Abigail Grotke and Nicole Saylor

00:04 Hi, this is Nikki sailor. I am 46 today's date is April 29th, 2016 and we are in Washington DC and I'm talking to Abby grotke who is a colleague of mine at the Library of Congress. Hi. My name is Abby grotke and I am 48 years old. Today's date is April 29th, 2016. We're in Washington DC and I'm speaking with Nicki Sadler my colleague at the Library of Congress.

00:31 Great. Well, Abby. Thanks for agreeing to chat with me. I am the head of the archive at the American Folklife Center where a storycorps is archive. So it's really exciting to have my first experience in the booth. And I appreciate that you agreed to chat with me. I'm happy to be here. So we were part of the assignment was to find Collies in the library to to interview and then have a conversation with and I thought that your work was fascinating. I thought your side projects in life were fascinating. And so I want to talk about a few of those two topics today. All right, so why don't we just start out with having you tell me a little bit about your background. So I was born in Upstate New York in the Finger Lakes Region. And then when I was in junior high, my mother moved the family down my dad stayed in Upstate New York, but we've moved to Florida so I had my formative years there and then quickly escaped.

01:31 When I went North to college, I had an interest in graphic arts when I was in junior high so that sort of like me to liberal arts colleges and then eventually to an art school and where I realize that I was not terribly Adept at dealing with a Cutthroat world of graphic arts in decided to become an artist and instead so that sort of my my early years in college Years into cultural heritage work. So when I was in in college working on the art history program, I learned about an internship opportunity at the Smithsonian and one of my teachers there recommended that I apply for this crazy position down in DC with a year-long internship and my brother was here. So I had a natural liking of the area anyway having visited him. So I applied to the internship and got it. So move down here with my two cats and

02:31 Jung Jung and Suzy azzam and started working as an intern at the Smithsonian then and then got hired on as an employee there and I worked early on in the inventory of American sculpture entering database records for all sorts of sculpture objects around the country and then also worked in the publication's in New Media office.

02:55 And how long were you at the Smithsonian was there about six and a half years doing a variety of job. I mostly in the new medium Publications office where I worked on things like New Media that time was that what was new CD ROMs and we had a big seed around project basically a catalog of all the museum. It was a museum of American art. We were working on documenting all of the art works there and putting it on a disc which immediately became obsolete. We also were very early on and put in content online in America America online. So will you Imaging these are I was mostly doing surveys toriel work and also data processing which kind of led me to my work here at the Library of Congress. So I worked on something called sgml which was explained that I have to remind myself of what it it stood for standard generalize markup language.

03:55 Water really structured way of doing things that basically HTML is a subset of sgml. I learned sgml before I learned HTML which was kind of weird, but it was a way to markup language. So there could be readable by by computer programs. And so did this spark your interest in playing with HTML and doing things on the web recreational? Yes it at some point I decided I should probably learn HTML since the web was kind of taking off and some of my colleagues and I decided to do a webzine which at that nobody uses that term anymore. But at the time it was very cool and hip to create some content outside of work for the web. So we we decided to create our own website with simple now, but

04:55 Whereabouts of the zine was called to the parasite. Com. I can't remember why we named it that but somebody artistic and people did various artists some somebody was posting graphic pictures that they were doing. Somebody was doing poetry and stories and I decided to do an advice column actually.

05:21 Great. Well, I want to talk more about that later, Okay, so you're at the Smithsonian and then what what brought you here to the library? So after about six and a half years I decided to start looking around at what I might do otherwise and I saw an ad in the Washington Post which was basically saying inviting people to apply for jobs to help come build the information superhighway through the library would literally said that right yes of a copy of the ad and it sparked my interest and it it's listed sgml is one of the things that people were they were looking for experienced with I thought well, nobody else would have this type of job. So it just looked exciting and fun. So I applied to it and got a job. It was sort of a temporary job at first

06:18 And it ended in the year 2000 as we met a goal, but then I became hired on more permanently later on. And so what were you looking to work? Yeah, I was working on digitizing some of the American memory collections that are still on online today and early on I was involved in processing some of the printed ephemera collections here at the library, which was a really fun collection to be able to dig through boxes of very old documents and be able to prep them for scanning and then make them accessible online. Then I worked on the Hannah Arendt papers collection for the manuscript division. So I had a number of different collections that I was focused on more about the inner.

07:05 That was my first experience dealing with lots of copyright issues and it was a more contemporary collection. So I gained a lot of experience which I carry with carry into my current days with having to ask permission of site owners. And today I do but ask permission to reuse materials for the web. So I learned a lot about dealing with the lawyers here at the library American memories is held in high regard here and it's the great things that doctor Burlington's credited with and so did you know at the time that a part of this early digitization access thing that was a big deal or did was it was it was it was pretty exciting because we we knew there were a number of people that came in and in those early days who were tasked with putting 5 million objects online by the year 2000, which is a lofty goal at that time and also but we just talk

08:05 Sound we decided to do it but we there were a number of people we didn't really know what we were doing. Really we're kind of making it up as we went along which was exciting and also pretty terrifying but nobody really was building collections like like this out there. We were sort of pioneers in this and and and in digital library work, so it was it was pretty exciting and also just a great learning experience and worked with a lot of fabulous people. So if you didn't have standards to draw upon a very robust standards that war or other colleagues tube to confer with how did you guys, you know come to agreement around all manner of things or

08:48 I think we there were some standards to the library itself put in place and there were various groups within the library that were saying. Okay. This is how we're going to tackle digitizing to these specifications. Those of later turned into standards that other libraries were able to use we created guides to help our own staff process materials and then help documents some of that that workflow and process to is really again making it up as we went along but also figuring out just we knew we had to get some work done and I'm trying to work through how to get that to happen. So I'm working in folklore. I'm always interested in different cultural groups and I would say that this American memory cohort that sort of descended upon the library all at once and you know, it's it's still many of you are still there and and it's interesting because you're really

09:43 But I wouldn't say you're the Future Leaders of the library or you're leading the library. And so can you talk a little bit about about that cohort and what it feels like felt like yeah that has a lot of the people that came on board were not necessarily Library trained in libraries Library work. They were musicians who were interested in this kind of work and they were historians who wanted to help process. The Jefferson papers were things like that. So they were it was a group of people that didn't necessarily have the technical skills, but had the flexibility and interested in learning those skills and adopted these new these new processes to get the work done. So it was it was a great group of people who was just willing to try anything and to see the people that were in that early group spread out around the library. I think it's really bad. If it at the library, I think most of us stayed on we just had somebody from those early days retire which was

10:43 19 years as of next month so many of us are lifers as we call it at the library. How many can you count on your hands? Would you say of of that group are still around I think.

10:58 I think there was I think they were about 70 of the early early staff. There's probably I would say maybe 50 still around in the library. I know that somebody one of my good friends that I still work with today. She started 2 weeks after me. So we you know, there's a continued collaboration and and being able to work with these colleagues has been greatly become your friend. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool.

11:28 Turn talking about what you're doing. Currently what you have been doing for the last few years. Yeah, so I moved off of digitization projects with a brief stint helping out with a digital reference service before settling in to where I am now in 2002, I join the web archiving program at the Library of Congress and I haven't looked back since the web archiving team that I I lead supports activities that are occurring around the library. So I get to interact with a lot of Staff, library that are help building are born digital collections when you started on the web archiving project. What did that look like? And what was but it it mean to crawl the web then and it was very different in a lot of ways but it's all so things are still the same in a lot of ways. It's hard to articulate the scale of things were so different than at that point.

12:28 I started we had we had a number of Staff working on it and we only were doing one or two collections a year. So building a thematic archive around a topic like the US elections or something like that your first the right. Yeah, the first archives at the library everbilt was the election 2000 web archive and then after September we were starting to work on the election 2002 archive When September 11th happened and we really sort of ramped-up production at that point and had to quickly document. What was unfolding on the web at that time to talk more about the September 11th project and how ya what so those September 11th webarchive. I hadn't quite join the web archive team then but I know a lot about it and I contributed in other ways at that time on September 11th.

13:24 We were already working with an organization called internet archive and that morning when things started to unfold are managers here contacted the internet archive or they they they were in discussion and said we need to start documenting what's going on on the web at this moment. So internet archive started crawling content, which means they made a copy array can copies of web sites around this topic and and what was going on on the when they were searching for certain words. How are they scoping what they were crawling they were looking at news sites and sort of identifying websites that were popping up looking for survivors. There were a lot of Registries of survivors. There were reactions that were unfolding on the web any type of organization we had school groups that were posting things on their websites. We had individuals creating tribute Pages. There were all sorts of materials that people were putting on the web and really for the first time.

14:24 This kind of outpouring of emotion and and contents that was being created just for this event. So we felt it important to document the library was closed for two days. I think and during that time and immediately after recommending officers from around the library started to identify websites as well as the public the public was asked to contribute sites and we started putting those into the archive. So at the end of the day then do you had dozens hundreds? However, I think the rest think about 2,000 specific websites at the Library of Congress identified in all I think about 30,000 websites or crawl during that time and not all of them have been catalogued made accessible through our website, but we do have about 2,000 that we we developed here.

15:23 All this content being created because it's like what you said. It's the first time you've ever seen this. So what was your reaction initial reaction, then the second thing is your emotional reaction because this is September 11th and you're seeing all this happened at the gym up such an unwavering speed. I think the Instinct and again, I wasn't personally on the web Archive of team at this moment, but the Instinct of the the the curators that were involved in the the the people collect selecting the content was we need to document this now before it goes away. There's this there's the personal reaction and having

16:08 Been in DC when this happened there's the how do I deal with this personally and then you put that aside and also think how do I collect this and preserve it so that others can know what this time was like and I think that instinct kicked in for a lot of us that were working in this field at the time and it's sometimes hard to

16:28 Hard to think about when you're in the moment, but also this desire to document and preserve which I'm sure Nikki is that you yeah from Pearl Harbor movie not having people with recording equipment do man on the streets. Alan Lomax asked those who had had Library equipment to do that on up tube September 11th. We've done that. I was a journalist during September 11th, and I know that throwing myself into you know, working on the stories really help me cope turn to let you know and I was nowhere near the sites of it of any of these when I give you something to do right I want to do anything else you feel like it was a weird way to cope or right right. I think a lot of us.

17:18 Even processing The Collection after we're very much like we need to we need to preserve this and make it usable for researchers in the future. And and that's how we could help really and we've done other collecting around tragedies. It evades. It's kind of depressing. We do a lot of happy collecting more fun collections, but we do the community as a whole does a lot of collecting around earthquakes and hurricanes and some of these other events where things unfold so quickly on the web and also disappear rather quickly. So you need to capture them at the moment and not wait right where you said to yourself This is worth it. This is from a reaction from someone or it's just a specific moment.

18:16 Trying to think of a specific moment, I think.

18:19 I think and it is funny cuz our are thinking about something like the recent Paris attacks. And our first instinct is to find out if our colleagues in Paris are okay on our second instinct is to document what's going on so that people can understand.

18:39 This time and I think a lot of the the use of the collections hasn't really been realized yet on the anniversary of September 11th. We see some usage of the archives I think and it's going to be much more important in the future. So it's a little hard to gauge right now. But we we know in our guts this is the right thing to do, even though it seems a little difficult to document all these tragedies and and difficult things.

19:14 So it's going from the emotional to the technical. Can you just explain a little bit about what it means to to Archive a website? What does that even sort of look like in in terms of what you get at the end of the day? Yes, who we used tools that have been developed by libraries for this work and they're open source tools that are like web crawler. So like a crawler would go out. Do I search a search engine crawler, but in this case, it's saving a copy of the website. So we have to give instructions to the crawler about what sites to go visit. And then also how often to go visit because we're trying to document changes over time. So the crawler humans tell the crawler went to go get and how often and to what depth we want to Archive. So the Crawlers

20:04 Go out to get this content and then we package it and in a format that's a standard and used by the community and that it has to be viewed in a access tool. So it's very gets very complex. There's a lot of moving parts to web archiving. It's not only getting the contents. It's trying to make sure that we have the right.

20:25 Write content captured because the web is very complex and tricky to navigate. It's also making sure we can display it for researchers and make it available and useful. So there's a lot of lot of a technical challenges the Crawlers that we use right now or a bit behind where the current web is because everybody wants to do flashy new things with their websites. So we are a little bit far behind and what the Crawlers that the technology can do, but we do our best and trying to get these complex sites and so they crawl and they grabbed a man Essence a picture of a site or can you get back you crawl and then we crawl and then we usually try to get every piece of the website that makes up that website. So the libraries Library of Congress School in archiving is to get the look and feel of the website and to capture all the content to get a complete capture of you want to be the researcher to sort of emulate what it was like to be

21:25 In this site at the right. So when you view it in the archive, you can click around it like you were looking at the livesight some things don't work in an archived. So if there was a search bar on the live side, you can see it in the archive, but you can click you can follow link so you can view content such as pictures and PDFs and there's all sorts of stuff that make up a website. So we try to get all of it. Some people probably don't even think about what that would look like and right and websites are very back when we started and images and now there's pretty much any wireless light. Oh and it's it's hard to keep up. So I know that one of the sites that your archiving is the web cultures collection, which is American Folklife Center.

22:15 Curated collection and so this is 50 some that yes sites that document online culture and I I hear that we're a bit of a problem children are asking for is animated. Andy told me there's a lot of wild format type something. So yeah, I think you would fall into this scale could be difficult with some very large website. So we tend to have to crawl them longer and deeper and try to get a complete capture, but we can never guarantee. We've got everything but it is a fun collection that we we collect a lot of government website. So it's nice to see you some other types of content that's documenting the experience of the web about doing this kind of work that keeps you engaged keeps you, you know coming back with every does a mortgage.

23:15 Maybe not exciting every day. But it's it's there. It's still such a new field. We've only been doing this, you know, we're in our 16th year or the library doing archiving of the web. The web is only 25 years old or 27 years old and it's just so new when you think about all the books in our Collections and all this other material that we've been collecting for hundreds of years there still so much to learn and understand and challenges with trying to figure out how to do this sensibly has gotten harder as the scale has grown. We have almost a petabyte of data already that we've archives are trying to manage all of that as a challenge, but it's it's a fun challenge the other part. I really love about the job is collaborating with people around the world were your were members of the international internet preservation Consortium, and I have colleagues all over the globe who are doing live archiving in

24:15 Well, yeah go to conferences and events. Do you know Abby? Yes, I do travel a lot, but it's really wonderful knowing that everybody's around the world is struggling with the Wabbit. It's not an easy problem that just one institution can solve so having partners that are collaborating and building tools together and just friends around the world. It's been fun to think about like, oh when wax cylinders came out or when sound started to be recorded right where the people figuring this out, right? And how how did they possibly and now you're sort of at the Forefront of his yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so you get to decide something. It's a big responsibility, but it's what I want to shift gears for a second to talk about Miss Abigail. You alluded to it earlier when you were talking about your

25:11 Webzine a column so talk a little bit about

25:18 Miss Abigail Allen who she is and so miss Abigail is my alter ego and she is she is a character who wears a lot of pink. I have a website and it basically started it all goes back to what I was a child from class by my grandmother who thought I had poor posture in and needed some cleaning up. So she sent me to this charm class and it was terrifying it was horrible and held for you think it was 7th grade. So whatever that was then how'd you do in charm clasp? I did horribly. I basically at the end there was a fashion show and everybody else got pretty little dresses and I got to wear the tennis outfits because I don't think they I couldn't walk in heels and I couldn't do my hair and I still can't do my hair so you when I was 40

26:17 It was just awful, but that sort of led me to really well. Anyway, it led me to make fun of enjoy mocking the the proper little girl that I was never going to be. So in college, I found with a college roommate and I found a book called The Art of dating and it was published the year. I was born.

26:41 And it it sort of told us how to be proper young teenagers and go on dates and we read it out loud while we were supposed to be in class. And how old were you when you get this is in college and college. Okay and just found it because it was just so silly and ridiculous don't invite boys to your party that kind of thing. But if you did I was all this sort of silly information trim proper ways to express interest in boys, but not be too forward and don't go drinking and and you know how these things and so when I left that college and move to a different one my friend gave me the copy of the book. So I had it in my own collection. I started to pick up other advice books at the time and then when the webzine started I thought I looked at my stack of about twenty bucks. So I thought will I answer

27:41 As Miss Abigail so I had friends right in initially real life problems. And I would answer from the books. So I would look in the books and give modern advice for contemporary contemporary dilemmas. So that's the way these like a tongue-in-cheek just a couple so the first one of the first questions about whether or not you should wear white shoes after Labor Day like that. So I dug around in the books for some some fashion advice. And what would Miss have to say about that now, I forget but basically I quoted directly from the book. So I gave a little bit of my own Silly response in that I quoted from the book. So and I did this for a little while just having friends right in and and then at some point the webzine folded and I got my own demesne and started to do, you know

28:41 Post updates a couple times a week and Yahoo! Picked me up as a pic of the week back with me. And what about when was this it was 1998. I think so that was back when they were a lot of websites that were featuring cool sites to go look at so I got picked up in a lot of cool side of the day and a lot of press around that time because the web was so news still that people didn't know where to go. Look on the web for things. So before Facebook and before it was so I eventually that led to so I would update the website twice a week or so and it this time I didn't have any life other than my dog, so I wasn't really taking my own dating website in your dating advice, but no dating and

29:36 And then the London Times contacted me and they wanted to they wanted to call him in there Saturday magazine. So I ended up doing a column for about a year-and-a-half there like a standing, Prince colum where Brits would write to me. And with their I was considered an Agony aunt and his Londo which is just crazy eventually that led to a prince book. So I I had a book published in about 2006 focused on dating meeting in marriage. So I focused on that type in these were rehashes of your columns yet pieces from the column and then serve created a narrative from puberty to marriage. So, how would you describe Miss Abigail like if you what would she look like what kinds of ways would she talk and what she's very if you look at my the website has a picture of a woman and a pink dress with sort of slipped curly hair. She doesn't look terribly old.

30:36 A later version of me that evolved in in a theatrical version of me turned into a sort of an old lady version has just hilarious story of the book. The book was published at some point. I got a few years later. I got a call from a producer in New York Ken Davenport and he had found my book and he was thinking about writing a play with this kind of idea about classic advice and he wanted to use my book. So we signed a deal and he came down with his co-writer to my house and look at some of the books and then went back and wrote a script based on this Abigail. So is Miss Abigail's guide to dating dating and marriage Off-Broadway starting in 2002 the opening Miss Abigail was an older woman who was giving out advice to celebrities and she had an assistant named Paco who I don't have but

31:36 Paco actually was in love with Miss Abigail so there's a love story built into the play. So it's very silly and fun, but I got to go to the opening and Eve Plumb played MIss. Abigail was a big fan of I mean, I was a big fan of hers having grown up with the Brady Bunch and Joyce DeWitt at some point have played with Abigail's

32:01 Set a trickling in from something that just was for pretty much stuff the game just a crazy ride. I made it really it's been surprising to see the extent that it's gone. And I don't really at this point. I don't update the website at all. But still they got a life of its own and it's every few years. I'll get some interest in it or any royalty royalty royalty check every once in awhile the play closed off Broadway, but it's still plays every Valentine's Day at various regional theater. So that's a lot of fun then and I'd life love to see one of those someday but it is it has felt almost surreal to see Miss Abigail take on a life of her own and have there's a theme song.

32:53 Well, I have to play it for you. So the first time when I was at the they had a reading of it before it opened Off Broadway and I was sitting in the audience and the music came on and it was just so bizarre and leaned over to my husband cuz eventually I did get married years later and it was just so strange to have a theme song saying Miss Abigail and then actors on stage pretending like they were really made but it was definitely not me. It was it was there characterization of what Miss Abigail could be. So do you like her I did she was she was I mean the fact that she was sort of a senior citizen was a little bizarre, but

33:52 Whatever is mine.

34:01 Sometimes I forget that that's me in and then conversations like this. So it's been awhile since you've served put away the Miss Abigail Persona would you say website is still up and I I have the book surrounding me I have about a thousand books at this point. So I have various every so often I get a surge of energy and decide to catalog my books. Can I because I need directions to a Library Thing account when I go in and I try to document tonight sometimes two images of the covers and put them online and try to I need some interns though.

34:43 The same suspension. Yeah, moving a thousand books from house to house is not not terribly fun, though.

34:54 Was there anything else that we should talk about?

34:58 Related to miss Abigail live archiving working at the library at the library now. I think it's been a really been a fun ride. I mean thinking about 19 years to the Library of Congress and how they're still so much to do and new leadership chain new leadership changes will be interesting or so. We hope that they will

35:24 Continue to help us provide resources to build the digital collections that are so important but being able to help people like you develop collections that will help future researchers has been really fabulous. So what do you want to accomplish between now and whenever year

35:46 What are some big I would love?

35:51 Would love to be able to devote more to helping researchers use the collections. We don't really know who those people are right now. We're building a lot for the future but we realize that researchers are starting to use and use web archives in their work. So working with historians has been a big interest in a lot of the community lot of the libraries that are doing this work. So I think the library of congress's is in a good place to start thinking about how we engage with those researchers so that our collections that were working so hard on Canal valuable can be useful.

36:32 That's great. Well, thank you very much for talking with me. Great. Thank you.