David Staniunas

Glad to be able to speak with 60 folks in the Presbytery of Ohio Valley this morning

Okay, machine transcription of audio does have some real gaps for at least one kind of white voice: real astringent Northeast Ohio

Sepia-toned photo of Añasco Presbyterian Church in Añasco, Puerto Rico, Nov. 1955.

Black and white photo of a Presbyterian Church in Moca, Puerto Rico, 1963.

Browse our digital collection, Presbyterians in #PuertoRico, here: digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/1109

Red triangle with an exclamation point in the center above the words Action Alert. Headline reads: “Office of Public Witness urges Presbyterians to contact their elected officials over ending the violence in Gaza and the West Bank.” Matthew 5:9 is cited at the bottom.

As the suffering of Palestinians continues, a new Action Alert from the Office of Public Witness is urging Presbyterians to contact their elected officials today to call for an end to the violence. Read the full Action Alert and contact your elected officials here: www.votervoice.net/PCUSA/Campai...

Also great respect to the new hire who just went, Let's play this! instead of hemming and hawing

iirc it cut a groove inside to outside, so not like a regular record, backwards. Would love to know how to digitamize those

The Gray Audograph disc! I know that dude

Note on oral history release "Please don't use names"

Restrictions on a collection should 1) be within the capacity of the archives to grant 2) have a sunset 3) list out who can release them and how before the sunset 4) should only be negotiated by staff not volunteers

I also have a t-shirt here or there that is less than 80% legible as a t-shirt

That is curious. Were these pretty well stored? Mass-produced or home made CD/DVD-RW?

80% legibility is so much legibility, we need less of the 2000s

Currently pulling images and videos off of CDs and DVDs, 2004-2012, getting about 20% not-legible discs. Rookie numbers we can get those numbers up

We’ve marched through file cabinets, hierarchies, networks, and relational models in History of the Database. Today we’re at NoSQL! miriamposner.com/classes/is29...

No one remembers the "civilizational backup disk" and I love that for us

You hire a person to acquire, maintain, make sense of, and make meaning from, original texts. A person comes and does it

Information maintenance is like Jane Jacobs's passage about rats: there is no technology that manages rats, you hire a person and they come and kill the rats, a person comes and does it

Every couple of years the same article comes about about an ambitious information storage mechanism. Like 7 years ago it was etched nickel plates getting shot onto the moon: "the civilizational backup disk". There's no reason to debase ourselves thinking through moronic ideas

Did some rapid appraisal (leaving notes for the church, email to follow) on 16 feet of stuff, and found about a foot of material for imaging

That is a 1932 panorama of the congregation, an (upside down) 1841 notice of an introduction to Presbyterianism directed to the African American population of 14th St, and the outside of the present day (1979) church on R St

Glad to have spent time with clerk of session Stephanie Cox and pastor Alice Ogden Bell of Fifteenth St PC Washington DC, home of Henry Highland Garnet, Robert Pierre Johnson and so many other Black Presbyterian lights

Glad to put my man Gene in the News Service pcusa.org/news-storyte...

Like in library school they put up a Here Be Dragons sign around tape formats

Like the thing older archivists said when I started just running tapes was Oh isn't there "Sticky Shed", and well no not most of the time

Kind of knocked out by the longevity of plastic. Almost ready to say that the preservation problems of plastic are hmm more written about than the baseline of successful transfer

That is 70 year old plastic

Currently playing back a tape from 1956

Message from Snoopy, on Palestinian child's shirt at "Baptist-run school in Jerusalem" digital.history.pcusa.org/islandora/35...

See that slipped right past me, wow

Confronting the Digital This discussion piece argues that the design and structure of online historical resources and the process of search and discover embodied within them create a series of substantial problems for his...

Hah, yes, it drives me crazy that immediately before that sentence it says "Digital search offers disintermediated discovery" and then invokes intermediating algorithms.

In a similar vein, there's Hitchcock 2013, "Confronting the Digital" www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

"Algorithms fetch for us, doing away with the need for brick and mortar stores (if you are Amazon dot com) or regional expertise, bibliographies, or immersive reading (if you are a historian)" I do not think that happened!