Kansas State Publications Archival Collection

During the 2002 session of the Kansas Legislature, two significant bills were working their way through the State Senate. These two bills were an attempt by the Legislature to reduce costs associated with the publication of statutorily mandated reports and publications. Each bill attempted to leverage the use of the Internet to aid in this cost-reduction effort and pointed out some common misunderstandings about the nature of digital publication.

Senate Bill 380 was written to allow state agencies to publish any reports or publications statutorily mandated for submission to the Legislature on agency web sites and to notify the Legislature of the URL for the site. If agencies made such reports available "to the public on the [I]nternet" then they must be available online for six months and need not print copies "… so long as the state agency retains an electronic copy of such report … in the archives of the agency for historical purposes." The second bill, Senate Bill 605, amended a number of statutes in such a way as to allow agencies to publish "such report[s] on the [I]nternet and by notifying … that the report is available and providing, as part of such notice, the uniform resource locator (URL) at which such report[s] [are] available."

These two bills raised flags with the Kansas State Historical Society and the Kansas State Library which, under state law, receive at least one copy each of state publication "provided by a state agency for use by the general public" (K.S.A. 75-2565 and 75-3048). As a result, State Archivist Pat Michaelis and Marc Galbraith of the State Library testified before the Federal and State Affairs Committee on S.B. 380. They told the legislators of the instability of electronic information and of work being done by a task force on guidelines for the management of web-based information. The Committee agreed to table the bill while work continued on the guidelines and asked for a follow-up report during the 2003 session. S.B. 605 slipped under the radar, however, and was passed by the Legislature.

And the trend is continuing. A number of bills went through the Legislature during the 2003 session allowing certain publications or reports to be published electronically. In order to preserve the growing number of electronic reports and publications, the Kansas State Historical Society and the State Library have partnered with the Kansas Division of Legislative Administrative Services, the Kansas Information Technology Office, the Department of Administration’s Division of Information Systems and Communication, the Chief Information Technology Officer of the Executive Branch, and the Information Network of Kansas to develop the Kansas State Publications Archival Collection (KSPACe).

KSPACe is an implementation of a product developed by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard called DSpace. DSpace was created to house research and publications of MIT faculty and researchers. It is open source software built upon free tools such as Linux, Apache Web server and Tomcat Servlet engine, and the postgreSQL relational database system. It offers the advantages of digital distribution and long-term preservation for a variety of formats including text, audio, video, images, datasets, and more. Also it offers the opportunity to provide access to electronic information from multiple sources through one web interface.

The planned implementation of KSPACe is to start populating the repository with the specific reports named in S.B. 605, allowing the agencies cited in the bill the capability to submit their own reports. Upon the submission of a report, an e-mail will be sent to the appropriate office in the Legislature notifying the office that the report is in the repository. From that point, the notification can be placed in the House or Senate Journal, read on the floor, and/or forwarded to the appropriate committee or concerned legislators. The notification workflow can be set by collection policy, i.e., the agency responsible for creating the report will develop the policy for its documents in KSPACe. Policy can also be set to include access rights, with the default setting for the system allowing anonymous users to read documents (system security does not allow any alteration of documents already in the repository). Agencies will be allowed to restrict certain reports if statute allows for the restrictions.

The timeframe for KSPACe begins with the ingestion of the reports listed in Senate Bill 605 by the start of the 2004 legislative session. During the intervening period partnerships with the cited agencies will develop; access, submission, and workflow policies will be fleshed out; and space for agency collections will be created in the system. An implementation plan will be crafted outlining the anticipated growth of the system over the next few years and showing hardware and budget requirements.

Currently, the KSPACe pilot project is operating on a server at the Kansas State Historical Society, but present Society resources will not allow for an enterprise-wide implementation. Over the course of the next few months a funding proposal will be developed for full implementation beyond the pilot phase. For more information about the project, contact Scott Leonard at sleonard@kshs.org

NARA’s 18th Annual Preservation Conference

"Preservation Reformatting: Digital Technology vs. Analog Technology," was the theme of NARA’s annual preservation conference held March 27, 2003, at the College Park, Maryland, facility. The session brought together archivists, librarians, and records managers to discuss the access/preservation trade-offs of analog/digital reformatting. Speakers included Steven Puglia, Preservation and Imaging Specialist, Special Media Preservation Laboratory, National Archives; Howard Besser, Director of the Moving Image Archives and Preservation Program, New York University; Carl Fleischauer, Library of Congress; Ed Zwaneveld, Innovation Strategist; Abby Smith, Director of Programs, Council on Library and Information Resources; Stephen Chapman, Preservation Librarian for Digital Initiatives, Harvard University; and Ken Thibodeau, Electronic Records Archives, NARA.

All spoke of the tremendous costs of keeping digital information, however, there can be tremendous benefits, as Abby Smith demonstrated in her discussion of a rare St. Petersburg Atlas. Not only could the atlas be pieced together in a digital setting, but with certain technologies, a researcher could get a close-up view that no curator would have ever allowed. Stephen Chapman discussed the need for some digital enhancements because users, the Harvard community, expected and demanded it. Mr. Chapman spoke of Harvard’s depository system for paper, microfilm, and digital materials, and the cost advantages/disadvantages for preserving or storing materials there.

Other conference topics included: preservation challenges of digital television, long-term management of digital repositories, managing large digital projects, and metadata and technical information for the management and use of digital images. Copies of the presentations are available online through the NARA web site.

OCLC Issues White Paper on Incentives to Preserve Digital Materials

The OCLC Online Computer Library Center issued in April a white paper by Brian F. Lavoie titled "The Incentives to Preserve Digital Materials: Roles, Scenarios, and Economic Decision-Making" as part of its Economics of Digital Preservation Project.

The report’s executive summary section explains: "Digital preservation tops the agendas of many institutions in the cultural heritage and information management communities. As the number of digital assets which they own outright, or for which they are at least stakeholders, continues to expand, the need to take measures to secure their long-term availability grows commensurately. Technical challenges remain in regard to achieving this objective. But as digital preservation moves beyond the realm of small-scale, experimental projects to become a routine component of a digital asset’s life-cycle management, the question of how it can be shaped into an economically sustainable process begins to overshadow other concerns. The fundamental economic issue associated with digital preservation concerns the incentives to preserve digital materials. The incentives to preserve can be characterized as perceived motivation sufficient to 1) induce a party to recognize a need to take action to secure the long-term viability of digital materials in which they are a stakeholder, and 2) induce a party to develop and implement technologies aimed at ensuring the long-term viability of digital materials. These incentives impact three key economic decision-makers in the digital preservation process: Rights Holder…, Archive…, [and] Beneficiary."

The remainder of the report delves deeper into this thesis, offering discussion of economic theory, applicable current work, and models in the field; touching on costs and financing; and examining potential strategies for success. Although some specific examples are given, the author covers the material at a fairly high level, with the goal of laying the foundation for future research. In this regard, he concludes that, "A thorough understanding of the nature and extent of the incentives to preserve is fundamental to more focused research into the economics of digital preservation. Future research activity should include the accumulation and synthesis of digital preservation case studies; the development of appropriate policies for enhancing incentives based on the characteristics of the underlying organizational model; characterizing and analyzing the structure of aftermarkets associated with digital preservation services; and devising sustainable pricing strategies for digital preservation services."

Duluth Lynchings Online Resource

On June 15, 1920, three young black men named Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie were murdered in Duluth by a white mob estimated to number between 1,000 to 10,000 people. Accused of raping a white woman – compelling evidence later asserted no rape ever took place – the men were broken out of the jail, given a hasty mock trial, beaten, and then hung from a lamppost on a downtown street corner. In an effort to increase awareness and encourage scholarship of this tragic event, the Minnesota Historical Society has created the Duluth Lynchings Online Resource.

The Duluth Lynchings Online Resource facilitates access to a wealth of primary source materials relating to the lynchings. The site features an in-depth database of historical documents gathered from the Society’s library and archives. Most scanned from microfilm, these documents include newspaper clippings, investigative reports, trial transcripts, prison records, and photographs. Documents can be viewed online as images or text, and are available as PDFs for printing. The collection is searchable by keyword, with an advanced options allowing users to limit searches by date, document type, and other parameters.

Additionally, the web site provides excerpts from oral histories of African Americans who lived in Duluth at the time of the lynchings. Created in Flash and containing imagery and audio, the oral histories reveal the impact of the event on individuals and their communities. Background text, a multimedia timeline, and other features complement the primary source materials, and help introduce users unfamiliar with the events.

In a nod to the impressive gathering of documentation, the site recently won a MUSE Award from the American Association of Museums (AAM) for outstanding achievement in museum media in the collection database category. The award will be officially granted at AAM’s May conference in Portland, Oregon.