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.