By Mark Matienzo, on November 18th, 2010 [Update: Aus-Archivists might not be gone for good, as ASA intends to share the entire run of postings on its website. See this post for details.]
Despite my relative distaste for the A&A list, I have previously found it useful and argued for its retention when it was threatened in 2007. I still agree with most of what I wrote 3.5 years ago, although I might have toned things down in retrospect. In an effort to find other e-mail discussion lists on archives that engaged my interest, I joined Arcan-L (the Canadian archivists' listserv) and Aus-Archivists (the Australian archivists' listserv, maintained by the Australian Society of Archivists).
Surprisingly, Aus-Archivists had been idle since around the end of October. I noticed this tweet from the Australian Society of Archivists only in passing at the beginning of November:
The ASA Office would just like everyone to know that our List Serv is still currently unavailable, we apologize for any inconvenience...
I didn't hear anything else between then and earlier today. I should note that I'm not a member of ASA, and so I can't speak to any communication they had with their membership. However, today a message was sent out by Pat Jackson, the ASA President, to all Aus-Archivists subscribers, announcing that the listserv was lost entirely. Continue reading Goodbye, Aus-Archivists: Listservs and the Commitment to Digital Preservation
By Mark Matienzo, on October 17th, 2010 I'd been long interested in starting to develop code using some sort of MapReduce implementation for distributed computing. I have never been able to get my head around Hadoop, so I gave up with that pretty quickly. I recently discovered Disco, a MapReduce framework with an Erlang-based core. Disco also allows you to to write your worker code in Python, which was a huge plus to me.
After stumbling through the tutorial, I took the word count demo and put together some basic code using pymarc that gathered tag count statistics for a bunch of MARC files. The code's still in a very early form, and arguably should carve up large files into smaller chunks to pass off to the worker processes; I've gotten around this for the time being by splitting up the files using yaz-marcdump. Once I split the files, I pushed them into a tag of DDFS, the Disco Distributed File System. This was a useful way for me to write some demo code both for using pymarc and Disco. The code follows, and is also available as a Gist on Github.
#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# pymarc_disco.py - Mark Matienzo
# sample MapReduce tasks for Disco to get tag counts from MARC files/streams
# usage: python pymarc_disco.py
<input1> [input2 ... inputN]
import sys
from disco.core import Disco, result_iterator
from disco.settings import DiscoSettings
import pymarc
def read(fd, size, fname):
return pymarc.MARCReader(fd)
def map(record, params):
for field in record.fields:
yield field.tag, 1
def reduce(iter, params):
from disco.util import kvgroup
for tag, counts in kvgroup(sorted(iter)):
yield tag, sum(counts)
disco = Disco(DiscoSettings()['DISCO_MASTER'])
print "Starting Disco job.."
print "Go to %s to see status of the job." % disco.master
results = disco.new_job(name="tagcount",
input=sys.argv[1:],
map=map,
map_reader=read,
reduce=reduce,
save=True).wait()
print "Job done. Results:"
for word, count in result_iterator(results):
print word, count
By Mark Matienzo, on September 14th, 2010 Every project has it's day. I've administered ArchivesBlogs for four years now. Originally, I created it to fill a void when blogging was new to the archival profession, and archivists were having to make the case for dedicating staff time to shepherding early social media projects. Four years later, things are much different; I'm less interested in Web 2.0 (professionally speaking), more archivists are blogging, and more repositories are maintaining their own blogs.
Despite the changes in the archival blogosphere and repository administration, archivists still contact me occasionally and remind me of the value of ArchivesBlogs. It's also lead to some interesting debates in the past. I still think it has its place, but I don't want to be the only person shaping its future. I've also been thinking for a while that I want to get out of the aggregation business, and I believe time to put together a succession plan.
The reality is that I don't have the time to rethink what ArchivesBlogs could be, or even give it the care and feeding it needs to keep running. In short, I'm looking for help. No, scratch that.
I'm looking for someone to take over ArchivesBlogs. You certainly won't go it alone - I'll help with the transition period, and it's even possible I'll help with a migration from its WordPress-based install to something slicker or even something simpler. Either way, please let me know if it's something you're interested in helping with. It would arguably be even better if several individuals were interested in helping out. While strong tech skills aren't essential, they'll certainly help, and if you don't have the, already, you'll likely pick some up in the process.
What you'd need to know and/or learn:
- Running a content management system like WordPress or Drupal
- Some knowledge of HTML and CSS
- Basic knowledge of PHP and how to work with a MySQL database
- Connecting to remote machines using SSH and SFTP
As a reminder, ArchivesBlogs is hosted by ibiblio.org, so you wouldn't have to foot the bill for hosting the site personally. archivesblogs.com is registered through August of 2012, and I'd certainly be willing to contribute several more years' worth of registration fees in the interim.
Please leave me a comment if you're interested or have any ideas. I realize that someone may propose the possibility of SAA hosting ArchivesBlogs. This might be a plausible idea, but would likely require more substantial planning than for which I have time.
By Mark Matienzo, on August 6th, 2010 Apologies for the unapproved comments - I was having issues with my email over the last week which I failed to discover until just today!
I have created two Google Calendars for events during the 2010 SAA/CoSA/NAGARA conference. One is for "official events" that were incorporated into the program, and the other is for otherwise related but unofficial events. It's also embedded into this post below for easy reference! Please let me know if there are any events you'd like to add to the unofficial calendar.
By Mark Matienzo, on July 28th, 2010 I am certainly not the first person to chime in on this topic, and I certainly hope not to be the last. Inspired by two fantastic posts by Ben Bromley and Maureen Callahan, I have chosen to discuss the reasons why I have given up on the Archives and Archivists List. Unlike Ben and Maureen, who discuss why they choose not to post to the list, I'm also including reasons why I choose not to read or subscribe to the list anymore. For what it's worth, until yesterday, I had been on the A&A List for almost nine long years.
- I don't think the majority of the traffic is terribly useful. This can be incredibly frustrating, especially there's a question on topic you happen to know something about. Telling someone how to perform a Google search is not an adequate response.Given the signal-to-noise ratio of the list, useful or timely messages can be easily buried.
- Off-topic messages seem to be the rule rather than the exception. I finally snapped when the "Virtual Picnic" began. I know it's a fun tradition and all, but it's a tradition that many of us have neither the time nor interest in which to indulge.
- People can be brusque, mean, angry, unhappy, etc. Posters to the list can be insulting. I tend to have a rather thick skin, but it's still a bit inexcusable to see some of the adults interacting the way they do on the list. Also, if a casual observer came across the A&A List, I'm afraid it'd give our profession a bad rap as containing a lot of miserable people who seem to spend the better part of their work day complaining or overreacting about the state of things. (I know, pot, kettle, black. To be fair, it's no longer during my work day.)
- There are better professional resources out there. A recent thread disputed the value of the list over things like blogs and Twitter. Generally speaking, I get better professional advice from sources other than the A&A List. These include blogs and Twitter as well as other e-mail lists. There are plenty of section-, roundtable-, and function-specific e-mail lists that are likely a better competitor for your attention. Arguably, I will send someone to the EAD Listserv before the A&A List if they have a question about EAD.
- It is arcane and hard to interact with beyond reading and posting. Maureen suggests checking the list archives before you post a question. Unfortunately, the search interface isn't entirely intuitive. Changing your subscription settings isn't entirely straightforward either. How can we be expected to use this resource with any facility if the tools we have are so suboptimal?
I may not leave the list forever, but I'm certainly done with it for now. I am happy to contribute back to the online professional community elsewhere and I certainly plan to continue doing so. We need a better solution, though, so start preparing your alternate online fora as soon as possible.
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