Following up on ideas

Wow–there have been some really great ideas in the comments on the last two posts, and a follow up message from the people in the UK who did the Sharing Made Simple event with some more information. Please take a look if you haven’t already. This seems like a good time to give a quick summary or status for some of the ideas that we’ve talked about.

• Sounds like people are interested in doing some kind of unofficial get-together in Chicago for networking and brainstorming about future technology-related events. We’ll scout out a location and we can put more definition around this concept via the Chicago wiki site.
• We may also want to do a blogger get together–of a more social nature. I’m thinking this might happen in a bar . . . but that’s just my preference.
• Yes–there will be a wiki for Chicago (again, not official)! I’ll keep you posted, and again, anyone who wants to get involved early before the public roll-out, please let me know in a comment and we’ll get you connected. This will be a great learning experience–a chance to get our feet wet and give us a running start setting up the wiki for the San Francisco meeting.
• In a relatively early post here I said I was going to follow up with two ideas: trying to get reviews in American Archivist of web resources and proposing a new SAA award for web sites and resources. Well, one out of two isn’t bad, I guess. I believe we will see those reviews in the next issue of AA, but I didn’t get a response from the chairs of the Awards Committee. I still think this is a great idea, and kind of overdue, actually. If any readers know anyone on the committee, feel free to suggest it to them again. And, again, I’ll do any work that is necessary to support it (although I’m afraid my budget will not allow me to contribute any cash to support it!)
• That post about putting information in Wikipedia to draw people to your collections? Take a look at “Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections” in the May/June issue of D-Lib.
• Sharing information via tools like Flickr and Technorati tags? We shared some images from the spring MARAC meeting, and it looks like people have been sharing things via tags to the Archives Blogs site–look over on the right hand column for the “del.icio.us links” section. And we’ll be using the wiki to do this in a more organized way for the Chicago meeting. I know there are a couple of readers who are really into this, so more posts are needed.
• I still want to follow up on what does or should constitute the “archives” brand. Look for more on that in the months to come. Maybe if I commit to doing something at the research forum it will force to me to produce something tangible . . .
• I had a post on 5/23 about the concept of “dues paying”–a topic that has come up on the listserv this week. This isn’t really my area, but maybe a group could try to put together another un-official get together in Chicago to do a debate on some of the issues that have been raised on the listserv? Seems like that would be a popular idea, given the level of interest people have shown.
• The ALA annual conference will take place in DC later this month, and I’ll be going and trying as best I can to blog it, but more likely I will be doing summaries after the fact about things relevant to archives. And I will be trying to attend their blogger get-together–I hope I make it.
• Are we any closer to an “archivo-blogosphere”? I kind of think we are. You might not have noticed, but a lot of the people who comment here are other bloggers, and there has been some cross-pollination of ideas , so to speak to other blogs. (Reminder: go to www.thesecretmirror.com and check out the post on an Archives Camp–I’d love to see that happen.) In addition to just getting more and more active archives blogs out there, I’d like to see us interacting more with the rich and vibrant community of library blogs. And reaching out to other blog communities from other professions–any time we can spread the word that archivists aren’t all hunkered down over dusty boxes (or at least not all the time!), it’s a good thing (as Martha Stewart would say).

What about you–what “good things” would you like to see next, or what have you got to share that you’ve seen out there?

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