Minutes, March 16, 2007

Maryland History and Culture Collaborative
March 16, 2007 Meeting
Frederick County Public Library (Hosted by Mary Mannix)

10:15 Welcome from Jennie Levine
Item 3 on agenda canceled because Nadia Nasr was unable to attend.

Round - robin Introductions:

Rob Shindle, Archivist, University of Baltimore
•    There will be a program on April 2008 commemorating the 1968 riots in Baltimore following Martin Luther King's assassination, entitled "Riots and Rebirth."  In preparation for the project, transcripts of Oral Histories are being placed online.  The "Riots and Rebirth" website has been moved to the university's main page and is now accessible at www.ubalt.edu/template.cfm?page=1634 
•    The archives has also digitized transcripts from the East Baltimore, Negro League, Penn North and Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage projects accessible through http://archives.ubalt.edu/oral.htm. 
•    Kathy Cowan of MICA said they have a good photograph in the MICA archives of the station building during the riots, with its painted message on the roof.

Mary Jo Price, Special Collections, Frostburg State University
•    http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/library/archives/main.htm
•    MJP volunteered Frostburg as the location for the next MHCC meeting.
•    She stated that she is interested in collaboration and feels there are many things we should do collaboratively.
•    The strengths of her collections include mining and transportation history, especially the B&O and C&O, and the railroad that served the mines.  They have a link to Agnew through the Bell senators Jr and Sr; Braddock and Washington walked through campus and no one seems to care. The Beall archives contains papers of George Meyers, prominent member of the CPUSA.  Special Collections includes the University archives.
•    She has a job opening going up now. 
•    Jennie Levine asked if they use the USMAI catalog for their collections.
•    MJP stated there is an inventory of 520 items waiting for cataloging.  Special Collections and Beall archives are cataloged.  She added there is also a great map collection in special collections.

Kathy Cowan, Head of Reference and Archivist, Maryland Institute College of Art
•    Works with archives but is also head of reference; archives include significant collections including building plans, but there are not many resources for attending to them.
•    Has questions about using databases and XML for providing access to collections; would like advice on how to create an integrated system.
•    Would like to know how to deal with Maryland publications created at the early Institute which they have borrowed from the Pratt library and digitized.  Beth Alvarez of College Park said the intellectual property belongs to the institute, and that anything before 1923 is in the public domain.
•    Doug Frost of the development department at MICA is working on an institutional history from 1826, and his research has been very stimulating of interest in and awareness of the archives.  He was the impetus for getting the publications from the Pratt.  University Arts previously put out a small history, but this effort is more comprehensive.
•    Beth Alvarez asked if alumni could be approached for funding.  KC stated that the college has doubled in size and the director's focus is on expanding services for them, and not on special collections/archives.  She guesses they are 5 to 10 years out from having a full time archivist.

Andrea Japzon of Drexel University
•    Andrea is a Doctoral candidate at Drexel in information studies and has come to the meeting to discuss her research.  She will address this later in the meeting.

Gail McCormick, Special Collections Librarian and Archivist, Goucher College
•    GM is the first full time archivist at Goucher.  She has been engaged in outreach to faculty and students, processing backlog, training students to help with processing and cataloging.  Photographs are the best organized resource in her collections.  Many were digitized long ago and need to be rescanned.  She is preparing a small exhibit with photos and memorabilia for the first community dance theater in the country, the Estelle Dennis Dance Theatre, which hosted many important artists of the day.  Oral histories also figure prominently in Goucher collections.  Dr. Jean Baker ran Oral History projects and they are currently inventorying tapes from those efforts, which include for instance many Maryland lawmakers.  Dr. Baker was also recently interviewed herself, and the alumni office is beginning its own oral history project.

Phoebe Latosha, Archivist, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of Johns Hopkins University
•    Phoebe is replacing Andy Harrison as representative to the group. 
•    The Archives move to its new Mt Washington campus has occasioned an evaluation of the archives program.  They have more space, they are analyzing backlog, and they have employed a visual materials archivist to look at photo collections and film collections.  They have applied for an IMLS grant for digitization.  They have over 365K images, many more than previously thought, consisting of medical photos and photographs from personal papers. They are the official repository for the Johns Hopkins Medical School and so have papers of people associated with Hopkins.  The bulk of their holdings consist of personal papers, for example the papers of Victor McKusik, the "Father of Genetic Medicine," who was also an amateur photographer who gives them everything (about 50K images so far).
•    They have to deal with HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) regulations which affect what kind of access they can provide to their collections. HIPAA has extended privacy rights for PHI (Personal Health Information) in perpetuity which means that they have to get permission from subjects or heirs before anything with PHI can be published. Although the act was passed in 1996, the privacy regulations took effect in 2003, for covered entities. PHI materials that have already been published are exempt, but any PHI that links medical information to an identifiable individual might be a problem. They are working on  ways to redact and blur images. There are non-publishable exceptions for researchers. The archives has set up a privacy board to review and grant waivers for research.  HIPAA is the first federal law to apply privacy regulations to access. However, HIPAA is also opening up some collections that were previously not accessible until after the death of the subject. In the past, the archives would wait until subjects were deceased before opening up a collection, but now they have a way to open papers up sooner. [Note, there is a Federal "central hub" site at http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/hipaa with a great deal of information about HIPAA and covered entities.]
•    The Visual materials archivist is looking at the film collection, which contains Hopkins-produced films from the 1930s to the 1980s, including surgical films, lab documentation, oral interviews, public awareness films, and teaching films.  The collection will be weeded of those films to which the archives does not hold the rights.
•    The archives has a staff of 7.

Jennie Levine, Curator of Historical Manuscripts, University of Maryland, College Park.
•    JL is responsible for archival personal papers collections at UMD, except for those overseen by other departments such as literary manuscripts.  One of her main projects has been the development of the EAD website, ArchivesUM.
•    JL is interested in collecting policies and the potential for collaborative collecting policies; she is interested in exploring the idea of a global colleting plan for the state.  She notes that collecting has been largely haphazard, for example when the state delegates leaving office at the end of 2006 all gave their papers.
•    They are working on a fall exhibit - "Murder and Macabre" - based on a campus tour devised by Anne Turkos, and they will include the "Goat Man" and the "Bunny Man" in the exhibit.
•    The College of Information Studies (CLIS) is right next door to the UMD Special Collections at College Park, and they benefit from students seeking internships and jobs.  JL asks that anyone in the collective who is interested in being put on the practicum list for archives students please send her your information.
Doug McElrath and Ann Hudak could not be at today's meeting, but Doug wanted her to mention that he is on a Digital State Publications Task Force looking at Maryland State publications, which has been organized by the State Library.  Joan Borne of our group from the Pratt library is also on the task force.  There is a draft of the task force's report that is not yet online, which includes the recommendations for additional funding, staff, and expertise. 

Ann Hanlon, Project Archivist for the  UMD/National Agricultural Library Cooperative Project, serving at the National Agricultural Archives in Beltsville.
•    AH is co-principal investigator of an NEH grant to preserve agricultural literature from 1820-1945, to microfilm. She has or may yet contact many in the group for publications held in their collections which they might borrow to be microfilmed.
•    They are considering a digitization project for the Baltimore News American morgue, and may try to collaborate.
In May they will be launching a digital repository with a public interface to  1465 images from the archives called the University AlbUM, which is expected to be the first of many digitization projects. 
•    Beth Alvarez added that they have been looking at ways to integrate and standardize the digitization process through this project. 
•    For a year and a half they have been using Microsoft Access to capture metadata and images created through the patron request workflow, with the intention of migrating the data to a repository with a public interface and preservation plan using FEDORA.
•    There was a discussion about making the images and data available:
•    Q: does UM have rights to the BNA collection?
•    A: Not yet, but they are planning to approach the Hearst papers for the rights that they own, which Hearst presently retains but does not charge for.  They will not both to approach AP, which also holds the rights to many prints in the collection.
•    Q: It seems as though using patron requests for the digital project means that they essentially selected images, which is a different model than most exhibition or curation processes.
•    A: Yes, but the selection occurred during a campus anniversary, so patron requests were already focused on campus history. Discussion ensued about whether an organic process driven by patron interest was preferable to a formal selection process by collections curators. Rob Schoeberlien remarked that when he was at MDHS, the first of their images that were put online were copy negatives that were requested for reproduction.

David Angerhofer, Archivist, Maryland Historical Society.
•    MDHS library is focused on trying to provide services following their staff reduction from 10 to 3.  when possible, they have been looking at their EAD documents and paper finding aids and starting to remove roadblocks to improving upon them.  They have a CLIS student Jim Emmons stepping into Mary Markey's position. Jim will be full time at the end of May as Special Collections librarian.
•    Jennie Levine stated that she had often found overlapping collections with MDHS in her collections at College Park.
•    There was a discussion of finding a way to share the reference load among repositories with overlapping collections. DA stated he is not averse to forwarding reference e-mails.  He offered to move large objects in exchange for reference help.

Mary Mannix, Maryland Room Manager, Frederick County Public Library
•    Handouts: Bell and History Days pamphlet; this is the official opening of the museum seasons put on by the Frederick County Historical Sites Commission.  A second handout describes the public art in the library building.
•    The MD room will be expanding into the space currently used by the Business Resources Center, which will be absorbed into Reference.
•    They are the local history/genealogy/government documents branch, and also curates primary sources at other branches. Their collecting interests include all secondary sources on Maryland history. [In the tour that followed the meeting, she showed us their Civil War collections, which may be the only place in MD with all the important series of histories in one location.]
•    The Thurmont Center for Agricultural History will be a collaboration between the Maryland room and the Thurmont Historical Society, which is donating their library to the center, and the Thurmont Branch of FPL.
•    Discussion ensued about primary sources in public libraries, historical societies, and museums and the relative advantages and drawbacks.

Anne Turkos, University Archivist, University of Maryland, College Park.
•    They are beginning an effort to look seriously at electronic records (ER). There have been discussions about changes to COMAR (Code of Maryland Regulations) that allow for shorter retention requirements (before transfer to the State Archives) for ER. The result of the discussion was a question about whether their IT department had to deal with ER. AT met with 18 senior managers at the University, the Dean of Libraries, and created a working group to look at ER issues and how they affect the University.
•    The new regulations affecting state universities will be posted in May for comment.  AT will alert the group.
•    The fall of 2007 is the 50th anniversary of the "Queen's Game" [football].  The archives will have a small exhibit, and a documentary is being produced.  There will be a public event.
•    Rob Shindle UMCP could share its findings with other campuses.  AT responded that hopefully she can, and that this will help clarify the policy for state universities. The only policy that people are working with right now is "you're supposed to manage your records." this opening with IT has been very important for broaching this issue.  Phoebe asked if there is any policy for e-records transfer to the state archives.  AT answered that there isn't, but she hopes that with the new Provost there will be an opportunity to figure it out. She has been trying to get a staff position approved for an ER archivist for the University.
•    Mary Jo stated that a senior official had left office and did not leave or retain any of his office papers. AT stated that it was probably illegal and constitutes destruction of State Property.  Rob Shindle suggested that a report from UMCP would raise awareness on other UM campuses, which is currently non-existent.
•    Beth Alvarez asked what kind of ER are currently in the data warehouse.  AT replied that she does not know, because there is no access to them. AT told the story about an office that had been producing hard copies of their digital reports of statistics, which she retained in the archives. When that office stopped making hard-copies, the information that she had relied upon was no longer available to her. Eventually, they created a custom application on the web site to access the data she needed, but there is a "gap" ... and the paper records retention schedules don't apply to ER, which will lead to problems.
•    Mary Jo asked if Maryland was behind other states on this issue.  Beth Alvarez stated that only 2 states are on top of it, California and Kentucky.
•    One other issue. UMCP has an informal affiliate relationship with the State Archives, in that they are allowed to manage their own records on campus. It hasn't been formalized, and Anne is trying to get an MOU issued to formalize it. She is working with Kevin Swanson at MSA. She would like to know if there are any other such relationships in place, either for educational or otherwise, in place in MD. This might be something that impacts on other state university institutions.

Megan McShea, Project Archivist, Archives of American Art
•    Processing archivist working on artist's papers.  AAA is moving from microfilming collections in-house to scanning collections in-house, and has developed a web interface which combines the digital files of papers with the EAD finding aids.  See http://www.aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline
•    MM lives in Baltimore and is interested in historical documentation of the Baltimore area.
•    Has been providing the news service, "Maryland History in the News" on the H-Maryland listserv since January and welcomes comments and questions.

Rob Schoeberlein, Director of Special Collections, Maryland State Archives
•    The recent change of administration has created a stir at the archives as it always does.  Some of the things they've recently accessioned include the last of the Schaefer papers, some Louis Goldstein things including many Betamax tapes, and a collection of gifts to the Ehrlich administration.  Tom Darden, the Governer's photographer has also recently retired and they will be receiving a collection from him.
•    Renovations/construction to the State House might include an improvement to exhibit areas for MSA. The much publicized resignation letter of George Washington will be prominently displayed there.
•    RS is conducting an informal survey of MSA's audio and motion pictures holdings and exploring the question of digital transfer. Some of the things that he has uncovered  in the process:
•    The entire dialogue of the 1967 Constitutional Convention, on reel-to-reel tape.
•    500 cassette and reel-to-reel tapes of the Maryland Arts Council, which includes recordings of significant bluegrass and gospel performances.
•    Oral histories concerning the vanishing professions of Western Maryland which were created in the 1970s as part of the Maryland Folklore Initiative.
•    Papers of Rudolph Torovsky, photographer for St. Elizabeth's Hospital, which includes films of treatment procedures from the 1930's; color film of Ocean City in the 1950s.  They also have photographs of Crownsville.
•    On their website, most of the digitization has been of land records.  Recent digitization has included McNeil's project files.  60% of their funding for digitization comes from users of land records. [http://www.plats.net]
•    Special Collections anticipates having a photo website this year with 4000-5000 scans of images taken statewide. Some of the images had been on glass plates that been forgotten in the drawers of a secretary that was purchased.
•    They currently have 1 staff member, 2 interns, and 5 volunteers.
•    Jennie asked whether anyone knew where  Governor Ehrlich's papers are at Towson, considering the recent passing of Nancy Gonce, Towson's archivist
•    Jennie asked about password protected data on the State Archives website.  RS explained that the thinking was these may ultimately become subscription sites, but that passwords can be requested easily enough.
•    Jennie asked about the process the archives uses for their photocopy requests. RS explained how they now scan documents using a work order, and that these documents are retrievable for future requests, which seems to work.  Documents previously scanned were saved to fixed disks (or CD's when server space was an issue).  They are able to retrieve some of those scans with limited success.  The CDs that were created earlier are an MSA series (S500). For an example of how digital records are retrieved now, take a look at http://www.maryland.gov, look at the Governor's Office section.
•    Rob Jenson asked if their servers are considered a preservation medium by the Archives.  RS said they are, that they were designed to be redundant and fault-tolerant systems.
•    There was a discussion of the existence of digital preservation plans in other repositories.  UMD has no digital preservation policy or plan yet but plans to develop one through current projects. 

15 minute break

Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts, University of Maryland, College Park.
•    Collections lit mss. Of Maryland writers; picking up papers today of Jesse Glass.
•    There will be an exhibit of the Maryland poets laureate, which will feature all the poets including Reed Whittimore and Roland Flynt, with an opening event and reception on April 26, which will include all the living poets reading from their work and the work of the deceased poets laureate.  On Maryland day, April 28, there will be a reading in the Porter Room.

Malissa Ruffner, Independent Contractor, Hampton National Historic Site in Towson
•    Two projects: microfilming of the Henry White papers, and the creation of a finding aid to the Ridgeley family papers.

Julia Lehnert, Archivist (PT), Hampton National Historic Site, and a doctoral student in history.
•    The park has always requested funds for a full time archivist, but it is always cut.
•    Hampton National Historic Site has family papers, including those of Henry White, which they received private funding to microfilm. They have a lot of papers of the Ridgely, Howard, Dorsey, and Stewart families. They also have the records of the Society of Preservation Antiquities, which was a precursor of  Preservation Maryland, and records of the National Park Service. They are working on their finding aids. At present, they do not have a reading room.
•    The mansion will be re-opening November 30th.  They are hoping for some exhibit space in the mansion and are preparing materials for display.
•    They would like to connect with other institutions for their Ridgely papers project, because the family papers are dispersed among many institutions.  They would also like to collaborate on join programming such as events and exhibits, and in the referral of interns.  Goucher already has interns working at Hampton.

Bill Cady, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore
•    Recent news of newly digitized slave documents from Carroll County, in which Jesse Glass became involved.
•    There has been a transfer and addition to the broadsides collection online, and they are adding metadata.  Civil war era broadsides reflect MD history as a border state.
•    They have been digitizing three volumes of photo albums, c. 1907-1915, from the Baltimore Streetcar Museum, which includes accident photographs, and engineering photographs.  Nadia has been working on Maryland Room maps.
•    Kathy Cowan asked about imaging systems and software for digitizing maps. BC  described the equipment that held maps vertically for photographing. Mary Mannix mentioned that they have a room and a camera set up for maps that are too big to put on a scanner. Jennie reminded the group that Nadia Nasr (also of Enoch Pratt) would like to arrange tours of their digitization facility for the group.

Rob Jenson, Archivist, Montgomery County Historical Society (PT), Rockville
•    MCHS currently operates the Montgomery County Archives, which makes him nominally the county archivist. The County has provided very little financial support for their archives, enough to cover about 8 hours per week. RJ estimates that two full-time employees are needed to run the County Archives program properly.
•    Alida Friedrich, who was RJ's predecessor and attended the first MHCC meeting, was the first archivist MCHS has ever had, although they have been collecting archival materials since 1947.
•    The Gazette Corp. has donated many newspapers to the organization, which are temporarily stored in a Department of Corrections facility.  They will need to move these collections by mid-April.  RJ estimates 72 person hours will complete the move, and welcomes volunteers.  He will notify the group of time slots for lending a hand.

End of round-robin introductions.

Jennie Levine stated that uncovered items on the agenda will go on the next meeting's agenda, plus other items for discussion that have come up at this meeting as hot topics for the group, e.g. digitization and e-records.

Andrea Japzon
•    AJ presented her research to the group and solicited feedback. Unlike the subjects of many of our collections, she is concerned about "regular people" and  all the digital materials that they have been amassing. She is interested in studying personal information preservation techniques, and the role that libraries could provide to help people expand their information literacy to include arrangement and preservation of their personal digital collections. She sees this as a potential to build community and also teach people how to take care of their stuff that eventually might come into the archivists hands.
•    Bill Cady stated that he and Rob Shindle were working on a project to do some preservation in a similar vein -- they help people digitize their own collections.
•    Discussion ensued about what to do about tools that need to be developed.
•    AJ: Can you see yourself involving the community in teaching how to make selection decisions, or proper storage formats for preservation? Some general assent. Jennie says that they did a survey and found that information literacy instruction really does work. If we come up with a plan to teach people how to organize, and preserve their personal digital papers, it can be done.
•    Mary Mannix stated that genealogists are very concerned about the loss of data and information, both online and in their own research notes. People develop and reference databases of family history on the Internet, but there is no permanency there.  She and Gail do a lot of information literacy education with patrons. As far as preserving their own web sites, they advise patrons to "print a copy of the web site and hope for the best."
•    We carefully avoided a discussion about what is going on with the Archives and Archivists LISTSERV archives.
•    AJ: Archivists and historians have been accused of looking to the past, but the technology is here and changing rapidly. Is this an opportunity to look to the future needs of history by helping to preserve things, and by promoting awareness so that people don't lose information that might be needed in the future?
•    Beth Alvarez pointed out that what we have in our archives, especially from  the days of antiquity, is stuff that survived through happenstance. Many things that we would have wished someone valued for future historians have been lost. The same will be true for much of the born-digital manuscripts.
•    Rob Jenson mentioned that we need to be careful to teach people about how to select and preserve digital materials that are important. Jennie mentioned email as an example of a problem area. She [and many other people] keeps all her email for future reference. Other people do a fair amount of self-appraisal and decide which emails to keep longer. Sometimes their mail system or administrators force them to delete mail messages.
•    Megan mentioned the Ephemera blog that talks about how individuals care for the things they collect. [http://www.ephemera.typepad.com] She also mentioned the fact that the National Museum of the American Indian is working to digitize Tribal archives, which often have a unique approach to community involvement in archival documentation.
•    Folks generally agreed that we (archivists) have some work to do. AJ noted that everyone at the table seemed to be short-staffed, and overwhelmed with more patrons than their staffing can handle. The group seemed to agree, and add that patrons expect everything to be online, and available right away. Jennie mentioned that people seem to want digital images and photocopies when they come in to the repository, and we don't really know who is not coming into the facility at all. Beth and Anne noted that once the finding aids were put up online, people were coming into the Maryland Room asking for obscure things, or they were interpreting terms in the finding aids completely out of context.
•    Rob Schoeberlein was doing some personal research and Googled a very obscure name. He found it in Google Books. He wonders what will happen to researchers who are using blogs and web sites for research. Jennie made mention of a UMd professor who put an URL on his mother's tombstone and wanted to know whether the University Archives would preserve his website. They recommended that he figure out how to maintain that URL in perpetuity -- locations in ArchivesUM are likely to change.
•    AJ: Has the increase in awareness about your collections led to more of an opportunity to educate and build community, or just more work for you and your staff? Mary Jo:How about "both?" Jennie: Anne does a lot of community-building in her work, which is more work, but also sometimes results in more materials coming in, or more information about the records creators. Discussion about the subjectivity of collections and what manages to be kept by institutions. All cultural institutions collect based on their policies and the opinions of their staff. In some cases, digital repositories are set up by people who do not have the guidance from professionals about how to handle their materials, or to provide information about the sources, or not to discard the original materials once an online surrogate exists.
•    AJ: If you have other comments to offer about my research, my email address is acj26@drexel.edu
•   

13:30 Meeting Adjourned. Mary Mannix provided a tour of the Maryland Room.