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”.

These are some example online community sites:

• rukus – black gblt archives
• Moroccan Memories in Britain
• eside community – east side working class community in London

Main Findings

• proceed from a position that ‘knowing your own history’ is beneficial their communities as well as to the public at large
• the quality of the work is done by individual passion and sacrifice, voluntary
• there is ambivalence to/about the mainstream archives sector — keen to work with mainstream archives, but scarred by past bad experiences
• good practices now could lead to partnerships in the future
• these are living archives — not static.. still alive and growing
• these ideas prompt re-evaluation of conventional archives thinking
• lots of access to digital objects – perhaps movement to online existence

We need to understand that these communities evolve and are fluid. They have as broad variety of structures, sizes and methods of working. What are the patterns in participation & ownership?

The site urban 75 has hosted extended discussions about recent UK history. Efforts include identification of places and people in uploaded photos. The site connects people about issues about housing and local services – it is very practical but it also has evolved to include this historical documentation. One example post from the Brixton Forum shows a discussion about an Old shop front revealed on Atlantic Road.

A Short Aside

Next Flinn apologized for taking his talk slightly off script. Setting his papers aside, he spoke to the audience about the eXHulme website which he had discovered the evening before while finishing his presentation. Having lived in Hulme, Manchester himself, he felt a great impact from looking through the site. He spent 4 hours looking at it – including photos such as the travellers living in their buses parked – otteburn close 1996 seen at the bottom of this page. His discovery and exploration of this site gave him a greater personal understanding of the impact of these types of community documentation projects. I felt he would have been happy to keep talking about this site and the directions it had sent his thoughts — but he then got back to his papers and continued.

Building Community Online

Interactions online are the historic record of the community itself. Archives evolve and change as the community builds and edits their online content. These heritage and archive sites work to shift from the idea of visitors to engaging users in interaction — they need users of the website to feel part of the community.

Examples of sites building community online:

• My Brighton and Hove – community history site
• Remembering Olive Collective – “social production of collective knowledge”
• The Newham Story — uses social tagging

How do you successfully encourage participation (rather than large number of passive observers) which is crucial to the success of these types of initiatives? Lurking without contributing is easy – even if joining requires action. The rate of uptake may correspond with the sense of ownership. Heritage projects might encourage and sustain such participation. See Elisa Giaccardi & Leysia Palen’s article  – The Social Production of Heritage through Cross-media Interaction: Making Place for Place-making.

Suggestions

• encourage conversation and treat all stories as having value – value every account
• promote a sense of ownership once a story has been shared
• allow for multiple ways to engage with and share content and memories
• recognize and let users shift from observer to active member

Flinn’s Conclusions

• What are the challenges and perils facing community archives? Lack of resources. People are doing these things in unsustainable ways
• Why should we sustain independent community archives? Benefit to individuals, communities and broader society.
• What can professional archivists do? Support and partnership with groups seeking this sort of partnership.

My Thoughts

The image I included above is from the Library of Congress’s Flickr Commons project. If you read through the comments on this photo you can see a diverse group of individuals come together to document the history of Sylvia Sweets Tea Room. This is just another example of the process of documentation being as interesting as the original image itself.

There is still so much to learn in the arena of building productive online communities. Archivists working through how to archive what online communities create will need to understand how the process of creation is documented via various software tools. As the techniques for encouraging participation evolve – archivists will need to evolve right along with them. I think it is interesting to envision archivists working in this space and supporting these types of communities — becoming as much the champions of the community itself as preservers of a community’s collaborative creations.

Image Credit: Flickr Commons Library of Congress: Sylvia Sweets Tea Room, corner of School and Main streets, Brockton, Mass

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

A History of Our Own, Representing Communities and Identities on the Web (SAA09: Session 202)

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.

• Duke Digital Collections
• RBMSCL Finding Aids
• AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials – this includes interviews with experts, a TV ads quiz and a wide range of TV ads available via iTunes U.
• Duke Yearlook – a set of Flickr collections displaying images from the Duke University Archives, each focused on a decade or theme related to Duke’s history.
• Duke University Libraries YouTube Channel: example Duke Exhibit: “A Century of Sex Appeals”
• Duke Digital Collections on DukeMobile iPhone application – This wasn’t included in the presentation’s slides – but I spotted it on the YouTube Channel. I downloaded the DukeMobile app onto my iTouch and had a great time exploring the Duke Digital Collections included in the images section of the app. I think it was

University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) Digital Collections: Tom Sommer (University and Technical Services Archivist)

UNLV has experimented with new technologies as they appear. Tom made a point of saying that when they started seeing others provide a feature on their websites, UNLV would find a way to try it out. A great example of this is the addition of a tag cloud and google map to The Boomtown Years collection listed below.

• Howard Hughes Digital Collection – Images displayed in this online exhibition about Howard Hughes, such as this portrait of Howard Hughes, feature the opportunity both to rate and comment on the image. In addition, they provide an RSS feed for every possible metadata attribute (such as location, subject and media type)
• Southern Nevada: The Boomtown Years – in addition to ratings and comments, this collection adds on display of recent comments, tagging and a google map which ties images to locations in southern Nevada.
• UNLV Special Collections Facebook Page – shares news and updates about projects – launched 2 months ago

Marist College Archives and Special Collections: John Ansley (Head, Archives and Special Collections)

Marist first launched their website in 2001 to raise awareness of their collections. They also used listserves and the on-campus newspaper. Utlimately their best tactic was working one-on-one with professors whose interests intersected with their collections. This led to contact with special interest groups. Working with the special interest groups led to new tag and metadata values for their collections.

• Hidden in Plain Sight – online exhibit about fore-edge painting. Includes videos as part of introduction since it is hard to understand through still images. The bibliography receives the most hits.
• Marist Environmental History Project – this ongoing project aims to document who has what information about environmental history. The site includes an extensive list of primary sources as well as a 24 minute oral history:  The Enduring Storm:  The Story of the Storm King Case and the People Who Launched the Modern Environmental Movement (mp3).
• Intercollegiate Rowing Association Poughkeepsie Regatta – timeline used to guide users to who won each race, PDFs of programs, and extensive bibliographies (including an index of 1000+ NYT articles about the regatta).
• Lowell Thomas Travelogues – a household name during the golden age of radio, Lowell Thomas created extensive multimedia travelogues of his travels around the world. He is credited with making T. E. Lawrence famous as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. The site was launched as a teaser to the over 1000 linear feet of photos, audio, video & other records which will be available to researchers in October 2009. For a taste of what is coming, check out this Lowell Thomas travelogue video clip – my favorite quote from which is “…come with me on a magic carpet out to the land of history, mystery and romance.”

My Thoughts

The archivists at all three of these educational institutions have tried new things and worked hard to share their materials with people beyond the traditional range of a reading room. The promise of the web, and all the tools and techniques it supports, is still being uncovered. It will be up to innovative archivists to keep discovering ways to push the envelope and welcome new audiences from all the corners of the globe.

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dukeyearlook/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

As is the case with all my session summaries from SAA2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

Archival Collections Online: Reaching Audiences Beyond The Edge of Campus (SAA09: Session 405)

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.

Blog L’Archivista has a great post about our session.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA09: My Session on Online Communities (Session 101)

What is an ‘unconference’ you ask? It is an attendee organized gathering focused on a common theme – in this case digital humanities. In the days leading up to the camp, attendees will post their ideas for discussion topics – but the final schedule will be sorted out on the ground during the gathering itself.

The original THATCamp event, organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, was a full two day weekend event. THATCamp Austin 2009 will be held on a single evening during the same week that the Annual Meeting of the Society of American Archivists is being held in Austin (and has the blessing of the CHNM).

I had an amazing time at the first THATCamp at CHNM in 2008 and wrote 3 posts about various presentations and discussions. Since I was unable to attend THATCamp 2009 I am especially pleased to be lending a hand in organizing this first regional THATCamp while I will be in Texas for SAA. If you can get yourself to Austin on Tuesday night August 11th and have a passion for the digital humanities — take a look at the what/when/where details over on the THATCamp Austin 2009 About Page.

A few details hijacked from the THATCamp Austin website:

How do I sign up?
Unfortunately, we only have space for 60-70 participants, so we’ll have to do some vetting. To apply for a spot, simply send email to thatcamp.austin.2009@gmail.com., telling us what you’d like to present, and what you think you will get out of the experience. Please don’t send full proposals. We’re talking about an informal note of around 250 words, max.  Please include your T-shirt size and an email address you can check from public places so that we can register you with the University of Texas wi-fi system.

How much?
THATCamp Austin is free to all attendees, but a $25 donation towards T-shirts and pizza will be very much appreciated.

Don’t be afraid to take a step into the less-structured unconference world. What I experienced at the first THATCamp was a group of very enthusiastic individuals who were so pleased to find like minded people with whom to talk – regardless of our very varied backgrounds. Folks have reported coming away from both of the THATCamps at CHNM feeling energized and rededicated to their projects — as well as having found new collaborators and opportunities for cross-polination across all the diverse members of the digital humanities community.

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

THATCamp Austin 2009: Now Accepting Applications

Title: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online

Abstract: As more archival materials move online, archivists must become adept at participating in and managing online communities. This session will discuss real world experiences of this involvement, including putting images into the Flickr Commons and links to archival materials in Wikipedia, as well as guidelines on cultural norms within online communities. We will also discuss choosing between building new communities from scratch vs joining a broader, existing community (such as the Flickr Commons).

I will be serving as session chair and moderator for our group of fabulous panelists (finances and travel plans permitting):

• Deborah Wythe: talking about Flickr Commons and other Brooklyn Museum web/community projects (or whatever the latest and greatest projects are afoot at the Brooklyn Museum by the time we hit August 2009)
• Ann Lally: talking about Wikipedia and blogs (co-author of: Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections)
• Mark Matienzo: talking about NYPL web/community projects
• Seb Chan: talking about Powerhouse Museum, Flickr Commons and (maybe) blogs

The intention is for this session to begin with very brief presentations showing off the current projects at our panelists’ institutions and follow that up with lots of time for discussion and answering of questions.

We see our target audience as archivists who want to hear about real world experiences of working within existing online communities (such as Wikipedia or Flickr) and building new communities dedicated to cultural heritage materials. The session will target individuals with less experience with Web 2.0 and social media implementations, but the lessons learned should also be of interest to those already in the implementation stages of their own projects.

I will put out a call for questions as we get closer to the conference so that our group can get an idea of what people are interested in learning about specifically, so start making notes now. Hope to see you in Austin!

This post is from from: Spellbound Blog.

SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities