A vital interest of mine is access to archives. I've been interested in the possibilities inherent in the web and network for increasing access to archives and enabling a greater number of non-academics to browse, organize and surface archive holdings. One of the most significant ways of exposing the holdings of an archives is blogging the contents.
We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds.
Illustration Art
All Edges Gilt
If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that would be. I don't know if people will do this, but I do know that ordinary people have a lot to contribute. Academics cannot know everything, they are an isolated individual, no matter how expert they are, and there is a very Long Tail out there of family members, amateur historians, hobbyists and who knows who that know something about cultural and historic artifacts. Maybe they will be willing to contribute. It will likely be only two percent, like Wikipedia authors, but that small percentage can do a lot of good.
As an aside, author and developer Liam Quin has a site, fromoldbooks.org which has great potential to provide fodder for bloggers. The interface to this digital archive of old book scans is easier to use and better than ones I've seen institutions deploy.
I wonder, also, if this phenomena is not somehow similar to the Cinematheque, not just an archive, but concerned that people actually view or interact with the artifacts.
We really haven't got there yet, but I've noticed a small trend, which I hope signifies the beginning of exponential growth, of people blogging artifacts. I do not remember the first site I came across where a blogger was posting pictures of artifacts, usually photographs from an online catalog of a museum, but here are some recent finds.
Illustration Art
All Edges Gilt
If we could just get every artifact in the world's museums and archives photographed or scanned and online, give the tools to blog the contents to millions of ordinary people interested in telling the stories of these cultural objects, think of how rich that would be. I don't know if people will do this, but I do know that ordinary people have a lot to contribute. Academics cannot know everything, they are an isolated individual, no matter how expert they are, and there is a very Long Tail out there of family members, amateur historians, hobbyists and who knows who that know something about cultural and historic artifacts. Maybe they will be willing to contribute. It will likely be only two percent, like Wikipedia authors, but that small percentage can do a lot of good.
As an aside, author and developer Liam Quin has a site, fromoldbooks.org which has great potential to provide fodder for bloggers. The interface to this digital archive of old book scans is easier to use and better than ones I've seen institutions deploy.
I wonder, also, if this phenomena is not somehow similar to the Cinematheque, not just an archive, but concerned that people actually view or interact with the artifacts.
Update: Shorpy is a commercial site, which shows how successful blogging the archives can be. The site appears to have developed a following, with, I imagine, readers checking in each day to see what new photographs are posted. The blogger acts as curator by selecting images that will be of interest to the readers. Arranging them into albums, possibly by narrative (using Tabloo would be a good way to achieve this).
This fits exactly with the idea of people being able to easily find images of their local area in the past and the idea of "blogging the archives" at its most simplest and effective. The power of simply posting images and their captions, without any commentary, is surprising. It is encouraging to see people are interested and willing to participate in the interpreation and "unpuzzling" of old photographs. One of the pleasures of old photographs is rediscovering what lies behind the mysteries the images present.
Comments
Institutions sometimes seem to have search interfaces designed by professional image searchers familiar with the collection, and almost useless to anyone else; others seem to be interested in "monetizing the collection" or see the Web as an advert, not a way to make something really useful. But times are changing, and people who were children when the Web was invented are starting to have more influence, as they grow older.
Liam
The site would be supported by revenue from selling prints of the pictures to people who were from those places or to researchers. I could never see a way to reasonably achieve this. In the late 1990s many of these small societies were still using a mimeograph and didn't even have a computer, let alone be required to scan their photograph collection, resize image, upload and catalog them.
The site would split the revenue from the prints, a portion to keep the site running and the rest for the institution. They are usually strapped for funds so I thought it would be a good way to support them and help maintain their local archives (I am a big believer in in-situ preservation).
Online printing services like Mpix and others did not exist then to fulfill the prints. Now, every photo sharing site has this capability. It would have required a lot of capital and resources to do this for such a niche market. With sites like Flickr and others, a small organization can probably now do what I envisioned themselves without a site devoted to just this purpose.
I would like see a collection editable by anyone who happens to enjoy the archives and know something about the cultural artifacts. I hoped that we could put a wiki up on Folkstreams and encourage people in the areas and cultures our films come from to contribute their perspectives and memories, but it mostly collected spam.
I'm not sure most people will participate in curating archives, but there are always a few individuals in any family who collect the stories, the family history, photographs, etc. or local historians who may be part of the 2% who contribute.
Perhaps that is asking too much and maybe cultural artifacts could be freely annotated and curated by ordinary people or by academics through the thumbs up/thumbs down process or other systems. The Library of Congress began posting images to Flickr recently. They have had a good response from ordinary people commenting and annotating pictures from what I've seen.
The steve.museum (ironically named) project is close to realizing this kind of interaction. I posted there about other ways of curating, such as organizing archives by narratives or using video games to explore archives.
I'm not an archivist by the way, so I'm pretty much working outside their universe (Folkstreams was founded and operated by outsiders). The archivists are catching on, as you say.