Topics of General Interest from the National Slavic Conference

Lost U.S. Silent Films

At ASEEES, the national Slavic conference I heard a fascinating report from Patrick Loughney of the Library of Congress about the rediscovery of lost U.S. silent films in Russia. Apparently 75 percent of all feature films made by U.S. studios between 1912 and 1930 have been lost. One of the reasons is that silver was used in producing the films, and the studios recycled film stock as much as possible. In 2010, 195 lost U.S. films were discovered in Gosfil'mofond, the Russian film archive. These were silent films that were sold to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s and shown there. In most cases the English titles have been lost because they were replaced by not always accurate Russian ones. Gosfil'mofond has restored and made digital copies of 10 of these films on DVDs and has given them to the Library of Congress. More will follow. We were able to see clips from several of these films, and Loughney showed in his comments that these and subsequently restored films will change the history of U.S. cinema as it's been understood up to now. The Library of Congress is looking for lost U.S. silent films in the archives of other countries as well.

How to Keep Track of Digitization Projects

Several sessions focused on the various Slavic digitization projects being carried out by libraries, both in the U.S. and abroad, and the difficulty in keeping track of what's now available. The Digitization subcommittee of the Librarian committee of ASEEES is in the process of compiling a national register of U.S.-based Slavic digitization projects. So far they're being divided into exhibitions, digital collections, such as Hathi, subscription databases, and sites that add value to content by marking them up, not just OCRing them, to allow searching in more depth. Some random examples: Yiddish books of the Russian avant-garde; Soviet posters; Gulag history; children's books of the early Soviet era; historical maps; Russian satirical journals.

This project, however, will not address the mammoth digitization projects now being carried out by all three national libraries in Russia--the State Library in Moscow, the National Library in St. Petersburg, and the new Boris Yeltsin library, also in St. Petersburg. In sessions devoted to these Russian projects I was amazed at the sheer volume of what they are making available: historical documents by region, history of Russian law, Russian history textbooks going back to the 18th century, the history of Russian foreign relations, the history of the Russian Orthodox Church, as well as the Soviet atheist movement, pre-1923 books, journals, newspapers, images, etc.

It's not clear to me how we as librarians can help researchers take advantage of these very valuable resources. As Erika Spencer of LC asked in her paper about creating the U.S. Slavic Digital Register, How do we review these projects? How do we keep track of them? How do we create a national bibliography of them?

ACRL/NY Annual Symposium "The Global Librarian: Information without Borders"

Registration is Now Open:

ACRL/NY Annual Symposium "The Global Librarian: Information without Borders"
Friday, December 2, 2011

Academic librarians serve increasingly diverse populations, across a variety of platforms at home and around the world. As higher education becomes more global - and mobile - physical distance is no longer a barrier to teaching and learning. Through innovated use of progressive technologies, academic librarians are mastering the skills needed to navigate this expanding environment. At this symposium, we will see how information is not bound by physical borders - nor is the global librarian.

Home, Click Registration: http://acrlnysymp2011.wordpress.com/

ExL ENUG Conference

I will be attending this regional meeting (and giving a presentation):

Ex Libris Northeast Users Group
2011 Conference Program
October 27-28
University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT

Keynote Presentation (Friday, 8:50AM)

Laura Guy, Systems Librarian at the Arthur Lakes Library,
Colorado School of Mines, will present Avoiding
DATApocalypse, a discussion of data management and
policies for NSF funding recipients

Conference program-
http://www.emausers.org/program.html

report from IASSIST 2011

I recently returned from the IASSIST Conference in Vancouver, BC. Luckily I was there when the Canucks were still winning and the sun was shining, and got back to NYC well before the riots.

IASSIST is the International Association for *Social Science* Information Services & Technology, and although the org has been around for many years, it’s recently been attracting more and more folks interested in e-science and data from disciplines that don’t fit nicely into the “social science” label (not to mention many professionals who are being asked to deal with ALL types of data). It’s an exciting time to be a part of IASSIST as interest in all things data continues to grow and we continue to contemplate our mission and scope. Another thing I like about IASSIST (the org and the conference) is that there are data librarians, but also plenty of others--archivists, programmers, LIS and other researchers, IT professionals, government employees, etc. Of course I love librarians, but it’s nice to hear what others are thinking about occasionally too. The group is still small enough for good networking and getting to know each other.

The narrative we’ve all been hearing for awhile now is still going strong: we need to get our researchers to contribute/share/preserve data...some of them are really into it, many are not (for various reasons)...we need to use a carrot and/or a stick to get more of them on board. Even in the relatively short time I’ve been involved with these communities, I see progress related to all parts of the story, this year particularly re: the NSF data management plan requirements (stick) and creating standards for consistent data citations (carrot).

I also really enjoyed the session on library workshops about data and am looking forward to seeing more (and hopefully to contributing more) sessions about the public services aspects of data librarianship in the future.

The closing plenary session was fantastic. Andrea Reimer is a member of the Vancouver City Council, which seemed an odd choice for a closing plenary speaker, but her session on Vancouver’s open government initiatives was an inspiring end to the conference. She was probably preaching to the choir a bit talking to the IASSIST crowd, but it was refreshing to hear these things from a politician. I was hoping I’d be able to post the video, but it isn’t available yet and would’ve been pretty long to watch anyway. A few key points:
- Citizens can’t be meaningfully involved in government decisions if they aren’t making decisions based on the same information that the politicians have. Plus, citizens/developers can usually make data much more useful faster and more efficiently than can a bureaucracy.
- A lot of info was already out there, but not in logical/usable formats and not well easily findable. It can’t be called “open access” if info is released in formats that are unusable. Releasing data buried in pdf documents is probably better than nothing, but under this initiative, Vancouver is making it standard for agencies to release their data in tabular format that can actually be digested, manipulated, and found. [aside: releasing born-digital material on paper is unacceptable. State of Alaska, take note.]
- Finally, end discrimination against open source software. Let government employees choose the tools they need to do their jobs.

-Samantha

Association of Asian Studies 2011 Conference

This year the Association of Asian Studies celebrated its 70th anniversary by holding its annual conference as close to Asia as possible—in Honolulu. It was a tough assignment, but attending that conference and the in-conjunction annual meetings of the Council on East Asian Libraries required me to spend a full week in Hawaii in late March-early April. Sadly, the panels and other events were largely overshadowed by the tragic occurrences in Japan, which affected both the conference, in terms of speaker and participant cancellations, and Hawaii generally, in terms of a significant drop in Japanese tourism. I was struck by the way the Japanese speakers who were able to attend the conference expressed their obviously deeply felt gratitude toward the United States for its assistance in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami. The topics of some programs were changed at the last minute to address the calamity. The “Network for Historical Materials,” which originated in the wake of the 1996 Kōbe Earthquake has posted some photographs and information about the damage to museums and other sites.

In the exhibit hall, I was happy to see that a book I co-translated was being heavily featured at the booth of the publisher, University of Minnesota Press. The title of the original work by Saitō Tamaki literally means “A Psychoanalysis of Beautiful Fighting Girls,” but the editors and translators ultimately chose the simpler Beautiful Fighting Girl as the English title of this somewhat eccentric, partly Lacanian treatment of otaku--obsessive fans of manga and anime--who focus particularly on the very young girl heroines who appear in those works.

ALA Annual 2011

ALA has published the preliminary program for this year's annual conference in New Orleans, June 23-28.