User Curation of the Archive
User curation of the archive helps people feel connected with the archive and its contents. Involving non-academics in the archives is important for the continued existence of an instituation and the collection, the value of which exists partly in the memories of people and in the objects themselves. I learned from genealogy that people only preserve what they care about, and that people care about things when they have meaning, and stories give artifacts meaning.
The context becomes a bigger and bigger net as it grows, bringing in more people from search engines. The effect of this net can be powerful, as I learned soon after getting on the web in 1995. I put a collection of family photographs from the middle 19th century online and within a few months several relatives of the people in the photographs had found them and made contact with me. After over 120 years of separation. This was when the web was very small, the users a very small percentage of the population. My idea to cast a net with the pictures and captions had brought in the catch I desired, helping to identify individuals in the images and reconstruct the family history, both photographic and genealogical.
I was intrigued by a project Social Media Classroom. It shares features with ones we envision for Folkstreams, as a platform for creating access to archives, but we also recognize that our site is mostly used in the classroom and that features of our site are shared with features of a classroom, such as the "contexts" accompanying our films, including transcripts.
Archives will, through online access, become an integral extension of the classroom. There will be less of a distinction between archives and classroom (and the public).
Labels: archives, classroom, education, school, social media, social networking, social web, web development, webtwopointoh