On December 23rd, the National Archives announced the launch of a new online project called the Citizen Archivist Dashboard. This forward-thinking initiative captures the "wisdom of the crowd" by making you -- the citizen -- an active participant in the digital archiving revolution. Through tagging, transcribing, editing, uploading, and sharing, you have the power to contribute to our nation's collective memory and history. While the Citizen Archivist Dashboard is fairly new, the National Archives has been encouraging user participation for some time. Here's a video which does a good job in describing their ongoing efforts...
Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero, deserves a lot of credit for delivering a fresh, new way of thinking to the National Archives. Think of it... through this new initiative, the National Archives is publicly stating that "All of our records will be online" and "You can help make it happen." This is a very bold and ambitious statement. By embracing social media and tapping into the dedicated passion of its users, Ferriero has successfully elevated the visibility of the National Archives, and has changed the image and culture of the nation's record keeping institution. By giving its audience a stake in its future, the National Archives is now in a much better position to preserve its past.
Click here to learn more about the Citizen Archivist Dashboard and start contributing to their effort to "document the links to our past."
3 comments:
Gordon--
I was inspired to check out NARA's project after you tweeted about it last month. It is indeed a great idea in theory, but I hope the execution will be refined before too much orphaned data gets uploaded. Here is an exchange I had with a NARA official:
>>> "E. Thomas Wood" 12/25/2011 12:36 AM >>>
NARA--
I am member “WoodFamNashville” on the National Archives Citizen Archivist Research Flickr group. My work at NARA in the past decade has been as digitally oriented as I can make it. I try to corral all the documents for a given book project in a scanned or photographed form. I have spent much time at College Park and some at Archives I, Atlanta, the USMA library, the Carter Library and the FDR library, gathering material for a variety of historical projects. I would gladly share this digital material (some sooner, some later, as not all related projects are finished) if I thought it could be made accessible through appropriate indexing.
Enabling the upload of user-generated images from NARA collections is a great idea — but as yet is not well-executed. Using Flickr as the repository for this material means I can only provide context info as free text, not the metadata you need in order to make this material useable to the public at large. It also means I can’t upload .pdf files where I have gathered images of complete documents into one place — Flickr allows photo files only.
I’m sure the relevant people at NARA know of these issues, and maybe the thought is that it is better to have users contribute inchoate data than none at all. But you have the potential to get a lot of uploads from historians like me who would go to the trouble to fill in a blank for record group, another for entry number, another for box number, folder name, microfilm number, etc. Likewise, for documents referencing individuals, I would be willing to fill in the fields you need in order to index them in a database — first/middle/last names, military rank and so on — and in some cases the public could provide further metadata such as birth or death dates.
I wish NARA the best of luck in its laudable efforts to crowdsource from its digitally savvy users. I hope I can be of use to those efforts in the future.
Warm regards,
E. Thomas Wood (Tom)
On 1/5/12 4:38 PM, "Meredith Stewart" wrote:
Dear Mr. Wood,
Thank you for your interest (and participation!) in the Citizen Archivist Research Flickr group. We agree with you that the Flickr group is not ideal for harnessing the images and metadata that researchers and historians want to share with us. We are working on developing an online upload capability so that researchers will be able to contribute images and metadata that could be incorporated into our online catalog. We are also working on determining how this contributed information will be displayed in our catalog.
We would love to reach back out to you when we are further along in our development of an upload tool. Please look to hear from us in the in future.
Thanks again,
Meredith Stewart
Thank you for your comment, Tom. I'm encouraged by the fact that they responded to you relatively quickly, and say they are working to resolve those issues. I happen to be working on a future blog post about Flickr, so your comment is very timely and informative. Thanks for sharing your story!
This is awesome :)
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