I am sad to announce the passing of Robert L. "Bob" Frost(1952-2011). Bob was an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Information, my alma mater, where he had taught since 2000. Bob had been battling cancer for over two years. Ed Vielmetti has written an obituary of Bob on his blog, including the announcement from SI Dean Jeffrey Mackie-Mason.
Bob was an inspiration to many of us SI alums, and his magnetic personality, sharp wit, and joie de vivre ensured he had a bevy of his students and colleagues buzzing around him at any given time. I had the opportunity to take his class Material Culture and the Interpretation of Objects in the spring of 2004, my final semester at SI. The class was intense in a way that few of my other classes at Michigan were, and it provoked my continuing curiosity in identifying theoretical frameworks to analyze the everyday world.
Bob reinforced my fascination with Wilhelm Reich and The Fugs by introducing me to Dušan Makavejev's W.R.: Mysteries of the Organismto the point I still have the DVD bootleg copy he made me in 2004. He challenged me to become an advocate for unpopular and "unrealistic" ideas. He introduced me to the history of science. Most importantly, he was a faculty member in a huge and ever-growing graduate program who seemed to enjoy nearly every interaction he had with a student, and encouraged us to reach out to him to send him links to "cool stuff" on the Web that might interest him.
Do WikiLeaks and its complex, attendant issues shift our conceptualization of our roles as information professionals? How might WikiLeaks change the public's views on usage of and access to archives and records? To what extent is the most recent release of diplomatic cables a product of information mismanagement?
Addressing these and many more questions, our confirmed speakers include Trudy Peterson, former Acting Archivist of the United States (1993-1995) and current representative for the Society of American Archivists on the Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee; Fred Pulzello, Solutions Architect in the Information Governance practice at MicroLink LLC; Jim Fortmuller, Manager of Systems Security at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP in Washington, DC; Mark Matienzo, Digital Archivist in Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library; and Derek Bambauer, Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. The panel will be moderated by Peter Wosh, Director of the Archives/Public History Program and Clinical Associate Professor of History at New York University.
Advance registration is required by January 17 for security reasons and because space is limited. Admission for ART and ARMA members is $5. Admission for all others is $10. For more information, including registration details, please see the announcement on the ART site.
Update: I've added a question on Quora about this too - feel free to contribute your story there.
In my last post, I talked a bit about the notion of Delicious being a platform with a myriad of uses, and I've been actively wondering about this since then. Upon further reflection, I've realized that the best way to figure this out is actually to engage and ask people directly.
Accordingly, I'm asking for your help. Of course it's upsetting that Delicious is being sunsetted, but other than individual users and Archive Team, people seem to be doing very little about it. Delicious is clearly more than the bookmarks. I want to gather information about how people like you and me actually used it beyond it's obvious functionality. Did you use it to manage resources for your dissertation? Did you use it to communicate with family about a serious event or illness? How did you go beyond the boundaries of it being just "about bookmarks"? How did it make you think about how you organize your information environment? I want personal stories that talk about what you may lose, however intangible it might seem, when Delicious eventually shuts down.
Beyond this, I want to use this information positively. I want to help share your stories. I'm hoping to do this in the form of more blog posts, or potentially even a journal article or conference presentation. Of course, I need your permission to share your story, but I'm willing even to hear how you've used it even if you would prefer it not to be discussed, cited, or quoted publicly.
To share your story, you have a number of options. You may, of course, leave a comment on this post. If you have your own blog or website, feel free to make a post there and then link it in a comment and send a trackback to my blog. Make a YouTube video (which I have, see below!) or a Flickr set. Tweet it. Use the tag #mydeliciousstory on whatever social media or Web 2.0 platform you prefer. Or... you can do it the old fashioned way and send me a personal email to delicious at thesecretmirror dot com. If possible, please let me know if you're willing to answer further questions, and if you're using email please specify the equivalent "speaking terms" under which you're sending your message.
Just as plenty of others have, I recoiled in horror when I heard that Delicious (née del.icio.us) was being "sunsetted". Regardless of the red flags that have been raised about its potentially imminent demise, I've still been using it on a daily basis. I've been an active user for over 6.5 years, which is longer than I can say for just about any other web platform or service. I deleted my Friendster and Myspace accounts quite a while ago; I've been on Flickr almost as long as Delicious, but the bookmarking wins out by a good four months or so.
My oldest Delicious bookmarks.
I started using Delicious in my final semester of library school, and it shows. I used it for procrastinating as well as a way to organize research materials before I had Zotero. The bulk of the bookmarks from that first day of use (February 24, 2004) were likely imports from my browser, but I quickly showed a facility for adding stuff that I saw as interesting, useful, etc. I became frantic about tagging, and quickly developed my own conventions for adding tags. One of the things I remember being impressed by was that people quickly found ways to build on top of Delicious, and going through my old bookmarks with the tag "del.icio.us" shows a whole number of these, and an October 2004 blog post from the RSS Weblog lists even more. I was particularly surprised and impressed with the number of alternate posting interfaces that sprung up, and by sid.vicio.us, which built ontologies based on Delicious tags.
sid.vicio.us
As my friend and colleague Amelia Abreu writes, part of the value of Delicious has been its ability to allow for individuals interact with others they didn't know well. Arguably, it was one of the first social networking platforms that really valued the importance of weak ties instead of strong ones. I think it's also the platform in which I first encountered Jo Guldi, who also wrote a fantastic blog post in 2007 about how Delicious changes academic research. Specifically, it allows you to sort things, and arguably more importantly, it makes things public:
What's rapidly happening with these shared tags is academics finding each other in rapid numbers. I have some twenty people in my network, at least half of whom I've never met in real life. ... Each of these is another intellectual putting together rarified connections about strange pieces of thought somehow related to my world. ... This is the nearest thing to running into someone else at the card catalog yet. I don't check in with them. I don't have, nor do I really need, the capacity to send email to them. Some of them I may actually encounter at academic conferences later, and we'll share more of a bond, through our years of doing collaborative research, than many scholars who have labored through the years in adjoining offices.
Could Joshua Schacter, the creator of Delicious, or even Yahoo!, anticipate all of the potential uses of Delicious as a platform? Definitely not. There were countless unsupported or under-the-radar ways to use it. I remember a Delicious hack (for which I can't find a link) wherein you could send someone a private message by tagging the bookmark as for:username and marking it as private.
In his post about preserving Delicious bookmarks through migration, Ed Summers advocates for releasing the Delicious data to the Web somehow. As he writes, this could be mediated by an institution like the Smithsonian or the Library of Congress. Nonetheless, we have to consider what this mediation means, or even what data would be made available. As Stephen Hood notes, as a platform, Delicious has a whole host important features that need saving: the networks of users, and users' inboxes, which contain bookmarks shared by others.
Tools and processes for researcher access will be developed from interaction with researchers as well as from the Library’s ongoing experience with serving collections and protecting privacy and rights. The Library is not Twitter and will not try to reproduce its functionality. We are interested in offering collections of tweets that are complementary to some of the Library’s digital collections...
Additionally, Martha Anderson of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program was quoted in a New York Times article from May 2010 stating that access would only be granted to "qualified researchers." I have seen no other coverage that qualifies who or what constitutes a "qualified researcher" in this context. In short, I don't think the Library of Congress is a suitable candidate for transferring something that arguably needs to have open, unfettered access from the beginning.
In the meantime, we can migrate our bookmarks to other services, but how do we migrate or emulate the experience of Delicious as a platform? Is the a platform a significant property, or is it an essential part of the context of the records created on that platform? Or, perhaps more curiously, is the platform a record itself? In my opinion, these questions require in-depth critical work if we want to have any hope for the long-term preservation and access to Delicious and other platforms with social networks and user-generated content.
Earlier today I'd posted about the Australian Society of Archivists' announcement about the Aus-Archivists listserv being "lost." Tim Sherratt, an Australian colleague and friend of this blog, announced this post on ArchivesLive, the Ning group created by the ASA seemingly to replace the listserv. Pat Jackson, ASA President, has already responded with an update:
The ASA National Office has not lost the Aus-Archivists list-serv. We have moved from an outsourced service provider to managing our new server at the National Office. The Aus-Archivists list-serv was a bit too ancient for our spanking new server to manage.
In terms of the posterity of the contents of the list-serv, the wonderful discussions and debate it fostered and engendered, they are not lost. It is our intention to post them to the ASA website where they can be perused. Further to that, it is my understanding that the Aus-Archivists list-serv is also deemed to be permanent under the ASA retention schedule. The ASA will be investigating other methods of storing the list-serv for permanent retention.
I can not give you a date or a time line for the Aus-Archivists list-serv to be put up on the website. This is one of many tasks that the National Office is currently undertaking. Please bear in mind that the National Office is probably smaller than most small archives and they have to service a wide and dispersed membership base. And today they were overwhelmed by the positive feedback of many of our members.
I thank Pat for being willing to clarify the situation of Aus-Archivists, and I'm relieved to hear that ASA intends to provide the run of the list on its website and that it considers the list to be records suitable for permanent retention. I do understand that resources are limited, and I would love to see ASA or Aus-Archivist's constituencies try to help ASA with this process if it's possible or preferable.
I started using Delicious in my final semester of library school, and it shows. I used it for procrastinating as well as a way to organize research materials before I had 
