Nicole H. Garrett

My second day started with a session on digital collections. The session mostly concerned MPLP (More Product Less Process). The project I am working on at the Archives of Michigan is testing this exact idea. I also found out about a Midwest CONTENTdm Conference that I would like to participate in next year.

Next, I learned about audio preservation in the ideal. There was an example of an audio engineer converting analog to digital and the quality was profoundly better compared to standard graduate student help. It’s too bad this option is out of the realm of possibility for most archival institutions.

The last session I attended for the day was about marketing archival resources to the “Netgen”. I was expecting a lot more from this session. One of my pet peeves is when established professionals stereotype young people with technology. Yes, people of later generations have grown up with computers, but most patrons requesting digital content are not younger than 20. In fact, they’re usually senior citizens in my experience.

Additionally, I fail to see how creating myspace and facebook pages will bring young people to archives and libraries. Personally, I see it as a waste of resources; instead, institutions should be working on creating more user oriented webpages that make searching fun and simple. Going into social networking sites also just seems absurd to me–I equate it to a librarian or archivist in 1969 setting up a booth at Woodstock. Young people should know that myspace and facebook are not places to go for research worthy information and just because they visit these sites, doesn’t mean they’ll visit a library facebook page. Neither myspace of facebook were set up to provide information for users, so why are librarians and archivists wanting to make it do something that it doesn’t do.

That’s not to say I’m against using the web. The Library of Congress’s Flickr site is a great way to use free and highly used web services to booster activity.

One good idea from this session was to work with teachers, since that’s where most students learn where to go for information. This isn’t a new idea, but it’s a much better way of marketing to students than social networking sites.

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Today was my first day of the Midwest Archival Conference Annual Meeting.  I started the day by going on a walking tour of the city of Louisville (photos coming as soon!).  From there, I visited the Frasier Museum and viewed a engaging exhibit on an excavated slave ship.  A school group happened to be there at the same time.  I overheard one kid tell a friend that “this is really cool.  I thought this would be boring, but it’s really kind of interesting.”  Hearing kids say things like that is so inspiring.  Maybe that’s cheesy of me, but I love museums that make history fun for the public.

At 1:30, I went to my first session on collection policies and met up with my friend Linnea. My job doesn’t relate to collection policies, so it wasn’t too helpful for my current job, but it was still interesting and a good review of what I learned in grad school.

The keynote speech concerned the need to put materials online to provide greater access.  Since this directly relates to my job, this was quite an interesting talk.  Jennifer Schaffner gave several examples of institutions’ digital collections, which I will be perusing.  She also offered the idea of digitizing snippets of collections to “lure” people into the archives to view the full collection.  For a repository with a small budget, this is a viable solution to creating a digital collection.  Additionally, this allows archivists to see the reaction of patrons without investing a lot of money.

In the evening, my family and I visited the Speed Art Museum.  I don’t “get” art, but I appreciate it!  The Museum had excellent displays with panels explaining themes and history for those of us who want to know more, but like being told rather than interpreting it any way we wish.  We took a guided tour where the guide explained modern art in a way that made me actually enjoy it (usually I skip anything post Impressionism).  So, one up on increasing my cultural astuteness!

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