This week we are looking at how historians, archivists, and other public history professionals can preserve the remains of the past, share stories, and collect them through crowdsourcing.

First we will discuss the work you have done over the past week on your blogs.

Then we will turn to today’s main topic:

Do we lose anything when we preserve physical paper digitally? Can we ever hope to preserve the massive volumes of material being produced every second online? Should we even try?

How has the internet changed how public historians should do their work?

We will return to some of these questions in November when we discuss Material Culture and Digital Preservation.

• Roy Rosenzweig, “Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era” (Have a quick skim of this classic article from 2003. How far have things come since then?)
• Meg Foster, “Online and Plugged In? Public History and Historians in the Digital Age.” Public History Review, 21 (December 2014): 1–19.
• On Crowdsourcing

Getting the public to help decode Civil War telegrams at the Huntington Library.

The Real Face of White Australia is a fascinating digitization project completed by Tim Sherratt and Kate Bagnall from records in the National Archives of Australia. How does changing the access point of an archive from text to faces change how we think and feel about the records, and how we can work with archival material?

Jeremy Dutcher used 100-year old recordings of Wolastoq-language songs to create his Polaris award-winning album Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa. What can he teach of us about new ways to preserve and extend what is stored in digital archives?

Explore these examples of Crowdsourcing and Preservation Projects:

• • NC HB2: A Citizens’ History
  • April 16 Archive
  • The Old Bailey Online
  • Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
  • September 11 Digital Archive
  • Polar Bear Expedition Digital Collections
  • The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake

 

Practical Guides to Digitization and Sharing:

• Sarah Pickle and Nancy L. Maron, “Collections without Borders: A Case Study of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia” (2014)
• Ooghe and Moreels, “Analysing Selections for Digitization“
• Digital Preservation Guide from the Library of Congress
• Planning Digital Projects for Historical Collections

Explore: omeka.net and see help and how-to guides. Also: Instructions for scholars

Have a look at this new platform for transcribing handwriting.