Secrecy, Archives, and the Archivist: A Review Essay (Sort Of)

This review essay considers five recent books on aspects of government secrecy in the United States, written by external observers and critics of American government and from within the ranks of archivists. This is just a sampling of the growing number of books being published on the issue of government secrecy with implications for archives and records management, but considered together they include some compelling lessons and warnings for archivists, both in and out of government

Writing for Professional Development and for the Profession

The records and information management (RIM) field needs its professionals to write and contribute to the field’s knowledge, but many do not do so because they are not aware of many basic, helpful tools available to them. This brief essay reviews the tools that RIM professionals can draw on for professional writing

A different kind of archival security: Three cases

Archival security is not just about guarding against theft and vandalism; it is about accountability and ethics and the potential challenges to archives and archivists. This essay considers three cases -the ownership and control of the records of indigenous peoples, the use of records of the U.S. Supreme Court, and the misadminstration of electronic mail messages to the White House. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

Unpleasant Things: Teaching Advocacy in Archival Education Programs

As graduate archival education programs have grown in scope, the variety of courses offered has changed to include some that prepare students to grapple with challenging and sometimes controversial aspects of the profession. This paper offers insights gained from teaching a course on archival advocacy, one that expanded over more than a decade from a focus on access to public outreach to ethical issues. This shift in focus created particular problems in engaging students who come to the graduate program with basic presuppositions about archival work that do not often mesh with the reality of this professional community; challenges also arise because of the kinds of training students expect from professional schools within the university. The essay places this course in the context of the modern university and the changing archival community and considers the challenges and potential successes of engaging graduate students within a professional school

Multivariate time series classification with temporal abstractions

The increase in the number of complex temporal datasets collected today has prompted the development of methods that extend classical machine learning and data mining methods to time-series data. This work focuses on methods for multivariate time-series classification. Time series classification is a challenging problem mostly because the number of temporal features that describe the data and are potentially useful for classification is enormous. We study and develop a temporal abstraction framework for generating multivariate time series features suitable for classification tasks. We propose the STF-Mine algorithm that automatically mines discriminative temporal abstraction patterns from the time series data and uses them to learn a classification model. Our experimental evaluations, carried out on both synthetic and real world medical data, demonstrate the benefit of our approach in learning accurate classifiers for time-series datasets. Copyright © 2009, Assocation for the Advancement of ArtdicaI Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved

Addictive links: The motivational value of adaptive link annotation

Adaptive link annotation is a popular adaptive navigation support technology. Empirical studies of adaptive annotation in the educational context have demonstrated that it can help students to acquire knowledge faster, improve learning outcomes, reduce navigational overhead, and encourage non-sequential navigation. In this paper, we present our exploration of a lesser known effect of adaptive annotation, its ability to significantly increase students' motivation to work with non-mandatory educational content. We explored this effect and confirmed its significance in the context of two different adaptive hypermedia systems. The paper presents and discusses the results of our work

Digital Curation and the Citizen Archivist

The increasing array and power of personal digital recordkeeping systems promises both to make it more difficult for established archives to acquire personal and family archives and less likely that individuals might wish to donate personal and family digital archives to archives, libraries, museums, and other institutions serving as documentary repositories. This paper provides a conceptual argument for how projects such as the Digital Curation one ought to consider developing spinoffs for archivists training private citizens how to preserve, manage, and use digital personal and family archives. Rethinking how we approach the public, which will increasingly face difficult challenges in caring for their digital archives, also brings with it substantial promise in informing them about the nature and importance of the archival mission. Can the Digital Curation project provide tools that canbe used for working with the public

Secrecy, Archives, and the Archivist: A Review Essay (Sort Of)

Reviews five recent books with implications about how archivists need to be concerned with government secrecy or how archivists have avoided the issues

Is There an Independent Principle of Causality in Physics? A Comment on Matthias Frisch, “Causal Reasoning in Physics.”

Matthias Frisch has argued that the requirement that electromagnetic dispersion processes are causal adds empirical content not found in electrodynamic theory. I urge that this attempt to reconstitute a local principle of causality in physics fails. An independent principle is not needed to recover the results of dispersion theory. The use of “causality conditions” prove to be either an exercise in relabeling an already presumed fact; or, if one seeks a broader, independently formulated grounding for the conditions, that grounding either fails or dissolves into vagueness and ambiguity, as has traditionally been the fate of candidate principles of causality

Copyright Back on Congressional Agenda

When the 110th Congress began in January there seemed to be little interest in copyright legislation. The newly elected Democratic majority was focused on reviewing Bush Administration policies on terrorism and privacy. There was continuing interest in patent reform, but a flurry of copyright bills that had been proposed at the end of the 109th Congress-including orphan works proposals, digital fair use reform, and copyright modernization–failed to emerge in 2007. A couple of proposals were offered to harmonize copyright licensing and to clarify the DMCA’s fair use provisions, but there was no “buzz” about copyright. Until recently, that is. Quietly, in November, then with a bit of a bigger splash in December, bills providing for enhanced copyright enforcement provisions were introduced in the Senate and House respectively. Neither bill deals with digital fair use or orphan works, but hearings on the House bill raised the glimmer of broader copyright reform being in Congress’s future