Cultural Heritage

About this guest post

Kiara King is the Archivist for the Ballast Trust, a charitable foundation that provides a rescue, sorting and cataloguing service for business archives with an emphasis on technical records such as plans, drawings and photographs. She can be contacted at: kiaraking@gmail.com.

Making Time for Web 2.0

Hopefully you now have a good idea about what web 2.0 can do for your archive and are convinced of the benefits of web 2.0. But if you are unsure if you can spare the time to get involved, then fret no more! Fortunately there is an entry point to web 2.0 for everyone, even if you can only spare an hour a week and don’t know what html is.

The world of Web 2.0

As this diagram shows, web 2.0 activity can be broken down into three different types that require varying levels of commitment and time.

Participate

• Investigate your organisation’s web presence by googling yourself and see if you can amend or add to the information that is available.
• Comment, amend, tag anything relevant to your collections that you find on sites like Wikipedia, Flickr and Youtube with your expert knowledge about the collection or item and link back to your own website.
• Start a Twitter feed and see what others are saying about archives on twitter by using the #archives tag.
• Join Flickr and post your own images.

Create and share content

• Start a blog, make sure you can commit to regular posting (at least 1-2 posts a week) which should only take an hour of staff time.
• Create podcasts, if you are already doing talks then this just means recording them and creating an audio file for download.
• Create some videos to show how to handle documents or a behind the scenes look at the archives and put them up on youtube.

Build communities

• Consider starting a facebook group for your archive.
• Create a social network group using a site like ning to build an online community for your users.
• How about opening up your catalogue in a wiki for users to amend and contribute to? This will require moderating but is a great way to harvest the knowledge users have about collections and share it with others.

Finally, work smartly and make the Internet work for you by creating a personalised start page. This acts like a personal web portal so that when you open up your browser it will push content to you from other sources for you to engage with. This could be recent activity in your flickr account, blog posts to read and comment on from other sources, news results for certain terms relevant to your archive as well as your emails.

screenshot of start page