Week 4: 6/12-6/18 Access and reference (Domain 3) Readings in Canvas Discussion post
Once upon a time, a small, county archives received an unexpected windfall of several thousand dollars. The staff held a roundtable discussion to decide how to extract the maximum value from the money.
Barbara thought it was about time the archives got serious about community outreach and proposed that the money be spent to purchase training materials (books, classes, consulting) to teach staff members how to set up a social media presence using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and/or Pinterest.
Erik argued instead that money be spent to create a series of videos that would provide a virtual tour of the archives, the collections, and even a training film to show potential patrons what to expect and how to get the most value out of visiting the archives. The archive could create its own YouTube channel and post the videos also to the existing website. Of course, the website would probably need to be redone as part of this idea.
Kevin liked the ideas of using social media and while he liked the idea of making videos, he reminded everyone that none of them had any experience filming and editing video footage. He suggested that creating a podcast backed with an RSS feed would meet the demands for an advocacy and outreach solution explaining how to use the archives could also be explained this way. And buying a decent USB microphone would be much cheaper than investing in video equipment and software.
Diana mentioned that she didn’t like Facebook's privacy policies but wasn’t opposed to creating a social media presence. She suggested that they create a blog using WIX. And everyone could be responsible for contributing articles, audio content, pictures, or even archival education materials to help community members understand how an archive works and how they can best make use of its collections.
The last to voice his opinion was Ambrose. Ambrose began by reminding everyone of the newsletter that was their collective project about 5 years ago. Only two issues were produced – because the articles dried up after 4 months. No one wanted to submit articles or be responsible writing things up. And so it ended. How could we be sure that social media wouldn’t be a repeat of the newsletter – initial enthusiasm was high but fell off rapidly within a few months.
Instead, he argued that they should create a finding aid that would make it easier to know what and where things were in the collections. To that end, he proposed that they should build a stand-alone wiki site using MediaWiki software and make it accessible via the website. The existing finding aid materials would be used to build the skeleton of the site and then it would be an easy source to add information to over time. Text and images would be searchable via the wiki search function.
After much deliberation, the group decided that their main emphasis as an archive should be on improving the finding aids with a portion of the money being used to develop a podcast that would be created in the form of a dialogue between the archival staff and/or invited guests to discuss topics related to the archives, how to make use of the archives, and interesting material to be found in the collections. To increase outreach, they tasked Ambrose with creating a page on Wikipedia for the archives, they worked with the local public library to create a display of items from the archives and worked with a busy local restaurant in town promote community awareness of the archive and its collection.
A tech-savvy local librarian worked with the archival staff and taught them the basics of using the MediaWiki software in two-weekend training sessions. Within a month, the wiki site had become second nature to the staff and they were eager to expand the information contained on it. Pictures, text, and links to secondary resources were incorporated. Traffic to the website increased steadily and the link from Wikipedia to the archive website and wiki had the effect of increasing public awareness of the archives and public visits to the archive were up 5% from the previous year.
And they archived happily ever after…
For maximum reference value, I think the use a wiki or similar system provides a collaborative platform with a primary emphasis on organizing and creating foundation content – lists, descriptions, image galleries, finding aid, etc. – that can then be used by non-experts in creating graphically more expressive layouts using social media tools. This solid but prosaic foundation can support the independent use of the data by archival staff, third parties, or computers.
And thinking longer term, as machine learning algorithms become more accessible, having structured data readily available will make machine processing of the collection description more seamless and provide future value that we can’t yet imagine.
Below is a link to an exciting opportunity for librarians (and archivists) to learn the skills to do just what I’m describing above.
http://www.webjunction.org/explore-topics/wikipedia-libraries.html (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
Wiki examples below:
- http://www1.cpdl.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
- https://familysearch.org/wiki/en/Main_Page (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
- http://imslp.org/ (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
- http://lgbtarchive.uk/wiki/Main_Page (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
- http://archiveswiki.historians.org/index.php/Main_Page (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wikis (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.