Archive Advent

A brief return to blog about the lovely advent calendars that lots of archives have put together this year.

• House of Fraser Advent Calendar from Glasgow University Archive Services
• RBS Advent Calendar from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Archives
• University of Nottingham Advent Calendar from Manuscripts and Special Collections Department
• University of Stirling Advent Calendar from University of Stirling Special Collections
• Wolverhampton Advent Calendar from Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies
• University of Liverpool Advent Calendar from Special Collections & Archives
• Maritime Archives and Library Advent Calendar from Merseyside Maritime Museum

[Image from here]

Your paintings

Love this!  Not really archives but a great use of tagging and sharing of collections.

Your Paintings is a joint project between the Public Catalogue Foundation and  the BBC with participation from organisations across the UK.

The project is:

A website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.

Ask Archivists Day 9th June

Ask Archivists day has kicked off.

You can see a snazzy visualisation of the questions being asked via this twitter fountain

Ask Archivists Day

This Thursday (9 June 2011) is Ask Archivists Day on Twitter!!

The aim of the day is that:

On that day everybody can ask questions to archivists in the world on Twitter. The main goal of the Twitter event #AskArchivists is to get more attention for archives and their collections and to know what archivists like about their profession. And ofcourse that archivists and people on Twitter can get directly into contact with eachother. Through Twitter, archivists inform their followers about events, new collections, publications and other things worth knowing. They also keep in touch with their colleagues about their profession. People on Twitter can ask questions, give tips and can retweet interesting archive tweets.

Its been organised by Ask Archivists who have a twitter account (naturally) and a blog where you can find out more.  There are also some great youtube videos and presentations on slideshare including this one:

Ideas on how to promote #AskArchivists

View more presentations from Arkivformidling

23 Things for Archivists

I discovered this blog thanks to a listserv email from Peter K and its great.  Put together by the SAA's Reference, Access and Outreach section (who incidentally have their own blog)

23 Things for Archivists is "an online program designed to help archivists learn about some of the most commonly used social media (or Web 2.0) tools."

There are 23 things aimed at beginners which include blogging, facebook apps, online timelines and creative commons. But there are also Things 24-46 for intermediate type things and a section for the future Things 47+.

This is a really great way for Archivists to take control of their own knowledge about these tools, keep up to date with advances in technology (I'm off to check out some of the online timeline tools) in a clear and organised way.  Each thing has a post which gives an overview, examples, resources and tasks to try yourself.

RCAHMS and Canmore

Beyond Text have interviewed Rebecca Bailey (Head of Education and Outreach, RCAHMS) and Michela Clari (Researcher, Edinburgh University) about the potential impact of social media on archives with a focus on Canmore which was opened up in 2009 to allow public contributions either as new images or comments on existing images.

Read more about it on RCAHMS.

One Day Diary event for Mass Observation Archive

Today (Thursday 12th May*) is the day that the Mass Observation Archive are asking for people across the UK to keep a diary of their day and donate it to the archive.  Read about it on their website here.

Thanks for Kathryn at Archives and Auteurs for the info about this and the tweets from MassObsArchive on twitter for reminding me about it and prompting this post.

Incidentally Faber has a series of Mass Observation books, including one on the May 12th 1937 diary day.

* Due to blogger breaking this post was delayed :(

UKAD Forum

Grea summary from Kathryn over at Archives and Auteurs on the UK Archives Discovery Network (UKAD) forum meeting held last week. Go read it here now, there's links to presentations and everything.