Episode 616: New Archivist, Digital Problems

Oh, wow, how amazing and interesting, too. But in this digital world, what can we do? What can we do?

Good question. Well, it's up to you. In the digital world, there's over three things to do.

You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and I am [INAUDIBLE]-- terrible. No. You're listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I am Charlie in the studio, with Marlee Givens and Cody Turner and a guest to be named later. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you tune in for, we hope you dig it.

Our show today is called New Archivist Digital Problems, because as you heard in the cold open, we are still asking, in the digital world, what can we do?

But that's just one part of today's show. The other part is, whenever we hire a new faculty member at the Georgia Tech Library, we like to introduce them to you with shows like New Library, New Journey, or New Librarian, New Challenge, or New Job, New Faculty, New Everything.

And our guest today is the new Digital Curation Archivist here at the Georgia Tech Library. We've been doing a lot of hiring recently. This is our third Introduce Yourself show this year. And there's another one coming up. CHARLIE BENNETT: Well, we need a set of diverse and specific skills to tackle of the future, Marlee. That's true. And our songs today are about changing workflows, combining tools and resources in a new way, and pushing back against digital decay.

That was "Introduce Yourself" by Faith No More. And I always think of that song as "Introduce Yourself Right On," but that's not the title. This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called New Archivist Digital Problems. Our guest is Cliff Landis, Digital Curation Archivist at the Georgia Tech Library. Welcome to the show, dude.

Hi, everybody. I'm glad to be here.

Yeah. So we'll start with an easy question. Can you explain your job in 60 words or less?

Oof. Does that one count?

That's one. You got 59 left.

Basically, my job is to take all of the stuff that is digital, whether it's delivered via some sort of media, like a CD or a jump drive, or whether it's something that lives in a cloud server or what have you, and try to make it last for the next 1,000 years.

1,000?

1,000 or more.

You're not on the 10,000 year tip yet?

Not-- well, I have the human era calendar in my office, so I do think of the year as 12,024, but I try to set a little bit more modest goals for myself. Just 1,000.

So I know you weren't doing that when you started in libraries. How did you get started? What brought you into this profession?

So when I was in undergrad, I first started studying horticulture, and then when I decided I didn't want to do that for a living, I went into religious studies because I wanted to flip burgers for a living. But then I looked around and met a really cool librarian named Nancy Noe at Auburn University. Hey, Nancy, if you're out there. And she showed me what a reference librarian-- I get to work with information and do research, but I don't have to write the paper? That sounds amazing!

That's like the academic librarian version of, oh yeah, work at a library and read books all day.

Right, right. So I looked into library school, decided to go to that first just to be on the safe side. I applied to there and a theological school, and I went to library school first, and I've never looked back. I really enjoy the field, the profession, all the stuff that we do.

Do you know that you're not our only former budding theologian in the Georgia Tech Library?

I did not.

Oh yeah. Remember when we interviewed Martin?

Oh my gosh, that's right.

Yeah, mm hmm. CHARLIE BENNETT: I always remember Martin's interest in birds. Right.

And that kind of subsumes any of his other interests.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, there's something to be said for the religious connotations and the way study in theological schools matches up with the librarian--

And the vocational awe.

Awe.

How did you get to Georgia Tech?

My career to date has been doing a tour of archival-- I was a reference librarian at-- excuse me-- at Valdosta State University. And then I transitioned into technology there, and then a web services librarian position at Georgia State very briefly as a corporate metadata and taxonomy manager. And then--

Wait. Wait. How it was very briefly? How brief is very briefly?

Eight months.

Was it just--

And within four months, they dissolved my team, fired my boss, and moved me into web revenue generation, and I said, this is not the gig that I signed up for.

Mm-hmm. CHARLIE BENNETT: It is amazing how a job can change even after you've been interviewed and hired for it.

Oh yeah. So I left there and became a digital initiatives librarian at the AUC Robert W. Woodruff Library where I managed digitization and a little bit of digital preservation. And I've just sort of been myself really fascinated with, curious about, and challenged by the idea of how do we make digital stuff last a long time?

And your title is archivist, but you did not get a archives--

Correct. CHARLIE BENNETT: Archival process degree. Was there a moment you could say, oh, just in my interests, or, like, what-- can you talk about that transition? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So going to the AUC Woodruff Library, I was doing digitization, so I was having to work a lot with archival materials and understand how stuff is organized there in order to digitize it and put it back appropriately.

Do you ever get to tell people how paper is probably going to last longer than digital stuff?

I do.

Does it blow their mind?

Yeah. I'm like, print off your emails that you want to say because good paper will last 1,000 years easy. Digital-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Both love and hate this part of the conversation.

[LAUGHS]

So now you're an archivist by interest, not by training.

Yeah.

No, there's some training.

The interesting thing about archives--

I'm thinking about school. I'm just thinking about the degree, really. That's the thing I want to drill down on.

Well, in the United States, the American Library Association has pretty much made it so that you have to have an ALA accredited master's degree to be a librarian. But archives are a little bit more public history degree or a history degree or some other kind of background. And some of it is "learning on the job" training, just like libraries are, honestly, because I didn't learn everything about libraries in library school.

I can feel the presence of Wendy telling me to make sure the distinction is there. That's really why. So what have you learned about Georgia Tech since you got here?

Wow. I went to Auburn for my undergrad. And Georgia Tech reminds me of Auburn in a lot of ways because there's so much rich history and culture and tradition as part of the student experience here. And that's been one of the fun things to dig into is-- --and George Burdell and learning about all of these little pieces that make for a very rich story that students get to experience.

Auburn also has two mascots.

Three mascots, actually, so the Tigers, War Eagle, and then the Plainsman.

I wasn't familiar with that one.

And which one of those do you yell at football games?

"War Damn Eagle" is the phrase at football games.

So we're coming to the end of the segment. Is there anything about Georgia Tech that is exactly what you expected or nothing like what you expected?

Not a lot like I expected. Honestly, there's been a lot of surprises but all in good ways. The experience of being on campus, the sustainability initiatives that you see everywhere, the of resources that I get to work with. It's been a lot of pleasant surprises for the most part.

Well done. We'll be back with more from Cliff Landis, digital curation archivist, after our music set.

And you can file this set under TR860.A88.

[ST.VINCENT, "BIG TIME NOTHING"] Nothing Big time nothing Big time

That was "Big Time Nothing" by St. Vincent. And we started with "A Long Walk" by Jill Scott. Those were songs about-- let's call them workflows or processes. This is Lost in the Stacks. And we are speaking with Cliff Landis, digital curation archivist at the Georgia Tech Library. So, Cliff, we talked about the scope of the profession and where you were during all these years. What are you doing now? What's a day in the digital curation archivist job look like?

That's a good question. Well, at least once a week, I'm cleaning books because we had the steam or, excuse me, the chilled water outage this summer. So I'm still dedicating a little bit of time to cleaning books.

I had this stress reaction when you said cleaning books because I forgot that we did that. It's been a little while. But it's like, what happened? Same thing that happened that we had to clean at the beginning of the semester.

So I joke. But I do enjoy spending an hour or two cleaning the books just to help out because I enjoy service work. Otherwise, I wouldn't be in this type of a profession. But a day in the life-- I work very closely with Dillon Henry, who's our digital accessioning archivist. And so part of what he does is take all of the media that gets handed over to us. So these could be old floppy disks, CDs, Jaz drives, CompactFlash.

Is that a background process?

Ideally--

What did you call them?

--yes, it's automated. Yeah. Ideally, yes, it's automated so that this can happen regularly. Unfortunately, there is a sustainability concern with it because if you're constantly checking files, then it's going to expend a lot of energy. So we try to do it only when needed occasionally.

So you got to make sure all those people are dead and have been dead for 75 years and that anyone mentioned in there is dead.

You try to make sure that all the dirt comes out long after it can impact anybody.

I heard you catch yourself and correct yourself a little earlier when you were talking about the disk, the 8-inch floppy that needs to be. And you said digitized. But then you're like, it needs the data pulled off. Can you talk about-- is that a very particular term of art these days or just how you think of it?

Yeah, I corrected myself because in my last job, I did digitization, which is where you take analog materials, like magazines and photos and scrapbooks and whatever. And then you scan them to make a digital representation. That's what digitization is. But what we're doing is making a copy of something-- it's just a different workflow, a different process because when you're scanning stuff, you're worried about, what's the resolution? What's the bit depth? How big is the file?

This part of it just makes me crazy and good, crazy and bad crazy. Because as soon as you say a write blocker, I just picture a piece of scotch tape going over the--

That's a physical write blocker.

But then thinking about how-- if we go with the cassette tape analogy, the magnetic head is hitting the tape. And it's wearing away a little bit--

Exactly.

--even with the write blockers off-- so then having the write blockers on, excuse me. But even accessing the stuff on the media that you've gotten is a delicate operation to make sure you don't-- you said Jaz drives.

Yeah, Jaz drives--

Those are just waiting to go click.

Yep. Think about wax cylinders. I mean, every needle in the grooves is wearing away at the audio, the recording. So nowadays, they're using 3D scans in order to scan the grooves so that you can reproduce the music digitally rather than having to actually touch the thing at risk, saving LPs that got snapped in half by doing this digital scanning, in order to make sure that they aren't having to fix the original object just to get the playback of the data.

You are listening to Lost in the Stacks. And we will be back with more from Cliff Landis, digital curation archivist, on the left side of the hour.

Hi. I'm Morna Gerrard from Georgia State University's Special Collections and Archives. You're listening to WREK Atlanta. And this is Lost in the Stacks, the one and only research library rock and roll radio show, which is fine. I'm an archivist. I don't make judgments. [LOU REED, "WALK ON THE WILDSIDE"] Holly came from Miami, FLA Hitchhiked her way across the USA

Our show today is called "New Archivist, Digital Problems." And we're speaking with Cliff Landis, the digital curation archivist at the Georgia Tech Library. When I went looking for some interesting or eccentric quotes about digital archives for this middle section of the show, something caught my eye.

That was "Whirl-y-Reel 1" by Afro Celt Sound System. That's a song that blends African, Celtic, and electronic music, African polyrhythms and Celtic instruments, all that to say it is new methods and old information blended into something new.

Welcome back to Lost in the Stacks. It is an introduce-yourself show today. And our guest is Cliff Landis, who joined the Georgia Tech Library earlier this year as digital curation archivist. So, Cliff, we have been talking about your job. But now we want to pivot to other things you're interested in. So let's talk about why the universe is hostile to computers.

So this is a pet topic of mine because it's something that anytime somebody interested in digitization, digital preservation, anything like that, I love to show them this one video called "The Universe is Hostile to Computers" because, basically, we're constantly being showered with radiation. There are these things called cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles that come and hit the Earth's atmosphere.

I'm imagining the Fantastic Four now. That's the only thing I can think of.

Very that, absolutely. And so if these particles happen to hit just the right place on a computer chip in just the right way, it can flip a zero to a one or a one to a zero. And it can actually change the data on computers that are active and being used. We've seen it change-- there was a vote that got cast. And someone got 4,000 extra votes. There was a plane that plummeted 200 feet in the sky because a particle hit the onboard altimeter at just the right way.

And it sounds a little bit like science fiction to say, it changed the voting numbers. Or it made a plane fall. But once I looked into it, it made perfect, horrible sense. If you imagine whatever holds that one or that zero in a grid of binary components, if something hits the little gamma ray-- a little particle hits that transistor, which is actually not a transistor, like any of us think of, just something so small-- and change number identifying that is represented by that string.

There's a lot of backups that have been built since the 1970s to make sure that these things don't happen. So now, typically, planes will have four different computers all on board.

These Single-Event Upsets, SEUs, or SEEs sometimes you'll hear them called, happen all the time. And particularly, for things in space, the International Space Station gets hundreds of these events happening to their onboard computers every day because there's just that much radiation that their astronauts have talked about, seeing flashes behind their eyes because one of these particles hits their optic nerve just right.

Oh no.

And all of a sudden, you're trying to sleep on the International Space Station. You see a flash of light.

[LAUGHS]

I don't know. I'm going to have to leave the studio. So when you first said the universe is hostile to computers as just a concept-- this is when we were chatting long before the show began-- I found that amusing and delightful in the sense that, yeah, the universe is hostile to computers. Everything is decaying, entropy and all that. This is so particular. And it is so clearly linked to fingerprints.

And more conceptual space for it to be hit by a gamma ray or a particle?

The fingerprint's going to change regardless of what type of algorithm that you use. So you're still safe regardless, even with a shorter algorithm, because the fingerprint will still change when that computer program analyzes it and spits out different between the two.

So did you find some existential dread in the recognition of the universe being hostile to computers? Or was it like, oh, a new problem to solve. Or what was your reaction to that?

I don't know. I think I take a spiritualist slash physicist point of view of things that it's all energy. Nothing really matters both in a literal and physical sense. It's all just stuff jiggle. So our goal in digital preservation is to take stuff and to keep it the way that it is as long as possible. But ultimately, at the end of the day, the sun will eat the Earth. And all of this will go away. And if we haven't taken our data elsewhere, then that's what's going to happen.

Why does your shirt not say solipsism?

So there's two paths to go on this. And I don't know which-- I'll pick the pessimistic one. So everything dies. Everything decays. Everything falls apart. Is that energizing or depressing? Or is that something that you just have to set aside to be able to do the work of a preservationist?

I find it energizing because everything that we gather is stories about people. Archives are about people. They're not about the data. They're not about the content. They're about the people who made the stuff and the people who want to access that stuff to make new stories or new information or new knowledge. And so I see it as a very human endeavor. And this is part of-- just like people painted a mark of themselves. That's what we're doing. But our stuff's just a little bit more fragile.

What was that about vocational "ah," Marlee?

It was vocational "ah."

I love it. I think that librarians and archivists, we take the history of humanity, and we make it accessible. And that's just cool. In terms of jobs, can't beat it. CHARLIE BENNETT: I can't possibly end this segment any better. Our show today is called "New Archivist, Digital Problems," featuring an interview with Cliff Landis, the digital curation archivist at the Georgia Tech Library. Cliff, thanks for being on the show-- Thank you so much.

--bringing this horrible fact about the universe to light.

File this set under TD 799.85.G33.

(SINGING) Hear me! You just heard "Choose Any Memory" by Fire Hose. And before that, "Welcome to Oblivion" by How to Destroy Angels, songs about trying to defend memory and communication against the hostility of the universe.

Our show today was called, "New Archivist, Digital Problems." I want to finish up today with a quick round robin. What's the digital problem you're really hoping gets a solution, big, little, personal, professional, whatever? Mine is digital photo management, which I understand is a process. But it is a problem for me. There are too many photos, too few useful descriptors. And it is severely lacking in the material oomph. Cody, what about you?

I need creators to have an "upload to all platforms" button because if I'm like, subscribed to your newsletter, I can't be checking your Instagram story to find out that the show was canceled.

It's amazing that that sentence really would make no sense to someone maybe--

No.

--10 years ago. Cliff, how about you?

You actually stole mine. I was going to say, I want AI to solve my photo issues. But following that, I would say, I want to search that really finds what you're looking for across all platforms.

I feel like we should do a whole show on that sentence, Marlee?

I feel like the younger generation is really more about texting than about email. And I think we need some way to really merge email and text so that we can communicate with people however they want to receive it.

Didn't you just pitch Microsoft Teams?

Well, no. But I mean, honestly, I want my child to read his email.

There it is. That's a problem. And with that, let's roll the credits.

MARLEE GIVENS: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Alex McGee, Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. Legal counsel and an adapter to pull the data off that 8-inch floppy-- thank you, Philip-- were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia.

Special thanks to Cliff for being on the show, to all the digital archivists, who have been working so hard to manage the modern age. And thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening.

Our web page is library.gatech.e du/lostinthestacks, where you'll find our most recent episode, a link to our podcast feed, and a web form if you want to get in touch with us.

Next week is another edition of the Georgia Tech Library Guidebook. We are going to visit the LRC. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's a big building with a lot of stuff happening. It's time for our last song today. We've been talking about a new job, a relatively new field, and new ways of doing things. But I'm also feeling the loss of the tactile of the immediate and the visceral that comes with the convenience and strength of the digital world.