ICA-Atom

A new option for those looking to use an open source alternative for archival description has been released.  The ICA-Atom is a project from the International Council on Archives which provides a software to help and encourage institutions to make their archival holdings available online.  Of course as an ICA project it is fully compatible with and based on ICA standards.

It is still in beta release at the moment but it is great to have another option, more information about the project is available here and it looks good so go check it out.

Scotland's Places

A new "mash-up" resource has been created by the National Archives of Scotland and the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments.  It is called Scotland's Places and it allows you to search by a location and then bring up information about the said place from these resources:

• Maps and plans of cities, towns, villages, farms, roads, canals, harbours, churches, schools, public buildings, private houses, mines and quarries.
• Photographs of the built environment in The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland.
• Archaeological reports on historic and prehistoric sites.
• Manuscript records and printed books from millions of pages in government and private records, including tax rolls, owners of land and heritages, and the annual reports of county Medical Officers of Health.

 This is one of those sites that you can lose hours in.

Make the Internet work for you

That was the jist of my final slides from last week and I think it would be my main tip for anyone struggling to think about how to fit web 2.0 into their working day, particularly blogging.

The simplest way to make the Internet work for you, is to create a start page.  This is an example of the one I use in my job for the Ballast Trust.

A start page is the page that appears when you open up a web browser and you can set one up with several different providers like igoogle, netvibes or bloglines.  By using a start page you can customise what content you see and subscribe to news feeds or rss feeds to ensure that content is pushed to you rather than you having to go around various different website to check if anything new has been posted.

On your start page you might have:

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  Email - this lets you see new enquiries or comments sent to your blog.
  
  
  
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  Bookmarks - browse useful websites or articles that you have saved previously, it can be useful to have a bookmark for items that you think will make good posts for your blog.
  
  
  
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  Reader - this feature lets you read the new posts from blogs you've subscribed to and perhaps prompt you to comment on them.
  
  
  
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  Flickr stream - this can show you new activity on your flickr account.
  
  
  
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  News feeds - you can subscribe to existing ones like the TNA feed or set up feeds for specific subjects like "literary archives", or "shipbuilding scotland".  This can help you keep blog posts and your work current and relevant.
  
  
  

Obviously a start page will only be as good as the information that you subscribe to and decide to put on it, so you need to make an effort in the beginning to find other sources of information that you can work off and related blogs or rss feeds.  Once it is set up though it should be easier to make it part of your daily life, particularly if you have to look at it every morning!

Web 2.0 and Archives

Web 2.0 and Archives

View more presentations from Kiara King.

New presentation

On Friday I was in Hawick to do a short presentation about Web 2.0 for Archives and more specifically to talk about the blogs that I use for work. These are the Ballast Blog and when I'm at Glasgow University the Archive Services section of this blog.

I've put my slides up on slide share so they are now available here.

One of the things I did differently for this presentation was try to explain how I attempt to work blogging and other web 2 activities into my daily routine. This seemed to be quite useful so I'm going to write it up as a separate series of posts this week for this blog.

The other presentation that morning was about the Scottish Borders Archive and their blogs, voyage of the vampire and my diary and my secret. These are two great blogs based on the diary of George Henry Scott Douglas and the diaries and letters of his sister Hannah Charlotte Douglas.

If we build it, will they come?

Joy Palmer has written an excellent article about Archives 2.0 in the July edition of Ariadne. The article 'Archives 2.0: If We Build It, Will They Come?'

It got me thinking about whether I've focused too much on the tools of web 2.0 rather than the ideas and I think I'll definitely take on board some of Joy's ideas for a presentation I'm doing in a few weeks at Hawick.

There is also some discussion about it on the forum of the Archives 2.0 ning site here if you want to join in.

SOA Conference

The Society of Archivists' conference is happening this week down in Bristol. I posted a while back about the web 2.0 aspects that they were introducing this year. Before the conference begun, the blog was used to give people an opportunity to ask questions for some speakers ahead of time (see this post for Tim Padfield's session).

Since the conference actually started though the trickle of posts on the blog have increased and I'm now receiving regular posts through my reader about the different presentations. So a big thank you to Jenny (Hon Sec) and the other authors for getting these posts up, I've found them very useful.

So if you'd like to know what's happening at the conference and weren't able to attend in person, check out the blog or twitter feed.