I'm off to the conference tomorrow, a little nervous right now but pleased I'm speaking first thing as I'll be able to relax and enjoy the other presentations (SOA 2008 programme). Who knows perhaps next year we'll have a conference wiki like the Americans....
Nina has put together suggestions for activities you can do depending on whether you can commit 1-5, 5-10, 10-20 hours a week to Web 2.0 activities. These range from adding content about your organisation to existing sites and starting a blog to managing community websites.
This post shows that there is an entry point to Web 2.0 for everyone, even if you can only spare an hour a week and don't know what html is.
So, you've taken the time to set up a blog, put images on flickr and record some podcasts, now what? You need to share all your hard work and encourage others to spread the word about your fantastic resources.
The main way to do this, particularly for blogs and podcasts is to set up a subscription option for your site, known as a web feed, one of the most popular options is the RSS feed. This will allow your users to subscribe and receive notifications when new information is published. This tool helps to increase the immediacy of providing new information and means that users do not have to keep checking your site for new content.
The national archives has RSS feeds for its news, document releases and podcasts pages.
It is also useful to give users the option to add a link to your site to their own websites, facebook pages or blogs. There is a tool that you can use to do this called addthis which gives you an icon that users can click and choose to add a link to your website to a variety of locations. Mia Ridge has explained the value of using addthis on her website.A wee while ago Archives Next ran a poll to ask what ‘web 2.0′ service do you think has the most potential for archives? the results showed that the majority of people favoured flickr. I've put together the graph below to show how the other tools fared in the poll.
My personal favourite is still blogs but it was interesting to see what other people thought.
Discovered some new wikis today whilst finishing my slides. They are two quite different resources that have approached the idea of an archives wiki from different directions. The British Postal wiki is part of the official museum and archive web pages for users to contribute to whilst the Cornish wiki has been set up by users of archival resources and asks for contributions from archivists.
A part of the main British Postal Museum & Archives website has been set up as wiki pages to allow contributions and changes by users. It has been nicely organised and established so that it is very easy to add entries.
A wiki that has been set up to act as a central point for information about archival resources in Cornwall. This wiki is interesting in that it hopes "that those actually working within the archive repositories of Cornwall will be encouraged to contribute to and edit the pages relevant to those repositories and their collections."
Image by Paolo MargariThere is lots of advice on the Internet on how to use Web 2.0 technologies and also information about the possible legal and safety issues to consider. I've not gone into these on this blog as I am in no way an expert on them and I'm hesitant to tie myself up in circles trying to explain things I don't know about.
Instead I shall post links to useful guidance as and when I discover it.
© Blogger template Brooklyn by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008
Back to TOP
