic avatars on Twitter

The visualization tells me that the first publication from my Twitter bot, created to dynamically update my avatars daily was 20 December 2012. My bot was a simple Python script that generated images in binary to represent the day of the month.

Visual representation of the binary number 0b10100 indicating the 20th of the Month -- in this instance 20 December 2012 — *20 December 2020 via https://github.com/exponential-decay/binary-numbers/blob/334d417ad2fef1ac37e082e7d78f42412d176de3/binary-numbers-original-images/binary-numbers-original-images-all/20-12-2012.png*

Why?

Well, doesn’t it get a little boring looking at the same thing every day?

Lets look at the details below.

Tag: GLAM

Digital dark times: Salaries in digital preservation

The Painter Goblin: Becoming Corporeal

Turning NASA Wake-up Calls into data

What we could do with a second life…

Digital preservation at the coalface: or how I learned that glamping doesn’t always involve the vast wilderness

Te Manaaki taonga

My GLAM: Sitting at the Coalface

Digital Preservation as a Thought Experiment

Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum

The Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…

Dynamic avatars on Twitter

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