Archive for the ‘outreach’ tag
Raising the roof
I just came from a SLAIS colloquium by Vancouver’s City Archivist, Leslie Mobbs, with the fantastic title, “Raising the Roof: Towards an Outreach and Awareness Strategy for the City of Vancouver Archives.” The Archives seeks to increase visibility through four tactics: strengthening existing relationships, establishing partnerships, building community, and leveraging technology. These are, of course, all intertwined. I’d like to highlight some of the great technologically-enhanced-relationship-projects Mobbs discussed.
Most prominent is their Youtube channel. This has been a vehicle for promoting their Archival Films Online initiative. The films in question, many of them privately donated home movies, were essentially inaccessible to the public, since the Archives did not have a projector to play the films. Digitizing the films and posting a copy on Youtube allows greater access than was previously available. However, Mobbs noted that the Youtube videos are not intended as a definitive display of the holdings. For archives, the context of records is imperative to fully understanding them and Youtube presents certain limits for the amount of description that can be appended. (Alas, it doesn’t permit the hierarchical display that, say, EAD-encoded descriptions do.) Mobbs said that the point of their Youtube postings (and of their new Twitter account) that these tools are aimed to bring people into the archives, not to be the primary display of holdings. Interesting, eh? It highlights their position to explore both in-person and online connections. It seems that the Archives has intentions to do both, so keep your eyes peeled.
p.s. The Archives also recently hosted a Hackathon, encouraging folks to play with the data freely available from the city. Read about it here and here.
