Tag: library

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Going to the Library of Congress

For just about the last four years I have had the distinct pleasure to work on Zotero and a range of other projects at the Center for History and New Media. It has been an amazing experience and opportunity, and I am grateful to CHNM’s senior staff for all the opportunities they have provided me to hone my skills related to this thing we now call the digital humanities. My time at the Center has shaped the way I think about software and scholarship.

I am very excited to bring this experience into my new position as an information technology specialist with the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIP) in the Office of Strategic Initiatives at the Library of Congress. I will be specifically working with the technical architecture team. I have been following NDIIP for a while, and not only are they working an array of important and fascinating projects, but everyone I have met who is associated with the program is fantastic.

I am still going to be around George Mason University. Over the years at CHNM I have been thrilled to have the opportunity to collaborate with so many of the folks in the History and Art History program, both through projects at CHNM and through my coursework in the MA program. While I won’t be on campus every day, I will still be around once a week for courses as I continue to work on my doctoral studies in the College of Education and Human Development.

I have a few weeks before I start my new position, and I find I have to pinch myself every once and a while. Growing up just outside of Milwaukee, I never imagined that I could end up working at a place like the Library of Congress. I couldn’t be more excited about the future.
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Mining Old News For Fresh Historcal Insight

This week I had the honor of participating in the Library of Congress’ national strategy for digital news summit. The Library gathered together a diverse mix of corporate and public archivists, representatives from public and private foundations, and librarians to discuss the digital future of news. The conversations focused on both how to preserve born digital news and how to archive old news migrating into digital forms. I was honored to have a chance to bring in my perspective as a consumer of that archived news.

I gave a short presentation about some of the ways digitized historical news enables historians to ask different kinds of questions. I think the talk has some implications for both historians and digital archivists, so I thought I would share the gist of the talk here to continue the conversation we started at the meeting.

In my mind this contributes to ongoing discussions about the role that digital tools should play in re-framing conversations about historical methodology. Since the structure of the archive plays a significant role in the structure and character of the kinds of questions a historian can ask it’s crucial for historians to be involved in helping shape these archives.

A Use Case for Historical News: Marie Curie Visits America

On May 11, 1921, the world’s most famous female scientist disembarked from a long Atlantic voyage in New York City. For the ten weeks Marie Curie toured the United States, she was greeted as an international celebrity, according to the New York Times, the “biggest hit of any celebrity who has come to New York” for quite some time. Curie was greeted with speeches and fanfare in New York, Washington DC, Pittsburgh and Chicago, gracing major news papers several times a week. Less than a year after American women won the right to vote through the 19th Amendment, Marie Curie —the only noble laureate twice over and worlds most distinguished women of science— visited the United States. Last year I decided to explore how different periodicals reported on Curie’s visit. Analysis of coverage of her visit exposes divergent ideas about the place of women in American science, society and work emerging in the early twentieth century. For our purpouses, this case also exposes some of the transformational power  databases and digital tools present for  historical inquiry.

Asking A Database Historical Questions

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It took me six seconds to find the 1512 references to Marie Curie in the entire history of the New York Times, the Atlanta Constitution, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Wall Street Journal. Now this obviously saved me a ton of time, but the implications of this search are much deeper than this. Reading the entire history of these publications for mentions of Curie would not only be impractical, it would be impossible.

If I had wanted to explore press coverage of Curie in the pre-full-text search world, I would have selected a few key dates when I would expect her to have been mentioned, gone to the library, and rolled out the microfilm. I would have found many of these articles, but the time it takes to find them requires a larger upfront commitment to exactly what I intend to explore, and how I want to explore it. With search I have the ability to quickly get a feel for different questions in different queries while simultaneously uncovering mentions of Curie on editorial pages and in periods I would not have expected to find her mentioned.

Personal Archive Tools Exponentially Increase This Transformative Power

Repositories like Proquest historical News are powerful, and their ability to allow users to explore connections between items inside their collections has a powerful effect on the kinds of questions historians can ask about their contents, but that is just the surface of the potential these databases afford. With a tool like Zotero it is possible to aggregate materials from a variety of different sources and mine them in sophisticated ways for historical insights.

After I gathered the relevant items and fulltext PDFs from Proquest I pulled a similar search through Reader’s Guide Retrospective. While readers guide retrospective did not offer seamless integration with Zotero I was able to pull out structured data for hundreds of references, and with a few clicks had submitted inter-library loan requests for fulltext scans of the most relevant articles. When I received those PDFs I was able to simply drag and drop them into Zotero to store alongside the data. As I constructed my personal archive I was then able to turn Zotero’s search capabilities on the collection to explore interesting relationships between my data.

Zotero Library

Data fields carry unexpected potential

I created a variety of saved searches from criteria in my research data. Page numbers are included in this data for a specific reason, they are crucial for citation. Beyond that purpose, page numbers also represent an important statement about the objects in my collection. While all of the articles I discovered about Curie are relevant to my analysis articles on the frontpage of a newspaper are particularly relevant to questions about how Curie was presented to the public. This field in my database, the page on which each article can be found, was included to help people find the articles in citations, but it, like many other fields in my database, also communicates an historical significance.

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Facets of that significance can expose historical insight

Once I had isolated the frontpage stories about Curie I had the opportunity to further explore this subset of thirty or so articles. Zotero’s ability to visualize the collection in a timeline allowed me to quickly visualize the chronology of Curie’s appearances on the front page. From there I could use the “highlight” function to further explore the data. Based on my experience with discussions of Curie’s visit to America I decided to highlight the mention of cancer in titles, finding the word in a plurality of the frontpage studies leads to a particular historical insight.

Marie Curie’s contributions to science are impressive, but the connection between her work and a cure or treatment for cancer is tenuous. While the word cancer does not appear, in any significant fashion, across all the hundreds of article titles about her visit, it does show up in a significantly larger portion of the front page story titles. This provides tentative support for the notion that Curie’s work, and importance, was misrepresented in feminine terms, framing in the feminine role of healer instead of the masculine role of a scientist.

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Implications for history and digital archives

Implications for historical methods: While it is indeed possible to count these things out without these sort of tools, the ease at which I was able to mine a large set of documents for relevant information, and historical insight, has important ramifications. As far as I am concerned, the only way that historians can overcome the issues that arise from the problem of abundance of historical materials is to begin using tools for data analysis that allow for “distant readings” of texts. This can only be accomplished if some larger issues are observed in the creation and digitization of historical records and texts.

Implications for historical archives and databases: Exposing fulltext and coherent metadata is essential, building fancy repository specific visualizations and manipulations is extravagant.  What is going to matter to historians of the future is the ability to take your data, dump it onto a tool like Zotero, and use any number of analytical tools to explore that data in relation to information from other repositories. In that light, any fancy encoding and detailed levels of information you work into your resources is of limited use if that is not carried across into other spaces. We are not going to solve the problem of abundance by digging deeply into small sets of documents encoded in TEI, were going to get there with the metadata we have, dirty OCR and the emerging universe of entity extraction.

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Making Book Labels With Zotero

To the left you can see a sample of some of my labeled books. It may not be particularly pretty, but those labels do exactly what I wan them to do. Display information, have only a limited chance to damage my books, and cost me practically nothing. In this post I will walk through how I took my catalog of books from inside my Zotero collection, generated the labels, and went about sticking them on. This has been a bit more time intensive than I initially thought. It is really easy to export the tab-delimited file and make labels out of it, that only takes a few moments. The time consuming part was matching up the labels with my books. After the first batch I came up with a few ways to help speed up matching the books to their labels. So, if your following along at home this should work a bit quicker than it initaly did for me.

1. Install my ugly hack of a tab-delimited citation style.

I tweaked a existing style into this tab-delimited export. To install it just download it to your desktop and drag it into an open Firefox browser window. You should be prompted to install it.

2. Export your data using the tab-delimited style.

This part is easy, just right click on the items you want to export and chose the style you just installed. At this moment you have an opportunity to make life easier for yourself. Export smaller batches of items using tags you have assigned based on where the books are located in your house. It will only take a few seconds to tag all the books on the shelf in the guest bedroom with “location:guestbedroom”. Export the guest bedroom books in one batch. Then run through the rest of the steps.  When you print out the labels you can just go straight to the guest bedroom insted of wandering aimlessly throughout your whole house trying to remember which shelf you stuck Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince on.

2. Check the exported file.

Remember, my export style is not fancy, in fact I called it ugly. Open up the file, consider sorting it by call number, double check that your data is there. I imported the file into excel to make sure it looked Ok, but you could use any kind of spreadsheet or database application to do this.

3. Doing the Mail Merge.

The next step is to merge the exported tab-delimited into a print ready document. I used Word’s Mail merge function and their standard address labels. It works a little different in different versions of word but the general concept is the same. You open the data manager, or whatever they like to call it, import data from our tab-delimited file, and then you just drag the data hunks into the labels with the order and spacing you want. Then you merge the data and the structure and send it to either a new document or a printer.

4. Print um and stick um.

Printing is easy, sticking them to your books is time consuming. If you like, you can pick up pre-sticky address label paper at target or a office supply store. I find these little guys to be more trouble than their worth though. In my experience some of the records inevitably print out of alingment with the diecuts, the ink smears when you touch it, they cause printer jams, and when you eventualy try to peal them off they leave nasty gunk behind. I chose to just print mine on regular paper, cut them apart with a paper cutter and addhere them to my books with scotch tape. If you broke your books into location based batches it should not take to long to stick on the labels. Once you have all the books labeled it is as easy as making sure the books are in the right order.

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Using Zotero as a Personal Library Catalog

Note: Not actualy my books image credit to Kristin Brenemen

My wife and I have a lot of books, tons of books. So many books that I am sometimes surprised to find books I didn’t even know we had. Over the years I have tried to organize them in ways that make sense to me. This approach has failed utterly and completely. I have now resolved to organize our library using the Library of Congress Classification system and I think I have the technology to make this relatively easy.

Below are the four steps I see to making this work. I have done some experiments and I am pretty confident that this will work. I intend to make detailed posts about each stage. So if anyone out their is as big a book dork I should leave detailed enough instructions for you to follow along.

How am I going to do this?

First I need to capture the bibliographic information for our books from the Library of Congress catalog into my Zotero collection. Since I already have about 100 of our books in my collection this should be relatively easy.

Then I need to export the Names and Call Numbers of all those books from Zotero. I should be able by hacking a simple custom bibliographic style. With any luck it won’t take long.

After that I will take that tab delimited file and use a mail merge to print the title’s and call numbers of my books onto address labels that I picked up at Target.

Why would I want to do this?

You might be thinking, why are you using Zotero for this? If all I wanted to do was organize my books by their LCCN’s I could just look them up and paste the call numbers into a Word document.

While this would be a way to go, doing this inside Zotero gives me the added benefit of having a really amazing iTunes like interface to find my books. I am also excited to see what the weighted tag cloud of all the subject headings for my books looks like.

One might also ask why not use something like Delicious library or Librarything? First, I’m cheap. Both of these services cost money where Zotero is free. Furthermore the various programs created to organize one’s local collections of books are set up do do just that and only that. There are some big plans for Zotero to do a whole lot more and I think it will be neat to have my entire collection of books in my Zotero library as those new features role out.

Edit: I meant to say LC clasification system, not LCSH.