Inside HistoryIT: Strategy, Metadata, And True Digital Preservation

What if your archive could fund your mission? We sit down with HistoryIT founder and CEO Kristen Gwinn-Becker to reveal why most organizations are far less “digital” than they think—and how a smart strategy can turn dusty boxes, dying tapes, and scattered drives into a living, searchable asset that powers storytelling, alumni engagement, and real fundraising results.

Gwinn-Becker walks us through the essentials: Start with strategy, not scanners. We delve into why PDFs are not a reliable form of preservation, how master files and standards safeguard against obsolescence, and why metadata is the engine that makes evidence discoverable. From NFL teams to fraternities and historical societies, she explores how unified metadata lets users click a single name and surface photos, plaques, film clips, and documents in seconds. The result is access that feels magical—and measurable. Hear how one membership organization achieved a 791% jump in its day of giving by making history personal and instant.

In this conversation, we also tackle the hard choices. Should you decide what’s “important” before digitizing? Gwinn-Becker explains the risks of guessing, the urgency of preserving magnetic tapes and obsolete formats before “last play,” and the real role of AI in accelerating metadata without surrendering quality control. We share practical steps to future-proof born-digital content: define owners, formats, intake checklists, and routine ingestion so the next twenty years don’t become another rescue project.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 0:47 What HistoryIT Does
• 2:04 Founder’s Journey From Tech To History
• 3:35 Why Strategy Comes Before Scanning
• 6:42 Translating Between IT, Archives, And Fundraising
• 9:02 Metadata As The Engine Of Discovery
• 12:12 The Trap Of Cheap Scans And PDFs
• 15:08 What To Preserve And Why It’s Risky To Choose
• 18:15 Future-Proofing Today’s Content
• 21:05 Handling Unusual Artifacts And Unified Metadata
• 23:13 Degrading Media And True Preservation Formats
• 26:10 ROI: Alumni Engagement And Fundraising Wins
• 29:02 Evidence First: Access Over Interpretation

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast, the photoimaging industry's opening outdoors. And here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society Podcast is brought to you by Media clip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again, and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society Podcast. I'm your host, , and today we're joined by Kristen Gwinn-Becker, who is the founder and CEO of History IT. Dr. Gwinn Becker is coming to us from Portland, Maine. Hi, how are you today?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 0:32

I'm doing great. How are you, Gary?

Gary Pageau: 0:34

I'm doing awesome. I'm doing awesome. So I have been following the digitization market for a long time, but I'm unfamiliar with your company. Can you talk about how it started and what it is you do?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 0:47

Yeah, I'd love to. Always love to talk about everything we do. So I founded History IT almost 15 years ago, 2011. We are software and services for all things digital preservation and access. So we provide the range of services, kind of soup to nuts, digital archives and collections. We have our own software platform called Odyssey Preservation, which is, you know, metadata catalog management, digital asset management, and museum curation and presentation software all in one. So you name it. So our services range from strategic planning for digital collections, what's it going to take to get fully digital? What does that mean for an organization? What are the steps to get there? We have our own preservation imaging labs. And we do all of all of the imaging. We have legions of people who work on metadata creation as well as then the curatorial component.

Gary Pageau: 1:36

So what's your story in terms of starting this? Because I find when people get into the preservation business, the archive, there's usually a personal story. There's usually something that inspired them to want to preserve history. What's your story with that?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 1:51

You mean we're not all in it for the money and the glamour?

Gary Pageau: 1:53

Um the glamour of the archiving business. It's it's true.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 1:59

It's true.

Gary Pageau: 2:02

Right, where someone comes in and does an archive.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 2:05

Archivists. Yeah. My career spans both technology and humanities. I was u when I started my career as a database and web developer for what that was in the 90s. So dot com boom bust.

Gary Pageau: 2:17

You have the flashbacks now, right?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 2:19

Exactly. Yeah. So I went to San Francisco in '99 and and then I made the you know very traditional choice of moving from technology into doing a PhD in history. Um very critically. Which everyone does at some point. Exactly. Yes. It's like I said, it was very, very crowded field. But I never wanted to teach. I just, you know, got a research fellowship and that I couldn't say no to, and I loved history, but no idea what I wanted to do with it, right? So I finished my doctorate and I had this unique set of skills, right? But in terms of being able to speak technology and understand all of the challenges um around like the world of digital and the world of the humanities. Um and there were a lot, there still are a lot. Really, what I had had was years and of experience um in graduate school working in archives, right? Hundreds and hundreds of archives. And it was seen as this like, uh, well, I have a PhD, so I have this secret access to this place that only archivists and historians go. And our role is to look at all this material and then interpret it for you, the rest of the world, right? Right.

Gary Pageau: 3:24

Almost like a gatekeeper mentality.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 3:27

Yeah, and like, but that in the like Google, you know, online search age of 15 years ago and today even it's not realistic, right? That can't be the only model. People go online and they want information, right? So I founded this company um originally because I wanted to help organizations, our market is organizations and companies, and we're not consumer focused, help organizations better understand that we live in a time when content is king and they are sitting on a unique trove of content, right? So and that their archive is something that they need to utilize um in a wide variety of ways. So that's really it started with that, this kind of passion for figuring out ways to help organizations understand the value of their history and not only preserving it, but utilizing it to really kind of bolster all of their other efforts.

Gary Pageau: 4:22

When you work with an organization, I mean, there's literally thousands of them around the country, right? And you've got everyone from like your local Kiwanas club to businesses to nonprofits and all of these organizations. And the people that I talk to in the consumer scanning space, um, who are kind of getting into that market, it's like it's like they're coming at it from the from the bottom end, they're working with local companies, maybe a library or a historical society or something, they are just stunned by the lack of cohesiveness to the to the materials because the record keeping from maybe 50 years ago was not very good. Or now they've got maybe 3D objects that they need to scan or preserve. Right. Is that what you're discovering even with big organizations?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 5:08

Yeah, I mean, so we work with everything from the local historical society to every type of membership-based organization. We work with NFL teams. So I mean, it really scans if you're or I like to say if you're an organization older than five minutes and you can draw value from better being able to tell your story, your ideal for working with us. Your question about it kind of being all over the map, it's absolutely true. The the kind of main pain point I think we solve when we talk to any organization, what we hear most is I'm overwhelmed. No idea where to begin, I'm overwhelmed, what's important, where to start. It's a mess. You name the condition, we've seen it. That's why we always start with strategy. History IT approach is strategy, then digital preservation, and then share, like then the utilization and the ROI of that. So creating a strategic plan is critical for any type of organization to figure out to fully own where they are.

Gary Pageau: 6:01

Right.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 6:01

You know, which is some I work with some organizations I go in at least twice a week. I have to tell people who think that their organization is, you know, we're 60% digital. You're like, you're at two, maybe. Like, you know, that, or like we've digitized, but what's that? What does that mean? It means we have really crappy PDFs somewhere and we don't even know what like what they are. So beginning a strategic plan in place and saying, this is where we are, this is where all of our stakeholders want to get to, what is the roadmap to get there? And and having that in place because as people like staff and volunteer turnover, you know, comes, we don't we have various people with their hands in like the metadata, and that becomes a mess. So if we don't begin with a strategy, then it's going to fall apart. We've all had that happen. We've all had digital projects that, you know, then the IT guy goes and now what are we doing?

Gary Pageau: 6:50

Yeah. Yeah, because I mean imagine you have a lot of stakeholders in these things that are just like you said, they kind of have their own little turf, right? You've got the IT people who think they know better. Um, they may not have a PhD in history, but you know, they've got the IT background. Or you might have maybe the development organization that is trying to fundraise off these assets, trying to build the history, and you know, they've got their agenda. And, you know, so bringing all those people together has got to be not a technical challenge, but a human relations challenge. That's where the problem probably is.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 7:25

Yeah. And I think early in my career, that's I really saw myself as a translator between like the IT side, the library side, the archive side, the curatorial side, the fundraising and development side, the executive side, they all use the same words, but they mean very different things. In a cataloging environment, that's really problematic, right? Because people use the words that they understand, like the normal language to search for what they're looking for. So there's even just getting into the technical detail component of that, but the human part of it too. So a big part of our job in building that strategy is getting everyone on the same page and building a plan that meets all of those needs and isn't skewed to one side of it, right? Because then if IT owns it, librarians are going to be frustrated. If archives or libraries own it, fundraisers are never going to be able to use it.

Gary Pageau: 8:18

Right.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 8:18

Because it's going to be cataloged in a in a way that is not useful.

Gary Pageau: 8:22

The Dewey decimal system or whatever.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 8:24

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Library of Congress subject authority, where they you have to use the word dwelling for house or home. It's just not realistic.

Gary Pageau: 8:32

And I even think like even words that you that most normal people would think would be obvious, like archive probably has a completely different meaning and depending on who you're talking to. Because like in the IT world, archive means storage. It doesn't necessarily mean you access it.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 8:46

Right. Right. Right. Exactly.

Gary Pageau: 8:49

So let's talk a little bit about the metadata piece because I think that's sort of interesting because that's something that everyone kind of knows about and they're familiar with, because you know, with uh you know, exit data and things like that that people can now manipulate on their even on their phones and things. There's a lot of apps for doing that sort of thing. Are there any AI tools that are helping with that now?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 9:09

Um it's the huge question in this space right now, right? Is what's the balance of helping versus hurting, hindering where we're we're already far behind, even in trying to get folks up to speed and what metadata means and like that metadata is the magic that makes it all happen, right? If something isn't cataloged or tagged in ways that the group that is acting needs to access it, much less future users can understand, it is pointless. It is pointless. Don't do it. Like if you're not going to significantly invest in your metadata and the strategy of that metadata, you're you are wasting your time and money. But it is the most uh involved and expensive project. Most of the projects we do are a minimum of 80,000 hours just in metadata.

Gary Pageau: 9:55

Hours?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 9:56

Hours.

Gary Pageau: 9:57

Wow.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 9:58

That's for a collection, maybe three, four million items. So AI can be a huge asset in like in many other areas, right? Absolutely, right, yeah, yeah. Metadata is never done, no matter how many tools you have, right? You have to continue to refine it and refine it. And using AI smartly, like any other approach, is going to make a lot of that creation more efficient, more consistent, but it still needs the human review, right? So it's this, it's the balance of what was always like, well, let's balance the human component with the technology component, and now we're bringing in AI. Like I said, in most other areas, we're like, well, where is this going to help and where is it going to hinder? The danger of it is the same thing as the danger of cheap scanning, right? Is that like, oh no, we're just gonna check it off the list now. And now we have a digital collection that has, but if it's if you have something that is not correctly or adequately described and tagged, you're not gonna be able to find it. Or the people you want to be able to find it are not gonna be able to find it, in which case, why is it there?

Gary Pageau: 11:02

Right. So you you gotta touch on something like the you know, the cheap scan, right? Like, you know, like let's say you've got a local historical society and they decide they're gonna digitize their archive, right? And they, you know, buy uh HP or Canon scanner or Epson scanner, and they just start. I mean, have you come across those situations where you have to go back and just redo everything? All the time.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 11:24

All the time.

Gary Pageau: 11:25

And the I just hope they haven't thrown them out, right?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 11:29

Right. Yeah, it's huge. Like, and that's I mean, that's a huge danger of so I I would think I would say that the vast majority of what we do is educational. Like it's just trying to get people to understand like why are you investing, like why and why is it worth the investment? Like this is the only copy of something you have, right? You want to make sure it's done correctly. So we we are constantly educating about like what does a truly like a true digital preservation file look like? How do you get it, right? There is the international standard that uh uh of like what that means. And if you just use a regular consumer scanner, like uh you're gonna get a JPEG or a PDF, right? And then so it's very easy when we start talking to people about you get a JPEG or a PDF, that's great. If that's a reference, that's something you want to throw in social media or email to your sister, fantastic. But that's not preservation because when we blink, the web is not going to render JPEGs or PDFs anymore, which were already a compressed format. I mean, well, it's a whole other interview to get into the the details of the bio format itself, right? But just talking about that piece of it, educating people about and organization, nonprofit organizations, especially, they'll usually they'll have gotten a grant 10 years ago to scan all of their magazines. And now they have these crappy black and white scans that are completely compressed. And I come in and say, like, well, how are you gonna explain to your how are we gonna explain to our board that we spent you know this money a few years ago and now we have to spend it to redo it all over again? It's a challenge.

Gary Pageau: 12:57

Now, do you ever run into situations where maybe people are making judgment calls on what to scan? And and it's it's frustrating because they're like, Well, we don't need that. And you're like, well, from a historical perspective, you might and you want, but you might have people who are like, Well, I want to save a couple bucks because you know, you're you're quoting me 80,000 hours, and it's like, well, maybe we just don't do this, but that actually might be you know important information.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 13:25

So a part, yeah, I find it as a historian, I find it incredibly frustrating. The question I hear more than anything else that makes me want to scream is well, what's important? And I'm supposed to tell you that, or you're supposed to decide. But it's another reason that history IT always begins with that strategic plan, right? Like we want to come in if they if an organization wants to make that decision, I don't love it, but I understand it. I understand that these decisions have to be made. What I want is for all of the stakeholders to understand the risk that's involved in doing that.

Gary Pageau: 13:55

Right.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 13:55

Right. So, first of all, who the hell are we to say what's important and what's going to be important 20 years from now? So for us, the imperative is so you know, our our hashtag is save history. Like we we believe that it is important and it is in danger. And one of the most dangerous pieces of it is this like like just our general attitude, like we are gonna choose what's important, but we don't actually know. So that's this other advantage of bringing in an outside perspective to say I understand why you think this is important now, but you don't know what's going to be valuable in the future. And here's some ways in which it might be. And you need someone to come in that's worked with 300 other types of organizations like this to say, these are the ways in which you can utilize all of this and justify this undertaking.

Gary Pageau: 14:45

Do you work with organizations, let's say, once you get their catalog digitized and archived, do you work with them so their current content is future-proof? Because the challenge is, of course, now many organizations are generating quadrillion giga quads or whatever of content and they want that to be findable and historically preserved in it. And they're clearly, you know, if they're taking pictures at a board dinner off their iPhone, you know, that's not an archive, you know, that that that H E I C file is not archival.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 15:15

Right. But increasingly the the quality is off the charts. Um, yes, what we do, and then you get into social media, the the gamut of like what the content that's being produced now. So part of our strategic planning is you know, that I think that it goes in phases. There's kind of everything pre-21st century that has a point, like anything that's paper, 3D, 2D, like that's actually the easiest component of any strategic plan. That's just like what's it gonna take to digitally preserve it, to get our future-proof assets and to truly catalog it.

Gary Pageau: 15:50

Right.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 15:50

Then there's like 2000 to 2012, the worst of in terms of digital preservation. Every possible kind of media that is completely obsolete, DVD you can scratch and it's gone, hard drives all over the place, zip disks. So there's that.

Gary Pageau: 16:06

And then I haven't heard the phrase zip disk in a long time.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 16:08

So oh, I see them all the time.

Gary Pageau: 16:10

Yeah, they just went bad randomly.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 16:13

Yeah, well, most things do eventually, and then it's now, right? So 20 2012 really to now, cloud cloud technology that's like a more kind of consistent framework, but there's still the same danger or people like putting their content in all these various things they think are gonna be there forever and they're not you know from now on, because now once you preserve the history, where do you go in the future?

Gary Pageau: 16:34

Because you've got to maintain that discipline then.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 16:36

And what and what we don't want to do is say, like, you don't want to come back to a company like history IT in 20 years, be like, okay, now let's do these last 20 years. So artists model, you gotta love that, right?

Gary Pageau: 16:46

Yeah.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 16:47

Well, it's still no, because but like what we care about most of the business model is making sure that history is preserved and used. Right. So when we build that strategic plan, we look at, okay, so now on an annual basis, what is being produced that we want to archive? Let's build that in and let's not make that every time we come in the there's it's very rare that someone's sole job is to do all of this, right? So it's okay, so who is producing? Are you producing publications? You're producing annual reports, you're producing photos, like all where is all this content being generated? Who is responsible for it? And then what is the plan on a on a regular basis to get that into the archive in a way that is consistent? Many times they do have an annual contract with us where they're gonna send us X amount of content each year, you know, and we're going to integrate it for them. More often they're doing it, and we're just kind of monitoring for consistency.

Gary Pageau: 17:39

Obviously, like in my world, it's it's pictures and increasingly video and all that, but you've got all kinds of other material that you have to archive, right? I mean, imagine what's the craziest thing you've had to argue that has kind of been an archivable item.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 17:54

Human skeleton. I mean, craziest? It's it's that is pretty crazy.

Gary Pageau: 18:06

So I is there is that was that like the founder of the organization they wanted to produce.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 18:10

Antelia. It may or may not have been Jimmy Hoffa. Um yeah, it's this the stuff, the stuff we see is is pretty crazy. But yes, I mean, every so one of the things when we developed our software, which is called Odyssey Preservation, we wanted to make it so that any type of artifact, digital artifact, was treated the same way in terms of the metadata, right? So you can so we can ingest any type of media, you know, and but then from a metadata perspective, we see an image, a digital asset of a plaque or a baseball, you know, or a human head, um, the same as a letter, an email, a video, you know, a video produced from a film reel, that it has a consistent application across it because when I click on Gary's name, I want to see anywhere he's going to appear in this digital archive, whether that's a name on a plaque or because he threw this baseball or whatever it is. Um it's my head. It's your skull. Yeah. Yeah, which would make this podcast way more like really dark.

Gary Pageau: 19:18

It would go very dark. So one of the concerns that is out there has got to be uh deteriorating media, right? Because we I mean, you know, in my world with you know, people doing consumer scanning and whatnot, with the old, you know, videotapes don't last forever. Like you said, even you know, back in the day when people used to burn their own CDs, you know, people thought those lasted for a long time, but they don't. Do you have any special techniques or processes you you had when you come across things that may be degraded to help to help restore those?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 19:50

Well, restoration is a tricky thing and an expensive thing, right? So when we're talking about when we create the strategic plans, we look first and foremost at preservation priorities, right? And magnetic tape, any or or any kind of disk media, that's at the top of the list. So magnetic tape, that's film reel, you know, VHS cassette, that's beyond peak degradation right now, which means like as we're speaking, your film is becoming less and less available. Um I think that the things that that we emphasize with organizations is it's a it's imperative to get it done, to get it done professionally and to understand the formats that are being produced for you. So sending your VHS to someone who's going to give you a DVD is not preserving it because it's a compressed format and that DVD can get scratched, right? At least you are getting another format. The other thing that I think is it's a really hard pill for our partners to swallow is that often if they don't even know what's on that film reel, they still need to invest in preserving it because many of them are last play. If you get like if any of these reels are VHS, it's like, well, we want to look at it and determine whether or not it's important to preserve, right? You want a professional doing that because it might be the only time you have to truly capture it. Are there secrets about restoration? And I that's like well beyond my I'm just a figurehead. But I think that understanding like the risk of it's not as simple as just like sending it out and you know and getting something back.

Gary Pageau: 21:24

Yeah, I mean it's it's one of the things like I said in the consumer space, right? When you're dealing with, you know, just normal VHS that someone was maybe recording TV shows on, then they threw their home movie on.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 21:34

Yeah.

Gary Pageau: 21:35

It's probably most well, if you can find a VHS player at this point, it's probably unwatchable anyway.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 21:41

It might be unwatchable. We but the worry is that it it could be the last time, right? Or that that you're going to do further damage by trying to watch it.

Gary Pageau: 21:50

Right.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 21:51

Yeah.

Gary Pageau: 21:51

So I imagine with some of the organizations that you're working with, you may even be dealing with, I don't know, what do you call those like uh wax recordings and all kinds of like totally obsolete formats?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 22:02

Cylinders and yeah.

Gary Pageau: 22:04

Totally obsolete formats. What's that like?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 22:06

I mean, it's it's all the same. The transfer of content from one format into digital, yeah, there are different tools, there are different specialists, you know. So, like where we don't do that in-house, we partner with specialists who do that. But at the end of the day, it's all about like the true strategy, is in how you treat it in terms of being able to find it and utilize it. Right.

Gary Pageau: 22:27

When you're looking, when you're talking to someone about their strategy, is is how they could monetize it part of it. Because I imagine a lot of that is they don't even know what they could do with some of this stuff. For example, if you're talking to like an like a fraternity alumni society, right? And you're digitizing the sorority archives from whatever, you know, that's a huge fundraising opportunity, perhaps.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 22:53

Huge, yes. So I think I mean, about 65% of our business is membership-based organizations, private schools, religious organizations, fraternity sorority, junior league, you name it. And without question, when they start to talk about like ROI, the biggest thing for any organization of any type, but particularly anything with an alumni base, is going to be alumni engagement, donor engagement, fundraising. Um, it's not how many things can I print on a mug and sell, right?

Gary Pageau: 23:24

Right. Although there might be some of that, right?

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 23:27

Uh yeah, but not enough to pay for a digital archive of billion items, right? Um, or or to continue to build not seeing value from it. So without question, understanding that to be able to give anyone who works in an in an audience engagement environment. So obviously with membership based, I think we work with NFL, like the fan base, like being able to, in a blink, serve up content that is unique and specific to any group I'm talking to or any individual I'm talking to. Hey, like here is a photo of your mother, here's a photo of all of your friends, hey, look at this film clip from whatever. Oh, you're really interested in the philanthropic effort on your campus in 1962. Here it is. Like being able to pull that up, instantly, we start to look at the value of that. So like Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity, the first year they worked with us, their annual day of giving, they increased by 791%. So you're looking not just at like raising money for history, but with like with that.

Gary Pageau: 24:29

Yeah, I mean, what you want to do is you want to build connections, right? So I imagine, like you said, you when you talked about 1962 that that what happened on campus, maybe there was, you know, you want to find out not only what was what's happening in the uh educational department, but maybe who was speaking on campus that that day. And you uh connect those dots through that. And that's where the metadata comes in.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 24:52

Yeah, absolutely.

Gary Pageau: 24:54

So what kind of uh materials are you getting? Let's say let's stick with the educational example, right? You know, where you're dealing with maybe uh imprecise sources or you know, things like you know, maybe like the college newspaper or things like that to try and figure out what was happening on campus in 1962 or something like that. I mean, that's that's where I think a lot of your 80,000 hours is just deciphering things from back then.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 25:22

Well, I think actually, I think that the true goal of creating an accessible digital archive is making the evidence, making the primary resource discoverable and available, then letting the user interpret it, right? It's not my job to tell you the meaning of this, it's my job to preserve that evidence in a way that you can find it and make sense of it. If anything, people are gonna question if it's like, oh now I'm telling you what this means, right? So I can say, you know, we can provide, sure, we're historians, we can provide historical context. We can say that like this is why this language is a certain way. Right. Um, but what's really imperative is like this is the evidence, like for whatever it is, this is a photograph that was actually taken in 1962. This is a, you know, this is an article from the campus newspaper that was authored by this person. It's not just something that AI generated in order to make an argument.

Gary Pageau: 26:16

Is there a way to allow? I'm sure there is. I'm just wondering if your system provides for it, like to allow annotation. So let's say, for example, that article in 1962 appears and I'm still alive and I wrote that, I could maybe add context to it. And it would not be historically accurate because it's, you know, obviously a recollection, it's not verifiable, but it's a way to annotate things to kind of build that connection.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 26:42

So in terms of like looking for user feedback on the content, our digital museums provide ways to do that that are not directly, and every every single organization asks for it and say, Do you want to manage that?

Gary Pageau: 26:57

Yeah.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 26:58

If you want to manage it, our system will do that. Not one has said yes, right. So it's a lovely idea, right? And a lot of folks think that they can get around metadata creation by crowdsourcing. It's just, it's not realistic. So we do get that feedback, and we often will look. So in the strategy of building and making digital assets available, we're looking at like what information isn't known and how can we use that to our advantage. So in a sorority example, you know, there might be a tag for unidentified Kappa in the Kappa Kappa Gamma Museum, right? And now at any point, we can search for I want all images, I want all photographs or all video that have an unidentified person from between this year and this year on this campus. And now I'm gonna use that to engage that alumni base. Right.

Gary Pageau: 27:50

Identify this person.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 27:52

Yeah, yeah. Do you know anyone in these photos? And so that interface is more, you know, we're constantly getting like, hey, that like you say it says you're in this room, but you're actually in that room. And I know that because I'm that guy in the corner over there. But like we're you get that, and then you have a human, to some extent an AI, but like a human like analyze that and determine its validity and then implement it rather than just asking. I mean, at this point, we're all familiar with patrols and everything else that can happen. Oh, yeah.

Gary Pageau: 28:20

Just people's memories aren't reliable. I mean, human beings are, you know, their memories are not reliable. Maybe that guy may think he's in that room with that person, but he may be remembering it differently entirely with somebody else.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 28:32

Yeah.

Gary Pageau: 28:33

Yep. Yeah, human beings are not reliable. But what is reliable is history IT. And where can people go for more information about your company and what is you? Because I'm fascinated by this. I'm I just think this is the coolest thing.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 28:45

I will thank you. I I'd have to agree with you. Um, so find us at uh history it.com, our software is at odysseypreservation.com or on all of the social net history IT or hashtag save history.

Gary Pageau: 28:58

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. It's great to meet you. Like I said, this is you know, when I deal with a lot of people in the consumer scanning world and the archiving world, you know, they would I I think they're just gonna be fascinated by the level of detail you have to do with this sort of thing. And maybe they'll want to reach out and partner with you or something because I think it's uh I think preserving, you know, history like this is a tremendous uh avocation. And I uh I appreciate you guys taking that on.

Kristen Gwinn-Becker: 29:25

Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for the conversation today, too.

Erin Manning: 29:29

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at www.theadpixels society.com.