Sunday, August 13, 2006

Blog # 6: Website link

My website:
http://domin.dom.edu/students/carrlaur/LIS753/CPLLocalHistory.html
(Looks better in Internet Explorer!)

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Blog #5: Archives 2.0?

Thanks to Heidi K.’s excellent post on blogs, and some archives-related blogs in particular, I was directed to Archivemati.ca . This is a very interesting blog, maintained by Peter Van Garderen, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, who is “studying the enabling technologies and practices that can enhance the access and use of digital archives.” Very cool, Peter. A recent post of his highlighted The Next Generation Finding Aid Project.

Anyone interested in working in an archives or special collections really needs to check this out. Admittedly, I got a bit jealous as I was reading the specifics of the project. Why does it seem like everyone else gets to do all the fun stuff? The project was established by Elizabeth Yakel of the University Of Michigan School Of Information (she is very well known in the archival education realm, and UM is one of the best archives programs in the country – so this doesn’t surprise be a bit). Here’s her philosophy:

Yakel sees current online finding aids to be inadequate, merely reproducing paper finding aids without taking advantage of their electronic environment. The digital realm allows for quick searching, interlinking, participation and collaboration, and interfaces beyond text, techniques a paper finding aid cannot do. While many repositories and archives employ EAD (or encoded archival description) in their online finding aids, no one has yet to take full advantage of all of the properties that EAD has to offer. Thus, we sought to expand the capability of EAD, make the archival and research experience collaborative and participatory, and challenge the traditional finding aid structure. emphasis mine


For those of you not familiar with EAD, it is the standard way for archivists to get their finding aids on the web. Think of it as the online library catalog for manuscript collections. This project (which features the Polar Bear collections and the Bentley Library of the University of Michigan – documenting the soldiers involved in the U.S. military intervention in northern Russia at the end of World War I) is attempting to enable finding aids to link to actual digitized content, allow for comments, and encourage researcher collaboration. How cool, and how Web 2.0! A quick browse through some of the material shows that the researchers who visit and use this collection are really into the features. I saw a comment by one user whose grandfather was a “polar bear,” praising the site and also asking for anyone else to contribute further information. Another user offered the Archives more material relating to one of the soldiers featured in the collection, which if in fact donated, will round out the Archives' collection for this particular soldier.

Elizabeth Yakel and her team are to be congratulated. I hope that other archives programs out there begin to follow suit. As I read so much about Library 2.0, I have often felt that the archives profession better hurry up and jump on the bandwagon before they get left behind. Unfortunately, I often feel as if the user's needs get pushed pretty far down the list of priorities in many archives. The emphasis is often on the protection and integrity of the records, and while I realize that this is very important, these concerns often eclipse consideration of access and user satisfaction.

I feel a little better now, and who knows, maybe we can even start touting Archives 2.0!