I’m working on a post about my session on Archives 2.0 on Thursday in Austin, but in the meantime:
SAA has published on its website all the comments they received on their Strategic Priorities Outcomes and Activities document. It makes for interesting reading if you care about what SAA is up to. My comments are included and I doubt they are hard to identify. If you have anything to say about the comments–or the plan in general–speak your mind here or you can save it for the annual membership meeting in Austin. (You can see all the materials associated with the Council meeting here).
Our friends at the US National Archives are moving deeper into the brave new world of Web 2.0. In addition to their presence on YouTube and Flickr, NARA has not one but two pages on Facebook: US National Archives and another one called Research at the National Archives. I really don’t understand why they have two pages and what the difference will be. It seems that most of the information that is being shared is of the same type. Perhaps someone at NARA can explain.
SAA has also just published–online only–The Interactive Archivist: Case Studies in Utilizing Web 2.0 to Improve the Archival Experience, an e-publication edited by J. Gordon Daines III and Cory L. Nimer. I haven’t had a chance to look into it, but I’m sure it will be an interesting resource.
If you missed the open house of Stanford’s Virtual Archives in Second Life, you’ve got another chance. In response to public demand they’ve scheduled another one on August 20, 2009 from 1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m (presumably PST). The SLURL address (this is the Second Life location for the Stanford University Special Collections’ Virtual Archive): http://slurl.com/secondlife/Stanford%20University%20Libraries/85/224/33.
For those of you who do not have access to Second Life but are interested in the project, you can see a short demo that Jonas Karlsson, virtual worlds researcher at the Xerox Research Center Webster, created of his experience in the virtual archive at:
https://www.stanford.edu/group/ic/cgi-bin/drupal2/node/763.
And a reader forwarded me a link to a blog post by Geoff Rockwell that looks back on the original TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) funding proposal that went to NEH 21 years ago. As the friend-of-the-blog noted, “It’s fun to look back at the ‘bow & arrow’ days of the digital humanities. There’s already an interesting history to this young domain that someone probably needs to synthesize at some point.” There’s a dissertation in that for someone, I expect!
National Archives & Records Administration (NARA), Social networking, Society of American Archivists (SAA), Web 2.0 & Archives | Kate T. | 
August 8, 2009 9:11 am 
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By Mark A. Matienzo, August 9, 2009 @ 8:34 am
It’s also important to note that if you’re a leader of a section, roundtable, committee, task force, or working group, you’ll also have a chance to discuss this during the SAA Leadership Forum on Wednesday, August 12.