Guest post

Another guest post for the UKLON Digital Curation blog, this time on how to make time to do web 2.0 in your working day.

Read it here.

Preserving 19th Century Newspapers

An interesting video from the people at Planets about the British Library project to digitise their 19th Century newpaper collection.  "The film is the first of four Planets case studies showing how national libraries and archives in Europe are using Planets tools to preserve large and valuable digital collections."


The video is also available on the Digital Preservation Europe youtube channel.

The Interactive Archivist

Another great resource I've recently discovered is the Interactive Archivist webpages created by the Society of American Archivists.  This site has general information about Web 2.0 and how archivists can use it, as well as descriptions about the different technologies and a bibliography for further reading.

The best thing about this site is the case studies.  At the moment there are 10 case studies covering all the different types of web 2.0 tools and technologies.  I find it very inspirational to read in detail how other organisations are using web 2.0 technologies and its great to get some information on how useful the experiments have been for that organisation.

What I particularly like about this resource is that the Society of American Archivists recognised that there was a gap in the existing literature and did something to help plug this gap.

Online class on Web 2.0 and Archives

Kate Theimer of the excellent archivesnext blog is holding an online class on Tuesday 13th October (6-7:30pm GMT) entitled "Introduction to Web 2.0 in Archives...or What You Need to Know in a Nutshell".

As well as her blog, Kate has also written a book on the subject so definitely knows what she is talking about and it looks like it will provide a good introduction and overview of the subject. More details are available on her blog here and on the Society of American Archivists' website here about the content and how to register.

Museums & the Web 2009

The 2009 conference Museums and the Web took place in Indianapolis on 15-18 April. This is a great resource for information about some of the best and most innovative projects in the museum world so I would recommend checking out the list of speakers and where applicable their papers here.

Some particularly relevant papers were:

"Time To Stop Doing and Start Thinking: A Framework For Exploiting Web 2.0 Services"

"Museums & Wikis: Two Case Studies" featuring the Science Museum Object Wiki and The British Postal Museum & Archive (BPMA) Wiki.

"Collection Effects: Examining the Actual Use of On-Line Archival Images"

Archival management - keep calm and carry on?

Managing archive collections is a pretty essential part of running an archive and being an archivist. Software helps do this better and faster and open source alternatives have opened up the options of what has traditionally been a fairly small market.

First the background reading. There was a very good and comprehensive report by CLIR on archival management software published in January 2009. There is also a wiki which emerged as a result of that report which should hopefully be updated with new developments. Both these resources explain much better the whys and hows and criteria so I'm not going to do that. I'll just point and link.

First up is the Archivist's Toolkit which states that its "main goals are to support archival processing and production of access instruments, promote data standardization, promote efficiency, and lower training costs." List of users includes New York University Archives and The Martin Luther King, Jr. Archive.

Next we have Archon (not the directory) but another software which is intended to "automatically publishes archival descriptive information and digital archival objects in a user-friendly website." User example - College of William and Mary

CollectiveAccess is another option and bills itself as " full-featured collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections." User example - Museum of Jewish Heritage

Flickr is a winner

Roy at HangingTogether brought my attention to this post on the Library of Congress blog about the success of their Flickr pilot project.

The full LC report is here but if you don't have time read the summary here.

Some stats from the pilot include:

• Within 24 hours of its launch the LC account had 1.1 million total views
• LC photos average approximately 500,000 views a month
• They have received over 10 million total views
• 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos

This report is very positive about the whole experience, has some good advice in it and is a brilliant example of what Web 2.0 can do for you. Show it to your boss!

Web 2.0 Guidance

Sometimes we all need a little guidance:

Finding guidance on how to start a blog isn't hard, it is more difficult to find something that addresses the issues that you might face if you're trying to do it for your organisation or answer questions from your boss.

That's why I was delighted to discover this excellent set of briefing documents from the folks at UKOLN on all things Web 2.0. They have lots on blogs and blogging and as its geared towards the cultural heritage sector it is more relevant than a lot of the advice out there about Web 2.0 in general.

At the moment they even have briefing papers on the use of blogs in libraries and museums so hopefully there will be one for archives soon...