It was a pretty good reading year for me. I met the target of 50 books that I set for my Goodreads reading challenge. As part of gearing up for this new year, I went back and pulled the five books that I am sure I’m going to keep thinking about. In no particular order, below are my top five reads of 2023.
Keltner provides a powerful tour of contemporary social psychological research on the importance and need for us all to experience awe and wonder. The book does a great job of laying out how valuable awe experiences are and the ways that the natural world and cultural institutions enable awe.
Labatut’s work of historical fiction explores a number of issues around the philosophical implications of break throughs in physics and mathematics in the early 20th century.
Rick Rubin set out to write a book about his approach to producing creative works, but ended up offering a broader meditation on how to live and interact with the world. Many of his ideas/practices for producing works of art map over into useful ways into any number of other kinds of work.
Jacqueline Mitton & Simon Mitton provide a great tour of Vera Rubin’s life and work. Following along in Rubin’s life and career is fascinating and inspirational, both as another way to get a perspective on life and science in the 20th century, and as a powerful exploration of how our understanding of the universe outside our galaxy changed in that period.
Trouet presents this engaging tour of both how dendrochronology (the science of dating trees by their rings) works, and it’s history. Both of which turn out to be fascinating. It has a bit of a travelogue and memoir aspect to it, too, as she takes you along on research trips to visit trees around the world.
As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this unit of time. This year 10th one of these year end reflective posts that I’ve written. You can see my reflections at the end of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.
I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year. If you are curious about what I’ve been reading about, you can see the 50 books I read this year in order on Goodreads.
Year two as Director of Digital Services
At the start of 2022, I was about six months into my new role as the Director of Digital Services. This year I was really able to get into the swing of things. Early in the year, I was excited to be able to share out about the Library of Congress Digitization Strategy. If you are curious to learn a bit more about what kinds of things folks across the Digital Services Directorate are working on, you can check out some of these interviews I was able to get up over the course of the year with Thomas Crowley, Carly Boerrigter and Lauren Algee.
After Disruption is Complete
At the end of 2021, I shared that I was under contract on my next book, After Disruption a Future for Cultural Memory. At the end of 2022, I’d shared that I submitted the full draft manuscript for the book. For anyone interested, I’ve had open review drafts of the first and second half of the book, out online since July of 2022. I’m happy to share that the full manuscript of the book was well received by peer reviewers. This year I worked through a short set of revisions to the manuscript to address reviewer comments, developed the index for the book, and worked through two rounds of reviews of page proofs. The book has gotten some really great advance praise. I’m thrilled that this book will be available open access when it comes out. It looks like it should be published in May of 2024. So stay tuned for that.
Cover of La teoría y el oficio de la preservación digital.
Spanish Translation of Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation
I wanted to take a moment here to both share out about this new publication, the journey that brought it about, and share some gratitude for everyone who made it happen.
I’ve been interested in the idea of seeing The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation translated into other languages, particularly into Spanish since I started working on it. The whole point of the book is to try and make digital preservation more accessible, and this translation makes the book much more accessible to the more than half a billion readers and speakers of Spanish. The fact that this translation has been published open access, freely available for anyone to download and read, makes the book all the more accessible.
The Journey of the Text
The idea for this translation came about as a result of an invitation to speak at a conference. In December of 2019 I gave the Conferencia Magistral at the Simposio Internacional de la Maestría en Conservación de Acervos Documentales hosted by the Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía in Mexico City. Below are a few pictures from that visit.
My talk largely focused on the digital preservation axioms that I open the Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation with. Isabel tweeted out about how useful she found those axioms and we went back and forth on Twitter about the possibility of developing a Spanish translation of the book. We ironed out permissions with Johns Hopkins University Press, and then she ran with it. She provides more context, and a screenshot of our exchange on Twitter as part of her introduction to the book. I like that the story of the origin of the translation of the book is contained in her introduction to it.
Gratitude and Thanks
The full team involved in producing the translation includes 15 people, all of whom are experts and thinkers working in library and information science, several of whom I have had the chance to meet and connect with at digital preservation events over the years. I’m including a list of them all below.
Pedro Ángeles Jiménez
Fernando Cruz Quintana
Jimena Escobar Sotomayor
Isabel Galina Russell
Maribel González González
David Alonso Leija Román
Norma Aída Manzanera Silva
Ana Cecilia Medina Arias
Betsabé Miramontes Vidal
Jo Ana Morfin
Ana Yuri Ramírez Molina
Lorena Ramírez López
José Antonio Salazar Carmona
Pamela Vizner Oyarce
It is a little bit overwhelming to know that this whole team has engaged deeply with this book. While it might seem like a book about digital preservation would be technical and somewhat dry, the book has a good bit of myself in it. It is the first piece of my professional writing where I feel like I could fully bring in my personal voice and point of view. I’ve come to believe that anything that honestly and genuinely engages with the complexities of and issues present in memory work ends up needing to be tied in with our personal memory and personal journeys. This isn’t a technical book, its actually a very personal one.
I’m particularly honored to have had my book translated by experts in digital preservation and library and information science. The work of translation involves such an in depth engagement with a text, and I am deeply grateful for the in depth work that everyone involved engaged in to produce this.
Book Launch Event
Last March, the print version of the book came out, and the Biblioteca Nacional de M?xico hosted an online book launch event with some of the team involved in the translation of the book. If you are curious, you can see a video recording of that event below.
My next book is a little closer to being fully finished. After working through some thoughtful feedback from peer reviewers I am now reviewing a round of copy edits. In fun news, the book now has a page on the University of Michigan Press website. It also has BISAC subjects, a DOI, and three different ISBNs.
Page for After Disruption on the University of Michigan Press site.
It is really rewarding to see the book becoming more and more finished. This view of the book is particularly exciting in that I also got to seem some advance praise/blurbs from the book that come from two scholars whose work I deeply admire and respect which I have included below.
“After Disruption provides a comprehensive analysis of the challenges faced by cultural memory institutions today and suggests how we might get out of the mess we’re in. It critiques modern management theory as applied to libraries to explain how we got ourselves into the mess. And it offers a thoughtful explanation and expansion of the radical futurity/possibility literature on cultural memory to propose ways we might get out of it. This book will be of value to workers in memory institutions, especially libraries and archives, and students interested in working in them.”
– Steven Lubar, Brown University
“Trevor Owens’ After Disruption is a highly compelling look into the rhetorical, educational, managerial, and economic histories of the Silicon Valley ideologies that have come to dominate US organizational life and—in particular—the ways those ideologies about the future imperil cultural memory institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums and render the lives of those who work for them precarious.”
—Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Michigan State University
The book cover is now also finished, and I’m really pleased with how that turned out. The cover photo is one I took about a year ago of the “Apple Carnegie Library” in Washington D.C on my iPhone. The story of of that building exemplifies some of the themes that the book engages with.
As a year comes to a close I try to round up and reflect a bit on this unit of time. This year marks a milestone in that reflective practice itself, now being the 10th year I have written one of these posts. You can see my reflections at the end of 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012.
I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year.
Back into the world: Teaching, Working, and Exploring
At the start of 2022 I was still deep in what become my routine for living in the pandemic. After working and teaching from home for roughly two years, I started teaching my digital history seminar in person during the spring semester at American University and started venturing back into the office at the Library of Congress. It was disorientating at first. But it was great to get back in the classroom with my students and while it took some adjusting, I’m really enjoying being back in the office. At this point, I’m going in three days a week and teleworking two days a week. Personally, that feels like a great balance for me.
In the summer, I taught a week long intensive course called “Born Digital/Digital Collections” for California Rare Book School. Teaching a week long intensive class like that virtually was a bit intense, but it was also rewarding to have the chance to connect with bright and engaged current professionals working in libraries and archives.
New Adventures in the New Job
In the summer, I had the distinct honor of being appointed to a new job as the Director of Digital Services. I’m now about six months in this new role and I am deeply grateful for the chance to apply my knowledge and experience across a broader portfolio of areas of digital services. Back in 2017, when I came back to the Library of Congress from IMLS I was really excited about the idea of being able to help grow and support thoughtful and sustainable development of digital programs.
I’m grateful for the chance I had to help build up and support teams doing that creative but sustainable work in that role and I’m doing my best to think about how I can continue to provide that kind of support in my now broader role. So far I’m really pleased with how it’s going.
Getting out there and Exploring
After staying local for 2020 and 2021, this year ended up being a great chance to get back out into the world. If you’re curious, I tend to post a lot of photos of our adventures up on Instagram. In February we took a trip to St. Lucia, in April we went to Portugal, in May I had the chance to spend three weeks consulting on digital strategy at the National Library of Kosovo through the Fulbright program, while in Kosovo we also were able to visit Albania, and in December I tagged along on a work trip Marjee had to visit and explore around the Yucatan.
Each of those trips offered me chances to explore and connect with new cultures and histories. I think we visited more than two dozen cultural heritage sites and museums. Across those experiences, collectively, I think those experiences contribute to a more complex, interwoven, and connected understanding of cultures and communities and the key role that cultural memory work plays in advancing a more sustainable approach to envisioning and enacting a better future.
My biggest writing project this year was getting the manuscript for my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory, completed and submitted. In January I shared out drafts of the first half of the book for comments. In July I shared out drafts of the second half of it. Huge thanks to everyone who gave me such right and thoughtful comments. I spent the fall revising the drafts based on all that great feedback and sent the full manuscript into the press in November. Early in the spring, I should get comments on the manuscript back from reviewers and then I will dive into any further work I need to do on it from there. This was a fun book to carry with me and be thinking about as I went on trips and worked through transitioning jobs. It’s a bit more personal than previous books I’ve written. In that respect, it represents my own memory work to make sense of my experiences in two decades of work at the intersection of digital technologies and cultural memory work. In any event, I’m excited to carry it with me into next year and hopefully we will see it come out and appear in the 2023 wrap up post on this blog.
Over the last three decades, US government agencies have published hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of PowerPoint files on the web. Hundreds of thousands of these files have been captured and preserved in web archives. With that noted, it remains difficult to find and interact with these files. This paper analyzes a public dataset of 1,000 PowerPoints from US government websites in the Library of Congress web archives to explore the properties of these kinds of files. This publicly available dataset published in 2019 includes a random sample of a thousand files from the more than 300,000 files that purport a PowerPoint media type in the Library of Congress web archives. The study focuses on characterizing the nature of these publications, the extent to which embedded metadata in these documents could be used to improve access to them and exploring what properties of these files are likely to be important to future users. Exploring these data provides a means to begin to understand the value and nature of PowerPoint files as a format of government publishing and government records.
Gallery of Images and Figures
We included a number of images from specific archived gov PowerPoints and some charts illustrating trends in the data which I’ve pulled out into the image gallery below.
Like I did with my pervious book, I am posting draft chapters for input from the broader community of memory workers. Each chapter is up in a google doc for anyone to suggest edits on or offer inline comments. Below are links to each chapter.
These are very much in progress drafts. So, I’m interested in any and all feedback and input. I’m interested in any feedback that can help strengthen the project, but I’m also interested in hearing about any parts of it that particularly resonate with readers. To that end, if there are parts that resonate with you feel free to screenshot them and share them on social media and or to add comments attesting to things that you think work well in the chapters. If you do share out about this on twitter please tag me @tjowens. Along with that, I’m particularly interested in any suggestions for work that I should be citing from women, people of color, and early career professionals. I’m also interested for any more scholarship written by memory workers (archivists, librarians, curators, etc.) that I should focus more attention on.
For the next few months, I’m planning to shift to work on revisions on the first chapters. At that point I will post those chapters and shift to work through revising and improving these first four chapters based on input I’ve received. So if you do have feedback on these, it would be ideal to hear from you on it by late August or early September.
If you do provide input on any of the drafts and you would like to be acknowledged for that in the final book, please list your name at the bottom of any of the chapters you provide input on so that I can make sure you get added to the acknowledgements list.
If it’s useful, you are welcome to cite these draft chapters, but when doing so cite them as something like Trevor Owens.(forthcoming). After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
Like I did with my pervious book, I am posting draft chapters for input from the broader community of memory workers. Each chapter is up in a google doc for anyone to suggest edits on or offer inline comments. Below are links to each chapter.
These are very much in progress drafts. So, I’m interested in any and all feedback and input. I’m interested in any feedback that can help strengthen the project, but I’m also interested in hearing about any parts of it that particularly resonate with readers. To that end, if there are parts that resonate with you feel free to screenshot them and share them on social media and or to add comments attesting to things that you think work well in the chapters. If you do share out about this on twitter please tag me @tjowens. Along with that, I’m particularly interested in any suggestions for work that I should be citing from women, people of color, and early career professionals. I’m also interested for any more scholarship written by memory workers (archivists, librarians, curators, etc.) that I should focus more attention on.
For the next 3-4 months, I’m planning to shift to work on the last four chapters, the ones that focus on Maintenance, Care, and Repair. At that point I will post those chapters and shift to work through revising and improving these first four chapters based on input I’ve received.
If you do provide input on any of the drafts and you would like to be acknowledged for that in the final book, please list your name at the bottom of any of the chapters you provide input on so that I can make sure you get added to the acknowledgements list.
If it’s useful, you are welcome to cite these draft chapters, but when doing so cite them as something like Trevor Owens.(forthcoming). After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor.
As a year comes to a close I try to make some time to reflect and synthesize some of what I’ve been up to across my work here on my blog. I’ve done this almost every year for the last decade. You can see my reflections at the end of 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015, 2014, 2013, and 2012. I’m a big fan of metacognition, so I get a lot out of taking time to round up, reflect, and try and synthesize things at least once a year.
Continuing to stay inside
Last year I was reflecting on how strange and abrupt the shift to “going inside” was at the start of the Pandemic. When we were able to get the vaccine in the spring, it felt like things were really going to start to change. The realities of the pandemic ended up meaning that “going outside” came in strange fits and starts and with a lot of uncertainty.
We were able to make it to a few film festivals to support Marjee’s documentary and to be able to get back to the midwest to see family, but we certainly haven’t gotten back to anything that I would think of as normal. I was physically in the office one day this year. I’m increasingly thinking that there really isn’t a normal to go back to. Our dog Iggy joined our family, and he brings us a lot of joy. We lost our dog Zelda in June, and have been processing a lot of grief. I read a lot of books this year, more than I read last year which was more than I read the year before. Whatever is coming next, I believe we are going to bring what we found going inside along with us. I think we are also going to keep reading a lot more too.
Getting out of the startup mindset
When I came back to work at the Library of Congress in 2017, I was focused on starting up a whole new unit. That was a lot of fun. As time has gone on, it’s been critical to make a mindset shift away from that kind of start up phase. I’m really proud of how my colleagues have been working to further make our work maintainable and sustainable. Earlier this year, I wrote a bit about developing our community of practice.
When the team was forming, we had a lot of ambitious goals to support the organizations first digital collecting plan. This year, I had the honor of being able to help steer the successor to that plan, the Digital Collections Strategy. I’m really proud of the work that the team on this project did together. The new strategy builds on a lot of the successes from the first plan. With that noted, the scope of this strategy is a lot broader than the previous plan. The new strategy is focused on how digital collections work becomes more integrated across the whole organization. With that strategy in place, I’m putting a lot more time and effort into trying to help line up the things that need to happen over the course of the five year period for the plan.
Futures of cultural memory work
I am really proud to join the distinguished list of scholars who have won the Kilgour Research Award from the American Library Association. I’ve won a fair number of awards in the past, but this is the first one that I’ve received that “recognizes a body of work probably spanning years, if not the majority of a career.” It is deeply validating to get that kind of recognition, not just for a specific project but for the broader body of work I have done in my career so far. With that in mind, the scope and focus of my research and writing has also started to broaden out a bit too.
I had a few new articles and essays come out that I think illustrate more of where I think my scholarship is going in the future. I published the essay A Good Jobs Strategy for Libraries in the journal Library Leadership and Management. I also published Collaboration, Empathy, & Change: Library Leadership in 2020, an open access book of my student’s essays on organizational theory and leadership in libraries. In both cases, this work focuses on how to help make memory institutions better and help support memory workers to both do good work and live full lives beyond their work.
As part of this broader shift in my work, I also got a contract with the University of Michigan Press to develop my next book, After Disruption: A Future for Cultural Memory. I’ve got about half of it drafted, which I plan to post here for input and comments early in the new year, and my goal is to have the whole book finished at some point in the fall of next year.
Huge thanks to Thomas Padilla and Ruth Tillman who provided some really thoughtful comments on a draft of it.
Sharing the abstract for it below.
Abstract: In the 2014 book “The Good Jobs Strategy” management and organizational theory scholar Zeynep Ton identifies a set of key issues in job design, operational models, and staffing that enable organizations to both create good jobs and, as a result, deliver better products and services. Written primarily about retail, the key concepts in the framework relating to building teams, defining services, and supporting and empowering staff are also relevant to library organizations. Ton’s framework focuses on four principles; offer less, standardize and empower, cross-train, and operate with slack, each of which are relevant to varying degrees to library and archives organization contexts. This essay brings together points from the framework and connects them to issues in library management and organizational theory literature to explore the extent to which issues in the framework connect with issues facing libraries. The paper ends with recommendations for how libraries can similarly benefit from implementing a good jobs strategy that both supports library workers and enables better functions for our organizations.