Screens and RSS: Gathering Information or Another Form of Escape

A couple of weeks ago, I embarked again on another round of 23 Things as part of a program at Appalachian State University. The first "thing" was to create a blog, so I began writing in this blog again. "Thing 2" was to explore RSS feeds. I have been subscribed to a number of blogs relating to archives and also to Appalachian history and culture. The last time that I did this, I chose Google Reader mainly because it worked so well with my Google e-mail account. I have been following ArchivesNext, Confessions of a Curator, Derangement and Description, and Curiosities and Wonders all relating to archivists and special collections in some way. The last one mentioned, Curiosities and Wonders, is an interesting blog that highlights university archives collections at the University Archives.

My biggest problem with all of this is that I fail to check Google Reader to see the latest posts of the blogs that I am "following" which makes me wonder whether I have really been following them at all. This exercise did prompt me to check my Google Reader account and I learned all sorts of interesting things going on in the profession and at other archives. This is a useful tool if you treated it like reading the morning or evening paper. It makes it much easier than searching out the individual blogs each time. I just haven't been that disciplined.

In all of these exercises, I am reminded a something a friend related to me summarizing a quote from Wendell Berry about screens. Basically, he was warning about being so lost in screens (television and computer) as escapes that you lose touch with the local world that surrounds you. This is something that I worry about, and I yearn for the day when I won't have to carry a cell phone and be so connected. More and more my interest is turning local where I believe are the answers to many of our modern day problems--local food, local businesses, local products. I think that I still prefer a local community to a virtual community.

Blogs: If You Write It, Will Anybody Read It?

Here I am starting another round of "23 Things" with the first topic being blogs. I spent some time exploring how blogs are being used by archives and special collections. First, there were the official blogs of special collections and archives that announced events, new acquisitions, collections recently processed, or highlighted collections relating to a particular theme. It is a good alternative to a newsletter but reaches a smaller audience generally than a social networking application such as Facebook. However, it does give you the option of writing more substantial information about the event or collection than the social networking applications. Many organizations are using a combination of both or a combination of several Web 2.0 applications. An excellent example is the Deseronto Archives in Ontario.

Another group of blogs in the profession concentrate on professional practice and issues. Blogs in this second category can cover a variety of issues or concentrate on a single issue such as conservation or an audience category such as NewArchivists, aimed at archivists entering the profession. One that I try to follow is ArchivesNext, a blog that explores the use of the latest technology by archivists. For those less serious moments, I turn to Derangement and Description, a comical perspective to the archives profession. Finally, there are blogs that are written more from the personal perspective of the blogger. These are sometimes useful but some times fall into the category of "Who Cares." I have to admit that the last category describes my own personal blogging so far. I assumed no one would notice.

Blogs can be very useful to archival institutions, but you have to be aware that they have limited audience and require some effort to keep current. Bloggers often get weary of it and drop out for a few months or years or just stop.

The Deal: Appalachia and 23 Things

Sorry to be away for so long. The garden and canning and the new job have just consumed my life. I know--excuses, excuses. You can see the products of our labor in the picture to the right. This is just the "ready room." You should see the root cellar. Enough beans, corn, tomatoes, tomato sauce, pickles, grape juice, peaches, and potatoes to last through the winter. Those heirloom seeds really produced when gardens around us were doing nothing. Now it is time to dry some apples and put back some cider.

So, what brought me back to the blog? Today, after a long day, I learned that the library at Appalachian State University is launching a group effort of "23 things." That is how this blog started last year when I signed up to do 23 things with the Society of American Archivists. I did it because I wanted to learn more about the new technology that is out there. I admit, I learned a lot. I also came to realize that I wasn't so comfortable with accounts with my information stored in the clouds and displayed all over the internet. I also wasn't very good at checking all the different e-mail accounts, twitter accounts--you name it. You think it is anonymous and that there are so many blogs and wikis out there that no one would notice yours--it was about archiving for goodness sakes. But find me, some people did.

Now the question becomes: Should I do it again? It is a different list of 23 things. It might be good for me. This program is giving us two weeks to do the designated "thing" instead of one. I guess I might as well do it, but here is the deal. I am going to talk about the experiments with the new technology tools, but I am also going to be talking about Appalachia. With each passing day, we lose a little more of the "old knowledge" of our ways. Archivists, more than anyone, understand how much is forgotten. Perhaps by making a practice of some of these "old ways"-- using heirloom seeds, canning, sulphuring apples--something will survive beyond me. I like the combination of technology and traditional culture.

Archiving Seeds: From the Clouds to Dirt or an Archivist Even in Retirement

My two weeks of retirement didn't last nearly long enough. I found myself working even harder than I had ever before. I found myself still archiving but archiving vegetables instead of papers and photographs. We discovered the family heirloom beans in the freezer of an aunt. It started us on a quest to find other heirloom seeds from the area. We found a nursery in Washington County that raised bed plants from heirloom seeds, and a group in Kentucky headed by Bill Best that saves heirloom seeds from around Appalachia. We planted the whole garden in different types of heirloom vegetables and we are working to keep it alive through this spell of heat and drought. I am pleased to report that we have been successful so far.

The garden is doing great with corn reaching way above our heads, and we harvested some tomatoes that weigh between two and three pounds. These old seeds are amazing. So, besides the prospect of canning a year's worth of vegetables for next year. We intend to save those seeds for the next year's garden. I think this archiving project could be among some of the most important efforts that I have ever done. There are no acid free boxes involved, but I have no doubt that we are saving Appalachian food culture.

I have started work at Appalachian State University as the University Archivist. I am sure that those Hollinger boxes are in my future here. I am looking forward to further exploring archiving Appalachian history and culture in this new setting and working on new ways to share this information through the web.

Still in the Clouds

This is the road where I start my journey to work each morning--descending from the foot of a mountain to the valley and the clouds. I used to deal with concrete things once I got to work: papers, printed photographs, folders, and acid free boxes. Now, I deal more and more with things in the digital cloud. On days that are more frustrating than others, I often think that it was so much simpler back then, but really it wasn't always. Some of the new technologies that I have learned to use make tasks simpler. I am finding that the difficult thing is knowing when to use this new technology and when it is advisable not to.

This past week, I experimented with different tools for making simple on-line surveys and experimented with Google Docs. I experimented with Zoomerang, Survey Monkey, and SurveyGizmo. All of them were fairly easy to use for short simple surveys that you wanted to distribute through e-mail or by posting on a web site. Of the three, I liked SurveyGizmo the best. As is typical of most web 2.0 tools, they only offer so much for free and then as you try to use them for more complicated processes, you have to purchase the product or different levels of the product. I can't blame them for that--they are in business to make money after all. If you did a lot of surveys, it would probably be worth purchasing their product.

I have to wonder about one point. Who owns the data? Could you extract your data and perform other statistical analysis with it than are offered through these services? I haven't tried anything that complex and probably wouldn't need to but I wonder about it. I do think that they could be an excellent tool for evaluating public service through a web site. It could also be useful to gather information from your researchers, professional colleagues, or donors on whatever topic you were interested in learning about.

I really like the concept of Google Docs as well. It would be so much easier to edit group documents when members are scattered over geographic distances. I can also see how it could be useful in compiling reports even when the individual contributors are not scattered over distances. I intend to keep working with it and hope to really put this tool to use in the future. My first attempt to use it involves a book about my family. I inherited a host of family photographs from various households. I hope to upload selected photographs and mine the memories of selected family members to capture family memories that would be lost otherwise. This is something that I have been wanting to do for some time, but this exercise showed me a way to do it.

This is my last friday working in my current position. I have three days to work here next week. In July, I will start working on the other side of the mountain at Appalachian State University, but I still will be archiving in Appalachia. Basically, when I get to the bottom of the hill, I will turn left instead of right and cross the Eastern Divide. It will be a big change for me. I have been the director here for the past 22 years and have been working here even longer than that. It is a new beginning. I thought that I was at the end of my career, but now I am starting a new path. Hopefully, I have learned a few things along the way that can help. I hope to keep writing this blog and share about Appalachia and archives.

Returning from the Bureaucratic Abyss and Reaching into the Clouds

I know, I know. I have done the thing that I hate most about blogs. I disappeared for a couple of months. I hate that when other people do it. I have no excuse really other than getting caught up in that annual bureaucratic abyss called budgets, annual evaluations and reports, and end-of-semester work. I am also preparing for retirement from my position as director of the Archives of Appalachia and preparing for a new challenge working in North Carolina, but enough about me.

Now that I have gotten caught up on all of those things, I decided to go back and finish the assignments that I missed in 23 Things for Archivists. I am starting back with week 10 on Cloud Computing. After reading through the resources listed, my first thought is that perhaps it is not surprising that there is so much disagreement on how to define or describe cloud computing. It is a cloud, after all. On many Appalachian mornings, you often find that the clouds have descended and draped themselved around the mountains or settled into the valleys. Walking through a cloud on a mountaintop, you feel cut off from the rest of the world below, but you can not grasp it in your hand or hold on to it. I think of cloud computing the same way. I do not have technical knowledge to understand how it all works, but I can sure experience the effects of it.

At the Archives of Appalachia, our main experiences with "cloud computing" have been through photosharing on Flickr and with the creation of an Archives of Appalachia Facebook page. Both cloud computing applications made what seemed impossible, before because of the lack of resources and technical support, not only possible but easy. Do we have a wonderful digital library complete with metadata and information about each image available in Flickr. No, but we have something. We also have the possibility of users adding to our knowledge with the addition of tag and comments. In fact, we did have a visitor to our Flickr site identify the individuals in one of our photos and describe the event captured in the photograph. This would not have been possible if we had waited until we had the time and the money to launch a fully described digital library site. Both of our experiences with Flickr and with Facebook were, I believe, productive and cost effective. They were worthwhile endeavors that I hope will prove useful into the future rather than something that disappears into the cloud.

I do have some doubts about cloud computing especially in the area of personal privacy. I wonder just how much information is being compiled about individuals in the cloud. I wonder if these resources will remain viable and affordable into the future. We are not trusting the cloud to store our digital images and are keeping multiple copies of our uncompressed images. I think that what bothers me most is that it just seems too good to be true that with Flickr you can pay $29.95 a year and upload unlimited numbers of photographs. I am wondering what are the hidden costs and will this continue to be possible.

Music and Photographs or Appalachian Animoto

This week, I am trying to play catch up on my 23 Things. So, I went back and put together a video using Animoto by uploading a tune from the Archives of Appalachia's iTunes U site and personal photographs from my Flickr site. It was incredibly easy to do, but I think that I would like to have more control over the end result if I did this for work. We have video editing software, so I would be able to do add photographs and select the time the photograph appeared on the screen as well as the way that it appeared on screen. The media specialist in the Archives has been working on adding screen titles, collection name, and repository information to our digitized films and videos.

The result of my efforts with Animoto should appear below. I was pleased with the way they put together the music and digital images to create a video. I doubt that what we created would be this "slick," but I found it frustrating to not have more control over how it was put together with the entrance and exits of images.

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Mountain Culture and History Captured in Podcast

Let me start out by saying that I am not going to get the three things done this week in whatever week of 23 Things this happens to be. We are supposed to explore creating podcasts, recorded sound, video, and a combination of still images and sound. While I have not made the recordings myself, I have worked on a collaborative project to design an iTunes U page for the Archives of Appalachia and to select items from our collection to make available through this page. So far, we have digitized and uploaded over 200 short segments from our recorded sound collection. The site is intended to be a sampler from our collection. You can find our site at http://www.etsu.edu/itunes and then click on the link to the Archives of Appalachia or http://ow.ly/1fHRO

We designed the page around subject categories and topics of interest. We used the following broad categories: Music, Life Cycles - From the Cradle to the Grave,Oral Traditions - Tales and Lore, Life and Times - Stories from Our Past, Subsistence Traditions or Just Plain Living, and Religion. We deliberately chose to use short segments from our oral history collection and folklorists field recording collections, because the people from Digital Media Services in the e-Learning Division told us that the number of downloads on iTunes U would decrease dramatically beyond 15 or 20 minute length segments. While the archivist in me is a bit troubled by presenting these podcasts without the context of the longer recorded interviews, I have been pleased with the use of the site. We have averaged 2000 to 3500 downloads per week. Even at the lowest number, it would be the equivalent of pulling 400 items per day. If our entire staff did nothing else, we could not match this on-line service statistic with in-person service. It reminds me of the traditional song, "John Henry," that recounts a race between a railroad man driving a steel drill by hand and a steam powered drill while building the Big Ben Tunnel in West Virginia. I can relate to John Henry dying with the hammer in his hand. Sometimes I feel like an archivist dying from technology overload, still clinging to the gray manuscript box.

We hope to continue building our iTunes U site and add video recordings to it. We also hope that with our new web page that we can provide additional background information on the collections and speakers and performers featured in the site. All in all, I am pleased with the iTunes U site and believe that it has been worth the effort. We did receive some recognition for it this past Sunday in the local newspaper through a feature story about our digital efforts. http://www.johnsoncitypress.com/News/article.php?ID=74282

I do want to explore combining pictures and sound recordings. We hope to begin producing readings of our Civil War letters and diaries along with photographs and scans of the documents. We want to release them as a series--a continuing story--on iTunes U as part of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.

Mashups and Badges

This week our assignment was to look at mashups and badges that could be placed on our websites. I first explored Big Huge Lab site and practiced making trading cards using one of my own photographs as well as one from the Archives of Appalachia. It was pretty exciting to see how easy it was to create a very nice looking trading card. I decided to post one of my own photographs from my personal Flickr site rather than the photographs from the Archives. We are in the middle of a total redesign of our web pages and I didn't want to add anything to the old site right now in fear that it would impede progress in getting the new web site up and going.

When thinking about how this could be used with photographs from the Archives, I immediately thought of all our railroad photographs and many devoted railroad buffs that support the Archives. Trading cards, posters, calendars, etc. would be of interest to them. One of the trading cards that I created is to the right of this text.

The next task involved creating a badge for a web page. The first thing that I tried was to create a flash badge using Flickr. I couldn't get it to work. It wouldn't appear in the blog text. After attempting several times, I decided to try the html badge. While it appears on the page below, it doesn't look like what I created in Flickr. The border and background color was lost. I am going to keep experimenting with it.

www.flickr.com Go to Cove of the Doe's photostream

From Photo Albums to Photo Sharing: How Many Pictures of Trees Are There?

Another week of "Twenty-three Things for Archivists" has just about gone past me. I will admit that I am having trouble keeping up with everything, so this week's post may be short. I bet this is common in the world of blogs--people just get busy and after the initial excitement start to drift away from it. I am still here and trying to compose a new post each week. This week our assignment was to explore photo sharing sites like Flickr, to post some photographs on Flickr (or a competitor's service), and to explore geo-tagging.

I have been familiar with Flickr for some time through friends that have used it. I found it a great way to view photographs from friends in Europe especially. My first realization that archives were using it to share photographs came when I was exploring the website,"Interactive Archivist," http://www.lib.byu.edu/sites/interactivearchivist/ and trying to learn more about Web 2.0. I discovered some articles that talked about experiences at some other universities, and I started exploring their sites. We were facing a 100th anniversary at our university, and my memories of the demand for photographs during the 75th anniversary led me to the conclusion that placing historical photographs of the university on Flickr for people to view and download would be a WONDERFUL idea. So, our journey began into the Web 2.0 world of photosharing. One of our archivists was given the task to create the Flickr site for our University Archives. We have three sets of photographs, over two hundred images, up so far.

This semester, a graduate student studying to be an archivist, approached us about a final project of creating a Flickr site for some of our Appalachian photographs. She wants to focus her project on the tagging and folksonomies and the question of users creation of sets--taking the photographs out of the original context. I agreed to let her use us as a guinea pig, so we are venturing into another Flickr experiment. We want to explore the use of Creative Commons licensing and users adding tags to the photographs.

Do I have doubts about all this? Yes. The archivist and librarian in me would prefer controlled, detailed descriptions such as could be done with ContentDM. The practical side of me realizes that we do not have time to create catalog level descriptions for our photographs. The adventurous part of me realizes that many of our users, such as our rail enthusiasts, know much more about our photographs than we do. Browsing through the public institutional photographs that are in "The Commons" on Flickr, I could see the best of both worlds. The detailed cataloging information in the description and the tags applied by viewers of the images. In many cases, the natural language in the tags applied provided a "richer description" and more possibilities of discovery by users for uses that the archivists perhaps could ever imagine.

When I explored geo-tagging, I was frustrated. I put up some of my own photographs using the Creative Commons licensing and applied geo-tags to some of them. My photostream on Flickr can be found at http://www.flickr.com/photos/coveofthedoe and contains Appalachian landscape shots taken during the past year. Applying the geo-tags through the map was not difficult. I have used the searching capability of the map when I just want to look at some pretty pictures. I discovered that there must either be delay time before the geo-tagged items appear or I didn't do the tagging right. I could not find my photographs through the map. I also found lots of photographs of North Carolina in Tennessee. I also worried about telling the world where photos were taken on a map and would not use it for many images.

I am anxious to see how all of this will look in a few more years. So much is changing in such a short time. It makes me wonder just how many pictures of trees are there? Search the Flickr map and you will know that there are probably more than we need, but I have certainly taken my share. Frankly, it all makes me long for retirement

Mountains and Mole Hills: the Small Applications of Web 2.0

Have you ever heard the phrase, "You are making a mountain out of a mole hill?" The statement is intended to say that you are making a big deal about something that truly is quite small. This week the phrase is haunting me, but I feel as if the quest is turned around to turn something really big into something rather small. One of our bluegrass music students put it differently in a song about daily life in prison "making little rocks out of big rocks" all day. This week, in "23 Things," we are looking at Twitter and services that shorten URL's. In the spirit of making larger things small, I will describe my feelings about this week's assignments in one word, conflicted.

The concept of shortening URL's excited me. I chose to try bit.ly. Changing the URL for the Archives of Appalachia's Facebook page from http://www.facebook.com/home.pho#!/pages/Johnson-City-TN/Archives-of-Appalachia/300223478446 to the shortened version, http://bit.ly/ArchivesAppalachia-FB was most definitely an example of making gravel from a boulder. I believe it can be a very useful tool when using Twitter and adding links to our Facebook page. I share a concern that the links would no longer work should the service end, but maybe we would at least get a "tweet" about it. I also discovered that it would not work for everything. Maybe, I should step back and say that I haven't figured out how to make it work for everything. I was equally excited about shortening our link to our iTunesU site. The URL for our iTunesU page is: itms://deimos.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/BrowsePrivately/etsu-public.2101594451 which is a very ugly URL. The bit.ly service would shorten the URL, but the link would not work. I could not get the long or short version of the iTunesU address to work from our Facebook page. The link will work from our web page, but it would not work from Facebook. It looks as if bit.ly turns everything into http whether that is correct or not. When adding a link on Facebook, it seemed to do the same. I would welcome any hints about making this work.

Twitter is another matter. I entered into opening an account with absolute dread. When I got to the point of creating a one-line description of myself, I said, "Archivist and native of Appalachia, longing for a simpler life." It made me pause. If I long for a simpler life, what, for heaven's sakes, am I doing with a Twitter account. Having said that, I can see how Twitter could be used to quickly get an announcement out or to share a link to some video or webpage. I also can see how it could be used to feed announcements into a Facebook page. Some of my folklorist friends prefer the Google version, Buzz. Why? They like the fact that you can use more words. They want to make boulders into rocks instead of gravel. Will I continue to "tweet" and "retweet" after completing the "23 Things." I rather doubt it, but you never know, I could have a change of heart.

To catch up on one of the "things" from last week, I did create a Facebook page for the Archives of Appalachia. After about three days of a live page, we have over 140 fans. I was shocked by the speed that the word got out through the social network. I chose to use a page rather than a group after looking at the way several other organizations and groups used their pages or their groups. The group feature worked well with a group of international fiddlers. This Facebook group came together as friends and formed a group because they were all interested in traditional fiddle music. They are scattered throughout the world but regularly share links to recordings and insights about fiddle tunes, performers, etc. It seemed to me that the page would work better for an institution like the Archives of Appalachia. I think it will be an excellent tool to share information about new collections, special events, topics of interest to researchers, etc. It also gave me a chance to do a behind the scenes photo tour of the Archives. I do intend to keep this page going after the 23rd thing is completed.

With all these comments from so many being shared with anybody over services like Facebook and Twitter, I wonder if we are trivializing what we have to say to fit it into the format. Are we creating a mountain out of trivial conversations that are truly just mole hills? I guess the answer to that is up to us. Are we talking "to hear our head roar," as my mother used to say, or are we saying something meaningful? I worry about thinking and communicating in "sound bites." I hope that the "sound bites" can be used to catch the attention of those that would have never thought about archives and the wonderful things that can be found there.

Communal Gatherings without Gathering

In Appalachia, there has been a long standing tradition of communal gatherings. Neighbors and friends coming together to help one another. There were quilting bees, bean stringings, corn shuckings, apple and pumpkin peelings, barn raisings, and on and on. All of these gatherings had the purpose of helping your neighbor with the expectation that this "gifting" of labor would be returned when the next big chore was yours. There also are gatherings just for a good time--to connect with people, to share in music and dance, and swapping stories. In Appalachia, you do not have to travel far to find musicians gathering at some community store, someone's barn, or yes, even a Walmart parking lot. I wonder if these traditions have gone digital with all the social networking applications like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc. I have many Facebook friends who are folklorists that share links to rare musical performances and then use the comments to provide background information on the performer or the event, putting the performance into context. This, I believe, is a good example of how these applications can be used for more than trivia.

I also wonder if we are losing something in it all. Over lunch, a friend shared a comment from one of her own friends that "if people spent as much time growing food as they do on their farms in FarmVille [a Facebook related application] that we could end world hunger." I wonder about these things too. Are these digital communities bringing together people scattered throughout the globe--making the world smaller--or are they drawing us away from our communities that surround us in a local place. When you have spent your life studying the importance of region and geographic place, you wonder about these things.

This week, the assignment was to explore social networks. I have been a user of Facebook and LinkedIn for some time. I am also part of a Society of Tennessee Archivists group on Ning. I have to admit that I have used Facebook much more (including FarmVille) than I have LinkedIn or the Tennessee Archivist site on Ning. Those two applications, I used for professional work reasons, and during my work day, I often forget to check in on them. They are good for networking with colleagues but do not offer the large audience that a general application like Facebook would provide for outreach.

Now Facebook has become more a part of my routine. I have worked with the Academic Technology Support people at East Tennessee State University to help build photo albums on the ETSU Facebook page from historical photographs from the University Archives. This addition was well received by the "fans" of the ETSU site. I believe that this exercise did give the Archives more visibility and it is a good way to advertise new collections or events.

On a personal level, I have enjoyed being able to stay in touch with past students, past friends from high school, and some of my archival colleagues on Facebook. Yet, I realize that it does pull me away from the world that is grounded in a place on solid ground and into another world that is located in a cloud, so to speak. I have come to the conclusion that I need to "sell the farm" in FarmVille and spend more time canning pink tipped green beans.

I guess that my final thoughts on social networks is this. They offer a lot of possibilities for an archives. It is a wonderful way to connect with the people that need the information that your archives holds. It is also a good tool for sharing information about your collection to an audience that would never darken the door of your reading room. I am a great believer in escaping the confines of the reading room, and I believe that these networks could be a very useful key in accomplishing that goal. It is like unlocking the gates to the castle to let people in and ideas out. I am not sure that some of us in the profession are quite ready for it, but I don't think that we will be able to avoid the process. I want to add one caution: too much of anything can be bad for you.

An Introduction to SlideShare

This is week two of 23 Things for Archivists, and we are up to "Thing #3: SlideShare." Each new "thing" we try just reinforces my amazement at how many individuals have put up so many things on the internet for sharing. There is so much information out there that it is difficult to navigate through it to find those few things that are useful to you. It was fairly easy to create an account in SlideShare and to search for presentations that related to Web 2.0. I chose to narrow the search to Web 2.0 and libraries and archives. I found several presentations that were quite interesting. The presentation that focused on the angry staff person giving all the reasons why you should not use Web 2.0 as a means to access your collection was fun but to the point. I certainly have heard all those reasons presented so forcefully that it made me pause to doubt my thinking.

The other thing that I keep realizing with every new application that I explore is that so many of the barriers are falling away. You can create beautiful blog pages without knowing XML and not having access to the server manned by the Office of Information Technology. I created the first web page for the Archives of Appalachia writing the html code on an IBM mainframe using Xedit. It is so much easier now. There are so many more possibilities especially for smaller archives that have limited staff and resources.

The one fear that I am not over is how materials will be used once we have placed them out there on the web. I am excited by the possibility of enriching the information through the contribution of users, but I am concerned about two things. How do you get beyond the trivia and how do you protect the people that you are documenting. This Archives documents life in Appalachia. The culture is one that has spawned many stereotypes, and I have seen requests to use images in a way that can be damaging not only to the individual but also to the Appalachian culture. When I search these sources for materials on Appalachia, I find information on coal and poverty. Maybe I have a new quest to study the region on the web through all these different means of people contributing content to see if the crowd depiction of Appalachia is any different than the stereotype of the hillbilly that has been alive and well since the advent of the color writers at the turn of the century.

Blogs and Feeds: Wading into the Digital Stream

When you are standing at the edge of the ocean or by a mountain stream, do you carefully wade in gradually letting your body adjust to the cold water or do you just take a deep breath and jump right in? Myself--I have never been a jumper, but after wading in so far I usually figure that it is just time to face the inevitable. I am looking at this process this way. I am still wading in to the digital stream with an introduction to blogs--this one in particular--and subscribing to RSS feeds.

For these first exercises, creating the blog was fun and easy. While I am still not sure what I have to say is of interest to anyone, it is an exercise in expression and certainly is an easy way to get information out to others. I will have to ponder on ways to best use this tool for the Archives where I spend my weekdays. I am also eager to watch some other blogs from archival repositories to see how they use the tool. This brings me to the second part of our first week of exercises, RSS feeds.

I did subscribe to some of the blogs through the Google Reader. I had my gmail account, so using Google Reader was an easy choice. It was easy to subscribe with Google Reader and I chose to follow some of the blogs from other repositories from your suggested list. I also used the Google Reader to try to search for blogs relating to Appalachia or higher education in Tennessee. Searching turned up lots of blogs out there on those two topics but very few were worth following. It reminds me of all the cable television channels that still have very few programs that I want to watch. All the Appalachian related blogs seemed to focus on coal and mountain top removal. Don't get me wrong--this is a huge issue, but there are other issues in the region worth blogging about. I did find a couple of blogs to follow on higher education in Tennessee and on Appalachia, but it really wasn't easy. I do think that there is a real need for lists like the one compiled on recommended blogs relating to archives.

Stepping from the Hills into a Digital Abyss

When I first began as an archivist at the Archives of Appalachia, we had one computer, an Apple IIE, that had just been purchased to create a database that would index our manuscript collections. Descriptions of collections were created by a typewriter and sat on a shelf. Mostly, we worried about having boxes and folders enough to store our paper collections. Life was so much simpler then, but it was much more confining. What consumed our thoughts and filled our dreams was how to take the sounds and images and stories of life in Appalachia beyond the confines of the reading room walls. We are still struggling with that, but the possibilities are so much greater. So, now we begin a journey to step into the digital abyss and enter the Web 2.0 world.

We have made a few tentative steps into this new world by using Flickr to post some photographs from our University Archives photograph collection and by creating an iTunesU site with a sampler from our sound recordings. I was amazed to find that there were 3779 downloads from our iTunesU site in the first week of January. This statistic strengthened my resolve to explore new ways to take our collections beyond our storage areas and reading room. So, I am going to try 23 things in the weeks to come. Maybe, they will inspire me and we can find some new (and cheap) ways to fulfill the dreams that we have had since the very beginning of the Archives of Appalachia.