Is This the 21st Century?
I recently attended the OCLC CAPCON meeting in Washington, DC. The topic was social networking. There were some entertaining presentations, most notably the one highlighting OCLC's new Sharing, Privacy, and Trust in Our Networked World report. My "aha!" moment at the meeting came from the presenter who reminded us that social networking is a default action of human nature. Reading a book and discussing it is a form of social networking. All that has changed, in many ways, is the way that we network.
Inspired by the talks, I returned to the office and vowed to spend a few minutes every day evaluating how people communicate on the web. My main goal is to try to figure out how archivists might use these 21st century tools to reach out to our users. Some of my colleagues and I have been talking for the past year of making a movie to put on YouTube. What it would look like and what it would tell people is still unclear.
I joined Facebook. After two weeks, I have eight friends. All except one are librarians or archivists. I am not entirely clear how Facebook can help reach out to users, but I sense that its strengths lies in its applications. I've added several to my profile, including "Cities I've Visited." This allows me to pin on a map every city I've ever visited, and so far, I have 112. This makes me proud. And I willingly sat for about half an hour pinning them all. Imagine if we could develop some tool that would introduce people to archives in such a way. I found out that the Harry Potter character I most resemble is Hermione Granger. As a reward for filling out a five question-survey, a picture of Hermione Granger now appears on my profile, letting everyone know how cool I am. If I want, I can have quotes from the Doctor Who series appear in my profile automatically, set up a daily romance horoscope, and rate my favorite beers.
I can also allow access to my own visual bookshelf, which turns out to be a very popular item. People like contests and points an incentives. What about an application to rate your favorite archives? Or have a manuscript a day appear on your profile?
I know that digital library projects take time and cost money and manpower to do correctly. I know that Apple or Microsoft or Flickr or YouTube have computer programmers and money at their beck and call. But this is the 21st century. When I see how long it takes a digital library project to get off the ground, and what is involved in supplying correct metadata and preservation-quality images, I wonder, how much is worth it? Not that I don't think we shouldn't be digitizing. I'm all for it. What I wonder is how much we need to let go of our control in order to make more available. When I was a young one, I was sure that we'd be flying by the year 2000. I also thought that I'd be married to Paul McCartney. Turns out, that wasn't such a far-fetched idea - Heather Mills is only four years older than I am.
I have great respect for all the members of our profession who are working hard to improve access and to make archival materials useful and fun to our patrons. And I know it costs a lot of money to design iTunes or the Flickr upload tool. But boy are they easy to use. With a click of a mouse I can rearrange my music library 50 different ways. Who wouldn't want to have that option with an archival collection?
I feel like this is something that is on its way. I just hope I live to see it. Just like I hope I live to see flying cars on the Beltway.
Inspired by the talks, I returned to the office and vowed to spend a few minutes every day evaluating how people communicate on the web. My main goal is to try to figure out how archivists might use these 21st century tools to reach out to our users. Some of my colleagues and I have been talking for the past year of making a movie to put on YouTube. What it would look like and what it would tell people is still unclear.
I joined Facebook. After two weeks, I have eight friends. All except one are librarians or archivists. I am not entirely clear how Facebook can help reach out to users, but I sense that its strengths lies in its applications. I've added several to my profile, including "Cities I've Visited." This allows me to pin on a map every city I've ever visited, and so far, I have 112. This makes me proud. And I willingly sat for about half an hour pinning them all. Imagine if we could develop some tool that would introduce people to archives in such a way. I found out that the Harry Potter character I most resemble is Hermione Granger. As a reward for filling out a five question-survey, a picture of Hermione Granger now appears on my profile, letting everyone know how cool I am. If I want, I can have quotes from the Doctor Who series appear in my profile automatically, set up a daily romance horoscope, and rate my favorite beers.
I can also allow access to my own visual bookshelf, which turns out to be a very popular item. People like contests and points an incentives. What about an application to rate your favorite archives? Or have a manuscript a day appear on your profile?
I know that digital library projects take time and cost money and manpower to do correctly. I know that Apple or Microsoft or Flickr or YouTube have computer programmers and money at their beck and call. But this is the 21st century. When I see how long it takes a digital library project to get off the ground, and what is involved in supplying correct metadata and preservation-quality images, I wonder, how much is worth it? Not that I don't think we shouldn't be digitizing. I'm all for it. What I wonder is how much we need to let go of our control in order to make more available. When I was a young one, I was sure that we'd be flying by the year 2000. I also thought that I'd be married to Paul McCartney. Turns out, that wasn't such a far-fetched idea - Heather Mills is only four years older than I am.
I have great respect for all the members of our profession who are working hard to improve access and to make archival materials useful and fun to our patrons. And I know it costs a lot of money to design iTunes or the Flickr upload tool. But boy are they easy to use. With a click of a mouse I can rearrange my music library 50 different ways. Who wouldn't want to have that option with an archival collection?
I feel like this is something that is on its way. I just hope I live to see it. Just like I hope I live to see flying cars on the Beltway.
posted by irreverent archivist at 11/08/2007 10:07:00 PM
10 Comments:
I am an archivist on Facebook. If you want to be a friend I'm Linda Clark Benedict.
Also I was using IM with another Archivist in my region to help walk her through a problem with Archivist Toolkit. There are some great tools out there.
"What I wonder is how much we need to let go of our control in order to make more available."
What do you mean? Cataloguing/metadata standards should be thrown out? Just start throwing stuff out there and let whatever handy keyword pops into our brain at the moment?
Have you ever had to search a poorly designed website or database? There is a reason why these things take a great deal of time and money - there are many factors to consider when dealing with digitization. Just throwing something up on flickr (or facebook or whatever) is corroding the whole idea of scholarship and being able to FIND things where they have been cited.
You are overlooking a very important "thing" about Facebook. YOU are proud of the 112 cities you have visited. Do you really think anyone else does? Facebook is a tool to exhibit yourself, but not too many people are watching - they are too busy adding their own cities-I've-visited and books-I've-read to pay any attention to yours.
Re: Facebook, I think it can be useful for pushing library and archives services out to these sites. Like MIT libraries has created a widget of its search engine that people can post on their iGoogle homepage.
http://libraries.mit.edu/help/gadgets/google.html
The idea behind it is that MIT people who use iGoogle don't have to type in MIT's library website in order to search the collection. They can do it from their homepage on iGoogle. You could create something similar for Facebook.
Facebook, iGoogle, Netvibes, and other sites are part of this transition from a client-orientated desktop(where you access all your services from one computer) to browser-based one (where you can log in from any computer, hop on the web, and access your desktop from anywhere in the world). It's why people have a zillion shortcuts on their computer desktop--it's easier than burrowing into folders to gain access.
To anonymous,
I am not saying that standards need to be thrown out. I'm saying that we need to think long and hard about where we are sticklers and where we are not. Can we make do with minimum cataloging in some instances? Does everything that is digitized have to be described at an item level, or can we do more collection-level or folder-level based description for digital objects (as we do for paper objects). With archives especially, it is, for example, difficult to assign adequate subject headings to represent an entire archival collection. And because cataloging standards have changed in the past 30 years, and because the quality of a record differs from person to person, it is, for example, very difficult to find things in my institution's online catalog when I KNOW they exist and should be searchable under a certain topic. So I don't think cataloging and metadata standards as they exist at the moment are the be-all-end-all.
I think we will never advance unless people try new things. There are already projects underway where people are examining user-supplied tags to see how useful they are.
Re: Facebook and other social networking tools - it is true, most people don't really care about what cities I've visited. Except that several of my real-life friends who have "friended" me have a) commented on some of the cities to me in person and b) added the "Cities I've Visited" widget to their own profiles. This is what I'm talking about. Using Facebook and other tools as a way to get people to pass on the word, so to speak. And I would *hope* that people would look at the "Cities I've Visited" (or the "Archives I've Visited") and go ahead and create their own maps. Because it will raise awareness in the same way that an advertisement might. At least, that is how I have observed these tools working.
Jordon,
That MIT widget is exactly the kind of tool I am thinking of! I've also been playing around with iGoogle. For years, I resisted this type of tool, thinking that my browser bookmarks were easier to maintain. But iGoogle makes it easy to have all your places and news together in one place, and easily visible on one screen, which although may seem like it makes things jumbled, is actually easier (for me, anyway) to digest information.
There's another new Facebook feature, "Pages," that a lot of libraries are using to "put themselves out there," I see no reason why archives couldn't do the same.
I started out in the minimal processing camp, but the more I work with digital projects the more convinced I am that description to the item level is necessary, for once those objects go out onto the web, harvested by OAI, and to effectively manage and preserve those digital objects over time, item level is necessary.
The key to this, I think, will be automation of these processes, and that points back to another issue that seems to be endemic to the profession...we need more archivsts (or people with archival training) who are programmers, database designers, software engineers, information architects, graphic designers, photographers, statisticians, etc. I am a "seasoned amateur" as so many archivists are, and the deeper in I get, the more I see that this is just not enough, to the point that I'm now planning on going back to school in one or more of these areas.
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You mentioned pinning all the sites you visited on a map in Facebook and said, "Imagine if we could develop some tool that would introduce people to archives in such a way." There are two social maps for archivists out there I know of. One is for U.S. archivists and has 81 members, and one is new for local users of an archival site. Both are hosted on Archivopedia.com. This site is designed to reach not only librarians and archivists, but students, those doing history and genealogy research, and the general public.
Join the social maps:
http://archivopedia.com/_mgxroot/page_10743.html
look this is the "diet" i told you about you should really enter the site :) bye enter the site
What about creating a Google Earth or Maps application that tracks the location of archives with colored pinpoints? Each pin could represent different types of archives (i.e., academic, scientific, legal, etc.) and include a hyperlink to any web-related resources. A search function could search by name or type of archive and be filtered by state, city, zip code, and so forth.
Check out this website that tracks the locations of breweries and brewpubs:
http://beermapping.com/brewery-maps/us-brewery-map/
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