The document summarizes the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street Archives Working Group to archive both analog and digital materials from the Occupy Wall Street movement. It discusses the challenges of planning for long-term preservation, collecting born-digital content, using tools like Omeka and Bulkr, establishing terms for donations, and collaborating with other archival organizations. While progress was made in gathering over 500GB of data, challenges remain in establishing a sustainable model for continued preservation efforts.
4. All day, all week,
Occupy Wall Street!
Occupation of Zuccotti Park (Liberty Square)
began 9/17/11
Eviction from park 11/15/11
The Occupied Office (November 2011-2/1/12)
Shipping Information & Storage (SIS) (mid
October 2011--5/1/12)
60 Wall Street (September 2011-present?)
5.
6.
7.
8. The Occupy Wall Street
Archives Working Group
Core team
Mailing list action
People who came to meetings
Advisors
Organizations
9. The analog archives
Working group focused on analog materials
The "paper archives" dominated discussions in the
working group
Working on terms for deed of gift
Digitization of these materials was a goal that has
yet to come together
10. Digital archives!
Born digital materials
If ____ gets digitized…
Why isn’t this all online?
Digitization does not equal preservation and
it’s not an easy thing to do right
11. Digital archives project planning
Initial commitment: 2 weeks to form a plan
User interviews
Assessment of needs and our goals
Project plan
Staffing/roles
Tool selection (ongoing)
Collaboration with creators
Collaboration with advisors
12. Informal work with the Internet
Archive
Sent over 200 links to websites to harvest
Deprioritized initial research interest
Immediate access to collection is helpful
Email suggestions to graham@archive.org
14. Bulkr
Working group member complained about
not being able to get own photos off Flickr
Did a little research, discovered Bulkr & used it
Pro version: file size variety and tidy metadata
So far so good
23. The decision to not
have orphaned works
It would be very easy to end up with a lot of
orphaned works
The working group approved my proposal that we
only collect CC licensed work
There is no ‘OWS philosophy’ on licensing or
problem with ‘exclusivity’ per se, we just didn’t
want a ton of orphaned content
25. Omeka
Free, open source, flexible, extensible
Initiative of George Mason University/Roy
Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
PHP with useful plug ins
Anticipated assessments, then compose feature
requests to programmers in Tech Ops or others
who know PHP and want to help
29. Sharing and collecting digital
files at Share Day at Eyebeam
Collaboration with artist in residence at Eyebeam,
Taeyoon Choi (Speakers Corners)
Opportunity to share finished or works in progress
with the audience and/or the OWS Archives
Working Group
The event was a lot of fun
41. Where is the project now?
At a crossroads
Test servers and plug ins have shown us a lot
About 500 gigabytes of data
Possible collaboration with activist owned tech
company pending funds to pull own weight in the
collective (membership model?)
42. Conclusions and take away
R-E-S-P-E-C-T your creators and colleagues
Talk to people who know the context
Have a plan
Make imperfect decisions instead of none
Keep notes