Session 6 (outreach)

Symposium Chat - Session 6: Outreach, Saturday 3.30-4.30pm

Proposals

• Thompson
• Wilson
• Redwine (collaboration)
• Hinderliter
• Gueguen

Simon: Two issues to talk about: Training and Collaboration

Gretchen: We need to work together (within and between institutions).

• What is needed?
• What is successful?
  
  

Catherine H.: UK Web Archive. Has it been used for other things?

Dave: Not collaborative. Destined to do only what it does now. British Library will take it over and it will probably get smaller.

Fees:

Collaborators pay a small fee depending on size of data

Access is free

Aprille: Campus Case study on Univ of Michigan’s use of website archiving tool now on SAA website. Collecting strategy to now partly rely on web collection for campus publications.  http://www2.archivists.org/publications/epubs/Campus-Case-Studies (Michael Shallcross)

Seth: PeDALS project. Question of resource equity or inequity. How do you distribute cost for project?

Existing organizational framework in Triangle Research Libraries organizations. Some projects work, some others do not.

Gabby: Goodwill Industries has a computer museum. This is a good source of older media for accessing old disks. Hasn’t worked out a way to work with them, or build a relationship. Anyone here been outside of an institution with a “civilian partner?”

Peter: Stanford has punchcards in Gould collection. They have a friend at the computer museum so they were able to read the punchcards at the museum.

Mark: Collaboration at Yale across library units. Can they create an institutional shared space with equipment, software?

Dave: Real issue isn’t hardware, it’s expertise and knowledge to understand how to use those machines. Good to be somewhat unstructured, but some instructions like contract.

Brian: Can’t we learn from video folks? How did they put together their networks? They’ve been sharing equipment for years.

Susan: How can we manage our time when we share?

Erin: Can each person be an expert on a topic in shared lab?

Bradley: Three parties: create a third-party that can liaise between two institutions as a vendor. This will fit exiting funding model.

Gretchen: Example of one institution (UNC) thinking they will become a scanning center and serve as a vendor to other institutions.

Peter: Stanford does use vendors, if they can find them. 5.25” floppies, punchcards can be hard to find them. Hiring is difficult but outsourcing can be easier.

Simon: Organizations trust us with paper, so assumed they automatically trust us with digital. We need to make an effort to explain the importance of capturing data earlier and how long it takes to process collections.

Gretchen: Libraries need PR staff member to do PR.

Tom: Search engine optimization. This is a way to get more people to know about us. You can use data analytics to learn where people are coming from.

Aprille: Wikipedia is another way to get traffic.

Urchin, Google Analytics but there can be issues with this when working with a handle server

Ricc: Over 10,000 unique visitors per month to their blog. They have two full-time staff to work on blog (one who is devoted specifically to social media). You can get wikipedian to write about your collections.

Helen: Some of their collections aren’t on Wikipedia at all. They don’t have time to make entries, but they would like to.

Ricc: Find out where people want to go and be there: Wikipedia and Flickr

Ed: They had ideas on how they would use items on Flickr, but it wasn’t the commuity of interest they wanted. It’s a lot of overhead to get community stimulated.

Gretchen: One of their photos ended up on the Glen Beck program from Flickr. ECU had a collection of a newspaper photos. Newspaper wrote about it and linked to website. Website traffic increased. User comments included changes to metadata.  Made a decision to put comments in metadata (community interaction). Doing local history collection is great way to get locals on your radar.

Gabby: Think in terms of professional outreach. Lectures to classes about work with electronic records. Excites undergrads that archives and digital world can meet.

Susan: One of their graduate trainees did a talk about her project at Bodleian and got great reviews.

Matt: Speak to other organizations like digital humanities at their conferences. There is a meeting at MIT this weekend (on twitter) on digital literature with panels on archives and cultural memory. There’s more that can be done to talk to writers about what archives means in digital collections.

Dave: Recognize enthusiasm of undergraduates. Students do work in institution and it’s interesting to talk to them about the work that they are doing. It’s clear that “passion for working with digital material is unbounded.” Counter to that: they are talking about working with digital material in a narrow concept. Aware of format migration, obsolescence, emulation v. migration but unaware of why they would want to work with digital material.

Helen: One lecture about digital stuff. No practical training.

Gretchen: Posts about Day in the Life of Digital Archiving. Way to brand what we are doing.

“Ask an Archivist” is about to happen.

What to teach in courses? Attitude, enthusiasm, willing to learn. Time limited in courses. Literature can be overwhelming. Number of tools can be daunting.

Ricc: A sponsor site for IMLS grant on preservation. Start with assumption that students may not have gotten to point to discuss literature. Start with 4 days of reading. Second, start with specific tasks that is research oriented because you can’t get away from research in this profession.

Bradley: Need to work with curriculum development people at LIS schools.

What skills do we need? Look at SAA New Skills for a Digital Era. Look at Jackie Dooley’s  report that is coming up.

Wrap-up and Moving Forward