Reflections on Year One of The Pauling Blog

Today marks the first anniversary of The Pauling Blog, and in celebration we’re announcing a new addition to our blogroll, archivematica.

Over the past few months, The Pauling Blog has featured a number of posts on our digitization projects which have, in turn, garnered a fairly-substantial amount of reader interest. While we will continue to post about our work here, we would also like to offer our readers access to other information about digitization efforts around the web. Hence archivematica, a blog about Peter Van Garderen and his work as a digital archive designer and analyst.

Peter is the president and senior consultant of Artefactual Systems, Inc. and a doctoral candidate in archival science at the University of Amsterdam. Peter’s doctoral work is concerned with digital archives in both a practical and social context, focusing on issues of public access and cross-archival collaboration. In his spare time, Peter uses archivematica to blog about developments in the world of archives, his Artefactual-related projects, and his scholastic research. For a topical and literate look into the mind of a professional archivist, we highly recommend a visit to archivematica.

Additional information about Peter Van Garderen’s work, thesis, and the Artefactual team can be found here.

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This is the 112th post that we’ve generated in our year of blogging and at the time of this writing, the project has attracted a hair over 13,000 views.  More importantly, readership is increasing steadily – despite it’s being the shortest of the twelve, February was, by far, our highest-trafficked month to date at just over seventy views per day.  Numbers like these do not a blog empire make, but we’re heartened by the feedback that we’ve been receiving and are glad to likewise note that older posts are being found in equal measure to newer content.

Here is a look at the top ten most-viewed posts of this past year.

1. Roger Hayward (1899-1979): Architect, Artist, Illustrator, Inventor, Scientist [published 4-22-08; 2,287 views]
2. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle [5-29-08; 408]
3. Featured Document: Linus Pauling’s Birth Certificate [3-31-08; 231]
4. Roger Hayward and Linus Pauling [5-1-08; 190]
5. Creating the Pauling Catalogue: Formatting Text with XML and XSL [8-12-08; 189]
6. Linus Pauling and the Birth of Quantum Mechanics [5-20-08; 187]
7. Cancer and Vitamin C Redux [9-30-08; 180]
8. The Martha Chase Effect [1-2-09; 174]
9. The Paternal Ancestry of Linus Pauling [9-23-08; 168]
10. Scenes from the Linus Pauling Legacy Award [5-6-08; 168]

Pretty clearly we’ve tapped into the “Martha Chase Effect” with our series on Roger Hayward, which shows up in two spots on the front page of the Google results for the “Roger Hayward” simple search…though this being the Internet, it surely does not hurt that this image is among the many used to illustrate the super-popular “Architect, Artist, Illustrator…” post.

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Thinking back on these past twelve months, the main theme that strikes us about our project is just how much work it really requires.  Five people have written posts for the site, and in any given week two students and one faculty member devote upwards of 30 hours to generating ideas for the blog, researching them and writing them up.

But we feel that it’s worth the effort.  The Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections is a little bit unusual relative to many of our colleagues in that virtually every project in which we engage has some sort of web element attached to it as an ultimate goal.  A major component of this directive is the (also unusual) fact that one of our three full-time staffmembers is an I.T. consultant.  In short, we are very Internet-centric in our mission and our workflows.

This being the case, The Pauling Blog gives us an opportunity to feature smaller components of certain very large projects and also to talk about some of the methods that have been developed to help smooth the marriage between traditional archival practice and the world wide web.  As such, our readers can expect to see more of the same throughout the coming year – two posts per week on topics related to Linus Pauling or bits of news from within the department, a few fairly techical write-ups and the occasional post done just for the fun of it.  Thanks for reading!

The Martha Chase Effect

Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey, 1953.

The Phenomenon

It pretty well goes without saying that the primary mission of the Oregon State University Libraries Special Collections is to preserve, describe and make available the Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Papers.  Beginning, more or less, with the Pauling centenary in 2001, the main focus of our Pauling-related work has been description and accessibility via the web.  In so doing, we have scanned over one terabyte of data and created, at minimum, tens of thousands of static html pages devoted to the life, work and legacy of Linus Pauling and, to a lesser extent, Ava Helen Pauling.

Knowing this, one might reasonably assume that the top search engine query channeling into the content that we have created would be “Linus Pauling,” or some variant therof.  A reasonable assumption indeed but, as it turns out, quite wrong.  In 2008, as in 2007 and 2006 (a close second in 2005), the top keyword query for those who found our content through search was…”Martha Chase.”

Martha Chase was a geneticist who, in collaboration with Alfred Hershey, made an important contribution to the DNA story as it played out in the early 1950s.  Prior to Chase and Hershey’s work, scientists were mixed on the question as to what, exactly, was the genetic material.  Many researchers, Pauling included, initially felt that the stuff of heredity was contained in proteins.  Others, of course, eventually theorized that DNA was the source of genetic information.  Using an ordinary blender as their primary tool, Hershey and Chase devised a famous experiment which proved conclusively that DNA did, in fact, carry the genetic code.

Diagram of the Hershey-Chase Blender Experiment. Image by Eric Arnold.

The breadth of Chase-related content that we have digitized is infinitesimally-small relative to the “reams” devoted to Pauling — this page and this page are pretty much it.  And yet, in the context of search, Martha Chase is the top draw to our resources.  It would seem then, that in the marketplace for information — at least that which is retrieved by search — supply and demand for Martha Chase approach their equilibrium at the two pages devoted to her work on our “Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA” site.

Looking through the web statistics, the phenomenon is remarkably consistent.  Not only has “Martha Chase” been the top search query for our domain over, essentially, the past four years, it was also the top search query for our domain over the final week of 2008.  Indeed, the trend has strengthened to the point where today, those who conduct the simple “Linus Pauling” search in Google will note “martha chase” as a recommended search related to Pauling, though in reality the two had little or no interaction at all.

The chicken or the egg? Google both reacts to and reinforces "The Martha Chase Effect."

Learning from the Chase Effect

Looking forward, the Chase Effect has become something that we’re thinking more and more about as we begin to develop new projects for the web.  Our top objective will always be to document Pauling’s impact on any number of fields, but in so doing there likely exists a great deal of opportunity for serving different user groups from what might be called “Chaseian” corners of the web.

To use the old many-fish-in-the-sea analogy, there is a lot of content related to Pauling on the Internet, and though we are the primary contributor to this content, we do compete for pageviews with scads of other extremely diverse projects.  (Take a look at the results for the simple “Linus Pauling” Google search to see how diverse the content providers really are.)  So it’s pretty clear that the Pauling sea is quite large and filled with all manner of creatures.

By comparison, Martha Chase represents a much smaller body of water and, in particular, image searches for her — which is probably where the lion’s share of our successful Chase referrals come from — are dominated by the osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections domain.

The idea for future work is to think of the Pauling Papers as a collection of collections in attempting to uncover more Martha Chases.

To an extent we have already, somewhat unwittingly, done this with certain of the Key Participants highlighted on our various documentary history websites.  The Harvey Itano Key Participants page, for example, is the second result returned by Google for “Harvey Itano” searches.  Erwin Chargaff‘s page is seventh,  Arnold Sommerfeld‘s page is eighth and Edward Condon‘s is tenth, to name a few more examples.  In each instance, by developing mini-portals related to specific colleagues important to Pauling’s work, we have created resources that help meet the information demand of a non-Pauling user base.

As we standardize our metadata platforms — upgrading older projects and maintaining the standard for new — and, in the process, increase our capacity to “remix” our digital objects, the idea of enhancing existing mini-portals and creating new ones will emerge as an important consideration for our digitization workflow.  This is something that we’ll be talking a lot more about in the months to come.