Blogging the Archives

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.

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.