It is official - the panel I proposed for SAA 2009 (aka, Sustainable Archives: AUSTIN 2009) was accepted!
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):
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Posted on 12th December 2008
Under: SAA2009, archival community, digitization, interface design, learning technology, outreach, software, virtual collaboration, web 2.0 | 4 Comments »
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As has been reported around the web today, Google is now digitizing and adding magazines to Google Book Search. This follows on the tails of the recent Google Life Photo archive announcement.
I took a look around to see what I could see. I was intrigued by the fact that I couldn’t see a list of all the magazines in their collection. So I went after the information the hard way and kept reloading the Google Book Search home page until I didn’t see any new titles displayed in their highlighted magazine section. This is what I came up with, roughly grouped by general topic groupings.
Science and technology:
Lifestyle and city themed:
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Posted on 10th December 2008
Under: access, digitization, future-proofing, historical research, information visualization, interface design, journalism, search | 10 Comments »
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As part of his portion of our SAA 2008 panel in San Francisco, Max Evans demonstrated his prototype for a new way to view an EAD finding aid. You can download his presentation from the SAA’s site: Finding Aids for the 21st Century: The Next Evolution.
Max’s prototype of Susa 2.0 is now online! He asked that I make sure you know it works best (showing all the intended mouse over text for links) with Internet Explorer version 6.0. The prototype presents the finding aid of the Susa Young Gates Papers from the Utah State Historical Society. His design tackles the major issues that plague large finding aids normally displayed in traditional single page layouts. Anyone who has looked at a large finding aid online has had the experience of being scrolled down somewhere in the middle and realizing they have no idea what they are looking at. What folder is this item in? What box is this folder in? Am I reading through a list of letters from 1950 or are these the ones from 1970?
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Posted on 8th December 2008
Under: EAD, SAA2008, interface design, software | 1 Comment »
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This afternoon I realized that I had passed a new landmark here on Spellbound Blog - I have published over 100,000 words! 100,208 words in 137 posts to be exact (thank you TD Word Count plugin).
Since I managed to miss my 2 year blogiversary back in July, this seems like a fine time to thank you all for sticking with me and giving me such great feedback over the past 2+ years. Since my Happy Birthday post in July of 2007, Google Analytics tells me that I have had 14,901 unique visitors to my blog from 139 different countries and territories and Feedburner tells me that I have over 400 subscribers to my RSS feed.
So, thank you everyone for giving my posts some of your precious time. Now, onward to 200,000 words!
Image Credit: 100,000 Miles by Melissa Doroquez via Flickr.
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Posted on 23rd November 2008
Under: blogs | 2 Comments »
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In news that would make any fan of old photographs drool, the Official Google Blog has announced that the LIFE Photo Archive is now available on Google Image Search. The LIFE Photo Archive’s home page is neatly organized to encourage you to browse for images by decade, famous people and topics.
There really is something for everyone here. I picked this striking image of Martha Graham because I love modern dance, but there are also images of war, fashion, sports, landscapes, architecture and tons more. The images currently posted stretch from the 1750s through 2003 and include many that have never before been published.
It is also worth noting that not everything in this collection is a photograph. I found illustrated pages from books like the Queen Summer by Walter Crane. I also found illustrations like this one of the ancient temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Turkey.
From the text in Google’s blog post, it sounds as if Google is doing the digitizing - while LIFE Inc (or their parent company Time Inc) will profit from the sale of prints. The current posted photos represent 20% of all the photos. Ultimately the photo archive is expected to be about 10 million images and stretch to the present day.
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Posted on 22nd November 2008
Under: controlled vocabularies, digitization, funding, metadata, photography, search | 1 Comment »
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My work now includes more SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work and so I have added SEO focused blogs to my RSS feedreader. Today I spotted Search Engine Land’s post Business Opportunities For Video News Archives. Stephen Baker calculates that 35 years worth of archive footage equals 51,100 hours of content per station. With approximately 20 stations per broadcast group he estimates a cost of $30 million per group to digitize each broadcast group’s archive of news footage. See the original article for more details on his calculations.
He then proposes 3 approaches to monetizing these efforts and leveraging the resulting digitized video:
- Media-Centric Wikipedia - complete with an expectation that social media contributions would provide “scalable way for creating editorial metadata, such as descriptions and story summaries that would be costly to otherwise create”. This makes me think of Flickr Commons for video.
- Education Site - akin to NBCU’s iCue site I mentioned in my post about NBC News Archive footage on Hulu. “Efforts like this provide educational/subscription opportunities as well as sponsorship/advertising opportunities—what advertiser doesn’t want to get in front of 13 - 18 year olds?”
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Posted on 14th November 2008
Under: digitization, journalism, preservation, video, virtual collaboration | 1 Comment »
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After reviewing the results of the ArchivesNext poll that Kate was so kind to organize, I created a Delicious account for Spellboundblog. Then I got to the hard part - sorting through my previously private list of bookmarks and separating personal bookmarks from ‘on topic’ bookmarks to share with the Spellbound Blog community (such as there is one). I had never really sat down and re-examined my tagging strategy. It was a very interesting experience. I cleaned up my tags (like combining the ‘photo’ and ‘photos’ tags into a single photos tag) and deleted some dead links I found by accident.
I found some useful tools along the way:
- Cocoalicious - a Mac only desktop tool for working with and exploring Delicious bookmarks
- Scripted Re-Mark - a web page that will generate a little javascript for you to use to bulk update your Delicious bookmarks. This means you can update up to 100 bookmarks at a time (the most you can show on a browser page at once in the Delicious interface). I used this to bulk update all my bookmarks from private to public after I was done with my review.
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Posted on 2nd November 2008
Under: archival community, learning technology, web 2.0 | No Comments »
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Thinking about politics, but waxing nostalgic for the good old days of movie stars and snappy jingles? Surf over to Hulu.com’s new gallery of Historic Campaign Ads. These are from iCue, which bills itself as “A fun, innovative learning environment built around the video from the NBC News Archives“.
And what would a political video blog post be without a political video? If you don’t see the video below, you can click through to view the I Like Ike ad from 1954 I chose for your viewing pleasure.
This is a great example of finding new audiences for material from archives. In this case, I had to dig for a while to discover that these were from the NBC News Archives. The Hulu iCue network/studio home page doesn’t really tell me anything - but you can imagine using a page like this to supply more information if you wanted to stress the archival origin of a set of videos.
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Posted on 28th October 2008
Under: access, digitization, interface design, journalism, video | 1 Comment »
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In honor of this year’s Blog Action Day theme of Poverty, I want to point people to examples of ways in which poverty is documented in archives, manuscript collections and elsewhere.
The most obvious types of records that document poverty are:
There are also organizations dedicated to research on poverty - such as the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research and National Poverty Center. The archival records from groups such as these could show ways that organizations have addressed poverty over time, as well as the history of poverty itself.
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Posted on 15th October 2008
Under: at risk records, diversity, future-proofing, historical research, outreach, preservation | No Comments »
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The Jewish year of 5769 began at sunset of September 29th, 2008. The Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) is a very reflective holiday, one in which individuals are encouraged to consider their own actions from the past year. It made me wonder what materials are available online to let us glimpse the celebration of Rosh Hashanahs long past.
A search in the Flickr Commons yielded this lovely Library of Congress image of women praying on the Brooklyn Bridge (likely participating in the ritual of Tashlikh).
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Collections & Archives has photos about Rosh Hashanah - including this optimistic card depicting a couple from the Fuerth displaced persons camp flying to Tel Aviv.
Yad Vashem has pulled together selections relating to Rosh Hashanah in an online collection called Marking the New Year.
I also found an assortment of treasures on the Internet Archive:
- A Jewish calendar for sixty-four years from 1838 “detailing the new moons, festivals, and fasts, with the sections of the law as read in the synagogues every Sabbath during the year; also the days on which the hour for commencing Sabbath is altered; together awith the corresponding Christian dates”
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Posted on 29th September 2008
Under: at risk records, digitization, outreach, photography | 3 Comments »
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