I’d like to propose a talk session to exchange ideas, opinions, and share experiences with the archivists and librarians (of course others are welcome!) who have been involved or asked or expected to be involved with their institutional anniversary celebrations.

Every institution wants to tell its story with a “timeline”, oral histories, stories&memories, multimedia presentations, exhibitions, online exhibitions, coffee-table books, etc. and they all need photographs, publications, files, facts and legends, and other “cool stuff”. Who do they call? Archivists and librarians… When do they call? When they need something “yesterday”!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be prepared or to be invited right in the planning stage? Well, as we know, things are not always perfect in the library world. So, please come to share or takeaway.

Scholarly works like masters theses and dissertations are already preserved in print and electronically through services like ProQuest. But what should happen when the scholarly work is a digital project? How should that content be preserved? Who is responsible for the preservation of digital work once the scholar leaves the institution? For example, if a graduate student creates a digital project instead of a dissertation, who preserves that work and how? Who should pay for perpetual storage? What about academic blogs? How should they be captured and preserved? In this session participants will thrash out some of the preservation issues unique to digital works, especially those produced by students. Hopefully there will be no Silence during this session. As always, fezes are optional.

This is a companion “play” session to the “talk” on crowdsourcing in the digital humanities. In this session we would visit various sites and contribute by reviewing menus, tagging photos, transcribing letters, etc.

We could share our thoughts informally during the process and more formally in a “debriefing” after our group crowdsourcing session. This is seen as a companion to the talk on crowd sourcing, but the two sessions could be compressed into one if necessary.

Possible sites on which to “play”:

• wardepartmentpapers.org
• diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/
• www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/
• menus.nypl.org/
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start.php
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/freeze_tag/start.php

Crowdsourcing is becoming more and more common in the digital humanities. Here is a sampling of projects which currently include crowdsourcing features:

• wardepartmentpapers.org
• diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/
• www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/
• www.pepysdiary.com/
• www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project
• www.archives.gov/citizen-archivist/
• menus.nypl.org/
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/tag_game/start.php
• www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/freeze_tag/start.php
• swem.wm.edu/news/fights-rights/transcription-project
• www.medici.org/

I would be interested in a discussion of how crowdsourcing can be used in digital humanities projects. Topics of discussion could include:

• How to  implement crowdsourcing
• Successes / Failures
• Strengths / Weaknesses
• Issues / Barriers

See also the proposal for a “play” crowdsourcing session.