Week 4 Reaction - Collecting History Online

Cohen and Rosenzweig, in “Collecting History Online,” use the example of the ancient Greek historian, Herodotus as a model for how one might engage the project of collecting historical accounts, data, and artifacts.  Basically, collect everything.

Go Digital, Get Current.  Using modern computing and communications technologies, the digital historian can leverage diverse opportunities to reach out to many different publics and to maximize one-way collection and two-way participation.  “The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has supported dozens of online collecting projects on science and technology,” Dan Cohen states in a 2005 CRM journal publication made available on his web site, “in the belief that the history of these subjects is growing much faster than our ability to gather it through more conventional means.”  (Cohen does not explain what is meant by this, so the reader is left to gather a posse of friendly digital historians for a round of exploratory discussion.)  As an example, National Public Radio offers not only traditional radio news and entertainment, but also a broad range of oral history, interviews, and mash-media content through a partnership with Hearing Voices and Story Corps, delivered to consumers in audio, written, podcast, social media, and email formats.  Story Corps has an easy-to-reach web page on recording your own story, including a downloadable Do-It-Yourself Guide.

Create Alliances and Diversify the Delivery.  Parallel to Cohen’s claim of historical growth, technology is growing faster than our ability to consume and learn it. We all have information and skill gaps, and have to specialize around and into the complexities of the many abundant tools available. There will never be enough time to learn everything we need to learn.  Digital historians must collaboratively combine their specialties—putting pieces together to create the whole—and undertake communal learning philosophies.  Creating alliances with contributors, in addition to professionals, means appropriate and targeted marketing, seizing and maintaining momentum once established, building a trust environment that encourages visitors, and providing tools that collect reliable information from participants.  Contributors, like professionals, have multiple online skills and strengths.  Having a clear definition and understanding of the data to be collected will help define and manage the decisions around how to collect data.  Knowing the target audience and having sensitivity to their expected skills will also contribute to successful tools selection and marketing approaches. 

Be Aware the Temporality.  Data, software tools, and hardware have an amazingly brief lifespan.  This may seem obvious, but 1) follow best practices, 2) document, 3) if possible, use non-proprietary storage formats, and 4) backup.

Flickr Commons.  Backed by an impressive group of participating institutions, including NASA, Cornell University Library, Smithsonian Institution, and many more national and international organizations, the Flickr Commons launched in 2008 in partnership with The Library of Congress.

The Commons has two main objectives:

1. To increase access to publicly-held photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge. (Then watch what happens when they do!)

Paul Strand, Spokane Baseball

The idea is simple: “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer.”  An easy to find and easy to use search box provides near instant return of images with a supporting list of contributors.  A search for “Spokane” returned 21 historic pictures from the U.S. National Archives, The Library of Congress, and the US Digital Collections.  Click on the contributor link and only those images that belong to the contributing institution are displayed.  Copyright information is provided with the picture specifically and more generally at the Commons Usage site.