Campers

Katy Meyers
Omeka-run online museum for the MSU campus archaeology program
Goal: online exhibit to lok at twhat the program has done, locations, objects found, and they relationship with the MSU

Mita Williams
How we deal with individual silos in collections: digital collections, books, etc.
Discovery layers in the library
- relevancy is difficult
- choosing the right result
- how to bring local content up
leddy by design: http://infoservices.uwindsor.ca/leddywebdev/
jamun – http://showcase.uwindsor.ca:8888/jamun/

Amanda Sikarskie and Justine Richarson Quilt Index
quiltindex.org
Any institution that has quilt collection can add the info on their wiki

GradHacker: Katy Meyers, Alex Galarza, Micalee Sullivan
gradhacker.org
Planning to introduce this to various conferences. Looking for content.

Megan McCullen – Alma College
Alma is planning on conference on human rights.
Invite sessions on human rights in relation to the moral & ethics session.

Harriett Green
Project Bamboo – http://www.projectbamboo.org/
Collab w/ institutions; looking for researches on digital collections.

Amanda French
THATCamp – http://thatcamp.org
Use Wordpress MultiSite; your THATCamp site can be hosted there.

Rebecca Bizonet
MakerFaire 2nd in Detroit Henry Ford
July 30-31st

Dejah Rubel & Randal Baier
Gordy Motown Collections
http://merlyn.emich.edu/archon/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=19

This is not an easy topic. Different schema from archivist, museum, and library’s perspectives.

Awesome collection stuff that we talked about:

OhioLink EAD
http://ead.ohiolink.edu/

Archives of Amsterdam

http://stadsarchief.amsterdam.nl/english/

CWRU Rocket Science collections
http://library.case.edu/ksl/collections/special/manuscripts/rocket/rocket.html

Newberry Library Manuscripts and Archives collections
http://www.newberry.org/collections/mssarch.html

Gordy Motown Collections
http://merlyn.emich.edu/archon/index.php?p=collections/controlcard&id=19

Powerhouse Museum, Australia
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/

I’d like to poke some brains about context preservation.

For the last couple of years or so, I’ve been intrigued by the concept of context preservation. It happens whenever I check our web log server and see a big spike on a certain page on our website, or when there are many page requests coming from a certain domain/area. What’s going on that day? What makes this particular page suddenly so popular on that day? Did one of the librarians post bibliographic instruction? Has somebody added a link to our web page and announced it somewhere?

The news that the Library of Congress will archive public tweets is also intriguing, especially when researchers or anthropologists start poring over the content and trying to make any sense of the myriad things people shared on Twitter. How to make sense of a conversation when it’s done between somebody with public tweets and another who has his Twitter account protected (and thus his tweets are not archived by the Library of Congress)? Do any of the hashtags make any sense at all? When a hastag is trending, does it get captured and preserved, too?

My questions about context preservation have more to do with how scholarly communication seems to change. In addition to the traditional methods (writing journal articles and presenting at conferences), the communication is also happening in multiple, simultaneous channels such as unconferences, blogs, social media, even THATCamp. There is a high volume of relatively unorganized information, due partly to the preference for spontaneity. There are users who want to make personal connections across broader and broader groups. Discourse will take in multi-directional conversations. Given that trend, how do we preserve the context of information or conversations?

Terry Brock’s (@brockter) blog post, Remembering the People Behind the Things, nicely explains context preservation from an archaeological perspective.  Many of you probably already know about this YouTube video about the Beatles, 1000 years later.  This is a fake video, but it points out precisely the problem of interpreting what’s happening in the past.

P.S. I can’t resist including this as well: Turtles have it figured out. http://xkcd.com/889/