The Official Google Reader Blog recently announced a new feature that will let users watch any page for updates. The way this works is that you add individual URLs to your Google Reader account. Just as with regular RSS feeds, when an update is detected – a new entry is added to that subscription.

My thinking is that this could be a really useful tool for archivists charged with preserving websites that change gradually over time, especially those fairly static sites that change infrequently with little or no notice of upcoming changes. If a web page was archived and then added to a dedicated Google Reader account, the archivist could scan their list of watch pages daily or weekly. Changes could then trigger the creation of a fresh snapshot of the site.

I will admit that there have been services out there for a while that do something similar to what Google has just rolled out. I personally have used Dapper.net to take a standard web page and generate an RSS feed based on updates to the page (sound familiar?). One Dapper.net feed that I created and follow is for the news archive page for the International Red Cross and can be found here. What is funny is that now they actually have an official RSS feed for their news that includes exactly what my Dapper.net feed harvested off their news archive page – but when I built that Dapper feed there was no other way for me to watch for those news updates.

Click to read full text of Leveraging Google Reader’s Page Change Tracking for Web Page Preservation.

• Thoughts on Archiving Web Sites
  
• SEO Evaluation of an Archival Website: Looking at UMBC’s Digital Collections
  
• My New Daydream: A Hosting Service for Digitized Collections
  
• Google Newspaper Archives
  

In the early 1960s, my father bought a Wheatstone concertina in London. He tells how he visited the factory where it was made to pick one out and recalls the ledger book in which details about the concertinas were recorded. After a recent retelling of this family classic, I was inspired to see what might be online related to concertinas. I was amazed!

First I found the Concertina Library which presents itself as a ‘Digital Reference Collection for Concertinas’. With fourteen contributing authors, the site includes in depth articles on concertina history, technology, music, research and a wide range of concertina systems.

I particularly appreciate the reasons that Robert Gaskins, site creator, lists for the creation of the site on the about page:

(1) Almost all of the historical material about concertinas has been held in research libraries where access is limited, or in private collections where access may be non-existent. The reason for this is not that the material is so valuable, but that in the past there was no way to make material of limited interest available to everyone, so it stayed safely in archives. The web has provided a way to make this material widely available—partly by the libraries themselves, and partly in collections such as this.

Click to read full text of Concertina History Online Features Virtual Collaboration and Digitization.

• Archival Context and Description – Taking It to the Next Level
  
• Footnote.com and US National Archives records
  
• Of Pirates, Treasure Chests and Keys: Improving Access to Digitized Materials
  
• Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies
  

Larry Sultan was famed as both a photographer and archives researcher. He passed away on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 and his obituary in the New York Times describes his use of archival photographs as “harnessing found photographs for the purposes of art while using them as a way to examine the society that produced them”. The 59 photographs, selected in collaboration with Mike Mandel from a broad assortment of corporate and government archives, were originally displayed and published as a collection named ‘Evidence’ in 1977. A reprint of Evidence was published in 2004, including a new scholarly essay and additional images not in the original.

The Stephen Wirtz Gallery has a number of images from the 2004 exhibition available online and features this great summary of the original project:

Sultan and Mandel created the series Evidence with documentary photographs mined from image banks of government institutions, corporations, scientific research facilities, and police departments. An NEA grant gave the artists a persuasive edge in gaining access these resources, and images were selected for their mysterious and perplexing subject matter. The series was presented in an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1977, and simultaneously collected in the book Evidence, which is recognized among the most important publications in the history of photography. Removed from their original contexts and repositioned without references to their sources, these images challenged the viewer to examine the conceptual concern of identifying meaning and authorship in the creation and consideration of the art photograph.

Click to read full text of Archival Photographs as Art: A Part of Larry Sultan’s Legacy.

• Flickr Galleries: Fun with Flickr Commons
  
• German Federal Archives, Crowdsourcing & the Wikimedia Commons
  
• Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part I – Archives of American Art
  
• Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons
  

I realized while at MARAC at the end of October that I never posted here about the completion and publication of the Interactive Archivist: Case Studies in Utilizing Web 2.0 to Improve the Archival Experience. The brainchild of J. Gordon Daines III and Cory Nimer, this free SAA ePublication only exists online and brings together ten Web 2.0 archivist-oriented case studies covering blogs, mashups, tagging, wikis, Facebook and more. It also includes thorough introductions to each of the technologies covered by case studies, an annotated bibliography and a link to a living list of resources on Delicious.

My contribution to the collection is titled Spellbound Blog: Using Blogs as a Professional Development Opportunity. I don’t spend much time on this blog talking about blogging, so if you ever wanted to know more about why I blog or are considering starting a blog yourself – my case study might be of interest.

Click to read full text of Interactive Archivist: Spellbound Blog as a Case Study.

• SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities
  
• University of Maryland: Benefits of Blogging Workshop (May 6, 2009)
  
• Ideas for SAA2007: Web Awards, Wikis and Blogs
  
• BlogDay2007: Five New Blogs for Your Consideration
  

In honor of Blog Action Day 2009’s theme of Climate Change, I am revisiting the subject of a post I wrote back in the summer of 2007: International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO). This non-profit’s goal is to rescue and digitize at risk weather and climate data from around the world. In the past two years, IEDRO has been hard at work. Their website has gotten a great face-lift, but even more exciting is to see is how much progress they have made!

• Weather balloon observations received from Lilongwe, Malawi (Africa) from 1968-1991: all the red on these charts represents data rescued by IEDRO — an increase from only 30% of the data available to over 90%.
• Data rescue statistics from around the world

They do this work for many reasons – to improve understanding of weather patterns to prevent starvation and the spread of disease, to ensure that structures are built to properly withstand likely extremes of weather in the future and to help understand climate change. Since the theme for the day is climate change, I thought I would include a few excerpts from their detailed page on climate change:

Click to read full text of Blog Action Day 2009: IEDRO and Climate Change.

• International Environmental Data Rescue Organization: Rescuing At Risk Weather Records Around the World
  
• Blog Action Day: A Look At Earth Day as Archived Online
  
• ArchivesZ Data Challenges: University of Texas at San Antonio
  
• ArchivesZ Data Challenges: Princeton University
  

Over the past month I have been playing with Flickr’s new Galleries. Each gallery is limited to 18 images from anywhere in Flickr (provided that the image owner has made their image available for inclusion in galleries). I thought it might be fun to try my hand at picking the best of the new images added to the Flickr Commons each week.

Each Thursday over the past month I have created a Commons Picks of the Week gallery from the all the images added to the Commons in the prior 7 days.

Here are the galleries from the first month of my experiment. Let me know what you think.

• September 17, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• September 24, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• October 1, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week
• October 8, 2009 Commons Picks of the Week

Each week I had about 150 new images from which to select my 18 favorites. Since many institutions seem to load their images each week along some thematic lines, sometimes I felt like I had too many of one kind of image. Moving forward I may switch to bi-weekly or monthly to get a larger pool of images from which to pick.

Click to read full text of Flickr Galleries: Fun with Flickr Commons.

• Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons
  
• German Federal Archives, Crowdsourcing & the Wikimedia Commons
  
• Flickr Terms of Service, Unwritten Guidelines and Safety Levels
  
• October is American Archives Month
  

Each week brings announcements of archives launching new websites. Today both my email and Twitter told me about  University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s new Digital Collections site. Who can resist peeking at new materials available online?

I have spent much of the past year learning the details of Search Engine Optimization. Usually shortened to SEO, this simply refers to the use of techniques which improve the traffic sent to a website via organic search. Want your webpage to show up at the top of the list for a specific search in Google? You want to work on your SEO.

So when I look at new archives website, I can’t help but keep an eye open for how well the site is optimized for search engines.

I hope that UMBC will forgive me for nitpicking their new site. A lot of their choices are great for SEO,  but they also have room for improvement.

Things Done Well for SEO


Click to read full text of SEO Evaluation of an Archival Website: Looking at UMBC’s Digital Collections.

• Home Page Title & Description: The site’s home page has a good meta description. This is the text displayed below the link on a search results page – as shown below:

• Session 305: Extended Archival Description Part I – Archives of American Art
  
• SAA 2006 Poster: Communicating Context in Online Collections
  
• Happy Birthday Spellbound Blog
  
• Google Tackles Magazine Archives
  

Andrew Flinn, University College London (UCL), was the second speaker during SAA09’s Session 202 with his presentation ‘A History of Our Own, Representing Communities and Identities on the Web’. Flinn began with the idea that archives are “a place for creating and re-working memory”. While independent community archives are constituted around many purposes, Flinn’s main interest is in communities focused on absences and mis-representation of a group or event in history. Communities in which there is a cultural, politcal, or artistic activism. Some of these communities may be considered ‘movements’.

How should/can archivists support local archiving activities?

Part of the challenge of online communities is the need to capture the interactions in order to not loose the full picture. The National Listing of Community Archives in the UK’s website states that they “seek to document the history of all manner of local, occupations, ethnic, faith and other diverse communities”.

The UCL’s International Centre for Archives and Records Management Research and User Studies (ICARUS) “brings together researchers in user access and description, community archives and identity, concepts and contexts of records and archives, and information policy”. Flinn is the Principal Investigator on the ICARUS project Community archives and identities which focuses on in depth interviews of 4 institutions which are “documenting and sustaining community heritage”.

Click to read full text of A History of Our Own, Representing Communities and Identities on the Web (SAA09: Session 202).

• SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities
  
• SAA09: My Session on Online Communities (Session 101)
  
• Video News Archives: Digitization as Good Business
  
• Supporting Appraisal of Digital Records
  

Expanding Your Local and Global Audiences (Session 405, SAA 2009) shared how three institutions of higher education are using the web to reach out to new audiences. While the general public may still hold close the stereotype of archives as of rooms full of boxes of paper (not so different from this Duke image on Flickr: “Mattie Russell, curator of manuscripts, and Jay Luvaas, director of the Flowers Collection, examine the papers of Senator Willis Smith in the library vault.”), the presenters in this session are focused on expanding peoples’ experience of archives beyond boxes of papers locked away in a vault. They are using the web as a tool to reach beyond the walls of their reading rooms and the edges of their campuses.

Duke University Rare Books, Manuscript & Special Collections Library (RBMSCL) : Lynn Eaton (Reference Archivist)

While I didn’t find my way into this session until the start of the next speaker’s presentation, Lynn was kind enough to share with me her personal printout of her presentation slides. The links below and any associated commentary are based solely on my own interpretation of the various screen-shots included.

Click to read full text of Archival Collections Online: Reaching Audiences Beyond The Edge of Campus (SAA09: Session 405).

• Duke Digital Collections
• RBMSCL Finding Aids

• Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons
  
• DH2009: Digital Curiosities and Amateur Collections
  
• SAA2008: Revealing Archival Collections at the Web’s Surface (Session 102)
  
• DH2009: Digital Lives and Personal Digital Archives
  

Thank you to everyone who came to our session this morning (Building, Managing, and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online). Word on the street is that we had about 150 people in the audience.

As I mentioned during our talk – here is the Online Communities Comparison Chart. Please let me know if you have any issues accessing this document and feel free to share it with anyone you like.

If you had questions you were unable to ask during the session – please feel free to post them as comments below or send me a message via my  Contact Form. I will be sure to pass questions along to all the members of our panel. I also plan to update this post with links to everyone’s slides as they appear online.

Slides from our talk:

• Mark’s slides on Slideshare: Online Presence and Participation
• Deborah Wythe’s slides available on SAA’s site: Archives on Flickr Commons (it’s not your mother’s audience anymore). She has also made a full paper available via SAA as well.

SAA has posted video of our presentation on facebook. The one I have linked to is the first of 7 segments. To view each in order, keep clicking ‘previous’ to view the next video.

Click to read full text of SAA09: My Session on Online Communities (Session 101).

• SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities
  
• A History of Our Own, Representing Communities and Identities on the Web (SAA09: Session 202)
  
• Final Count Down to SAA2007
  
• Yahoo & Google’s Search for Reusable Images and the Flickr Commons