More conferencing

            Here is the ticket that didn’t win any door prizes at the Southwest Archivist conference.  I never win anything.  Oh yes, there was one time when I was 12 and I won a gold fish at a carnival.  I remember both the goldfish and the winning fondly, but I digress.

            Other things I learned at the conference.  These are new terms, at least new to me, and new software mentioned at the conference

Wiki.  I could have figured it out if I’d thought about it.  One needs only to think of Wikipedia, the first and probably best wiki.   I never put wiki and archives together though at least not until I read Kate Theimer’s book Web 2.0 Tools and Strategies for Archives and Local History Collections (New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 2010).  I have now so I’m almost an authority.  For those of you who aren’t here is Wikipedia’s definition

 “ A wiki is a website which allows people to add, modify, or delete the

 content via a web browser usually using a simplified markup language

or a rich-text editor.” 

In the context of the conference, the presenters were referring to websites devoted to areas of archival management where individuals added and edited content. I should have known that. Duh!

Fanzine.  A fanzine is the publication of fans of a particular group or movement. Guess I was never a groupie. Anyway the fanzine collection they were talking about also was connected to a wiki.

Crowdsourcing is, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Wikipedia, “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.“ (http:// www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/crowdsourcing)  You use the internet audience to help with the task.  In this instance an archivist was using crowdsourcing to solicit donations of fanzines from unidentified online users and combining it with the sharing of ideas in a wiki. Wow!

Wayback Machine – Again according to Wikipedia a wayback machine is like Archive-It (see last post)– a method of harvesting and storing web pages and documenting their changes over set periods of time.  It was created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization, based in San Francisco

WIX – WIX is a website hosting and creating program.  The presenters claim that it is simple unlike Dreamweaver.  Since I have been fighting with Dreamweaver for at least a month now I’m intrigued.  I’d hate to admit failure with Dreamweaver, but simple is certainly alluring.

Standard Series - When a collection is processed it is arranged in series following the original order we talked about in a previous post. Series are quite simply headings that describe a group of similar papers.  I think of it as an outline, but this is an outline of physical papers.  You can have series of correspondence , which can be further divided into sent and received or personal and business.  Photographs could be another series, financial records, meeting minutes and so on.  In 2001 Waverly Lowell and Kelcy Shepherd received an award from the Society of American Archivists for the development of a standard series (or group headings) for architectural records.  These include groupings like drawings; plans; correspondence, business records.  I’m guessing here because I have not seen it nor have I worked with architectural records.  Guess I should investigate further if I’m going to volunteer to help process the Andrews Maya Collection.  Information about the Architectural Standard Series can be found at:  http://www.archivists.org/saagroups/archtec/standardseries.html.  There is a push in archives these days for standardization across collections and institutions.  Standard series provide one element in meeting that goal.

See what you can learn when you go to conference sessions.