I arrived exceptionally early today thanks to the new schedule, so I decided to take this opportunity to continue reading Douglas Adams' The Restaurant at the End of The Universe. Coincidentally, where I am in the book is quite relevant to what one of my tasks would be for the coming weeks, so I thought I would share an excerpt.The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses. To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. Trin Tragula - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake. "Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day. And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show her. And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.
And so with this in mind, I met with both Dustin and Josh for our usual weekly meeting to discuss issues. (For more specific details, see the summary below). We discussed the scheduling and structure of the staff interview process, wiki and how Josh said to "Make the Wiki Your Brain," and the primary task of the day: taking inventory. Josh instructed that I start by getting a grasp of the "high-level" structure: basically starting at the series level - such as individual folders and sub-folders before listing their contents. It then became clear to me that he too sought the creation of a "Total Perspective Vortex" for Vera. Now let us just hope that this is not intended solely to annoy his wife and certainly hope that it will not melt hers or anyone else's brain.
When you think about it though, we can call the entirety of the Vera Archives, "The Universe" then say the digital and physical archives can be galaxy clusters with each folder or drawer representing an individual galaxy and posters, representing an event, can be individual planets, and the photographs from those events capture the locations of individual people at those events (or on those planets). Ergo, anyone approaching the Vera Archives, will have a total perspective of their place within it.
So, within the universe of the Vera Archives, I decided to dive into the galaxy cluster that is the physical archives - where I have been spending most of my time thus far. I thought this would be more fitting for the day, since Terri, the Admin Archives intern, will be personally giving me the tour of the Digital Galaxy cluster tomorrow.
When I entered the Physical Archives I found that a great deal had changed as you can see in the pictures below:
I was most certainly glad to see that Vera's pet anaconda had decided to take up residence elsewhere. Finally, some space to maneuver. So I started looking through the cardboard folders pictured on the left and quickly discovered that they were not all organized chronologically as I had previous thought. Several of them - 12 to be exact - were organized categorically. I decided I would start with these. Among these that I found most amusing were ones such as "Melissa's Calendar & Personal Thangs," "Mystery, to be filed," and one with no name whatsoever. For a complete listing please visit the inventory on the wiki. In addition to writing down the title of each folder, I briefly flipped through the contents of each to get a general sense of their condition and date range this data is also available on the wiki.
5:00 PM - Meeting with Dustin and Josh
*Interviews
- Start scheduling right away
- Dustin gave me staff contact info
- Dustin will give the staff my schedule at staff meeting on Thursday
- Send follow-up email with basic description and questions to prepare staff for interviews
- Interview at work station: how they're doing their work now.
*Wiki
-"Recording function" "Make the Wiki your brain"
- figure out folder and page structure
- for ideas, reports, analysis, and tracking progress
- possibly put blog summaries onto wiki instead? - Ask Nora.
*Inventory
- Get started right away
- possibly a searchable spreadsheet
- start with "high level stuff" - the series level, then go back and inventory individual items
- Get the "Total Perspective Vortex" / screenshot of digital archives structure from high level
through all its sub categories - (the main project)
- get a handle on existing system via windows explorer, standardize it and attach metadata
- discussed hypothetical structure and procedure for this
*Tasks for November
- Interviews
- Inventory
- Report on findings
*N-Power Database
- Get in touch
- determine structure, who has access, can we integrate the archives?
*Physical Archives
- Issue of duplicates and overfilled folders
- How many duplicates do you keep?
- monetary value?
- Future options
- oversized folders or binders
- map out ideal and low-cost models
- possibly build a cabinet system?
- binders have multi-use: good for preservation and presentation
- include findings on wiki
6:00PM - In the Archives
* Inventory
- began the high level inventory of all the Utrecht folders not organized chronologically
- includes folder name, brief description of contents, and significant condition issues
- Will be posted on the wiki and updated regularly.
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