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.