The Prevail Archive has received visitors from Japan, United Kingdom, Canada, China, Luxembourg, Poland, France, Ukraine, Romania, Denmark, and Serbia. Welcome!
Virginia Tech has made the official April 16 archive available to families, according to the Associated Press. Given our experience creating The Prevail Archive - we figured now would be a good time to compare and contrast our efforts.
“Hincker said thousands of staff hours went into setting up the archive, which includes about 13,700 pages of information.”
Our staff of nine worked in shifts of four (occasionally three) from 8am - 5pm on Day 1 (9 hours), and 8am - 3:30pm on Day 2 (7.5 hours) to sort more than 15,000 pages and scan them. If you assume we always had four people working for a total of 16.5 hours, that comes to 66 hours total.
Site development took roughly 20 hours, which brings total staff hours to 86 - a far cry from the “thousands of staff hours” Virginia Tech needed to be compliant with the settlement terms.
In contrast - presumably they have stored keywords with each document and these documents are organized beyond simple optical character recognition. This would have taken time. Also, finding and preparing the documents for scanning would have also added time. Still, “thousands of staff hours” seems a tad exorbitant.
Prior to starting this project, we did consult with various departments and other resources at Virginia Tech to try to find equipment and additional assistance. While no department was able to loan us equipment, we did discover that there is quite a bit of digitization and archival equipment that Virginia Tech owns that can scan at page rates much higher than our scanners could (our three scanners scanned at about 20ppm at 400dpi, the archival scanners we found at Virginia Tech archive much quicker and higher quality).
“Andrew Goddard said access to the online files appeared to require specific searches and thought that might make it difficult to make discoveries.
“I had hoped to find things that I didn’t know,” Goddard said.”
This implies that perhaps Virginia Tech did not spend the “thousands of staff hours” organizing the information as postulated above. Admittedly, finding information in these archives - ours included, is very difficult and time consuming due to the scale of the archives. Our archive does not have search functionality across all documents - but you can search inside the documents thanks to optical character recognition (OCR). The documents are also downloadable in PDF format.
“Even when the archive is available to the public, access may be restricted at first to computer terminals in Virginia Tech’s Newman Library and in the Library of Virginia in Richmond.
The reason for that, Hincker said, is to make sure the software can handle a large volume of traffic.
“There literally could be thousands of people all over the world trying to access this thing at the same time,” Hincker said.”
Our archive received a large amount of press during the first two weeks of availability and withstood the large visibility quite well for the 20 hours of development time we put into it. If the interest in our archive is applicable in any way to what the official archive will receive, Virginia Tech should not anticipate a sudden barrage of traffic rendering the service inaccessible.
Restricting access in this manner should not be necessary. There are several Virginia Tech April 16 Archives that are already accessible online and likely received more initial traffic than the official archive will receive when it is made available, simply because the other archives were made available much sooner after April 16, 2007, while media interest was high.
In conclusion…
It is our view that if a group of students can find the time in between classes to make this happen, Virginia Tech should be able to do at least the same in a reasonable amount of time.
The settlement terms specified that Virginia Tech had until December 16, 2008 to make a remotely accessible archive available to the families, but that does not mean that Virginia Tech needed to wait until December 16, 2008 to make it available.
While Virginia Tech faces different constraints, it is not an unreasonable expectation for a research university and engineering school of Virginia Tech’s stature to be able to manifest a public online archive in a more reasonable amount of time.
Science Magazine has mentioned The Prevail Archive.
If you are on Virginia Tech campus, or if you have a subscription or site license to Science Magazine, you can view it here:
Science 28 November 2008:
Vol. 322. no. 5906, p. 1309
DOI: 10.1126/science.322.5906.1309c
The Prevail Archive has now surpassed 20,000 hits.
Visitors have arrived from 45 states and D.C -the five remaining states being South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming.
A document relating to the settlement and investigation panel report have been posted to the archive.
Media references regarding The Prevail Archive:
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Putting papers online ‘a project worth doing’ - The Richmond Times-Dispatch
Virginia Tech students post documents online about April 16 shootings - Associated Press, carried on WSLS (online), Virginia Pilot (online)
Monday, November 17, 2008
Virginia Tech Students Create Electronic Archive on Shootings - The Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog
What’s in VT Shooting Documents - ABC 13, WSET
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Virginia Tech Students Make April 16 Documents Accessible - The Prereq
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Archive of documents about the Virginia Tech attack - Open Access News
What We’re Reading - American Historical Association
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Students Have Archived April 16 Documents - Collegiate Times (Print only)
Pulling Teeth - The Richmond Times-Dispatch
