Cross blogging with "The Wilder Side of Archives."
I think you may be dead on in your concerns Michelle, and theres also the question of managing what may be one of the "wildest" user communities that ever existed!
The University of California, Santa Cruz Campus will digitize materials from its Grateful Dead Archive and make them available in a unique and cutting-edge Web site, the Virtual Terrapin Station. The Virtual Terrapin Station will provide access to Grateful Dead Archive materials and tools to facilitate public contributions to the archive. This project will enable the university to convert a significant part of a traditional archive to digital form and make it available online while simultaneously experimenting with the impact of fostering, creating, and curating a large, socially constructed archive. The project will develop a click-through permissions form for content contributors and will extend the reach of the Grateful Dead Archive to the academic research community. It will also implement and contribute to the development of the IMLS-funded exhibition tool, Omeka
Details are sketchy so far on how this project will roll out, but what we do know is UC Santa Cruz was awarded $615,175 (match: $795,549) in an effort that appears to include a social component.
Socially interactive collections are the holy grail of Web 2.0 digital archives. We all dream that we will be able to go online, and our users will naturally form a self sustaining user group which will then generate additional interest, fill in gaps in our accessions, make us generally famous in the academic world, and (we hope), generate new donor leads. The constant of creating these interactive collections however, is that they require more resources to moderate over time then a library or museum can usually afford, and there is no guarantee that a user population will latch on to the collection and make it bloom.
Many of these concerns are erased in the Santa Cruz Grateful Dead archive. The Grateful dead user community is as eager and active online as it was when the dead were still touring. The Internet Archives vast collection of audio files http://www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead has no shortage of user input, and the reviews are as prolific as they are factually accurate and informative. A collaboration or crossover into that storehouse should provide an additional flow of informed users that in turn, will supplement what the press releases are calling a "Socially constructed" archive, in a structure that looks like it will function like a wiki. The immediate question I have is, how much of their resources is Santa Cruz willing to hand over to policing these content contributors? It seems to me that the context of the Grateful Dead archive demands a hands off policy. How much control over user input will there be and what I wonder are the policies concerning moderating user input? In a community where a vast number of outside hobbyist users will have a stunning (and occasionally controversial) historical and cultural memory of the collection, how will users react to stringent rules by academics?
Grateful Dead donates archives to UC Santa Cruz.
No comments:
Post a Comment