To opine without much forethought:

A traditional way to look at the role of archivist is as steward — physically preserving, intellectually curating, and providing access to archival collections. In some cases, we digitize collections in their entirety or at least in large part, and in other cases we create online exhibits from selections of our physical material. My biggest concern as an archivist is the former. Why shouldn’t our stewardship extend to our digitized material. There seems to be an aimless drive in many archives to digitize materials in order to take advantage of potential grant funding, or because we feel like we *should* be throwing digital stuff online. There is no plan, no priorities that sync with collection policies, and no organizational plan to maintain and evolve content and discovery systems over time.

I think the digital preservation field is starting to tackle some of these issues in the context of digital libraries their output will be useful to see how folks are thinking about what stewardship of digital materials might look like.

For online exhibits, then I think we get into the issues with revising and evolving that you raise. Personally, I see many online exhibits as equivalents to physical exhibits; they are creative, engaging, and ephemeral. But, as we don’t keep old, uncared for material lying around our reading rooms, let’s not leave unsightly stuff in our web presences either.

And, if I may toss out one more opinion, there should be a call to not see our finding aids as static documents. We interpret and as our understanding changes, so must our descriptions.

Looking forward to hearing more about this!

The problem is that, in the meantime, GeoCities had been shut down, and the pages that now exist are archived copies saved by folks like ArchiveTeam.org and Archive.org. Because these pages are now archival versions of dead sites, there is no real mechanism for changing or “restricting” them. Of course, from a purely academic standpoint, we might prefer this, since it provides a more complete archival record. But archivists have always had to consider the privacy concerns surrounding records. And does considering privacy become even more important now that something someone wrote in college can be retrieved by a potential employer with two seconds of “googling?” Is there potential for backlash here, particularly as an increasing percentage of the population has essentially lived their entire life online?

So I like the idea of discussing how to facilitate linkages between disparate information sources using names, etc. But I wonder if we should also consider the ethical aspects of the increasing availability and “linkability” of sources, particularly those that might refer to living people.

If I was attending I’d like to ask whether the archival community needs its own equivalent of the FRBR entity model? Almost all of the archival standards come with an *implicit* assumption of an underlying entity model that has never been formalized. Would this be an extension of FRBR or a brand-new ‘Archival Resource Entity Model’?

However, this may also be just another dead-end on the path to find the “One True Model to Rule Them All” yfrog.com/nejs8ubj. Perhaps using RDF triples, facets, key:value pairs, and/or noSQL technologies eliminates the need to have our data models represented by entity models altogether?

At any rate, I like your idea of establishing a framework or some common rules, even just agreement on syntax, for how we document & then iterate/version our archival resource data models. The standards bodies/processes (bogged down by their bureaucracy, volunteerism and international scope) are currently too slow to react to the technologies that are defining new requirements and capabilities for getting archival resources online (or even just catching up to years-old common XML practices). That said, I don’t want to dismiss the strength and legitimacy of community standards, we just need a better way to sync them (and have them informed by) any number of constantly evolving implementation models. Hopefully this THATcamp session can contribute to the discussion.

I see this in addition to collection level access, not instead of it. Collections provide one of the many contexts we could be supplying users. Historical and geographical displays are two others.

Thanks for proposing this.
-Patsy

The prototype is exactly that. A very basic, functional representation of what we hope to do but kind of awkward and without 98% of the bells and whistles that we want. This is my main objective for THATCamp: to come out with a better understanding of what we need to do to pull together all the people with the skills we’ll need to take this to the next level.

I follow and chat with Rey Junco on this who is an expert in this area. His latest study on Twitter & student engagement has been covered a lot in the past week. mashable.com/2010/11/04/twitter-student-engagement/

We’ve made that mistake ourselves, making a class for members of our school, for example.

I’m currently working on a scheme for usefully describing places related to an organisation. Specifically that an event is in a room, with a building and that building is at this lat/long and the nearest public carparks are x,y and z with the following open hours…

Rather than start from scratch we’re probably going to mint very few new predicates or classes. Mostly we’ll just use GoodRelations, foaf and the like with guidelines of how to use them to make them useful for a consumer.

Ideally I’ll produce a validator so people can check it’s discoverable, parseable and saying what they meant to say.

I would be very interested in this session at THATCamp this weekend. I’m also a social tweeter, and have also live tweeted a conference [50th Anniversary Maine Women Writers Collection, 2009]. I have not used twitter live in the classroom [but sounds like a wonderful experiment I’d like to chat more about], but this semester I did experiment with Twitter in my history research methods course. I had my students go into my twitter account, look at the archive of my tweets, and then they had to draw five analytical conclusions [with evidence and explanations] about me based on what I had tweeted. What they came up with was pretty intriguing, and they all really liked the assignment. I’d like to explore more possibilities!

Hey Kate! Have you partnered with your local History librarian? 🙂 What you describe is tough to balance, though, and I find that by trying to teach students the overall concepts, it seems to work a little better. Also, we can meet with those students who are struggling so that you can focus on content!

As a librarian, I find that I am more frequently turning to the Internet Archive to find fugitive information from the web. As someone who works with undergraduates and grad students, I think it’s great to have these resources, but does it create more silos of information that don’t cross-reference each other? My question might be “…and how do we make sure there’s easy access to these sources for future researchers?”

I would definitely love to talk about this more…

First, thanks for reading and citing my post on Twitter and Facebook in the classroom!

Second, I’m not sure if you’ve returned to my blog since that post, but I have written a bit more on the use of Twitter in the class since then. Unlike last time around, this semester I’m requiring that students tweet a certain amount of times per week (a minimum of 6x in my classes of 30 and 3x in my class of 125+). This has been working out well so far, really well actually. In any event, I’ve recently posted the following on this “experiment,” if you’re interested:

Teaching 200+ Students How to Tweet: The Challenges
kellimarshall.net/unmuzzledthoughts/teaching/teaching-tweeting-challenges/

Teaching 200+ Students How to Tweet: The Rewards
kellimarshall.net/unmuzzledthoughts/teaching/teaching-tweeting-rewards/

Best of luck to you!

(Incidentally, I also have a huge love/hate relationship with Echo Bazaar, which is both wonderful and amazingly flawed.)

Research Tools Survey

This survey is designed to give me a general sense of the class’s level of familiarity with the library’s various research tools. We will be meeting with The John Hay Library’s scholarly resources librarian and collections curator on 2/9 and I’d like to help them tailor their presentation to your needs. They’ll also be introducing us to collections that might be of interest for your research project for this or other courses you are taking.

1.The database(s) that I most often use for school-related research is/are:

2.I’ve worked with Brown reference librarians on past research projects: YES NO
If “YES,” what was useful and/or not so useful about the experience?
If “NO”, please explain why.

3.My research strategy is best described as follows:

4.The most difficult aspect of conducting research is:

5.When we meet with the research librarians, I would like them to address/answer the following issues:

It was an informative exercise but one that would be harder to implement with a larger class. So, one question I have is this: how can we effectively gauge students’ baseline skills so that our efforts to improve them are targeted?

I must say the results of my small survey confirm your statements about the problem of information overload. In describing the most difficult aspect of their research students responded with statements like these, “The obstacle I encounter is an excess rather than a scarcity of relevant sources; how do I identify appropriate material and synthesize the information” and “Too much information; how do I decide what information to include and to omit?”

I’ve been playing around on a limited basis (limited because I know zero about altering code) with Omeka as a tool to perform the basic data archiving. What I really envision, however, is something that would also allow collaborative interactions. I’ve found Omeka, which I first used on a version installed at school, to be very easy and intuitive to use. I could only get part way toward my goals, however, using the software as is. Because the university install was a shared resource I wasn’t allowed to make changes (i.e., get things to look and act like the great example sites to which you linked), so I switched to an Omeka.net site. My site is just bare bones at the moment but I find I’m able to do less than I remember being able to do with the university-hosted one. So, I’m thinking about a self-hosted site.

One important issue (of the many) that you raised is that of copyright not only for an anthology but also for a shared research database. How do we collect, store and share the sorts of born-digital materials that I mentioned above when we’re not the creators? Where is the line between fair use and infringement?

As an archivist, it’s great if faculty and scholars find our resources, but it’s even better if we can engage with them in projects that go beyond that person’s own particular project and take the resources to a larger audience. Believe me, archivists don’t want to create resources in a vacuum.

Maybe we should add some sort of brainstorming to develop techniques to persuade institutions with all of these fabulous resources to update the wiki.

And many thanks for the book tip – I’m going to send an order to my collections folks now!

I could see Omeka being used to create a a series of modestly-sized, high-quality collections of primary sources based around undergraduate majors. The idea would be show students who have a primary interest in other academic areas the relevance of history to their fields of interest (founding principles, important developments, key figures, etc.).

By having all these sources in one place and housed in Omeka, one can avoid the pitfalls of the colossal lists of links which are often out-of-date or simply overwhelming to beginning undergrads. It could hopefully serve as a tool to give faculty a better way to connect history and the practice of history to students who often can’t or won’t see why they should care.

I teach graduate high school teachers who want to know more about digital tools and resources. I would like to know if Omeka can be a solution for them if they want to show their own collection of primary sources. If Omeka is easy to use for people with little knowledge in computing I might add it to my syllabus and propose it to other colleagues.

I have two questions that I would like that session to answer:
1.How to tell people that the sites are out there.
2.How to convince people that the tools and the content of those sites will be helpful for them.

I’m planning to put together a proposal for a related topic within the next few days. (The materials I work with are largely in public government archives and either not under copyright or in a copyright gray zone.)

I think these are questions that many people deal with. Some Smithsonian Staff gave a presentation on your second question last week at Museum Computer Network 2010 in Austin. I’ve posted a few of the presentations here – mcn2010.pbworks.com/Building-Communities-of-Interest-with-Museum-Collections%2C-Libraries%2C-and-Archives

I unfortunately can’t make THATCamp NE this year, but I hope it’s inspiring!

Effie

On the Saturday morning of the conference, there will be a list of all
the session proposals. Everyone will be able to vote for their top
several panels. Then, We’ll take the expression of interest, go into a
back room, and combine the sessions and put them on a schedule. Then
the entire conference will quickly take a look, see if we’ve made any
mistakes, combine more panels if possible, and voila! we have a
schedule. If that sounds like it won’t work–trust us, it will!