We have been hard at work architecting a robust Repository program for our Duke University community. And while doing this, we’re in the midst of shoring things up architecturally on the back end. You may be asking yourself: Why all the fuss? What’s the big deal?
Well, part of the fuss is that it’s high time to move beyond the idea that our repository is a platform. We’d much prefer that our repository be know as a program. A suite of valuable services that serve the needs of our campus community. The repository will always be a platform. In fact, it will be a rock-solid preservation platform- a space to park your valuable digital assets and feel 100% confident that the Libraries will steward those materials for the long haul. But the repository is much more than a platform; it’s a suite of service goodness that we hope to market and promote!
Secondly, it’s because we’ve got some new and exciting developments happening in Repository-land, specifically in the realm of data management. To start with, the Provost graciously appointed four new positions to serve the data needs of the University, and those new positions will sit in the Libraries. We have two Senior Research Specialists and two Content Analysts joining our ranks in early January. These positions will be solely dedicated to the refinement of data curation processes, liaising with faculty on data management best practice, assisting researchers with the curation and deposit of research data, and acquiring persistent access to said data. Pretty cool stuff!
So in preparation for this, we’ve had a few things cooking. To begin with, we are re-designing our Duke Digital Repository homepage. We will highlight three service areas:
Duke Scholarship: This area will feature the research, scholarship and activities of Duke faculty members and academic staff. It will also highlight services in support of open access, copyright support, digital publishing, and more.
Research Data: This area will be dedicated to the fruits of Duke Scholarship, and will be an area that features research data and data sets. It will highlight services in support of data curation, data management, data deposit, data citation, and more.
Library Collections: This area will focus on digital collections that are owned or stewarded specifically by the Duke University Libraries. This includes digitized special collections, University Archives material, born digital materials, and more.
For each of these areas we’ve focused on defining a base collections policy for each, and are in the process of refining our service models, and shoring up policy that will drive preservation and digital asset management of these materials.
So now that I’ve got you all worked up about these new developments, you may be asking, ‘When can I know more?!’ You can expect to see and hear more about these developments (and our newly redesigned website) just after the New Year. In fact, you can likely expect another Bitstreams Repository post around that time with more updates on our progress, a preview of our site, and perhaps a profile or two of the new staff joining our efforts!
Until then, stay tuned, press ‘Save’, and call us if you’re looking for a better, more persistent, more authoritative approach to saving the fruits of your digital labor! (Or contact us)
The Duke University Libraries software development team just recently returned from a week in Boston, MA at a conference called Hydra Connect. We ate good seafood, admired beautiful cobblestones, strolled along the Charles River, and learned a ton about what’s going on in the Hydra-sphere.
At this point you may be scratching your head, exclaiming- huh?! Hydra? Hydrasphere? Have no fear, I shall explain!
Our repository, the Duke Digital Repository, is a Hydra/Fedora Repository. Hydra and Fedora are names for two prominent open-source communities in repository land. Fedora concerns itself with architecting the back-end of a repository- the storage layer. Hydra, on the other hand, refers to a multitude of end-user applications that one can architect on top of a Fedora repository to perform digital asset management. Pretty cool and pretty handy. Especially for someone that has no interest in architecting a repository from scratch.
And for a little context re: open source… the idea is that a community of like-minded individuals that care about a particular thing, will band together to develop a massively cool software product that meets a defined need, is supported and extended by the community, and is offered for free for someone to inspect, modify and/or enhance the source code.
I italicized ‘free’ to emphasize that while the software itself is free, and while the source code is available for download and modification it does take a certain suite of skills to architect a Hydra/Fedora Repository. It’s not currently an out-of-the-box solutions, but is moving in that direction with Hydra-in-a-Box. But I digress…
So. Why might someone be interested in joining an open-source community such as these? Well, for many reasons, some of which might ring true for you:
Resources are thin. Talented developers are hard to find and harder to recruit. Working with an open source community means that 1) you have the source code to get started, 2) you have a community of people that are available (and generally enthusiastic) about being a resource, and 3) working collaboratively makes everything better. No one wants to go it alone.
Governance. If one gets truly involved at the community level there are often opportunities for contributing thoughts and opinion that can help to shape and guide the software product. That’s super important when you want to get invested in a project and ensure that it fully meets you need. Going it alone is never a good option, and the whole idea of open-source is that it’s participatory, collaborative, and engaged.
Give back. Perhaps you have a great idea. A fantastic use case. Perhaps one that could benefit a whole lot of other people and/or institutions. Well then share the love by participating in open-source. Instead of developing a behemoth locally that is not maintainable, contribute ideas or features or a new product back to the community. It benefits others, and it benefits you, by investing the community in the effort of folding features and enhancements back into the core.
Hydra Connect was a fantastic opportunity to mingle with like-minded professionals doing very similar work, and all really enthusiastic to share their efforts. They want you to get excited about their work. To see how they are participating in the community. How they are using this variety of open-source software solutions in new and innovative ways.
It’s easy to get bogged down at a local level with the micro details, and to lose the big picture. It was refreshing to step out of the office and get back into the frame of mind that recognizes and empowers the notion that there is a lot of power in participating in healthy communities of practice. There is also a lot of economy in it.
The team came back to Durham full of great ideas and a lot of enthusiasm. It has fueled a lot of fantastic discussion about the future of our repository software eco-system and how that complements our desire to focus on integration, community developed goodness, and sustainable practices for software development.
More to come as we turn that thought process into practice!
We’ve been talking a lot about the Repository of late, so I thought it might be time to come full circle and make sure we’re all on the same page here…. What exactly is a Repository?
A Repository is essentially a digital shelf. A really, really smart shelf!
It’s the place to safely and securely store digital assets of a wide variety of types for preservation, discovery, and use, though not all materials in the repository may be discoverable or accessible by everyone. So, it’s like a shelf. Except that this shelf is designed to help us preserve these materials and try to ensure they’ll be usable for decades.
This shelf tells us if the materials on it have changed in any way. They tell us when the materials don’t conform to the format specification that describes exactly how a file format is to be represented. These shelves have very specific permissions, a well thought out backup procedure to several corners of the country, a built-in versioning system to allow us to migrate endangered or extinct formats to new, shiny formats, and a bunch of other neat stuff.
The repository is the manifestation of a conviction about the importance of an enduring scholarly record and open and free access to Duke scholarship. It is where we do our best to carve our knowledge in stone for future generations.
Why? is perhaps the most important question of all. There are several approaches to Why? National funding agencies (NIH, NSF, NEH, etc) recognize that science is precariously balanced on shoddy data management practices and increasingly require researchers to deposit their data with a reputable repository. Scholars would like to preserve their work, make it accessible to everyone (not just those who can afford outrageously priced journal subscriptions), and want to increase the reach and impact of their work by providing stable and citable DOIs.
Students want to be able to cite their own thesis, dissertations, and capstone papers and to have others discover and cite them. The Library wants to safeguard its investment in digitization of Special Collections. Archives needs a place to securely store university records.
A Repository, specifically our Duke Digital Repository, is the place to preserve our valuable scholarly output for many years to come. It ensures disaster recovery, facilitates access to knowledge, and connects you with an ecosystem of knowledge.
We are shouting it from the roof tops: The migration from Fedora 3 to Fedora 4 is complete! And Digital Repository Services are not the only ones relieved. We appreciate the understanding that our colleagues and users have shown as they’ve been inconvenienced while we’ve built a more resilient, more durable, more sustainable preservation platform in which to store and share our digital assets.
We began the migration of data from Fedora 3 on Monday, May 23rd. In this time we’ve migrated roughly 337,000 objects in the Duke Digital Repository. The data migration was split into several phases. In case you’re interested, here are the details:
Collections were identified for migration beginning with unpublished collections, which comprise about 70% of the materials in the repository
Collections to be migrated were locked for editing in the Fedora 3 repository to prevent changes that inadvertently won’t be migrated to the new repository
Collections to be migrated were passed to 10 migration processors for actual ingest into Fedora 4
Objects were migrated first. This includes the collection object, content objects, item objects, color targets for digital imaging, and attachments (objects related to, but not part of, a collection like deposit agreements
Then relationships between objects were migrated
Last, metadata was migrated
Collections were then validated in Fedora 4
When validation is complete, collections will be unlocked for editing in Fedora 4
Presto! Voila! That’s it!
While our customized version of the Fedora migrate gem does some validation of migrated content, we’ve elected to build an independent process to provide validation. Some of the validation is straightforward such as comparing checksums of Fedora 3 files against those in Fedora 4. In other cases, being confident that we’ve migrated everything accurately can be much more difficult. In Fedora 3, we can compare checksums of metadata files while in Fedora 4 object metadata is stored opaquely in a database without checksums that can be compared. The short of it is that we’re working hard to prove successful migration of all of our content and it’s harder than it looks. It’s kind of like insurance- protecting us from the risk of lost or improperly migrated data.
We’re in the final phases of spiffing up the Fedora 4 Digital Repository user interface, which is scheduled to be deployed the week of July 11th. That release will not include any significant design changes, but is simply compatible with the new Fedora 4 code base. We are planning to release enhancements to our Data & Visualizations collection, and are prioritizing work on the homepage of the Duke Digital Repository… you will likely see an update on that coming up in a subsequent blog post!
In the Digital Production Center, many of the videotapes we digitize have “bars and tone” at the beginning of the tape. These are officially called “SMPTE color bars.” SMPTE stands for The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, the organization that established the color bars as the North American video standard, beginning in the 1970s. In addition to the color bars presented visually, there is an audio tone that is emitted from the videotape at the same time, thus the phrase “bars and tone.”
SMPTE color bars
The purpose of bars and tone is to serve as a reference or target for the calibration of color and audio levels coming from the videotape during transmission. The color bars are presented at 75% intensity. The audio tone is a 1kHz sine wave. In the DPC, we can make adjustments to the incoming signal, in order to bring the target values into specification. This is done by monitoring the vectorscope output, and the audio levels. Below, you can see the color bars are in proper alignment on the DPC’s vectorscope readout, after initial adjustment.
Color bars in proper alignment with the Digital Production Center’s vectorscope readout. Each letter stands for a color: red, magenta, blue, cyan, green and yellow.
We use Blackmagic Design’s SmartView monitors to check the vectorscope, as well as waveform and audio levels. The SmartView is an updated, more compact and lightweight version of the older, analog equipment traditionally used in television studios. The Smartview monitors are integrated into our video rack system, along with other video digitization equipment, and numerous videotape decks.
The Digital Production Center’s videotape digitization system.
If you are old enough to have grown up in the black and white television era, you may recognize this old TV test pattern, commonly referred to as the “Indian-head test pattern.” This often appeared just before a TV station began broadcasting in the morning, and again right after the station signed off at night. The design was introduced in 1939 by RCA. The “Indian-head” image was integrated into a pattern of lines and shapes that television engineers used to calibrate broadcast equipment. Because the illustration of the Native American chief contained identifiable shades of gray, and had fine detail in the feathers of the headdress, it was ideal for adjusting brightness and contrast.
The Indian-head test pattern was introduced by RCA in 1939.
When color television debuted in the 1960’s, the “Indian-head test pattern” was replaced with a test card showing color bars, a precursor to the SMPTE color bars. Today, the “Indian-head test pattern” is remembered nostalgically, as a symbol of the advent of television, and as a unique piece of Americana. The master art for the test pattern was discovered in an RCA dumpster in 1970, and has since been sold to a private collector. In 2009, when all U.S. television stations were required to end their analog signal transmission, many of the stations used the Indian-head test pattern as their final analog broadcast image.
Our modern day lives and professional endeavors are teeming with digital output. We participate in the digital ecosystem every day, contributing our activities, our scholarship, and our work in new and evolving ways. Some of that contribution gets lost in the Internet ether, and some gets saved, or preserved, in specific, often localized ways that are neither sustainable nor preservable for the long haul. We here at the Duke University Libraries, want to be able to look to the future with confidence, knowing that we have a game plan for capturing and preserving digital objects that are necessary and vital to the university community. Queue the new Duke Digital Repository.
The Duke Digital Repository is a software development initiative undertaken by the Digital Repository Services department in the Duke University Libraries. It is a preservation repository architected using the Fedora Open Source software project, which is intended to replace the current manifestation of our institutional repository, Duke Space. It is a superior product that is provisioned specifically for the preservation, storage, and access of digital objects. The Duke Digital Repository is fully operational; we are now in the process of refining user interfaces, ingesting new and varied collections, and assessing descriptive metadata needs for ingested collections.
So what’s next? Well we’ve got the Duke Digital Repository as a platform, now we need the Duke Digital Repository as a program. We need to clarify the services and support that we offer to the university community, we need to fully define its stakeholders, and we need to implement an organizational structure to support a robust service.
Here are just a few things that we’re engaged in that are seeking to define our user groups and assess their needs in a preservation platform and digital support service. Defining these expectations will allow us to take the next step in crafting a sustainable and relevant program to support the digital scholarship of the university.
ITHAKA Faculty Survey: In the Fall semester of 2015, the Libraries deployed the ITHAKA S+R Faculty Survey. Faculty are considered a primary stakeholder of the repository, as it is well provisioned to meet their data management needs. 260 faculty members responded to the survey, sharing their thoughts on a variety of topics including scholarly communications services, research practices, data preservation and management needs, and much more. There was a lot of valuable, actionable data contributed, which pertains directly to the repository as a preservation tool, and a service for data support. The digital repository team is working through this data to identify and target needs and desires in a repository program.
Graduate & Undergraduate Advisory Boards: The Digital Repository staff are also working with the Assessment & User Experience team within the library to reach out to graduate and undergraduate student constituents to capture their voice. We have collectively identified a list of questions and prompts that will engage them in a discussion about their needs pertaining to the repository as a tool and a service. From this discussion we are also gauging their understanding of ‘a repository’ and hoping to glean some information that will help us to understand how we might brand and market the repository more effectively.
Fedora Community: Fedora is an open source software product developed and stewarded by the DuraSpace community. The Duke University Libraries are active participants in the community which is essentially a consortium of academic institutions that are working toward a common goal of preserving intellectual, cultural, and scientific heritage. We are reaching out to our community constituents to ask how other institutions similar to ours are supporting their repository programs. We’re assessing various models of support and generating a discussion around repository support as a resourced program, rather than a simple software solution. We are also working with Assessment & User Experience to conduct an environmental scan and literature review to gain greater insight and understanding of best practice.
In short, we want to make the repository special, and relevant to its users. We want to feel confident that it provides a service that is valuable and necessary for our university community. We invite your feedback as we embark on this effort. For further information or to give us your feedback, please contact us.
This is a story about how our own digital collections program led us to rediscover an amazing manuscript collection that has been at Duke since at least 1896. The Trinity Archive, now published as The Archive, is a Duke University student literary and cultural journal, first published in 1887 while the college was still based in Trinity, N.C. It is one of the oldest continuously-published literary magazines in the United States. Early editions of the Trinity Archive,held in the University Archives, were digitized through Duke’s digital collections program and are now available through the Internet Archive.
It turns out that the Duke University Archivist, Valerie Gillispie, enjoys reading digitized issues of the Trinity Archive. While perusing the December 1896 edition, she found an interesting article: “The Removal of the Tuscarora Indians from North Carolina.” Written by Sanders Dent, then manager of the magazine, the article aims to “arrange some facts found in the old papers of General Jeremiah Slade and, thus, preserve an interesting bit of North Carolina history for her future historian. General Slade was one of the Commissioners appointed by the Legislature in 1802 to settle the affairs of the Tuscarora Indians and from his letters we get most of the material for this sketch.” Dent’s article recounts the history of the Tuscarora in North Carolina in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Following the end of the Tuscarora War in 1713, many Tuscarora fled to upstate New York and joined the Iroquois Confederacy as the Sixth Nation. Those that remained in North Carolina were granted land in Bertie County, but by the late eighteenth century they too were being forced to lease their land to the whites and leave the state for New York.
Dent’s article liberally quotes from letters held in the Jeremiah Slade Papers. Between 1803 and 1818, Slade served as an agent for the Tuscarora, managing their land leases in North Carolina and tracking money owed them by their white tenants. The papers include letters, receipts, and legal documents between Slade and the Tuscarora in Niagara, New York, with several documents signed with an X by the chiefs representing their tribe. Dent adds in a footnote that Slade’s “papers are now in the possession of the Trinity College Historical Society.”
A power of attorney sent to Jeremiah Slade in 1817, signed by Tuscarora chiefs and warriors
Thanks to Dent’s footnote, Val found that the Jeremiah Slade Papers were now held in the Rubenstein Library (but under his son’s name, as the William Slade Papers). It was an exciting connection to our Rubenstein Library ancestors, the Trinity College Historical Society. Founded by Trinity College students and professors in 1892, TCHS sought to “collect, arrange, and preserve a library of books, pamphlets, maps, charts, manuscripts, papers, paintings, statuary, and other materials illustrative of the history of North Carolina and the South.” It was a history club and a museum and a library all-in-one, and many of the library’s oldest Southern collections were acquired by TCHS before being transferred to Duke’s manuscript department in the early twentieth century. (You can read more about the TCHS here and here.)
Undated letter to Slade from the Tuscarora, asking for transfer of funds and telling him they intended to “prosecute their claims” to the N.C. Legislature
How and when the Slade Papers first came to the Trinity College Historical Society is still a mystery. The TCHS records, held by the University Archives, are incomplete for that period. A clue lies in the Slade Papers, with an 1884 item from J.D.B. Hooper, a professor at the University of North Carolina. Hooper writes that “I have consented to receive from Mr. William B. Slade, a Box of Scraps, culled by him, from newspapers, magazines, &c. with a request that I will endeavor to have them received into some library, public or private, where they may, at some future time, become useful…” He goes on to write, “I think that they may furnish materials for interesting Scrap books, when they shall fall into the hands of a person of leisure and literary taste.” Um, sure. Thanks Professor Hooper! (His papers are held at UNC.) The only other hint I have found as to the initial transfer of the Slade Papers to Duke lies in this undated clipping from the collection:
Undated clipping announcing the transfer of Slade’s scrapbooks to the Trinity College Library
But I can find no record of Slade scrapbooks in our accession logs or catalog records from the 1890s. I can only assume that with the scrapbooks came the box of papers that Hooper mentions. It all must have arrived sometime before 1896, when Dent wrote the Trinity Archive piece.
Since this all came to light after Val’s browsing of the Trinity Archive, we decided to revisit the Slade Family Papers, update their housing, and enhance the collection’s description to reflect contemporary descriptive standards and scholarship interests. The original catalog record had no mention of the Tuscarora, and there was no finding aid or other web presence for the collection. It was really fun to re-process such an old collection and see its contents firsthand. The Tuscarora documents, while fascinating, are only a small piece of the Slade story. The majority of the collection documents the nineteenth-century operations of the Slade plantations, farms, and fisheries around Williamston, N.C. Plus, each generation of the Slade family had many children, so there are a lot of letters between all the siblings and cousins discussing their activities, family life, education, politics, and entertainment. There are also extensive legal and financial documents, including receipts, account books, land deeds, court cases, and other items. I was amazed at the amount of documentation discussing slaves; items recording student life at different North Carolina colleges in the early nineteenth century; letters detailing life in the Confederacy during the Civil War; and materials about postwar recovery and politics, including the new business arrangements between the Slades and their former slaves, now freedmen.
Estate inventory including slave valuations, 1820, in the Slade Family Papers
It’s always wonderful to see what sort of research can happen as a result of digitization and online access to our collections. But the re-processing and new finding aid for the Slade Family Papers was special. It is one of those rare projects where it all came full circle: because the Trinity Archive was available online, we rediscovered this collection, and along with it, further evidence of the work of the Trinity College Historical Society. The TCHS acquired the Slade Family Papers, among many other things, over 120 years ago for future historians to study and use. We are active participants in that legacy today.
Now, I know last week’s Bitstreams post about metadata and date encoding left you wanting to know more about Duke Digital Collections date metadata, the Extended Date Time Format, and how we are planning to apply it. Well, don’t you worry – I’m going to talk about it now in scintillating detail.
As Cory talked about last week, we have a lot of inconsistent, “squishy” date metadata in use in our digital collections, squishy both in terms of what those dates mean and how they are represented. This is a problem when you want to do fun stuff with your dates, like create facets and visualizations, or, um, retrieve reliably comprehensive search results when looking for everything from a time period. So we’re beginning the process of normalizing all of that data, but as we’re talking about special collections materials, date squishiness is not an uncommon occurrence, it is inherent to the materials, and we need to be able to represent it programmatically.
There are 12,146 unique date values present in our digital collections metadata, and these values range from very machine-processable – “January 1, 1936” or “1971-1972”, – to a lot less so – “[ca. late 1880s]” or “[1950s] Nov. 22]”, along with a plethora of values all meaning the same thing – “n.d.”, “None”, “undated”, “Unknown”, etc (along with one inscrutable instance of the word “Philadelphia”). In order to begin the process of normalizing the data, we identified the main patterns those dates took, and came up with a list of 38 rough patterns into which all but 178 values fell. Next we took a stab at converting those patterns to EDTF. The following represents the great bulk of our data:
Pattern
EDTF
Display Example
yyyy
yyyy
1910
yyyy-yyyy; yyyy/yyyy
yyyy/yyyy
1910-1913
mm/dd/yy; yyyy Mon. dd; yyyy-mm-dd; dd-Mon-yy
yyyy-mm-dd
January 1, 1910
yyyy Mon. dd?
yyyy-mm-dd?
January 1, 1910?
yyyy Mon dd-dd
yyyy-mm-dd/yyyy-mm-dd
January 1, 1910 to January 3, 1910
yyyy-mm; yyyy Mon.; yyyy/mm
yyyy-mm
January 1910
yyyy Mon.?
yyyy-mm?
January 1910?
ca. yyyy; circa yyyy
yyyy~
Circa 1910
yyyy?; [yyyy?]
yyyy?
1910?
[yyyy/yyyy?]
yyyy?/yyyy?
1910 to 1913?
yyyy or yyyy
[yyyy,yyyy]
1910 or 1913
yyyx; yyy?; yyy_?; yyy?; [yyy-]
yyyu
191x
yyyys
yyyx
1910s
circa yyyy-yyyy; yyyy-yyyy and n.d.
yyyy~/yyyy~
Circa 1910 to 1913
As you can see above, the specification accommodated most of the patterns we identified, but when we tried to encode more nuanced dates, we discovered that couldn’t quite take the encoding as far as we wanted.
For example, one pattern that shows up in our metadata frequently looks like this:
Circa 1940s-1950s
A decade encoded in EDTF looks like this:
194x (for 1940s)
and we can encode a circa date like this:
1940~ (for circa 1940)
But we can’t combine the two formats – the following is not a valid EDTF date:
194x~ (for circa 1940s)
Ideally, the specification would allow us to create an encoded date that looked like the above date, as well as this:
194x~/195x~ (for circa 1940s to 1950s)
We can work around this deficiency by stripping ‘circa’ from the date ranges and using the ‘unspecified’ encoding:
194u/195u (which we can translate to display as: 1940s to 1950s)
But this approach isn’t ideal, as it is inconsistent with our other usage of the format and isn’t technically ‘correct’, either. Happily, the EDTF specification is open for modification and proposals for modifications are still being taken. A quick glance at the listserv archives indicates that we’re not the only people trying to encode this kind of squishiness.
In the meantime, we can keep ourselves busy with cleaning up, normalizing, and converting the great bulk of our date metadata, as well as dealing with those 178 outliers individually. We still feel good about using EDTF – it’s a LOT better than our current date situation, and has some good room for improvement, as well. Pretty solid for a first date, I’d say.
The initial thought I had for this blog post was to describe a slice of my day that revolved around the work of William Gedney. I was going to spin a tale about being on the hunt for a light meter to take lux (luminance) readings used to help calibrate the capture environment of one of our scanners. On my search for the light meter I bumped into the new exhibit of William Gedney’s handmade books displayed in the Chappell Family Gallery in the Perkins Library. I had digitized a number of these books a few months ago and enjoyed pretty much every image in the books. One of the books on display was opened to a particular photograph. To my surprise, I had just digitized a finished print of the same image that very morning while working on a larger project to digitize all of Gedney’s finished prints, proof prints, contact sheets and other material. Once the project is complete (a year or so from now) I will have personally seen, handled and digitized over 20,000 of Gedney’s photographs. Whoa! Would I be able to recognize Gedney images whenever one presented itself just like the book in the gallery? Maybe.
Once the collection is digitized and published through Duke Digital Collections the whole world will be able to see this amazing body of work. Instead of boring you with the details of that story I thought I would just leave you with a few images from the collection. For me, many of Gedney’s photographs have a kinetic energy to them. It seems as if I can almost feel the air. My imagination may be working overtime to achieve this and the reality of what was happening when the photograph was taken may be wholly different but the fact is these photographs spin up my imagination and transport me to the moments he has captured. These photographs inspire me to dust off my enlarger and set up a darkroom.
It may take some time to complete this particular project but there are other William Gedney related projects, materials and events available at Duke.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Hopscotch Design Festival, a 2-day precursor to the music event of the same name in Raleigh, NC. The Design Fest used a very wide tent in gathering speakers from the world of design — they included urban planners, architects, musicians, and writers, in addition to more typical designer/illustrator/interactive types. While I haven’t been to that many conferences, the ones I’ve attended have usually been heavy on the tech side, typically exemplified by a sea of glowing silver macbook pros. During the opening keynote, so far as I could see, I was the only one with a laptop. This crowd was heavy on the analog side (pens and moleskines). This ethos was reinforced by Austin Kleon’s presentation on essential tools for the analog desk. I wasn’t all that familiar with Kleon, but he was clearly a very skilled presenter and offered some interesting tips on maintaining creativity. I was particularly impressed with his newspaper poetry. Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the conference and will hopefully be able to attend again in the future.
Here are some of the speakers I particularly enjoyed:
I don’t watch much TV. But one show I really enjoy, thanks to my wife, is Project Runway. My favorite contestant, by far, has been Justin LeBlanc. Not only did he come across as a genuinely wonderful person on the show, his designs were amazing. I especially appreciated how his work incorporated non-traditional materials and technology, like 3D printing. Which is all to say that I was super excited to seem him in person. He talked a lot about his creative process, showed off some projects he’d worked on in grad school [before he hit the big time], and also showed some newer work that he’ll debut on the runway soon. He stressed that his latest work is heavily influenced by living in North Carolina. He’s collaborated with local companies to procure materials, print fabrics, and more. The whole thing felt very positive to me.
While I had never heard of Steve Frykholm before, I was immediately impressed by him. He’s been a designer at the famed Herman Miller company for 45 years. He’s clearly seen a lot of things change in the design industry over that time, so the perspective he shared was really insightful. He told an interesting story of the first Herman Miller catalog that was designed by George Nelson in 1952. The original proposal was for a highly stylized, photo-heavy book printed on nice paper — a sharp contrast to the text-heavy catalogs of the day. The top brass shot it down, saying it would be incredibly expensive to produce, and asked the team to come up with a new and more affordable version. The next iteration kept the same design, but added a bound cover and a $3 price tag. No one had ever charged for a product catalog, so this was a bold step. However, the bosses eventually relented and the catalog went on to be a huge success. The next year their competitors were charging $5 for their catalogs. [As an aside, an original copy of the catalog is available at the UNC Art Library.] His point in sharing this story was that sometimes you need to be the first at something — it’s OK to take bold steps and try something new. It won’t always work out, but sometimes it does. He also shared a bit about his creative process and how design work happens at Herman Miller. Towards the end of his time he talked about a series of posters he designed for the company’s annual Spring Picnic. These posters were recently added to the permanent collection at MoMA. I could have listened to him talk for much longer. He’s truly an inspiring individual.
I first encountered Cheetie Kumar as the lead guitarist for her band, Birds of Avalon. I just thought she was a great musician. Then I learned she was also a recording engineer/producer, an entrepreneur, a chef and restaurateur, a designer, and generally an awesome person. So, I was excited to attend her talk. She came across to me as very humble, but she was also very inspiring. She talked about how she first settled in Raleigh and how she and her band mates / business partners have been dedicated to making it a better place ever since. She explained that they would be out on the road for months at a time then come back home only for a short time, almost like visiting, and with this fresh perspective they were able to find new and exciting things to love about the city that they probably wouldn’t have otherwise. She also highlighted the design features she came up with in creating the space for her restaurant — wood floors salvaged from a basketball court, an awning made from leftover construction material, a penny-covered floor in the bathroom, and a wall of paintings towards the back of the space. She mentioned multiple times how much hard work friends and others contributed to making it all a success. It’s literally amazing how much she juggles in her day to day life. She also said she doesn’t get a lot of sleep.
I was familiar with Graham Roberts’ work without realizing it. He’s worked on some truly amazing projects at the New York Times, such as Inside the Quartet, Music and Gesture, and Skrillex, Diplo, and Bieber make a hit. During his talk he essentially walked us through the process of working on these projects. There were way more people involved in building these things than I would have guessed. For the Kronos Quartet piece, they captured real-time 3-D data using multiple microsoft connect cameras. He then had to visualize what ended up being a staggering amount of data. The end result is beautiful; abstract, but graceful in capturing the essence of their performance movements. He also talked about what it’s like working at the Times and how he approaches his work from the perspective of a journalist, not just as a designer/animator/3D artist. In short, his work is stunning. And while it’s inspiring, in a way it’s also hard to imagine being able to create something so amazing. But I’m hopeful with the richness and diversity of our collections at DUL that we’ll continue to make our own inspiring work.
Notes from the Duke University Libraries Digital Projects Team
Justin LeBlanc
Steve Frykholm
Cheetie Kumar
Graham Roberts