THE BURNS ARCHIVE

Burns Archive Link: http://www.burnsarchive.com/about.html

Collection Principles: The Burns Archive houses what is arguably the largest early medical photo collection in the U.S. The photographic processes encompassed in the collection include daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes and early silver gelatin images.

The collection contains about 60,000 original medical photographs, documenting many well-known case histories. The archive documents numerous diseases which are rarely encountered nowdays, after a cure had been found for them. The Burns collection features extremely rare images of esoteric medical practices like phrenology (determination of personality, psychology and criminal tendencies based on the shape of one's head), skull trepanation (drilling or scraping holes into the patient's skull to treat various physical and mental disorders) and blood letting.

The Burns Archive is best known for its medical photographs, however, it also contains other categories of images. Among then are: memento mori photographs (private memorial images of diseased family members dressed for the afterlife), wounded Civil War soldiers, war images spanning the time period from the Crimean War to WWII, criminology, ethnographic photographs from Europe, North Africa and Asia, and a large collection of photographs depicting lives of African Americans.

Mr. Stanley B. Burns was an eye surgeon. He started aggressively collecting vintage photographs in mid to late 1970's. The archive is housed in a town house on E. 38th street in Manhattan. Burns' collection is rated as number one among private collections of historic photographs by Art and Antiques Magazine. Aperture Magazine rates this collection as one of six most important photographic collections in the world.

This collection IS amazing, which makes you wonder why the website for the Burns Archive is so poorly designed, clunky to use and unattractive! Sorry, Mr. Aaron Traub (the website's designer, who is credited on the 'Contact' page).

Object Characteristics: The Burns Archive website is not set up as a digital exhibit, it just gives you a taste of what the archive has to offer visually and historically, while familiarizing you with the background of the collection. The photographs are divided into thematic categories according to subject matter depicted. Each category has a web page with a descriptive piece of curatorial writing and one selected representative image for that category. The text for each thematic category is hyperlinked to more complete listings of other categories.

For example, the Judaica section is broken up into 17 subcategories, which include such diverse topics as Diaspora Portraits, Towns, Germans and Jews in WWII, Zionism/Palestine. These nested subcategories are presented in list form, with no associated images.

The images for the main thematic category are very small and low rez, with a huge watermark "B A", which I feel could use some subtlety. There is also copyright information on the bottom of each digitized photograph. It appears that the digitized objects are meant to act as visual reference aids, sort of saying "here is what we have in terms of subject matter". The digital images are certainly not meant to convey the look and feel of the original photographic object, or at least I hope not....

Metadata: Well, there is minimal amount of metadata for the actual images - a date and a descriptive title that sometimes includes the geographical location and identifies the subject of the photograph in loose terms. An overwhelming majority of persons depicted in historic photographs are anonymous faces to us and to the collector as well. Famous medical cases or surgeries are sometimes associated with a certain physician's name. The image of the medical theater at the top of the page is identified as 'Dr. Rodham operating in Philadelphia, 1902'. There is no mention of photographic processes used to create the original object and no dimensions are given.

The image on the right is titled 'St. Petersburg Women's Battalion of Death, 1917'. It depicts a group of Russian women soldiers who enlisted in the Russian Army to fight in WWI, fulfilling their own patriotic desire and the government's last ditch effort to inspire the weary soldiers on the front lines. None of this information is offered by the archive website.


The images are selected and changed periodically by Dr. Burns himself, who is the director, curator and proprietor of the archive. The home page image featured on the 'About the Archive' page is always a rather shocking and grotesque medical photograph. I have looked at this website several times for research purposes and the homepage image is always one to stop you in your tracks.

Possible Intended Audience: It seems that this website best serves a user who is already interested in vintage photographs for a particular reason and is searching the web for historical images depicting specific cultural themes. I would argue that the archive and the website mostly attract lovers or strange visuals and stranger histories.

The term "vintage" photographs (which is used frequently in the text) vs. "historical" photographs implies sales to me. The archive has an extensive client list, which is also posted on the website. The Burns Archive is used for sales, prop rentals, research consulting, record label/ album cover design, exhibition driven loans, by movie and television industries, art/photography/antique magazines, publishing companies - and the list goes on and on. The sight's purpose seems primarily commercial and not educational.

Biblioteque nationale de France

Having been a French minor in undergrad, I chose to examine the National Library of France. The homepage is well organized, with lots of pictures and neat graphics and has many different languages available to its patrons. In English, the page is not as flashy or aesthetically pleasing but gives good information nonetheless. However, I wanted to examine the main OPAC of the system, which is only available in French. It was a good exercise for me; with my basic (and becoming increasingly more basic as time passes by) French I was somewhat able to simulate the experience of a new library user. The words chosen in French were sometimes different than I expected them to be (which often happens with library users) and I had to think sometimes about the meaning of a word in this new context. That handicap taken into account, I had surprisingly little difficulty searching for various books, both French and American, novels and non-fiction. Overall, the layout of the catalog is logical and provides features that improve the searching immensely.
The OPAC has a list of personal features for registered users. There is a personal profile where you can view your previous searches (mes recherches), your preferences or favorites (mes preferences), and reservations or holds on books. They also provide a glossary and a help page (aide) to help you with your navigation of the site and your searches. Between the glossary and a web dictionary to help me when I really got stuck, I was able to perform several searches and evaluate the OPAC accordingly. I did a few known searches for French and American titles (Pere Goriot by Balzac, A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and Harry Potter by Rowling). I was able to find results fairly easily and quickly. The results page has filters that you can apply to your results (you can filter by date, language, country, city, format) which is handy if you forgot to limit your search results to books. This way allows you to filter your results and saves time so you don't have to search again or try to find the advanced search. Another feature I enjoyed was the list of links that showed the pathway to your results. For example, if you searched "Harry Potter", then clicked on a result to look at the record, then clicked on the author for more books, a pathway of links would form at the top of the page that allowed you to link back to a previous step without pushing the browser "back" button (which can sometimes throw off a search engine) or having to go through all your other steps. Another good feature is that you can click on the Dewey Decimal number (and it's interesting that they are using the DDC and not the UDC in the first place) and look at all the items that fall under that number. Boolean terms are available on the advanced search page, which is also handy.
There are a few things that bother me about this website. The overall look is clean and modern, but the streamlined nature of the site can lead to some confusion. For example, the button "Valider" (which strictly means "validate" or "enter") does not really look like a clickable button. This especially becomes apparent when applying the filters to a search. When you want to filter your search, you have to pull down a menu and choose what you want to filter (date, country, language, format, etc.). Then a screen appears asking which dates, languages, or formats you want to keep in the results. At the top of the screen, there is a button "Appliquer" which you click to initially apply the filter. However, that will just take you to this second screen. Then you have to go to the bottom right corner and click "Valider" in order to actually apply those filters to the results. Even after writing my notes about this, I still made this mistake several times. The other problem I have is the lack of pictures for the book covers (which is actually not something most OPACs have, but I like it). The results page can be a little confusing as well, trying to figure out what link to click in order to see the actual record or "notice". Sometimes the book title is hyperlinked in the list, but many times, you have to click on the "Voir les notices" link to see the other records that are not hyperlinked.
Overall I had very little trouble with the OPAC of the Biblioteque Nationale de France. Considering that French is not my first or best language, I feel that the trouble I experienced with it was minor and trivial. In the end, I was able to find all the books that I wanted in the different forms that I looked for. Vive la France! :)

Online Poster Catalogue: American Poster Institute

For most of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, posters were considered a cheap and easy way to inform and advertise to large numbers of people. In recent decades, however, the term "poster art" has developed in response to the notion that flatstock advertisements often adhere to creatively aesthetic and artistic design principles and that these designs have value beyond a simple ephemeral form of mass media. Yet, as a printed media, gaining access to these designs digitally is often difficult and OPAC's dedicated to collecting, cataloguing, and providing access to posters are still underrepresented. One site worthy of mention is http://www.americanposterinstitute.com/ if for no other reason than because it is one of the only sites attempting to create a credible and complete network of and for artists.

According to the website,

The American Poster Institute is a non-profit corporation dedicated to furthering public awareness and appreciation of the poster art form. It is committed to supporting the community of artists creating entertainment-related posters, to fostering interaction and communication between the artists, and to constantly improving standards in the field.

Thusly, the users of the site are those with any interest in poster art, be they fans, artists, vendors, entertainers, venues, with a particular emphasis on the artists themselves. So how well does the site meet the needs of these users with its website design principles? In all three areas outlined in the Expectations of an OPAC Review provided by Dr. Winget, I would say adequately, but not perfectly.

A) User Principle: Does the Site Meet the Overriding Needs of its Users?

• For the primary users, artists, the site is surely an invaluable resource. More than two-thirds of the homepage is dedicated to "latest news," outlining upcoming opportunities for artists to display their work. Similarly, their is a "random artist" thumbnail gallery on the homepage. In addition, the site has a navigation header directing artists to the application process for becoming an API member. Membership allows artists to showcase at the various Flatstock conventions sponsored by API. On becoming members, users may then join one of the many interactive forums, adding to a sense of community among artists, and they can join the artist gallery and display their posters on the website.
• For non-artists, the website designers seem to have given little or no thought to user needs. For example, there is no way to simply search posters by content such as date, venue, band name, or city. In fact, the only search functions available are keyword searches for forum discussions and artist name in the artist gallery. This limited search functionality would seem to indicate that the site is not really dedicated to cataloguing and providing access to posters so much as it is to cataloging artists.
• Regardless of how well it meets the specific needs of its users, the general design of the site is relatively well organized and navigable. The wording of navigation buttons is not vague and even users outside of the poster artists community should have no problem understanding what the various terms mean: for example, the "faq" tab takes you to a very detailed and well organized list of questions that are relevant to navigating the site and understanding its history and objectives.

B) Content and Arrangement Principle: the importance of the content and arrangement of records to finding, identifying, selecting, and obtaining items.

• The most significant flaw in the site relates to the content principle in that the server used by the site can't seem to handle the content. Searches take forever and sometimes end in a blank screen.
• In addition, as stated earlier, the arrangement of content, or how one finds a specific poster is somewhat contrary to the name of the site. Cataloguing is done by artist name. So if a user doesn't have this information, it is almost impossible to find, identify, select, or obtain the desired record. This problem could easily be solved simply by changing the name of the site to "The American Poster Artist Institute."

C) Standardization Principle: the requirement to follow accepted international standards for information content and structure.

• As my understanding of these principles is concerned, the site seems to follow accepted standards to at least a minimum. The depth of information content is adequate. Content is structured in a meaningful and aesthetically pleasing way. Although not necessarily as navigable as possible for those with specific search criteria outside of the major user network, the site provides the service it implies, it has created a community forum for those with a related interest in poster art.

I came across this site as a link from flatstock.com, a website dedicated to the poster convention held annually in Austin and semi-annually in several other cities. Apparently, The American Poster Institute is the organization that sponsors Flatstock. As such, it seems to me they have access to a wealth of posters. To register to show at Flatstock, artists must send API a digital record of their work. And the website gallery has hundreds of posters. What the site really needs to work on is adding navigation features to allow the casual user greater access. Download speed is also a real issue that is going to need to be addressed. Also, as a non-profit institution, I wonder why the site doesn't team up with archives in the various cities where the conventions are held and make a concerted effort to digitize and catalogue the flatstock produced by members on an ongoing basis. Certainly this is a project in need of a champion and API seems to have the infrastructure in place to tackle it.

On authority et al

Here is a great article on Duncan Watts, who does great work showing that many of the ideas of the tastemaker is fallacious. He especially dislikes points made by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point.

Social Knowing vs. News

(Disclaimer: I am a sensitive newspaper reporter. I write for the web and I write for print; I'm a "backpack journalist" stuck between worlds.)

Some of the issues I have with David Weinberger's "Everything Is Miscellaneous" are underscored in newspaper and Internet coverage of Heath Ledger.

In Chapter 7, "Social Knowing" Weinberger nods to the famous images of newspaper journalists gathered at what we call the budget meeting. That's where the fancy editors assign stories to a specific, first order place in the print version of the newspaper. Weinberger graciously mentions that social tagging sites like Digg allow anyone the possibility of letting readers become their own editorial board, their own insider's network of news. More on that in a moment.

Then, he proceeds to write: "Not all of these sites will survive...But some will survive and others will arise, because enabling groups of readers to influence one another's front pages not only brings us more relevant information, it also binds groups socially." (The italics are my emphasis.)

So, if I'm reading this right, if a story is popular to the users on these sites, then it's relevant. And that relevance helps bind people. This is counterintuitive to everything news stands for, everything news is and it grates my nerves to read it more than once.

The first problem I have with this theory is that it only works with feature stories. You know, stuff about jogging, think pieces about whether women will vote for Hillary Clinton or blacks will choose Obama. Pieces like these can bind people, because they can talk about their opinions, their habits, as they relate to the piece.

It does not work with news, something like Heath Ledger's death, for instance, which is based on facts.

When Heath Ledger was found dead in his apartment, a blog "broke the story": Essentially, because someone posted the suspicion of a rumor, they wanted credit for getting the story first. That's problematic in and of itself, but it was later only relevant in my opinion, because the New York Times and other mainstream newspapers followed up in the first order world of news gathering -- the time consuming work of being an "expert": by calling the police station, going to the scene to talk to possible witnesses, etc.

"If it bleeds, it leads" is true both in print and on the web -- the main difference is whether or not Ledger died from an overdose, which is implied based on hearsay, versus what the Medical Examiner in New York City will have to say when he releases the cause of death.

I'm not sure Weinberger understands or thoroughly encapsulates the problem of integrating the first, second and third order across platforms as it relates to time-sensitive information. Maybe this is in Chapter 10, but he has yet to give any good recommendations for navigating the first order world we are all used to -- one that exists parallel and in the media environment, in direct competition with, the third order.

News is a peculiar kind of information in the sense that its value seems to decrease as the news is disseminated. (Some of those men in the interior room might argue that the Internet has caused the massive layoffs that have occurred at most print publications in recent years.) Blogs, TMZ, RSS feeds, citizen journalists, list-servs. I'm happy to know that Weinberger believes that they bind us in some ways, and I know that's true because I love to share some articles with friends all over the world and hear their opinions about that work.

But all of my primary sources exist first in print, or they are from print-based media. I did not, for instance, believe that Heath Ledger was found dead until I read in it a print source. Why? Because I know that if it made the front page of a newspaper, or even a newspaper site, I could at least be sure that they followed some sort of protocol to report the Ledger's death authoritatively. Not based on something someone heard --widely known as gossip -- which may be popular but untrue.

I'm not sure if this is because I'm entrenched in the first order world of fuddy-duddy newspapers or if it is because I can appreciate social knowing on a deeper level than just someone's blog on a page that I hardly ever read because I'm not sure where they're getting their information.

Some say that journalists are jacks (or jills) of all trades, masters of none. But that isn't necessarily the case when it comes to organizing information in a uniform way -- according to the inverted pyramid, which in the third order, may not be any kind of way at all, with the news first and the story getting less newsy as a reader follows the column to the bottom of the page.



What will this look like when newspapers are no longer printed on newsprint, and how will a new model conform to users' expectations for how they find out new information? Now, news has become miscellaneous, but only partially, because TV sites and Google and other web sources rely on newspapers as gossip-vetting authorities -- even as they try to take credit for "breaking news."

As for allowing people to decide what is most relevant based on the popularity of a news story, if journalists cannot remain gatekeepers or experts when it comes to evaluating and explaining -- through placement, headlines and metadata that changes based on whether the story is in print form or online, what will that mean for what is considered news in decades to come? Who will become the authority, the source that not only knows that other people have read the story, and like the story enough to display it on their virtual front page, but the source who can say, "I know all of that is accurate"?

Seattle Public Library

Seattle Public Library has a fantastic online presence. Their homepage has lots of information, covering a wide range of services. The information is well-organized, with different items divided into boxes. Below the page title is a menu bar of the major types of online resources.

Clicking on the Library Collection tab brings the user to the main search page. There is one simple box for users to input keywords, although the page also includes other standard choices, such as an advanced search link. There is also a sidebar with several reference links (dictionary, research topics, newspaper databases, etc.)

Major media are simple to look up. Entering a title, author, or subject into the keyword box elicits a (usually) good hit list. Each listing includes the basic info, (title, author, publisher, copyright,) available locations, call number, cover, and type of media (including info such as large print.) Many of the listings also include book (or media) covers. On this hit list page, the user can sort by title, author, publication date, and also - interestingly - arrival date.

The user can also limit her searching by media type. Advanced searching is available and easy. These searches can limit results to works of particular languages, individual branches, or even other library systems, specifically the University of Washington or King County Library System.

From the search results page, clicking on a particular work gets you access to reviews, summaries, and first chapter previews in many cases. Also, this page includes links to title, author, and all pertinent subjects, so you can very easily look up other works by the same author or other books of the same subject. Tres cool.

It's easy to see when the item will be available, as well as how many people have the item on hold. It's also easy to put the item on hold, or if you have a Seattle PL card, you can put the item in "Your List," which is the equivalent of Amazon's "Wish List." The books placed in your list are held there indefinitely, unless the user chooses to delete them. This made me wonder if this sort of information is something that could be requested by the FBI. The SPL privacy policy didn't mention the wish list either way, so I contacted the library via chat. The chat module was easy to use, and after a brief delay, I got to "talk" to Connie, a librarian with the "Questionpoint 24/7" service, which I guess does the chatting when there are no SPL librarians around. She didn't know the answer to my question, but forwarded it to the local librarians, and said I should receive an email with an answer. (I'll keep you posted.)

In addition to the standard catalog of dvds, cds and books, there are several databases and e-book databases available to users. There are three types of databases available: accessible in the physical library only, remotely accessible with a SPL card, and remotely accessible to all for free. However, at present the database list does not appear to include any free databases.

OTHER STUFF

There is a Readers' Corner page, which includes staff reading lists, as well as new and popular lists.

Suggestion form for purchases.

RSS feeds for availability/due date reminders of individual books.

Simple, straightforward ILL system.

And last but certainly not least, they have several podcasts, with interviews of and readings by several authors.

ALSO
The page appears to be compliant with ADA requirements, and there are links to assist people w/ disabilities.

Overall, a pretty darn good OPAC. The best I've seen in my limited experience.

UPDATE 1/31/08: I got a response on their "My List," the service where users can keep a list of material they're interested in. Interesting response:

The Library Board of Trustees has adopted a very strict policy regarding the confidentiality of users of the library. Any record of your use of the library, including the titles of materials you have saved on My List, would not be revealed to anyone (including the FBI) without a court order. Here is a link to that policy on the library web site:

http://www.spl.org/default.asp?pageID=about_policies_confidentiality

In addition, as explained in the My List help file, a My List list is deleted after one year if it has not been used. Each time you use a My List list, the list is saved for twelve months after that use and is then deleted

(Italics mine.) So it appears that this is a concern for users, as many library systems delete all records of your browsing/checkout history as soon as you log off/turn in your books.

Library of Congress Blog � Flickr Followup (Library of Congress)

Library of Congress Blog � Flickr Followup (Library of Congress)

I am providing this blog entry as a formal model of what a blog entry should contain, in terms of format.

1. Please provide a link to the website or page that is the subject of your blog.

2. Images always break up the page, so if images are relevant, please include them. Here's an image that I've added.



3. Saving as a draft is not posting to the blog. You must "publish" your blog entry.

We will go over the basic practicalities in class on Thursday, so please respond to your blogger invitation if you have not done so already.