Jay's Blog - Thoughts on the SIA and Other Things

SIA Fall Tour - VT

2010-09-14T01:43:00.000-07:00

Created a Flickr Group for images from the SIA 2010 Fall Tour to Vermont. Though I'm not sure anybody reads this blog, if you're on the Tour, pls do post your (#sia2010vt tagged, geotagged) images there.

IA Treks - Location Based Social Media

2010-09-01T01:44:00.000-07:00

YUM, new Android phone (ATT Captivate, aka Samsung Galaxy S) opens lotsa location aware social media, e.g. Gowalla, Foursquare, SCVNGR etc.
How can the IA community take advantage of zillions of these smartphones to increase awareness of historic industrial sites, and create activities (SCVNGR et al) to get folks out to appreciate them?
HMMM, task for me....

EBOM

2010-07-31T02:04:00.000-07:00

LEED speak for Existing Buildings Operations and Maintenance.
The USGBC has established a program to certify existing buildings at various levels of "green". There are no bad ideas in the standards and they reflect a broad consensus on best practices for an existing building. Even if there's no possibility of LEED certification (it's a big deal), consider the principles in this well done standard for the buildings you influence/own.

Cool USGBC Meeting re Retrofits

2010-07-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

Back from an excellent USGBC-NCC meeting re high yield, low impact retrofits to significantly improve energy efficiency in existing buildings. Cool use of smarter thermostats and lighting control, mesh networking and clever sensors to yield of less than 1yr payback. SWEET!

ASCE Hoover Dam Symposium

2010-07-24T01:01:00.000-07:00

The nextgen (Erin, the PE) sent me a note about an upcoming ASCE Symposium celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Hoover Dam. Certainly relevant to the IA/IH community.
Thanks Erin!
jay

SIA eNews Goes REALLY Live

2010-07-21T00:29:00.000-07:00

In Jan 2009, I got the SIA BoD to agree to an experiment with member email. Over the last year or so, about 260 folks signed up, encouraged by signup blocks on the SIA web site and other places. So, after discussions w/ Don (who keeps the SIA actually working... THX), we merged his list of email addrs into the ConstantContact DB. First, the merge was essentially painless. Ten or so of his record from our member DB actually had two emails, easy fixes. Crafted an eNews with timely info (opening of on-line reg for the Fall Tour, etc.) and with all fingers crossed, hit SEND.
WOO HOO! We have valid email addrs for about 90% of our members (from the bounces), and about 50% of the recipients actually opened the mail, with about 20% of them clicking on one or more of the links in it.
I don't have any followers here, so let me celebrate in private...
WOO HOO!!!!
jay

SIA President

2010-06-06T06:38:00.001-07:00

Now it's official, I'm the new President of the Society for Industrial Archeology. I'll write more in the next few days, but to get a hint of my goals and priorities, look at the early posts in this blog, started two years ago when I became the VP.
http://jayssiablog.blogspot.com/2008/06/my-goals-for-sia.html
Progress on some of these has been good, others, not much has happened. So lots of work to do!
Thanks to the members of the SIA for supporting me, it's an honor.
jay

civiCRM Experiments

2009-10-28T00:05:00.000-07:00

For another non-profit, I’ve started to play with a “constituent relationship manager” package, the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) civiCRM. So far it looks interesting. The standalone version is tied to OpenID, and I couldn’t make it work in the local sandbox, but the version embedded in Joomla seems to work. They say the Drupal version is better integrated. Stay tuned for a more thorough look.
jay

knightsia.org hacked, now fixed

2009-08-27T20:43:00.000-07:00

ARRRGH, somehow hackers got into knightsia.org and planted some malware on 14 Aug. Google found it in a routine crawl, and informed me. The problems were fixed in an hour or so after notification, but it's taken almost two weeks to get off the bad guys list. The suspected attack came in via a slightly downrev version of WordPress or SMF. I'll be more vigilent. My apologies if you were affected by this brief problem.
UPDATE: trying blogger in parallel for a while. Both will be kept in sync til I pick one.

Interesting Historic/Current Map Mashup

2009-06-21T15:18:00.000-07:00

Wired.com posted a note about Hypercities, an ambitious project at UCLA funded by a Macarthur grant. Hypercities has digitized and scaled a large number of historic and current maps of several cities around the world. Maps can be overlayed in multiple layers on Google Earth, allowing the user to make their own combinations of data. I want to learn more and see how the SIA might be more engaged in the project.
http://hypercities.com/

jay

SIANS Web Site

2009-06-09T06:24:00.000-07:00

Nope, not THAT SIA, but Survey of Industrial Archeology in Nova Scotia, an ambitious, community driven site that seeks to document the industrial heritage of the Province of Nova Scotia. I'm trying to learn more about it, but a quick visit looks to be very interesting. I really like the community aspects of it, but am curious about workflow and quality assurance. Cloudy vision about this sort of thing for the SIA...

Hmmm,

jay

2009 NTHP 11 Most Endangered Historic Sites

2009-06-09T06:13:00.000-07:00

In April, the National Trust for Historic for Historic Preservation issued its annual list of the Eleven Most Endangered Historic Sites. The SIA had previously been asked to support two of these sites, the Memorial Bridge btw Portsmouth, NH and Kittery, ME, and the Ames Shovel Shops in North Easton, MA, which we did through the Historic Preservation Committee reviewing the requests and having our President, Mary Habstritt, draft a letter in support. The process, created in 2007, allows a timely, considered response in which the SIA can review and endorse significant industrial heritage preservation activities. I'm pleased that these sites made the list, though that's a dubious honor, as they are still very much in danger, and worthy of continuing efforts to preserve them. I'm also happy that the SIA was able to respond to the requests of the organizations supporting the preservation of these sites in a timely way, but with careful review and internal comment. Can't win 'em all, but this is an important role for the SIA.

Excavations at Heinlenville (San Jose)

2009-04-19T14:01:00.000-07:00

Got a chance to stop by an on-going dig at Heinlenville (the third?) San Jose Chinatown, that also fostered the growth of Japantown. This is the second year of work on the site, which was preserved by the City turning the site into the main vehicle garage etc and paving over all the cool stuff, saving it for work in the last two years. This was a destination at SIA2008, though the 2008 dig completed a few weeks before we came to see it. COOL!

Pix and links to follow...

SIA eNews and Social Networking

2009-04-03T02:31:00.000-07:00

We're about four months into the experiment with eNews for the SIA, and have gotten a good response. Signup off the SIA home page.

In response to member suggestions, I've gone ahead and set up SIA groups on facebook and linkedin. These are experimental, but it's free, so what the heck.

I'm even tweeting as jaym3

Dunno the long term future of these efforts, but I hope that they enable us to reach out to new members and friends.

jay

SIA email Project

2008-11-02T07:38:00.000-08:00

At the Board Meeting in Chattanooga we voted to proceed ahead with the member email project. Experiments conducted in June and July showed that the web-based system offered by Constant Contact was easy to use and met our needs quite well. You can sign up using the form on knightsia.org There will be a similar signup form at the main SIA web site by mid-November.

This is an opt-in, value-added program. You need to opt-in by signing up. It does not replace any of our current publications, but adds value through more timely information and supplemental materials.

It's still an experiment, so constructive comments are welcomed.

jay

It's the Society FOR not OF!

2008-08-05T11:10:00.000-07:00

Grrr, I was cleaning up the Augean Stables, aka my office, and some equally cluttered computer files, and stumbled across not one but THREE different places where somebody I've had dealings with listed us as the "Society OF Industrial Archeology" Too late to correct them now, but I'll be more aggessive and careful to correct in the future.

It's all about branding...

jay

California Association of Museums Green Museums Initiative

2008-07-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

My friends at the Computer History Museum pointed me at the page from CAM about their Green Museums Initiative. Many SIA members have associations with museums. As folks concerned about preserving our industrial past, we should also show concern about our future, and getting your favorite museum to be more green is a great project. I'm on the GreenStep team at CHM, and it's been very interesting to see the impact of even simple steps.

Go GREEN!

jay

1956

2008-07-24T10:41:00.000-07:00

There is an odd temporal coincidence that I hit while working on SIA 2008, but haven't written about. It's the year 1956 that ties together several different threads from SIA 2008. (No, don't bother calling Scully...)

In 1956, Fairchild Semiconductor was founded by former employees of Schockley Semiconductor who balked at William Schockley's management. (He called them "The Traitorous Eight", which stuck, they were amused...) A huge chunk of the semiconductor industry was founded by "Fairchildren", folks who had worked at Fairchild and went on to start their own companies. We drove by several of them, and stopped at the Intel museum.

In 1956 IBM shipped the first disk drive, invented by Rey Johnson and a team of researchers at 99 Notre Dame in San Jose. The Computer History Museum has one of these RAMAC disk drives in a restoration shop. Many of the SIA 2008 tours departed on paths close to 99 Notre Dame, and the site was a Treasure Hunt stop.

In 1956 Malcom McLean converted a WWII T2 Tanker into the first container ship. I don't know where that ship, recristened the IDEAL-X, was built, but T2's were built at Bay Area shipyards like the Kaiser complex in Richmond. Container ships now dominate shipping. Our visit to the Port of Oakland put folks right next to the Hanjin Lines container port.

If only I could find a 1956 connection for the Over the Hill tour!

jay

Adaptive Reuse in Istanbul - SantralIstanbul

2008-07-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

I was chatting with Computer History Museum Registrar Allison Akbay, at her going away celebration about her recent trip to Istanbul (her husband is Turkish, so they visit there). She told me about an interesting adaptive reuse project for an early coal fired power plant that has been transformed into an energy museum. This is part of a much larger adaptive reuse project that includes the relocation of Bilgi University to the site. Dunno when I'll get to that part of the world, but if anybody is traveling there, sounds worth a stop. (She said it's "an adventure" to get there on public transit. The site is so new it doesn't show up on most maps.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silahtara%C4%9Fa_Power_Station

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SantralIstanbul

THAT'S How to Do IT!

2008-07-07T07:07:00.000-07:00

SIA President Mary Habstritt gave me a pointer to the Save Brooklyn's Industrial Heritage web site. (Full disclosure, she had done some consulting to the sponsoring organization.)

This, IMHO, is what ANY serious industrial heritage preservation effort needs. A rich visual environment mixing current and historical images, an interactive map (as a map afficianado it's interesting that I don't recognize the vendor, it doesn't look like either Google or Yahoo!), and good historical detail. I'd argue that it needs some way for folks to join in, and help build a community. How 'bout creating a Flickr tag/group so folks could contribute their own images and ideas to this worthwhile effort? What other ways could they use to engage folks??

Compelling web sites are just another tool and don't replace more conventional forms of advocacy, but certainly can extend the reach of our passions for industrial heritage preservation. This is a good one to use for ideas about YOUR site (deliberately ambiguous...)!

jay

Maps and Mashups

2008-06-30T13:54:00.000-07:00

Shortly after Google launched Google Maps in 2005, the first mashup was created, an automatically generated map of apartments for rent listed on Craigslist. Since then, a huge variety of map based mashups have been created. Indeed, Yahoo! has an experimental tool that creates a map mashup from any site that has addresses!

For the first year or so, creating a mashup required some reasonably heavy duty web programming, not that hard, but certainly beyond the skills of most folks. The game changed when Google added the My Maps feature. Now all you had to do is put down a point, a "push pin" on a map, and add rich content to it. Subsequent users of the map could click on one of your "push pins" and get access to the content you'd created. It gets even better when you can point to images stored in photo sharing web sites like Flickr.

That site and most of the other major photo sharing sites also offer the option of geocoding your uploaded images, that is, you can tell folks where this picture was taken. My new mobile can do this automagically (as soon as I figure out the hopelessly obscure setting to do so...), so every pix is identified as to where I was when it was taken.

So, why am I blogging about "ancient" technology, gosh it's three years old!

Well, 'cause I think anyone who has a web site with some IA content should create interesting maps relating that content. At the very least, you should have a map that shows how to get to your museum or whatever. For things like SIA Chapters, making a map of "interesting" sites in your local area is really easy, and of great value to our outreach mission. A couple of thousand people have viewed the IA Sites In Northern California map linked off the Knight Chapter web site or the Historic Highway Bridges map derived from the Caltrans survey.

Ultimately, I'm interested in "location aware industrial heritage touring". There are MILLIONS of devices out there that know where they are, and can connect to the internet at very high speed. What if we had tools to create a guided tour with rich multimedia content that took you through an interesting neighborhood or wonderful industrial heritage site? We can do this NOW with a LOT of work, but we need to create tools and guidance to allow anybody to do it. Come along, contribute your ideas and gimme a hand!

jay

SIAWiki - an Experimental Wiki

2008-06-25T14:07:00.000-07:00

As an experiment, putting up a MediaWiki on knightsia.org for the overall Society was easy, as the ISP has all the necessary bits already installed. So do register and start contributing to SIAWiki ! Right now, it's SOOO under construction, but bear with us, it'll get better soon!

jay

Slides - What Can the SIA Do?

2008-06-24T07:33:00.000-07:00

A chance meeting with Deborah Douglas, Curator, Science and Technology at the MIT Museum, brought some thoughts into sharper focus. We were chatting about preserving the heritage contained in slide collections. They are hard at work on the slides of "Doc" Edgerton, "the man who made time stand still" via the invention of numerous techniques for very high speed photography. She was pleased to hear that MTU has started on Robert Vogel's slides. Both projects are very ambitious, and are planning to have a significant web presence for the results.

Their efforts include very high resolution scans and reasonably complete documentation, pushing the costs per slide above $1 (it costs about $0.25 for a basic, commercial scan), and beyond. EXCELLENT, preserve these unique insights for future researchers who really need the best possible imagery!

As noted in an earlier post, I am hopeful about the collections of our most prominent members. I am far less hopeful (at the moment, keep reading) about the excellent collections of SIA members who may not have achieved international prominence, but have images with unique insights into particular industrial heritage sites.

My "elevator speech" "...and when one of our members passes away, the heirs look at the slides and say 'Gosh, it's just pictures of a junkyard, no need to save them' and a bit of our industrial heritage disappears."

What should the role of the SIA be in preserving this heritage? We're less than 40 years old, and don't have any permanent archival facilities. Still, can we be a catalyst/sponsor to spur preservation of these collections?

One of my all time favorite quotes is from Soul of the New Machine, where an exasperated project manager tells a team member "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well!" Even low resolution capture of historic images is better than losing them.

Again, as always, more questions than answers, stay tuned...

jay

11 Most Endangered Industrial Heritage Sites - Some thoughts

2008-06-24T07:08:00.000-07:00

The National Trust for Historic Preservation publishes an annual list of the 11 most endangered historic places in the US. There have been a few industrial sites on the list in past years, but their net is pretty broad, and the industrial heritage sites we know and treasure might not make their prioritized lists. The list is a great thing, and benefits these sites immensely. Recognition by a national organization with excellent connections and influence has helped many of these sites in past lists to survive. The record isn't perfect, but even if not every site is preserved, it's a great thing that some are.

I wonder if the SIA (and perhaps allied organizations?) should undertake creation of a similar list? We are all WAY too familiar with seeing a significant industrial heritage site simply disappear with little or no public awareness or comment. By helping to identify significant sites that pass some level of SIA scrutiny, we, as an organization can help local groups preserve these sites.

Obviously, this needs LOTS more thought and work before even becoming a proposal. Right now, consider it to be just some more musings. But, isn't that what all blogs are...

jay

Location Aware IA Tours

2008-06-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

iPhone 2.0 contains a GPSr (I'm a purist, it's a Global Positioning Satellite (r)eceiver), as does my much cheaper Samsung Blackjack, and millions of other devices. My Blackjack is a 3G device, capable of megabit/sec connection in most cities.

How can we take Cannery Life (an SIA 2008 Tour), the Google Street View of the area as part of Google Maps, external links to the History San Jose Cannery Life web site (the inspiration for the SIA 2008 tour) and turn it all into an engaging, captivating, informative look at a now gone aspect of San Jose's industrial history? Oh, and by the way, I don't have any money to spend on this. (blew it all on the data plan...)

As little as two years ago, this would be impossible to realize on a shoestring budget, now, hmmmm, anybody really know how to figure out where somebody is and pop the appropriate images, data etc?

How would we tell a visitor to the area that 10 min from her downtown SJ hotel is a cool, safe walk in an interesting area that even locals don't really know much about?

What about YOUR area? If we had simple directions on how to create this sort of thing, what would YOU like your visitors to see about the industrial heritage of where you life and work?

More questions than answers at this point, stay tuned...

jay

Virtual Chapters

2008-06-19T06:11:00.000-07:00

It's our tradition to have members of each of our Chapters stand and be recognized at the Annual General Meeting. After I had done that at SIA 2008, it struck me that quite a few SIA members are not members of a local Chapter. In many cases, there isn't a Chapter in the area.

That shouldn't prevent folks from doing some of the things Chapters do, like organize tours, publish newsletters, and advocate for industrial heritage preservation.

So, let's organize a "Virtual Chapter" that anybody, anywhere can join. I've put up some place holder items on the knightsia.org forum If this takes off, it's easy to set up a more sophisticated mechanism.

We usually create a name for our Chapters, most often a local figure relevant to IA. Any suggestions?

jay

My Goals for the SIA

2008-06-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

First, thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve the Society as Vice President for the next two years. I hope that with your help, Mary Habstritt, the incoming Board and I can move the Society forward.

There are a several things on my agenda as Vice President. Some of these are “stretch goals”, things that are ambitious and might not be fully achieved in the next two years. An organization cannot achieve great things without reaching for things beyond the current grasp.

First, we must improve the technology we use to find, reach and stay in contact with our members, friends and allies. Although we will continue to reach members via standard mail, I’d like to see us move aggressively to use electronic means of communication to improve timeliness of communications and reduce costs. This is more than email, it includes RSS feeds, text messaging, and social networking. Anybody want to help build a copy of the Troy Gasholder in Second Life? How about a YouTube video on one of the sites YOU are passionate about? We also need to find ways of being discovered by new friends and allies. Improving our web presence and relevance is part of this, as is seeking new ways to engage the public in industrial heritage awareness and preservation. There are millions of geographically aware mobile devices out there, what can we do to point out industrial heritage sites as one gets near one of them?

We must find ways of reaching under-served demographic groups. We must broaden our geographic base, and actively seek out new potential members and allies in the ranks of students and young professionals, and in the immense cohort of the Baby Boom, now entering active retirement with resources, interests, and time to get involved in our activities. Coming up with new programs and events to entice, captivate and engage new members is a top priority for me.

I am also very excited about aligning our interests in industrial heritage preservation with the green movement. Existing industrial buildings in creative adaptive reuse are exceptionally green. It is particularly interesting to see how leading edge companies have achieved formal green certifications for buildings over 100 years old. We need to make sure our interests are in sync with the organizations, processes and people in the green movement, and to seek creative alliances with other organizations and people in the historic preservation community who share a green vision with us.

Finally, I was struck by the risk of losing vital parts of the documentation of our industrial heritage while working on SIA 2008. It was a delight to hear that Robert Vogel’s slide collection has been donated to Michigan Tech, and to see the initial steps being taken to make it available to the public. I spoke with other prominent SIA members who were taking similar steps. However, we have a rich legacy of imagery in the hands of individual members who, on their own, have collected slides etc. documenting our industrial heritage. I plan to propose programs in which the SIA can foster the preservation and greater dissemination of these collections. This is still an embryonic idea, and I’d welcome inputs, ideas, and discussion on it.

Thank you for your support. Let’s make something HAPPEN!

jay