Author: Jon Wanzer

New Projects

An upcoming school project is providing the impetus to begin another, bigger, long-term project, the archive. My last post expounded on the great expanse of cataloging and what all is involved in the data management and location side of establishing an accessible archive. I already have an archive per se, a collection of photos, documents, papers, letters, and a handful of artifacts, the issue is it is little more than boxes of stuff, not the searchable and accessible collection it should be. As the previous post indicated the metadata captured and the form it takes provides the searchable elements of the catalog. This is where the old computer axium, garbage in – garbage out, stands very true. Bad use of, or poor, non-standard quality metadata is worse than none at all.

There will be more on the school project in future posts, suffice it to say at this point it is a pilot project to define the standards for a permanent digital media archive comprised of digitised magnetic analog media. The goal is to establish the background policies and procedures for an entity to build a media archive from old magnetic media before it degrades to the point it can no longer be accessed and to make the created digital media searchable and accessible. Searchable and accessible being the key operators, hence the need for a thorough look at what metadata will be useful, and to what level should the metadata be standardized to easily integrate with other institutions in a shared environment.

While my own archive has been nagging at the back of my mind for years, having a project along similar lines for a graduate project helps breaks the rust of apathy and stagnation. The project is under the auspices of an internship that will span two sub-terms, from mid-August to mid-December, and will be a pilot project that is primarily an investigation of what would be required to establish an archive. While I will be digitizing some media for the project, the primary objective is to gather data for a thorough report that will outline the policies and procedures for starting and maintaining a permanent archive along with the projected cost of maintaining it. I am hopeful that the my report from the pilot project will result in a decision by the organization to take on the full archive, but even if they chose not to, I will have set out to build a working archive and have the pilot project to show for it as well as the skills to continue with my own archive.

One of my biggest questions was were to build the archive website. I am running a testbed on and internet accessible server to learn the platform I have chosen to build the archive on, but I wanted to build the pilot project on an internal machine, something not hosted by a provider to allow for complete control and an opportunity to try and break it. I decided to run the pilot on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of memory and a 1TB SSD. I am familiar with running servers on the Pi platform and keeping them secure in a production environment which will help reduce IT needs. I have an isolated sandbox and can tunnel into the server which reduces the organizational expense to all but naut. I am used to taking on the IT/IS responsibilities for projects of this scale so this was a no brainer. In the runup to the project’s start date I am working on familiarizing myself with the inner workings of the Omeka platform and how it handles the metadata and customization.

That’s all for now,
~Jon

Cataloging

Over the summer I have been evaluating my studies and potential paths forward academically and professionally as well as considering optimal locations to pursue these paths. My proclivity towards physical objects leads me towards the public history side of my interests. I find the prospect of part-time teaching while working in an historical archive or museum very appealing. I am also drawn to the idea of digitizing an organization’s assets and producing expanded presentations of digitized assets. Expanding an objects presence in an archive might include multiple photographic representations, 3D scans, video, audio, text transcriptions, documentary editing, and a host of other representations. A printed pamphlet might lead to a dozen representations each needing to be preserved, cataloged, archived, and made accessible to a range of consumers.

Cataloging of assets can be an overlooked, or at least under appreciated element in the process of public history training which can be seen particularly in the community museum or cultural archive environment where volunteers make up the majority of practitioners in the typical facility. Public history is a nebulous term in general and spans so many disciplines that one could not expect to be a subject matter expert on any one area in a single graduate program, it is a generalist degree. While cataloging and finding aids are discussed and their importance expressed, no detailed attention is placed on cataloging models or how to establish or improve a system, presumably to leave the details up to to on-the-job-training. OJT is fine for institutional knowledge, but too little attention is placed on the mechanics of cataloging in a typical public history program. A detailed appreciation of cataloging comes from library sciences. I have come to this conclusion after years of casually trying to establish an archive cataloging system for a family genealogy collection and personal mixed media library.

The last six years of academics have seen my personal library grow in the measure of yards-per-semester with an extra yard or so on non-academic interests over the course of each year, and while my interest in finding a mixed media friendly cataloging system has yielded some possibilities, the search to find an institutional level solution has not resulted in success. This summer I decided to actively search and research for a mixed media Integrated Library Management System (ILS/LMS) with built-in cataloging features. Thus far I have added another half-yard of books and come to a handful of conclusions. With regard to the ILS, to really explore this I will need to build a Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP (LAMP) server for each of the perspective ILS options of which two stand out as likely candidates, Koha and Evergreen. Another is that I will still need to manually catalog code each entry which means deciding between Dewey Decimal Catalog (DDC) and Library of Congress Catalog (LOC) classification numbers. I will likely use Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) either way. Lastly I have come to the conclusion that library science reference materials are bloody expensive.

Thus far the so-called guides on classification are good at high-level descriptions of the basic mechanics of classification but not so good at the nuts and bolts and the core organizational and metadata guidance like MARC, RDA, AACR2 which at first glance are arcane and exceedingly complex will take time to digest and internalize. The current DDC index, all four volumes, is way too expensive for the non-institutional curious researcher. A subscription to the LOC index is $375 and WebDewey is $391. The advantage with Dewey is I can order the print version and amortise that over 10 years if ordered once a decade, presently the four volume set would run $520.

So, where does this leave me in regard to cataloging? There are two main considerations to resolve, the first is the ILS. I can build a LAMP server on a single-board computer with PoE and SSD-bootable capabilities for $250-350 which should work fine as an evaluation server. This would give me the necessary data to determine the specifications and cost of a production system. The second consideration is the classification system, DDC or LOC. At this time I am leaning towards DDC. I am already familiar with Dewey and having hardcopy, though less fun to search through, will provide years of access unlike an annual digital subscription. Regardless, the hardware is the easy part. I will work on the parts list and put together at least one LAMP server to test ILSs. The cataloging/classification piece of the puzzle will require some more research.

One Semester Away

I applied to the Ph.D. History program at Liberty University and was accepted. I received the welcome letter by post yesterday so it is official, I start the doctoral program in January. I am waiting for a grade from the historical filmmaking class to be posted, hopfully over the weekend, to close out the Spring semester. There are three classes left for my M.A. in Public History which I will take in the fall. Registration for the Fall semester opens in two weeks, once registered, I can submitt my application for graduation. My head has been burried in the books for so long it’s a little weird thinking I am a doctoral student with two master’s degrees, well, one and almost a second. It feels like I was just finishing my bachelor’s last term. Three and a half more years if all goes acording to plan, I am looking forward to it though.

My area of interest is the Industrial Revolution, as has been clearly stated in every post so far, and while the IR is a large topic, my specific interests in it are somewhat narrow, but they cover expansive territory within the topic and field. It sounds and is contradictory, which is part of my delema. There are some subdivisions in the field that I find interesting and more narrow, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era (GAPE). These areas wholly overlap the time period of the IR but they carry different connotations and focus leaning more into the social and political than the technical that is generally associated with the IR. There is also a stronger tie to the litterature of the period due to the growth of social justice movements which are represented in the period literature. Thus far I have found two associations with academic journals in my specific areas of interest, the Society for Industrial Archeology [sic.] and the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The first issue of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era arrived a couple of days ago and I am looking forward to reading it this week. Already I have some ideas that center around the saterical social commentary illustrations of the period. I am hoping to make some connections and find inspiration for my dissertation in the one of these journals, or one of the other primary history journals as I get closer to that phase.

April Flowers

Not a good start but consistant, it’s been less than 6 months since my last post. At some point I do want to stick to a consistant frequency in blog posts, I’m not sure what that frequency will be, but the desire is there. I have been busy of course with gradschool and considering life’s progress. All things considered, I am in a relativly good place and making progress in the contemplation of which of many possible paths to follow. Since removing myself from volunteer obligations, I hanen’t realy been involved in anything outside of school and home. The academy has been my world since August 2023. So, lets dig into some details.

My B.S. in Religion took longer than it should have, 2018-2021. I stepped up my game for the M.A. in History and completed it in four terms, 2021-2023 amidst some distractions early on. The M.A. in Public History started in the spring 2024 term and will be completed in the fall of 2024. I am almost half way through the second master’s now, just three more weeks to go. Off loading the mass of volunteer work helped tremendously in finishing the first M.A. and diving right into the second. With three more classes to go, I am raring to get these knocked out by the end of the year. An Internship, a Local Historical Research class, and a Digital History class are what is left to complete.

As I plan for the next phase, I need to start narrowing my interests in the field, at least for the dissertation phase of the doctoral path. Yes, the decision to pursue a terminal degree in history has been made, more or less… ??? Yes, I know, is it a yes or is it a no, the variable is employment. I am activly looking for a remote adjunct in history position at the undergraduate level. If I can find one that requires less than 20 hours a week I should be able to take that on and work on the Ph.D.. In broad terms, Industrial Revolution (IR) technologies is a vast span of material to cover, far too broad for a dissertation. Trying to narrow the scope has been dificult since I haven’t had the time do any in depth reading or research to narrow things down to a tight topic. My other academic interests skirt history proper so they also play into the process. Political science, industrial archaeology, experimental archaeology, and experimental history all have a place in the field.

Along with the lack of time to attack the mountain of reading material to find a narrow topic for a dissertation, I also have some academic challenges. I am a slow reader. I read for context and understanding. I have a tendancy to wander on concepts in the reading, and when I come across a word I am not familiar with I look it up. When there is reference to a person, movement, or concept I am not familiar with, I need to divert my attention to understand the context. This can slow things to a frustratingly glacial pace.

As an example, I am currently indulging my political science and history interests on fascism in America and Europe toward the end of the IR. Klemperer’s The Language of the Third Reich1 is literally about the contextual language of the Reich, which is German. I don’t speek or read Greman. I can work out some of the pronunciations and word forms but I want to have at least a cursery understanding of the proper pronunciation, structure, and context so that when these words come up in research in various texts, and they do, frequently, I want to grasp the actual meaning. German words appear in English translations mainly because linguisticly German creates compound words that translate to sentenses in English, with meaning often beyond the litteral translation. This matter is compounded by the context of when the expanded word came into common use, when common meaning changed, or when it left common usage.

Volk [people]2 is the stating point for a plethera of other words, Volkswagen, is people’s car in a general context. In the context of 1930s Germany, volk means folk which has a nuanced context that might not be understand without a German language background as well as the period context of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei [National Socialist German Workers’ Party]. Thus in a 1938 text with Volkswagen, the car of the folk takes on a different context and meaning. This is only one of many words in the volk family which were used to great effect in propaganda and the building of a fictional “historical” Nordic narrative.

I have a number of books on the shelf waiting to be read. Most can be placed into one of four main categories. Late-19th to mid-20th century fiction which is important for contextual interpretation, the civil rights movement and elements there of, facsism and democracies, and architecture. A broad swath of topics but they all relate to history and public history. There is also a backlog of more reading material on my wishlist. This is another of the reading issues, so many things to read but I have to keep my time reserved for academic works first. This will be even more critical in the second phase of the doctoral path, the comprehensives. Anything tangential will have to wait at least until the dissertation phase.

If I do manage to find the unicorn of employment over this summer or fall I will need to start considering a dissertation question and thesis, I will also need to start thinking about publish or parish. There are a number of forms to consider, journal articles, papers, reviews, books, and documentaries. These will also benefit from a narrowing of the field. As I get closer to a question and thesis, I should be able to take some of the impractical side topics uncovered in the dissertation research and pursue them for publication. Time to start looking at journal submission criteria.

Until next time,
~Jon Wanzer, M.A.

  1. Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Tird Reich, London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. ↩︎
  2. Klemperer, 30. ↩︎

Things to come

You may have noticed, there is not much content here. My attention has been directed elsewhere, mainly with postgraduate studies. There are 14 days left (December 15, 2023) in my last class for my M.A. in History program, however, it dosn’t end there. A second M.A. in Public History starts in January and thanks to some advanced planning, completion of the second master’s will be in December of 2024. It will be head down and full-steam ahead to get the public history degree completed on time. The month between the fall and spring semesters will be dedicated to planning what happens next. One of the top items to be concidered is whether or not to pursue a terminal degree, if so, what major concentration, and where. I will be looking for degree related work throughout 2024 and will revisit the terminal degree question over the summer.

Degree antics aside, this post is an opportunity to ask myself a few questions about this website that will be reviewed over the winter break; what is this site for, what are its intentions and voice? Will it be a historically focused personal blog or a research publication and portfolio site? There is also the question of research focus which is important if pursuit of a terminal degree is the path forward.

While my primary area of historical focus has remained constant, subsets and concentrations have been flexible. The chronological period has remained relativly fixed to the Industrial Revolution about 1830 to 1939, though the roots of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S. go back to 1790 and Samual Slater’s cotton mill (1790-1808)1 and the Pawtucket labor strike of 1824.2 In the U.K. the first sparks of the Industrial Revolution can be seen as early as the 1760s with James Hargreaves invention of the Spinning Jenny3 (pat. 1770) and James Watt’s improved steam engine4 (pat. 1769). Topically, my interests are centered around the technologies of power, communications, and transportation. Other period considerations include the social and political aspects that allowed industrialization to take root in the first place, topics like social class mobility, international commerce, dependant economies, monopolies, workers rights, and social justice were all developing during this period. Any investigation into the topics above will quickly show how interconnected they all are.

These are questions to explore during the December/January break.

Until then,
~Jon

  1. Gary Kulik, “Factory Discipline in the New Nation: Almy, Brown & Slater and the First Cotton-Mill Workers, 1790-1808,” The Massachusetts Review 28, no. 1 (1987): 164–84. ↩︎
  2. Gary Kulik, “Pawtucket Village and the Strike of 1824: The Origins of Class Conflict in Rhode Island,” Radical History Review 1978, no. 17 (May 1, 1978): 5–38. ↩︎
  3. Charlotte Moy, “Who Invented The Spinning Jenny?,” The Economic Historian, January 30, 2023, https://economic-historian.com/2022/07/spinning-jenny/ ↩︎
  4. “Industrial Revolution Timeline,” Britanica, accessed December 1, 2023, https://www.britannica.com/summary/Industrial-Revolution-Timeline ↩︎