Okay. I think we can start. Well, first thing, welcome to ThoughtWorks. Tonight we're actually lucky we've got Dr. Rebecca Parsons with us tonight. Some of you may know Rebecca is the CTO of ThoughtWorks. She's been the CTO for over 10 years now and has been at ThoughtWorks for over 19 years. Obviously, she's a passionate technologist, but more than that, I think Rebecca has a deep passion and has been an advocate for women in STEM as well as helping women build their careers in tech. So while she's actually in Singapore promoting her new book on evolutionary architecture, we thought it would be a great opportunity for her to do a session to talk about her personal journey, how she's developed a career in tech, and eventually now become the CTO of ThoughtWorks. And I'd encourage you to ask questions, share your journey through a blocker's ask her for advice. And we'll keep this pretty casual, so feel free to stop or ask her any questions along the way. All right. I'll hand over to Rebecca. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here. So I've always considered myself a geek. When I was a kid, I wasn't exactly sure I knew what that meant. I was one of those weird people who loved school. And I know that's not something you necessarily admit in public, but I did really enjoy going to school. But I was always passionate about reading history, science, math. And I think that really affected me throughout my career. And I want to talk about some of the basic decision points that I went through and kind of the lessons that I learned from some of those, both the things I think that went well, and perhaps the things that didn't go quite so well. So some basic background. I actually started programming when I was about 13 years old. And we had switched school systems. My parent, my father had gotten a new job and we moved to a new school system. And I was in an algebra class. And my teacher very quickly recognized that I knew everything he was going to teach me that semester, because I had actually had it two years before. And he happened to be taking a course at the local university. And so he threw me out of class, but bought me a programming book and said, learn how to program. That's going to be what your year long algebra class is going to be about. And I fell in love with it. I eventually got a degree in computer science, but I also got a degree in economics. I had a wonderful economics teacher for my first economics course. And so I decided, well, I've got all of these electives I have to fill. I will fill them with economics courses. And so I got a degree in economics. I was a cooperative education student with one of the local employers. And basically what that meant was I worked full time for some of the semesters I was actually going to school. So I got to get some real work experience while I was still going to school. I became a part time graduate student and a full time graduate student. So I worked for several years, was taking some part time courses and then decided if I was really serious about getting a degree, I should go back full time. I did some postdoctoral research. And then I ended up in academia. And then I ended up back in industry at ThoughtWorks. And so through the course of this talk, you'll see where some of those decisions came from. So first, as I said, I was self taught in programming. My teacher literally threw me out of class, gave me his textbook. He was taking a course at the local university and said, and he actually gave me a key to the key punch room. That's how long ago it was. I have no idea why my high school had a key punch because we didn't offer any computer classes, but we did. And so I typed up my programs, gave him the cards and he ran for me at the university when he ran his own programs. And I also at the time got a chance to play with a personal computer. So I learned the CPM operating system and such. And I just fell in love with it. I don't know what it was that appealed to me, but I really fell in love with programming. And so some of them were around data structures. Some of the things I did on the personal computer, my a friend of mine's father owned his own business. And so we kind of automated some of his accounting to help it.  It was just fun. But a lot of the things in the textbook were more around basic data structures. Can you manipulate a list? Things like that. What bonus or portrait? PL-1. PL-1. And on the PC it was basic. And then some assembly language, which will be a theme. So lesson number one, you don't need to be taught to learn. And if you can manage to approach learning not as a chore, but as play, then it's much less intimidating. So don't worry if you don't know something. Just say, okay, I'll figure out how to learn it. So the next one is this co-op assignment that I was mentioning earlier. So it didn't exist for computer science graduates at that time at the local employee who was Caterpillar Tractor Company. They had them in lots of different engineering disciplines, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, and all of that, but not computer science. I was working for a dentist at the time. And the person who ran the program was a patient of my dentist. And he came in for a dental appointment, talked to my dentist, and they came out and said, would you like to pilot a co-op program for computer science majors at Caterpillar? And so I said sure. And by that time, I had done my first semester at university, and then I learned Fortran, as well as yet another assembly language. But I hadn't learned cobalt yet. But that's what Caterpillar used. So I bought a book and I taught myself cobalt. So lesson number one again, you don't need a class. Just think of it as fun. But the second thing is think about and then ask for what you want. Because who knows? You might be surprised and get it. And part of where this lesson came from. So even though the dentist patient was the overall head of the program, the person who worked for him wasn't yet convinced that these computer things were really going to be that important. And that it wasn't necessarily that important to have computer scientists because they had this wonderful training program and they literally were hiring people with philosophy degrees and anthropology degrees who could think logically. And they trained them on cobalt, on job control language. Yes, that's how old I am. And they trained them how to do all that stuff. So why would we need to hire computer scientists? And why would we take up space in our important co-op program with computer scientists? So even though I had the big boss who wanted me there, the guy who was actually administering everything didn't want it. And so I could have said, okay, well, this is just too hard. But it actually sounded interesting. I wanted to know what it was like to program for a job rather than just doing it for fun. Because everything I'd done so far was really for fun. So make sure that if it is something you want, continue to fight for it. So now came decision time. As I said, I also had a degree in economics. And the local employer offered me a job, both as an economist and as a computer scientist. And I did all the right stuff. You know, I had my list of pros and cons for both of the jobs and thought about them. And I decided I was going to take the job in economics. My short phrase for that was if somebody's actually going to pay me to read the Wall Street Journal, why wouldn't I take the job? So I called the recruiter and he said, okay, which job do you want? And I said, I'm going to take the computer science job. And I thought, what did I just say? But I realized that I wasn't going to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, I made a mistake. I want the economics job. Because even though with this clinical analysis, I had come up with the fact that I should really take the economics job, what I really wanted to do was the computer science job. And I think part of it was that it was still exciting to me. I knew what I was going to be doing. And I was really excited about the projects that I was going to be able to work on. And so what I learned from this really is to trust your instincts. And what I had been doing and hadn't really realized it until I thought about it was over this time when I was making the decision, I was basically playing with it in the back of my head. What would it feel like if I was actually doing the computer science job? What would it feel like if I was actually going to work every day and reading the Wall Street Journal and doing that job? And I realized that when I thought about the work that I was going to be doing and the things I would be accomplishing and the computer job, I got all excited. And when I thought about the other job, it was kind of like, okay, and so trust your instincts. Yes, you should still go through this analysis of what are the pros and cons of both of the possible options. But also just try to think about what would it feel like? How do you feel when in your in your mind, you say to yourself, I've made this decision, and just pay attention to how you feel. And if you're really excited about one and kind of on the other, well, that's telling you something. Listen to it. And I did have a blast. I learned a lot. But eventually I hit a wall. This was back in the early 80s. Young, ambitious, intelligent women were not necessarily the norm in a lot of jobs. And I kind of got tired of hearing, Oh, yes, well, we're giving that to John because he has a family to provide for it. Yeah, it's like, wait a minute. This is really, this is really exciting. I feel like I've hit a wall and they said, Well, I'm sorry, but you know, John's John's getting that. And then John got the next one. And John got the next one. And I finally said, Okay, obviously, this is not the place for me. And so I moved on. And that's the first lesson is no when it's time to move on. No when for whatever reason, you're no longer in the right place. But the important thing to realize as well is make sure that you're going towards something, not running away from something. Make sure that this isn't just I finally found an alternative. But you can say why it is you're excited to be going to where you're going. Because if all you're doing is saying, at least I'm escaping, and you don't have anything positive, you're not going to be in a good frame of mind. And it's going to be very difficult for you to be happy and to succeed in word wherever it is you've gone. So make sure when somebody comes up to you, and says, Where are you going? It's you've got something that you can say you're excited about why not that you're leaving why you're going to where you're going. Now, what to do when I was in a situation. I was asked by my direct boss to lie to a client. We were standing outside a conference room. At the client side, the client was in the conference room. He said, If you are asked this question, you will give this answer. And I said, No, I won't. That's not true. And he said it again. And I said it again, I will not say that. And we're standing there arguing outside the client's conference room. And I finally said, This is the most I will do. If he asked the question, I'll let you answer. Even though I felt terrible about even doing that. So what am I going to do? I'm standing outside the client's conference room. I'm 800 miles from home because we were at their site. Fortunately, for me in my conscience, he never the client never asked the question. But I went home that day. And decided I can't work in this organization. But I was lucky because what I had in the mail was my acceptance to the PhD program at Rice University. And so I could go in the next day and talk to my boss and ultimately my boss's boss. I was in another situation in an organization where at its peak, we had about 28 to 30 people working in this group, had the most wonderful boss, the best manager I have had in my entire career. And then he got promoted. Great for Steve, not so great for us. Because the person they brought in was a fantastic individual contributor who could not manage his way out of a paper bag. And they tried everything. They sent him to management training course after management training course after management training course. And people quit and quit and quit. And by the time I got fed up, we were down to 13 people. I was covering five people's jobs. And I was exhausted. And I was fed up. And so I resigned. In the first case, the VP of engineering asked me why I was leaving. And I said, I'm leaving to go to graduate school. I said, what do you think of your manager? I said, this is what happened to me yesterday. He was fired. What happened on the second one? My boss, the one that I thought so highly of came into my office. And he said, are you leaving because of your new boss? And I said yes. And he said, will you talk to the VP of engineering? And I said yes. That was on a Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday morning, I went into the VP of engineering's office. And I told him, these are the things that have been happening. These are the courses that you've tried to send him to because he would come back and he would talk the language that he learned in the course. But then he would refer to his old behaviors.  And I just laid it out very calmly, very rationally. And security packed up his office and moved him to another building and they put him once again into a chief scientist position, which is what he should be doing. He was an incredible scientist. He just couldn't be a manager. And one of the things the VP told me is of all of those people that quit, not a single one said anything bad about that manager. And yet every single one told me that they were leaving because of him. And none of them said a word. So two lessons. First thing, in the short term, if you're in a bad position, do what you need to do to protect yourself. That's what I did standing outside that conference room.  But that was the best I could come up with in that situation. So do what you have to do. But you have to tell the truth. The people you work with and for cannot solve problems they don't know exist. And the people that you work for cannot deal with situations unless they have the facts. And this is a story I tell to a lot of people that I work with or who work quote unquote for me. You have to give me the information because I cannot fix problems that I don't know exist. You have to tell me. And so even though it's hard and I'm not proud of the fact that one person got fired and one person effectively got demoted on the basis of what I said, but then on the other hand I start to think about well, that person should not have been a manager. So yes, he was back in a job that perhaps he didn't want anymore. But what about the people who could now be effective at their job, who could now enjoy their job, who could now be productive in their job. So one person was hurt, but it helped everybody that was left. And oh, by the way, I stayed because we were less than 50 percent and I knew a whole lot about how to run that particular system. So do what you need to do to protect yourself, but ultimately tell the truth. And if you're calm, if you're rational, if you're factual, you can actually make a difference. My old manager, Steve, told me later that the VP of Engineering was really scared about this because he thought, of course, you know, flighty woman, that I was going to be yelling and screaming and crying and all of that. And he was shocked that I came in and fact, fact, fact, fact responded to questions. So do what you can to be very prepared for a meeting like that, because what you don't want to do is you don't want to burn bridges. You don't want to make enemies, but you have to do the right thing. So now I'm in graduate school and it's very early in my first semester. And there's this talk, these professors come from the University of Wisconsin and talk about something. And one of the professors who happened to be teaching one of the courses I'm taking, but I still don't really know anybody because it's still very early in the semester, he asked this question, has this particular area of research been pursued yet? And the answer was no, we're focusing on this area. And I thought that sounds really cool. And so I went up afterwards and I said, they were talking about that area. And I said to this professor, I would really like to work on that. And so very early in my first semester, I knew what my PhD topic was going to be. I actually published a paper probably a year and a half earlier, simply because I knew what I was writing about. So when you see something like that, when something really excites you, when you're passionate about something, go ask for it. Pay attention to when your eyes light up. Pay attention to when you get really excited and you just can't stand still, because those are things that you want to grab a hold of. Even if you're not sure. So Nora Denzel is someone that I've heard speak multiple times. And she was standing on a stage once in India and said, fake it till you make it. And she actually said, so make believe you're standing on a stage in front of a thousand people and you're actually comfortable doing it. And that's exactly what she said. It's like, I'm up here faking it, but eventually I'm going to be okay with this. Now I think by that time she was actually okay with it. But sometimes it's not that you can't do it.  And sometimes you have to say, little voice, you need to go take a hike. Let me get on with this. So even if you're not sure, give it a try. Believe in yourself. So now next decision point. I finished my my doctorate. I finished my postdoc. And I'm deciding should I stay at Los Alamos and be a researcher or should I go to academia? Yes. While I had been at Los Alamos, I was an adjunct professor. And I had decided actually when I went back to graduate school, I said two things. I will never live in the state of Florida in the US. And I will never be an assistant professor on the tenure track. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to go be a researcher. But I had all of these people telling me, you're a wonderful teacher. You really ought to do this. And the way the academic system works, at least in the United States, if you don't go into academia shortly after you finish your PhD, it's going to be another 10 or 15 years before they'll take you into academia. So it was really a decision point. If this was something I wanted to do, I had to do it then. And so I listened to what everybody told me. And I became an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. I don't use that N word anymore. Never doesn't work out very well for me. And what I realized is that I was right and that they were wrong. I really didn't like being in academia. I loved working with the students. I loved the excitement of all the new people coming in every semester with their bright ideas and where their questions and all of that. I found that fascinating. But academia was not for me. And so one of the things that I learned first, not all decisions are right. Sometimes you're going to get it wrong. Learn from the mistake, but don't dwell on it. You can never know how things would have turned out on the other path. And saying, well, if only I had done that, my life would be wonderful. But you don't know. You didn't expect this one to go wrong. How do you know the other one wouldn't have gone wrong in some other way? So don't dwell on it. Yes. The politics. Yeah. Although of all the places I could have been in Florida, I was in Orlando, which was actually marginally tolerable. I lived there for 10 years, but so don't don't dwell on it. Learn from it, but don't dwell on it. And one of the things that I learned is that when you're getting a lot of advice from other people that runs counter to what you really think, think about where they're coming from. And I should have realized this because when I was back talking to that VP of engineering about going back to graduate school, one of the things he said to me is I would love to be able to talk you out of it. But I didn't go when I had the chance like you do. And I regret that. And I think a lot of what happened with the people who are giving me the advice is that it was a similar situation. They regretted not going into academia when they had the chance. Think about whether or not people are projecting some things on you. I'm not saying never take advice from people. You want to seek out advice. But if it really runs counter to what you think is right, think about where they might be coming from and why. Because ultimately I took that job because I listened to what other people were telling me as opposed to listening to what my gut was telling me. So I ignored what was a lesson to. That idea. So I ended up with ThoughtWorks after spending about four years in academia. Yes. And for the first time in my career, I had a leadership development coach. What do I do with a coach? I never had one before. And he kept asking me these difficult questions. Like what did I want to do? And you might have been able to discern from this that I didn't really have a career plan. I had known since I was five that I was going to get a PhD. I didn't know what it was going to be in. But I really didn't know when I was going to get it. And so I didn't really have this grand plan mapped out. A lot of these things were opportunistic. And after a lot of questioning and searching, what I realized is I knew very well what I didn't want to do. And I was always very clear. These are the things I don't want to do. But I really struggled with saying what I did want to do because I was afraid that if I was too specific about what I wanted to do, there would be this really exciting thing over here that no one would tell me about. And I didn't want to miss out on those things. So I said, okay, I just won't say what I want to do and then I won't have to worry about that. But that actually doesn't give the people you work with the kind of guidance they need to help bring you opportunities. And so what we did was we actually got to the point where I could describe these are the characteristics of what I want. And it came down to two words. I wanted to be an impactful technologist. I am a geek. I will always be a geek. So being a technologist, being seen as a technologist is a very important thing to me. And one of the things I always knew I didn't want to do is I do not want to be a manager. And like that manager that I had so long ago, I'm probably not a very good manager. I need to be in some other kind of role. But I also wanted to have an impact. I wanted to make a difference. It was important to me to do things that would somehow make an impact. And so don't be afraid to articulate what it is that you want. When I put that out there, the job that I got was the job I have now. Chief technology of ThoughtWorks. Because they could see how that lined up with what it is I said I wanted to do. I still get to do all kinds of other things. I'm out on the speaking circuit. I'm getting involved in all kinds of different things. It's not stopping me from getting anything that I wanted. So I needed to stop being afraid that somehow I was going to cut off paths by actually putting a goal out there. It does help to have something to shoot for. Now, be aware of the boxes that you put yourself in. Pretty much since I joined the company, I've been on most of the senior management groups. And for a long time, I was the only woman and I was the only geek. Unless you would consider our founder a geek and he would argue back and forth on whether or not he was a geek. But I put myself in a box. I said I'm here because I'm the voice of the technology community. And there was one meeting we had. And we were talking about forecasts. And I asked the question of our global head of demand, are you comfortable that you have the sales personnel necessary to achieve this plan? And he said no. I thought, well, this is a problem. But I looked around the table and all of these other management types who understood business, who understood all of this stuff, they didn't seem concerned. So I thought, obviously I'm missing something. So I didn't say anything. And lo and behold, a couple of months in, it's like we're scrambling because, gee, we don't have enough people in our demand organization to meet our revenue plan. And it's like, you know, I knew that. But I didn't say anything. It wasn't that they put me in the geek box. I put myself in the geek box. And I said, I shouldn't be challenging this. Because clearly, my better is no more about this than I do. Don't do that to yourself. If you're in a situation like that, bring your whole self. You might be there because you represent a constituency. But you're not just there because of that constituency. And you don't have to say what you idiots, he just said he can't do it. You can say, this is what I should have said, and I've said similar things since. Okay, clearly, you all understand something that I don't. But this makes no sense to me. Can you explain to me why I'm the only one who's worried about that answer? Because clearly, I'm missing something. And that allows them to either educate me about what I'm missing, or say, hmm, maybe we should be paying more attention to that. But the important thing is, I wasn't put in a box, I put myself in that box. Sometimes others will put you in a box. But it's just as easy to put yourself there.  So now it's sabbatical, one of the wonderful perks of ThoughtWorks. At 10 years, you get a three month sabbatical. It's like, what in the world am I going to do with myself for three months? And so I had to decide. And so I thought long and hard, what are the characteristics of the things that I want to do? And I came up with three things. I wanted to experience a different culture. I wanted to do something obviously that had an impact, but I wanted to do something that actually took advantage of who I was. And so I knew someone with a lot of contacts on the continent of Africa and he put me in touch with several people. And they said, well, gee, I'm setting up a computer lab in Accra, Ghana. So why don't you come and pull cables and help us set the lab up? And said, well, that would have an impact and it would definitely be a different culture. But there are a lot of people who know how to pull cables. So that really didn't satisfy that third criteria. And so what I ended up doing was being a fellow for UNICEF working in their technology for development division in Kampala, Uganda. And I was bringing all of my experience and having dealt with systems because they're senior most technologists. And he was brilliant. But he was 24 years old. There's a whole lot you haven't seen when you're 24 years old. For example, what one of the things they were trying to do is move from pilot to a country wide rollout of a kiosk. They wanted to put at least one kiosk in every village in the country of Uganda. At that time, there were 55,000 villages in Uganda. And I asked him, so how are you going to do software updates? Hmm, hadn't thought of that one. At that time, all of those kiosks didn't even have internet connectivity. Bad roads, 55,000 at a minimum, that would mean even in the large cities you only had one. They had never thought about configuration management because you don't think about it. When you're dealing with pilots and proofs of concept and small scale systems, you don't worry about that because it's not that much of a problem. But large Fortune 100 companies have entire departments that do configuration management for estates that are maybe 25,000 or 30,000. And they have connectivity to all of them. So this was exactly what I was looking for, something where I could take advantage of who I was and make a difference. And the lesson I learned here is you need to decide for yourself what constitutes success. And then figure out what you have to do to meet that definition of success. And ultimately, what I realized is why I wasn't happy in academia. Is their definition of success and mine didn't line up? And that meant I was faced with a choice.  And that didn't sit well with me. Either. So you have to understand what does success mean for you in your job? What does success mean for you when you're when you have an opportunity like this? Figure out what's most important to you. Figure out what you can ignore because some things, yeah, might not have been ideal, but I could cope with it. What are your absolutes? What are you passionate about? What gets your eyes to light up when you talk about it? What are your non negotiables? And then everything else in the middle you can negotiate on. But it's up to you to figure out what success looks like and make sure it's something that you're passionate about. That's one of the things that I really have learned. If your eyes don't start to light up when you're talking about something in your life, you need to go find something that gives that to you. It may not be your job. Not all jobs can can be that thing for you, but make sure there's something that you can get that excited about. Because who knows what might happen. I must admit I never thought I would be wearing a bulletproof vest on my sabbatical. But at that time we went to the northern part of Uganda and there was some inter gang rivalry between a couple of different sheep rustling gangs. And so they were firing at all the UN Jeeps. So if we were out of the cities we had to wear a peth helmet and a bulletproof vest. So that's me on my sabbatical. So how much did it matter that I was a woman? In college it mattered some, but not a big deal. I had one professor who stated categorically women were incapable of understanding math and computer science. There were 58 of us, four women. The four of us banded together and decided we're going to prove this guy wrong. All four of us got A's. Some of the men flunked out of the course. But one thing about this is there was one of us that I don't think she would have made it if it wasn't for the support of the other three. Because she had heard that same thing from her family and from her relatives. Oh math is hard. You're a girl you can't do that. But she stuck with it because we stuck together and we proved him wrong. In my early jobs, again some. But it had more to do with the environment than I think it had to do with the opportunities except for that. Well no, John has to do that because he has a family to support. But at that time there was a lot of very casual sexism that went on. And you just accepted it. In graduate school I did not sense anything at all. It may have been that I was just so happy to be in school and I know that sounds terrible. Once again in academia there were some. It's still a reality. Unfortunately at ThoughtWorks I am happy to say not at all. But in our industry it's still there. And it's much less obvious in some ways. It's really not socially acceptable anymore for somebody to say the kinds of things that professor said. He said it in front of the class. Women are incapable of understanding math and computer science. That is no longer socially acceptable. In some ways though it's more subtle. And so it makes it more difficult to fight. But I think more what we're dealing with is just an atmosphere that right now there's this archetype of what a good technologist is. And there are a lot of people who don't fit that archetype. And that's part of what we're railing against. So the final lesson fundamentally the only thing you can do is your best. If you deal with people with integrity. If you tell the truth. That's the best you can do. That's all anyone can ask of you. And that's how you can look yourself in the mirror in the morning and say I did the right thing. And you can go to sleep at night. And yeah. OK maybe you made a mistake but you did the best you could. Deal with honesty and integrity. Tell the truth. And things in general will work out for you. And hopefully you don't have to repeat the mistakes that I have made. Thank you very much. So questions. Could you share some of your.


You too team keep it clean. What's going on is engraving here with another video and in this video See the NFL the new starting to pick up a little bit So we get that means we're just getting one step closer Towards free agency in the draft and the next step of the offseason Right now with free agency coming up There are a lot of teams that have to pay roster bonuses to certain players Depending on how their contracts are set up There are a lot of teams that got That just a broke like the Ravens. I mean nobody really broke like the Ravens But a lot of teams they try to get some more cap room. So they start into a Start to release some guys decline some options on some guys So we starting to get more new so to start to get a little excited about NFL season But we still got a while to go But that's why we have channels like this one to where we could talk about football All year round all year long and we could talk about our hopes our dreams for our teams and What we hope they will accomplish who that we hope they will sign who we know they're not gonna sign Shout out to Jarvis Landry cuz he ain't coming to Baltimore unless he takes a big discount. But anyway That's why I wanted to talk to y'all and really quick before we get into this Let me introduce myself because I don't want to be rude me. I mean gravy is this is my YouTube channel engraving vids And I'm a Ravens fan and even though I'm a Ravens fan on its YouTube channel. We don't just talk Ravens We talk football period.  You love the Ravens How do you feel about them? Have you feel about your team? Have you feel about the team in NFL? Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel Turn your notifications on and once you do that Make sure you leave a like on the video. Then you can also follow on Twitter, Instagram, and even vids all one word all three and Let's get into it. So And just before we get into this Knew this was the the biggest new that I felt like talking about I know there were some other things that happened that we will Mention really quick like the Chiefs. They signed their kicker to a five-year deal the Bears they cut Names starts with a J Not Jeremy, what is his name again? Wow, I forgot to do name with a bear cut believe it's a linebacker. Oh I really forgot his name. Anyway The bears declined an option on Josh sitting or Josh Sutton the guard. So he's gonna be a free agent Vontae Davis visiting with the 49ers we talked about 49ers before and how that's gonna be a very attractive spot to some players Because they got a lot of money and they show Not a lot of players or they showed that last year So it's gonna be enticing for a lot of people to go there What was some other things that happened the Bucks cut the D. Lyman Chris Baker?  He was running around everywhere giving people stiff arms. It's a little muscular Perfect size for a running back though and Doug Martin was straight killing it then all of a sudden He started getting it suspended for the PDs and Just that was a wrap Last year when he got suspended for a PD that pretty much Spelled the end of him in Tampa Bay He was once a prominent running back. He was once considered one of the one of the better running backs in the NFL But the PDs suspension that that cost them man that cost him big time And I think Tampa Bay was just like, you know what this dude just gonna keep getting suspended for us You know what let's just go ahead and cut ties now Let's just go ahead and get it over with and they said cutting him save them like almost seven million dollars in cap space So now they get that money back and Doug Martin has to move on will he be picked up by somebody? Oh for sure. He's definitely gonna get picked up Teams could always use depth at the running back position It is a position that depending on the team it has more or less value somebody like um Shout out to one man. He said you got to get ground PD guy. What's up, George? We need fresh faces in the backfield. Anyway, he's okay. Oh, yeah, Mason is a Bucks fan He always got the hands right there with the gloves, man So, yeah, so Doug Martin is on the outs. He is out of there I Know it's it's so funny that a shout out to my boy get old vegan But he doesn't sometimes like when we're in vets from teams will be cut He'll be one of the first people like oh, yeah, Patriots gonna sign them Patriots gonna sign them and then I saw somebody else when this news first broke that Doug Martin was gonna get cut Or he got cut somebody for oh, yeah Patriots gonna sign him and they could possibly sign him. That's the possibility So we'll see what the future holds but He's out of there He is out of there Like we always talk about mostly when we talk about Ravens players more so than injury-prone players like a Jimmy Smith Your if you you could be one of the best in the league at your position But if you can't be there on the field if you don't have that availability Then what good is your ability if you you're never gonna be on the field It's no point in paying you the big bucks There's no point and even keeping you around because what do you what are you gonna do for a team that you can never play for I Don't some people just cannot drive man. I don't get it. Some people just make they make driving so difficult Anyway So Doug Lawrence out of there and other news something a little more tricky a little more thought-provoking The chiefs cornerback a lot of people thinking that the chiefs might be trying to trade Marcus Peters Now why would they try to trade Marcus Peters who's one of the better cornerbacks in the league? He's somebody who always has his hands Around the ball. Why would they try to trade him? What would be the point? What would be the logic in doing that? Because Marcus Peters is a beast He is a monster. I love Marcus Peters And he I would love I would love to see him in Baltimore. Even though I know it's definitely not going to happen Not it's not even a long shot It just ain't going down But a lot of people think since they brought in the cornerback from the rare skins Kindle fuller and they brought in another corner back to that. They may be They may be thinking about trading Marcus Peters away So could they do that It's a positive. Oh David Amerson. That's who they sign. It's a possibility, but I don't think it's happening. Oh really quick here's um This is the school that This is the school Stoneman Douglas, this is it right here. That's the school where the shooting was last week That's the school right there And it's a lot of Just a quick side note, man They're not back at school yet I talked to one of the parents today because one of them goes to my works at my job, but um They're not back at school yet What one of them said they might have like us a special kind of schedule or something like that But yeah, this is it. This is the scene man. It's crazy. I told y'all it was like right there by where we live And that's it right there man crazy Crazy it's been super busy Somebody told me Yeah, it is unreal man. It's it's crazy Somebody told me the the lady whose daughter goes there who I work with She said that she went to a funeral I think yesterday she said yesterday on Sunday.   No, just they had to show you all that or didn't have to but Just decided to show you all that that that's so that's the scene at the school right now. I Don't know exactly when they're going back to school, but we'll see But yeah That was that But anyway back to Marcus Peters with with the chief signing David Amerson and Also bringing in Also bringing in fuller from the Redskins a lot of people felt like oh, yeah, the cheese They probably gonna try to give it a Marcus Peters now since they bring in all these cornerbacks Why can't they just have quality depth? Why can't they just have quality depth on the team and that could be something George George mentioned how um It was hilarious when Peters threw the rest leg It was but that could be a reason why people may think that they may be trying to trade Marcus Peters Because he may have a little attitude problem or whatever he may be sort of a diva or whatever something like that and it could be But I mean It is what it is Do I do I think they're gonna try to trade them? I Can't I can't say no, I would say no one once I first heard about that people were thinking about that My immediate thought was no, they ain't gonna try to trade Marcus Peters to a ball hop He's always around the ball always picking the ball off and when he picks the ball off He he's he's great at returning the interceptions for big yards. He's a beast at that But then I thought hold up is 2018 we've seen crazier trades in NFL and teams are not loyal to anybody Even if you wanted a better players Sometimes if they're done with you hey, that's that could be a rap man And a lot of teams they not they're not putting up with stuff They are not putting up with stuff and if you are somebody who's a quote-on-quote problem child And they want to give you up and they can get something decent in Return of what yeah to get this get something decent in return for you to give you up. Oh, yeah, they'll take it They will take it if they can avoid having to pay you a big contract Then a lot of teams are willing to hear what other teams have to offer and listen to what they were in the trade in order to pick you up so Immediate thought when this first happened was like, okay here Marcus Peters ain't going nowhere Chiefs wouldn't do that. They got one of the better quarterbacks in the league man, but then I was like, oh wait a minute This is NFL.  Thank you for your services But you out like think about it. Where's Alex Smith right now? Alex Smith is with the Redskins Chiefs got rid of that. They're starting quarterback. So if they if they're willing to get rid of they're starting quarterback If they willing to get rid of their starting quarterback, why would they not get rid of be willing to get rid of a starting corner back? Why wouldn't they why wouldn't they so I mean it is what it is and That makes that makes even more That makes it an even bigger chance that uh, he could be up on it. He could be on up out of there So, I mean, we'll see what happens and We'll see what happens. I did see somebody mentioned on I don't know if it was Twitter or if it was I Forgot where I saw that But they said that um, no, of course not the chiefs not gonna get rid of Marcus Peters because Marcus Peters and Kind of full of outside cornerbacks and David Emerson is a slot cornerback You present a good point there, but Like I said, NFL is a business. So That's that. But anyway, like I said just to recap Doug Martin he he ran his way out of Tampa Bay So he will I wonder if he's even still gonna be in Florida anymore because we still got Miami Dolphins and Jacksonville Jaguars Jacksonville Jaguars got Chris Iredo. I don't know how his contract is I And I'm referring to backup running backs, of course. They got linen for net. All the Miami Dolphins have I Don't even know they got rid of Jaya. They were tired of him and what happened here. Oh, he went in one of Super Bowl She's that's gotta burn that got to burn But is what it is anyway Appreciate y'all watching Thank you all for coming through Thank you all for supporting the channel Thank you all for Just continuing the show love man Thank you all for all your support. I really do appreciate it I always it always like I hate when these people when they ride their bikes You can't probably can't even see when they ride their bikes So close to the road I Feel like they're in the road and I feel like man, what if my perception is messed up? And I accidentally nudged them and then it always reminds me of Grand Theft Auto I don't know if that happens to y'all too, but I just I hate when people riding their bikes so close to the road It always reminds me of Grand Theft Auto Anyway Appreciate you guys. I am pulling up to the house right now so Until the next stream Till we meet again


Aaron Judge's injury is still a little bit of a mystery. He underwent testing yesterday on the Yankees off day, and according to General Manager Brian Cashman, two more tests were scheduled for today. As of now, all of those tests, including an MRI, have come back negative. They're hopeful that today's test will reveal why Aaron Judge has some discomfort in that right pack area. Judge actually is here in Tampa. He was seen walking through the clubhouse at about 11.45 but did not speak to the media. One thing we do know for sure, David, is what you alluded to. Time right now is not on Judge's side. Just over three weeks until opening day in Baltimore, and Brian Cashman confirmed that it is unlikely he is going to be ready to go by the 26th. The same goes for John Carlo Stanton, who's out with a right calf strain. Not the ideal outfield for the Yankees, but just like last year, guys are going to need to step up until Judge and Stanton get back. You see Clint Frasier in the outfield. Mike Talkman is an option. You see Miguel Andujar in the outfield, and I spoke with Tyler Wade, who told me he is going to see his first game action of the spring in the outfield come tomorrow.


Hello, everyone. Thank you and welcome to another Mara guest lecture. We are very fortunate today to have Stephen Abrams. Stephen has had a digital preservation for the Harvard Library with responsibility for policy, strategic planning, innovation, and oversight of the Library's preservation initiative systems and services. He has been active in the digital library community for over 20 years and has served in an advisory or governing capacity for many projects and organizations, including ca.gov.web.archive, collaboration to clarify the cost of curation or C, data in the lab, data one, end of term web archive, facade, federal agencies, digitization guidelines initiative, the International Internet Preservation Consortium, the Jewish Women's Archive, make that account, the National Digital Stewardship Alliance, Planets and Pronome, and program committees for the DLF, IDCC, IPRES, ISNT archiving, JCDL, and Open Repositories Conferences. He was project director and editor for the ISO 19005 PDF-A Standard and the creator of the JHOV and JHOV2 Format Characterization Tools and the Unified Digital Format Registry, Samantha Quickie. His doctoral research with us here at SDSU in the Gateway Program focuses on frameworks for evaluating the efficacy of digital preservation activities when viewed as technically mediated human communications across time, in concubitant technical and cultural distance. We are incredibly lucky to have him here with us today. So welcome and we're thrilled to hear your presentation. Thank you, Carol. Your preservation as well. Well, thank you for the invitation to come and speak to you and your students.  It's a little bit embarrassing to hear it out loud. But anyway, good morning or good afternoon, everyone, depending on where you are, afternoon for me here in Massachusetts. And I'm gonna be talking to you about a number of what I consider to be a very important digital preservation issues. And as a structuring idea for this, because of the nature of your educational experience, I wanna talk to this in the context of building a digital first archive. How hard could that be? So to begin with, the University Archives here at Harvard about three or four years ago announced a very ambitious goal to translate transition rather to what I would call a digital first records management program by 2026. Internally and externally, they often talk about this as a born digital program or a digital only program. But I think digital first actually captures what's actually gonna happen because paper or other types of tangible assets are certainly not gonna go away. Although we would expect those to become increasingly more and more rare in the overall set of collections. So obviously when we're dealing with these digital materials, we have to be concerned with the preservation, the long-term preservation of that material, both in terms of our policy obligations, perhaps our statutory or legal obligations, but beyond that as a university, it has to do with our role, essentially as a memory organization and preserving the cultural record. So I'm gonna talk very, very briefly today about ideas I have about what constitutes the appropriate technical and social infrastructure for the effective and sustainable persistence of the university records. Although this is actually applicable to all other forms of digital information. Beyond that, I wanna end up with a little bit of a, give you a little bit of a flavor of my doctoral research, which is looking into the question of how can we know whether or not our preservation goals have actually been achieved. So to begin with, I just wanna talk a little bit about who I am. So you will sort of understand my perspective. And first of all, it's very important to note that I am not an archivist. It's very possible, if not likely, that all of you may know a little bit more about the archival world than I do. I would consider myself to be a librarian, both by experience and training. And while there is, of course, a tremendous amount of overlap in goals and so forth, there are things that we do differently. I suspect there are things that we perceive or conceive of a little bit differently. So again, just to hint at that experience and training, I've been sort of in this business for over 20 years now, started off back at the Harvard Library in 1999, when we were just first building our digital capacity. And this predates GitHub by a fair amount. So if you wanted something, you had to build it. And that's in fact what we did. And part of my tenure there was in building the first generation of our infrastructure, including the infrastructure for preservation purposes. After about 10 years, I went out to sunny California at the University of California's California Digital Library, where I was Associate Director of the UC Curation Center. I'm not gonna try to disentangle curation from preservation. That's a whole nother lecture, but it's safe to say that I was very intimately involved with a lot of these same issues, including preservation activities there. For the last five years, I have been in a doctoral candidate at the San Jose and Queensland PhD program, which is how I became familiar with DARA, who's a wonderful new addition to the San Jose faculty. And my research is, as I alluded to earlier in the area of the evaluation of the digital preservation enterprise, and in particular, how we can quantify success of that enterprise. And then for the past three years, I have come back to Harvard as head of its newly established preservation program, which is not to say that we have not had been doing preservation for these 20 years, 20 odd years, but it was never sort of publicly identified as an administrative unit, which it now is. So that's about me. I would like to know a little bit about you. And in particular, if you could raise your hand either actually, or if you can do it sort of iconically through Zoom, just wanna get a sense whether you've taken either of these two courses, which seem to be the ones in the MARA curriculum that are most germane to the kind of preservation issues I've been talking about. So I don't know if you're allowed, are you allowed to sort of raise your hand if your video is off? You can't quite see. Well- You could be able to press the reactions button, although I know at least a couple of folks here are brand new for semester first year MARA students. And so they would not have taken those courses yet. Okay, well, that's useful to know because I don't wanna bewilder anyone. There's gonna be some acronyms and some concepts that you may have heard, you may not have heard. Please drop something in the chat or I'm trying to leave lots of time at the end for questions in discussion. So what is the problem we are trying to solve? Let me kind of illustrate it this way. Harvard University is a very old institution and this is one of the oldest records in the archival collection. This is a piece of correspondence that was written by the first Harvard president, what is that, about 380 years ago. And we still have it, the piece of paper and it's sitting on a folder in a box in a controlled environment. And as you can see, we actually have a digital facsimile of this thing. Let's fast forward 380 years. Here is a piece of correspondence from the current Harvard president, Larry Backow, that he sent out to us, all of the staff just about two weeks ago. The problem, 380 years later, we still have that original piece of paper. I suspect 380 years in the future, we're still gonna have that piece of paper. Can we say the same thing with any degree of confidence about this piece of email? Now you may think, well, how hard could that be? It's just a bit of text. Well, let's look at it a little bit closer. This looks like an embedded graphic, but in fact, this is a link to an external image sitting out on a server someplace. Is that server gonna be there in the future? Here is a link to a calendar app, again, external to the email itself. Is that gonna be there in 380 years? Similarly, we have a link to a website down there. Same question. Overall, this looks like text, but it is actually encoded in HTML form. Is anyone gonna know what HTML is or how to decode it? Are they gonna know what all those little angle brackets mean and so forth? More significantly, Harvard uses Outlook as its enterprise mail system. So even though this message is represented in HTML, it's actually being stored on a server and on my laptop as a PST file, which is a proprietary database format. It's binary format, it's not actually text. So is anyone gonna know how to read that all those years in the future? So it's actually even this seemingly simple example presents some really significant preservation challenges. So you might ask, well, in the email case, how good are we? Well, what have we been doing with email? It's been around for a while. Well, let's take a look at some things and try to put this into context. 180 years ago, we actually know what the first telegraph message ever sent was. And in fact, we have the message right there. It was the nature of telegraphy back then because it got printed out on a little piece of paper and that's in the Smithsonian. Fast forward to another couple of years, was about 150 years ago, we know what the first telephone message was. We don't have a tangible representation of it because it's ephemeral nature, but in fact, we know what was said by whom and to whom. What's the first email message? That's only 50 years old. Well, we really have no idea what that first email message was. Ray Tomlinson, who was the person who sent it and actually invented our modern notion of email. As far as he can remember, he sort of danced across the keyboard and sent a sort of a nonsense message just to test that it actually arrived at the other end. What we can draw from this is that significance, archival or cultural in the broader sense, often only emerges in hindsight. So the first telegraph, the first telephone message, those were seen at the time as historically and culturally significant events and were very well documented. Email in 1971 was a very, very fringe thing. It was done in the context of the ARPANET, which is a research project. And the idea was, well, maybe at some point, there'll be a couple of dozen obscure computer scientists who are going to send mail back and forth. No one contemplated it was going to become one of the preeminent channels of communication. And therefore no one thought to actually save it so that it can in fact be preserved. So what do we actually mean when we're talking about digital preservation? Well, if you've had any coursework in this or you've had any interest or looked it up, there's a variety of definitions you can find very, very easily in a number of places. They're all gonna probably sound something quite like this. I picked this one in particular because this is about the newest definition you could possibly find. Dan Nunin and his colleagues out at Ohio State released this as a public document just about a month and a half ago. Now, there is nothing particularly wrong with it. Everything that is said here is absolutely correct. It's absolutely necessary. But I would argue that while not wrong, it is also not complete. So let me sort of take this apart a little bit. First of all, there is this reference to managed activities. Essentially what this means is that the Preservation Act enterprise has been conceptualized as a managerial endeavor. It has to do with the mechanics of you got something and you're gonna at some point hand it off and it's what's in the middle there. Again, absolutely necessary, but not really the whole story. Again, if you've done any study in this area, you've probably come across a diagram. It looks like this. This is the open archival information system reference model. It is pretty much the standard instrument that we use to explain what we do to design systems to do it and so forth. And by calling Preservation and Managerial Activity, we're basically saying it's really only concerned with this little middle bit. And very significantly, the concerns, the needs, the experiences of content producers and content consumers is held to be sort of outside the purview of Preservation proper. I think that's a little short-sighted. Come back to this in a moment. Another thing we see here is that the end goal of Preservation is to provide access. Again, that's necessary, but perhaps not quite enough. Access has a number of meanings, both sort of the dictionary meaning. It is actually a fairly codified archival term. You could look like in the SAA dictionary and you'll find that it has to do with being able to be findable and retrievable, both from sort of a technical and administrative and a legal point of view. You can get the thing into your hand, but it doesn't say anything at all about what you can do with that thing that's now in your hand. It does not address usability. And after all, the whole reason we are archiving and preserving this material is so that it will be used by some future user. Here is President Bacow's email message. If you didn't know anything else about it and you retrieve it, you have access to it, this is what you're going to get. And it's very possible that in the absence of other information, that's not going to be particularly useful. Going along with that is the sort of central focus of the Preservation activity is the digital object, the actual encoding of abstract information into digital form. Digital objects are the primary unit of preservation management. But again, the scope of preservation, I would argue, needs to go beyond just dealing with objects. This perspective of looking at things in terms of the preservable objects is what I'm calling an artifactual perspective. We're dealing with that physical, well, we're virtual, that digital artifact. We're not necessarily there in the concerns we should be on the human experience engaging with that artifact. In essence, we want to turn this binary data into something a little bit more familiar. We want to be able to read and manipulate this email message in the context of some sort of an email client. Lastly, the risks to preservation are couched here in terms of technical risks. And there are lots of those, and that certainly occupies a lot of our time in ameliorating those risks. But basically, there's an assumption here that because we're dealing with sort of archival time spans, there's obvious technical distance that arises across those time spans between the point of acquisition or creation acquisition and the point of eventual use. And that's what this definition is trying to get at. But also accompanying that increasing time dimension is cultural distance. The future user is in a very, very different cultural position than he or she was, they were at the point at which the information creator actually put something down. So to illustrate this, you're probably having a, where I didn't give you a chance to read this message, you will see that in it, President Bacow is very generously giving all of us some additional time off during the upcoming winter recess. Someone in the future just reading this in isolation might think, well, that was kind of a nice thing for the president to do. They would be losing the whole point here. COVID is not mentioned anywhere in this message, but it is the imperative context for understanding what was actually being done here. Over the past two years, Harvard, like many institutions, hopefully yours, has been making a variety of accommodations. To its staff, to its faculty, to its students. And in fact, this extra vacation time is nearly the latest instance of that. So although there is no explicit mention of COVID, you really aren't gonna understand correctly the purpose, the intent and the impact of this message without knowing that it was done after two years of pandemic conditions. So what is digital preservation really? If I was of a particularly poetic mood, I would give sort of a metaphorical statement like this, that digital preservation is about the continuity of memory, whether individual, institutional or cultural memory in the digital age. I actually think that's a very nice encapsulation. That's getting to the point, the goal, what it is we're trying to do, why it is in fact so important. If you wanted a little bit more nuts and bolts to this, I could say something like this, that it is about human communication. There is a managerial, a technically managerial aspect in the middle of it, because we are dealing with digitally encoded information. There's always gonna have to be a technological component to it, but we should never lose track of the site that at either end, there's a person and that what we are doing is to enable communication of past informative expression to some future consumer of that expression. And a little bit more specificity about the actual preservation activity, I think it all comes down to two complementary activities which has to do with assuring the persistence of authentic digital information objects, as well as the persistence of opportunities for legitimate digital information experiences. So here I'm very carefully drawing a distinction between objects and experiences. We need both, the one is fact, you can't happen without the other. I'm also drawing a distinction between my adjectives, authenticity versus legitimacy. When we're dealing at the artificial level of the object, it makes sense to talk about authenticity, which is a somewhat objective measure. Essentially, something's gonna be authentic for pretty much universally independent of who is evaluating that. Experience, of course, is particular to time, place, person and purpose. So we can't really talk about authentic, which implies that there's a single canonical form of it, but we can't talk about legitimacy, legitimate for the purpose of the particular individual. So what do we sort of need to put into place in order to make good on those two points? Well, we can think about things in terms of a variety of programmatic imperatives, things that we're doing at the institutional program level. And what, how many are here, do I have? I sort of collected this into eight categories that more or less move from necessary things to hopefully fully sufficient things as we sort of move down the list. They're all in the same category, as we sort of move down the list. They're all important, but if you had to prioritize them, this is sort of the way in which I would go about trying to develop capacity to make good on these things. First of all is proactive analysis and decision-making. Unlike the archiving of tangible materials, which is often, you know, can be referred to as sort of, you know, well, a regime of benign neglect meant in the positive way is not necessarily a bad thing. We take a piece of paper, if we deacidify it, or it's acid-free, we put it in a box, we keep it cold, we keep it dark, we keep it at low humidity. We ensure that there's no fire, there's no flood, there's no bug. Beyond that, it sort of takes care of itself. And if something does go wrong, we have opportunities for reactive amelioration. In general, in the pressure of digital world, that all gets flipped on its head. If something goes significantly wrong, you may not be able to react. So it's all the more important that we have a very proactive set of programs and initiatives in place. Beyond that, the single most important thing that anyone can do in terms of preservation is to acquire it and bring something, piece of material into a, you know, proactively managed and sustainable preservation program. So we want to make sure that we have the widest sort of most opportune acquisition of materials and the least prescriptive bars in terms of eligibility to be able to bring things in. Once we have something, we need to know what it is. We want to be able to provide a variety of description. We want metadata of all different kinds about it. Sometimes the metadata comes along with the thing from someone who presumably knows. Other times we are able to sort of extract descriptive information from the thing itself. There's often a lot of interesting technical, if not descriptive metadata that's baked into our various digital artifacts. Beyond that, there is the opportunity to have enriched description. Say we have a digital text. We can actually, you know, using natural language processing techniques. We can identify named entities, people, places, dates. We can do sort of a punitive subject analysis by looking for concept clusters. We can make a stab at what this thing is actually about. We can do keywords. There's all sorts of things we can do there. There are similar kinds of things we can do with other types such as audio streams and video images and so forth. Now we have the thing. We know what the thing is. We need to protect it. We want to assure its integrity, its authenticity, its usability. We want to make sure that it is under appropriate curatorial control. And ideally we should be giving our curators the ability to exercise that control sort of on their own without having to go through necessarily an intermediary. And finally, because we know that we're doing this for a purpose, there's a whole body of potential stakeholders out in the world. We need to make sure that we have the possible discovery and delivery of the material. And then finally, this is not a one-time thing. We need to continually adjust to changing conditions as well as continually evolving stakeholder needs, aspirations, not to mention the ever-ongoing evolution of technology and the inevitability of technological disruption. So we're going to have to have a variety of infrastructural components to help us deal with this. So what are sort of the operational imperatives, both of actual technical systems, as well as social systems? Preservation makes use of a lot of machinery, but that machinery is always directed by people. It's a human activity as well as a technical one. So I would identify what seven or so imperatives. They're probably more, but these are the ones that can only lead to mind or that I certainly keep in mind in the development of our own program here at Harvard. First of all, we want to ensure that there is maximal stakeholder clarity regarding planning activities and in fact stakeholder participation in those kind of planning activities to ensure that it is meeting their purposes. We want to ensure that there is maximum availability of our systems, of our content, at a time and place and in a manner of user choosing, ideally at user choosing, not what we think they want to do and when, but what went the way they want to do it and when. Those stakeholders should be able to rely on our systems, both human and machine, to behave the way they expect them to, to behave the way they've been documented to behave. All of this should provide maximal productivity, which is the users of these systems should derive maximum benefit for a minimal amount of effort. There should also be, we should be enabling maximum participation and adoption at minimal cost. And we want to make sure that we're minimizing any potential negative impacts on finite institutional resources and in fact finite environmental resources. Because this is all based on technology, everything is plugged in, there's an on switch that's using up a lot of resources. So compute cycles, storage corresponds to carbon. To make that carbon, we're creating heat, to reduce the heat, we're using more energy. More energy is more carbon. So it's certainly something that we're very much engaged with in minimizing our footprint in that regard. And then finally, we want to make sure that all these systems remain responsive to a changing environment. Lastly, I want to talk about what I initially labeled as functional imperatives. But because of the way in which I've written this, I would say these are actually perhaps better couched as functional aspirations. Ideally, we would want to have the capacity to deal with digital content in any genre or any format in any number or any size with any form of description or potentially no description. We should still be able to do something with it, not as much as we would want, but something. In any language or script, in Harvard's library collections, English is the minority. You go back, you know, both bibliographically and in other collections, we have about 60% of all of our materials that are under our stewardship are in non-English. We should be able to deal with any sort of duration. The appropriate lifespan and stewardship for a given piece of material is going to vary widely. And we want to be able to deal with things from the transitory through the persistent to the permanent. We should be able to deal with any eventuality, being proactive whenever possible and reactive whenever necessary. And we should be able to enable any sort of use or reuse, whether that is purposeful or serendipitous and whether it is a mode of use that we expect or that is unanticipated. So those are all kind of heady goals. How are we going to know whether we've made any progress towards that? In order to do that, it is very important that we have mechanisms in place to allow us to evaluate the efficacy of preservation and archival activity. As Nara said, it's part of their records management assessment program that they do internally. Assessments are very useful for purposes of evaluating existing practice as a way to think about new ways to provide better guidance, better policy, better training and better tools. It is also important. Here's a nice quote that I like from a couple of years ago. This is dealing with library assessment as opposed to archival, but I think they're both germane to both areas. That assessment and evaluation, it's very important that it goes beyond sort of the obvious markers of use and satisfaction to examine much larger and global questions of impact and outcomes. Another instance of where sort of the state of the art in preservation is not wrong, but again, I think is not complete. Because of the sort of perspectival bias within the field towards artificial management, this lends itself to an evaluative benchmark of trustworthiness. Has the process, is that worthy of being trusted? Do I have confidence that the preservation process has done what it says it's going to do? That's a very important thing, and we want to make sure that our processes are trustworthy. But when you think about it, trustworthiness is essentially a measure of preservation means that preservation ends. If we can expand our conceptual perspective beyond artificial management to that of communicative experience, what is that person, future person doing with that managed and preserved object? That suggests to me at least a complementary benchmark of preservation success. I would argue and have that success, this is really the critical quality in terms of what we're doing. Because if we did not know whether or not we'd been successful, how in the world can anyone expect us to plan rationally for preservation activity? How could anyone reasonably expect that we're going to get successful outcomes out at the end? How are we ever going to effectively measure those kinds of outcomes? And importantly, certainly at least for me, and it should be important for stakeholders, how can anyone be held meaningfully accountable for the outcome, whether it is successful or less than successful? So what does it mean to be talking about digital preservation success? It's important here I think to recognize that archival preservation in general and digital preservation in particular usually happens as a delegated responsibility and that is played out within an implicit service provider stakeholder relationship. And this can happen within a given organization or across organizations. In the Harvard Library, I had a central service unit that offers digital preservation services out to all 70-odd university archives, libraries and museums. They're not doing it for themselves. They are passing along that delegated obligation to me. There are also perhaps in smaller institutions, this gets delegated outside the boundaries and there are a variety of consortial and commercial opportunities, which again are placing people into this sort of implicit service provider stakeholder relationship. That kind of a relationship is something that is very well studied, at least in the business management world. And there's a huge body of research and scholarship that tells us, what does it mean to have a level of satisfaction or success in such a relationship? And it all comes down to the hopeful alignment of service provider intention, of the realized state of the service provider's intentions and the stakeholders' expectations. So in other words, things are probably going to look something like this, that at some time in the past, I as a service provider, preservation service provider, had an intention to do something with regard to a piece of digital content that leads at some later time period to an actual archive state. And then at some point in the future, a stakeholder is going to want to make use of that material and has a particular expectation about what they want to see from that archive state. Those things could all be equivalent, in which case I think we can declare success, or they could be a little less than equivalent, which means we don't have perhaps full success, although success should never be seen as a binary quality. It is a continuum and hopefully we'll achieve things towards the far-ended scale. So what are the norms for success? Well, I just said that what we're interested in is trying to find an alignment between a provider's intention and the stakeholders' expectation. Unfortunately, those things are not generally made explicit or made visible in the preservation context. However, they are recoverable, sort of from their tacit expression in the form of digital preservation policy statements. A policy statement essentially establishes a social, if not legal contract, that is going to underpin the service provider stakeholder relationship. In fact, what is a policy statement? It is the way of the provider to assert a particular obligation. We are going to do this for you. In the face of that articulation, it is perfectly reasonable for the stakeholder to make an assumption about what they can expect. In fact, if you take a look at preservation policy statements, and there's a lot of information about this in the reference that I had on that last page, and you'll see it again at the end, you'll find that there are four primary norms for success that are implicit to policy statements. There's a lot of other norms, but these are the ones that are essentially our uniform. You find these again and again and again, in almost every policy statement that you would choose to look at. These four are accessibility, integrity, authenticity, and usability of the preserved materials, by which is meant, or at least I interpreted it to mean that the preserved digital artifact is findable and retrievable, technically and legally. The artifact is whole and unaltered from its accepted, if not canonical, state. That artifact is, in fact, what it reports to be, and then finally, that artifact is germane to and exploitable for the stakeholder's purpose. If we take a look at these things, we see that they fall into two categories. Those top three, I would argue, are more or less objective. The determination of whether these things are there or not is going to be pretty much the same for anyone who goes through that kind of an exercise. Usability, on the other hand, I would claim is highly intersubjective. It is, again, particular to time, place, person, context, and purpose. That makes things a lot harder, much easier to come up with objective metrics than subjective ones. So what would it mean for there to be successful usability? We've ensured usability successfully. Well, that means that some sort of contextually situated engagement by a stakeholder with that preserved artifact is meaningful, by which I would say that is something propulsive, is newly known, is newly felt, or is newly acted upon by the stakeholder that would not otherwise have occurred. In other words, we could say the preserved information has, in fact, informed the stakeholder. Now, different stakeholders could look at the same piece of preserved information and want to interact with it in a variety of ways. So there's actually probably going to always need to be a number of metrics or norms that are used to quantify the success of usability. And here are sort of the ones that, again, I like to talk about, these seven. And I know some of the terminology is a little bit obscure, so let me give some examples here. A system administrator may only really care about the physical manifestation or ontic manifestation. Is there a file with a given name in a location where it's supposed to be? In that case, this presentation you're watching right now, it's a number of, it's all of these things, but at the physical manifestation level, there is a file sitting on my lap. Well, I'm a preservationist, there's lots of copies of this in various places, but it's just a set of bits sitting there somewhere. If I was concerned about the way in which, you know, this file was created or say I'm in a digitization laboratory, I might be concerned with the empiric encoding. You know, what is the symbolic representation of this thing? This particular set of slides are encoded in the Microsoft's Office Open XML format, for example. There's also a higher level syntactic expression that I as an author was concerned about. This is a slide deck, it's made up of individual slides. Each of these slides has some graphics, it has some text in a variety of ways. There's also a dimension of performing behavior. So I've been going through these slides one at a time. Some of them have had little internal animations. So that's an aspect of this presentation that has to get preserved along with the actual file itself. In this case, I've been using the PowerPoint application. There are other similar things that could do the same kind of thing. Obviously, of course, there is some underlying semantic meaning that's going to be at the heart of the preservation activity. In this case, the meaning here is what is Harvard doing to build a digital first archive. That meaning is initially expressed from my point of view. This is the meaning as I know it. You watching it are going to interpret what I've just said and seen in terms of a particular context. You are all seeing this in the context of the San Jose Mera program. It's also in the context of your lived educational and professional experiences. You're all going to have perhaps a slightly different take on what this is, which is going to lead to the final sort of pragmatic understanding, which is how is Harvard building a digital first archive as you've come to know it or understand it. With that, I am going to close my formal remarks with just a few high level summaries. As we are building our digital first archive, we're making use of a number of principles that really applies to the preservation of all of Harvard's materials. In doing it, we are attempting to be very complementary to what sort of constitutes the current state of the art, which as I've mentioned a number of times is not wrong, but not perhaps complete. So we feel it is important to approach digital archiving from the perspective of communication as well as management from the perspective of human experience as well as a technical artifact from the evaluating it in terms of overall experiential success as well as artifactual and procedural trustworthiness. And that this all has to be seen from a perspective that is intersubjective as well as objective in terms of the evaluative norms that we come up with. And with that, I will close my remarks and offer some information here. Please feel free to reach out to me later on. Here's some pointers to some recent publications of mine that goes into a lot more detail about many of these issues and questions that I've raised. And at this point, I would be delighted to hear any comments or reactions and answer any questions that you might have. And with that. Thank you so much for that, Stephen. That was fantastic. I know I've taken away a lot and have learned a lot and I'm really excited to turn over and engage again with some of your work students. If you haven't had the chance, please do read Stephen's article in archival science. It is fantastic and it's a really, it's a perspective that we don't have a lot in the field. So I will pause and give the chance for the students to ask some questions. I have many questions myself, but I would like to prioritize their learning and experience. We're all just so blown away that we're, okay, so I will start then. I guess one of the biggest questions I have is how do we deal as you, as you rightfully pointed out, there's a huge distance that grows culturally between where we are now in 380 years from now. How do we balance that distance in trying to address the expectational state of our future stakeholders when our future stakeholders are likely to be so distant from us? Well, that's, it's tricky. And there's sort of two ways you can look at it. There's the somewhat traditional way, I think, which is, well, isn't that what scholars do? This is the nature of the scholarly exercise. You dig up some source material that perhaps no one's looked at or you interpret it in a new way. And that interpretation, of course, has to be based on what you are able to recover or intuit about both the time in which the thing was created, what purpose it might have been intended for. But there's also the purpose that it may be used for in the future, which doesn't necessarily have to be the right thing. This is why I like to talk about legitimacy of use, as opposed to authenticity of the artifact. There's many different types of uses and some that were undoubtedly, well, certainly over-article type spans, completely unknown, unrelated to the original intention. Many maritime and naval archives hold very rich collections going back to the great age of exploration, the 16th to 17th century, including a lot of ship's logs. There was some boasts in sitting there every day, writing down what was going on. That included atmospheric and oceanographic information. What was the air temperature? What was the water temperature? That was for a very practical purpose. And as long as it was on paper, it was kept alive. And what if someone said, well, you know, this really doesn't matter. Let's just snip all that stuff out. It's just taking up a lot of room. Well, nowadays, it turns out, climate scientists are using that very same information, collected for a completely independent purpose to do very, very long-term longitudinal studies and explaining and exploring climate change. No one could have anticipated that. And it could very well have been discarded at some point. It's just, oh, this is, we don't need this. So it's hard. Hopefully we all, as curators, are always thinking about the things we know about and the things we expect our customers are going to want. But there's always the notion of, there's the things that we don't know. We know we don't know that they're going to want. And luckily in the digital world, digital space is relatively inexpensive. At least it has been historically. So the thought is, let's just kind of hoover up as much as we can and do as much as we can practically and try to leave things in as good enough state for that future scour. But again, capturing context, the fullest possible context at the point of creation, at the point of acquisition, at the point of prior use. You may be looking at something that's 100 years old, but there's probably 100 years of prior scholarship. People have written articles, they've cited this thing. We should be finding ways to pull together this vast network of these interconnections so that we're handing someone not just the thing, but the thing as the focus of a whole constellation of related information. So that sounds to me like there's going to be a lot of infrastructural, not just a change, but advancement that's necessary. Because like to my mind, you can't really start that without really building out some real semantic web and really that rich sort of, you know, link down at all of that. Is that an accurate assumption or? Yes. I mean, semantic web is our current, you know, technology du jour for dealing with it. And we always need to think about these things at two levels.  And we want to make sure the information persists indefinitely, knowing that the implementation, you know, if we can get 10 years out of it, well, we're doing pretty well. And then we're going to have to move to the next new, new, new thing. You know, preservation is a relay.  You approach it, but you never actually get to it. Right. Always have to be handed that baton off. Yeah. So what would you recommend for those students who are here who or who will listen to this later on our webcast, who will be the ones receiving the baton? What do they need to know and to do to be able to take up such a big responsibility? Oh, gosh, well, there's just no ends. There's no end of knowing literally because again, tomorrow you're going to be handed something you've never seen before. And so it's, you know, being, being open, being able, being not too wedded to the past or the present. A lot of these ideas I'm presenting here today. I mean, I will admit, you know, I'm, I'm probably seen as a bit of a contrarian in the field. I don't like to think of myself as a contrarian. I think that's, I like to think of myself as a as a complementarian. Because again, it's not that I'm objecting to anything almost. Well, I do object to something, but I don't really object to most things. It's again, it's, I'm trying to say, well, yes, that's all true, but let's, let's look a little bit. Let's take a little bit of a bigger picture and let's not necessarily be wedded to, you know, receive wisdom. I mean, it's, it's, it is, it is wisdom. And it's useful, but sometimes it gets us a little calcified. And we always need to be opening, opening up ourselves to looking at things from, from a more expansive perspective, which of course makes it a fascinating field. You know, it's intellectually, it's philosophically, I've always found this just to be tremendously interesting because we're just, we're dealing with the raw stuff of thought and memory and scholarship and culture. And we're right at the center of it. Hopefully we're invisible if we do our job right. So, you know, don't go into it if you're looking for a lot of kudos, but if you're looking for a lot of satisfaction in doing a job that needs to be done and doing it well, then this is, this is a tremendous thing to be, to be associated with. Wonderful. So we have about two minutes left. I'm going to give our students one last opportunity to pose any burning questions they might have. Okay, they're just taking it all in, soaking it all in, I'm sure, because it was a lot and it was wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time and your wisdom received it otherwise that you've shared with us today. Like I said, it's a really important and valuable perspective, you know, that we, we did, we need that both and as opposed to either or kind of expansion. And so we're really grateful to you for sharing your time with us with, and there's about one minute left. If you have any final thoughts you'd like to share with us. Oh gosh. Yeah, I don't know what to say. That's, that's the one thing I didn't prepare for. Okay. Well, I'll just close it up and by saying we are again very grateful for your time and expertise. And this was a really wonderful and thoughtful talk. And I, I know I learned a lot. I'm sure those even stood as well. So thank you so much. I'm very happy to do it. Take care. Bye everyone.


At Wayside Food Pantry, with partners from across the Southern Maine community, including many of our corporate partners, as well as other food insecurity partners, like you can name a collecting food and just having a good time as a community to help those who aren't as fortunate as many of us are in regard to food insecurity. I'm a part of the campaign cabinet, well United Way, and this is a great way to pick up the campaign season. The campaign really kicks off this week in earnest events like today, certainly marked the beginning of that. Certainly this is the busy time, but the needs are significant and never ending, and our role is to keep pace with that, best we can. One of our missions is to mobilize the caring power of the community, and that's a very inclusive mission and takes the community to be able to do the work that we do, so whether it's individuals or it's CEOs and everybody in between, there's a place of table for everybody in the other way. And there's many ways that members of the community can get involved, not just financial, but as I mentioned, through volunteerism, advocating on issues that are important to our community, our work and our strategy is informed and guided by the community and we're all directed to address some of the community's most pressing issues as it relates to education, financial stability and health, which are really the building blocks of good life, and we are focused on making that more equitable, so that all of our Southern Vane neighbors are able to thrive. We have several awards that we're handing out throughout this event, the Sculpture Contest, and we have judges, including folks from some local media, other community members, helping to award various businesses who are building these amazing canned sculptures. The most memorable part for me is the generosity of the community, all of these companies coming together with the amounts of food and the number of cans that they put together and the creativity that comes into creating the sculptures, but the highlight is the generosity of everyone and how open they are to the community. Perhaps the best way to certainly get involved would be to stop by our United Way website, UWSME.org, to get some information, there's ways in which folks can understand how to give, advocate, and volunteer. This is only one event of many that people can contribute and help out in the community because by helping one person in the community, I think the community becomes stronger.