Presentation I gave at the Lift Every Voice National Forum, Columbia, SC, May 16, 2013

1. Reaching a Broad Community
with Online Collecting
Sheila A. Brennan
sbrennan@gmu.edu

2. People are Sharing
http://www.pewinternet.org/

3. Why not use SM platform
to collect?

4. Better Connectivity in SC
http://www.connectsc.org/

5. Good Reasons to
Collect Online
1. Collections can be large and more diverse in perspective and
voices (in aggregate & individually).
2. Opportunity to collect greater variety of evidence beyond a
narrated story through web interface: text, images + audio,
video, other files.
3. Individuals decide what they want to share online.
4. Collected materials are discoverable & available to the public
very quickly (immediately or soon after w/vetting).
5. Building community by building a new archive together, based
on by shared experiences.

6. Get Started
http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory

7. Digital Memory Banking since
the late-1990s
Outgrowth of oral projects
http://blackout.gmu.edu

8. http://echo.gmu.edu

9. http://911digitalarchive.org

10. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar

11. http://hurricanearchive.org

12. http://hurricanearchive.org/contribution

13. http://braceroarchive.org

14. http://omeka.org

15. http://historypin.org

16. Online collecting by
Museums

17. http://americanhistory.si.edu/agheritage

18. Assessing a Platform
To ensure sustainability, consider:
• Metadata: Standardized schema (Ex: Dublin Core)
• Scalability: large collections and broadly for multiple file
formats (text, images, video, audio)
• Data portability: export in multiple data output formats
• Interoperability: communicates with archival, library
systems, w/ability to share content in other spaces
• Usability: Intuitive user interface, simple & easy to use
• Accessibility: sight-impaired, & Mobile accessible
• Open access: freely available for research, while also
giving contributors rights over their own contributions

19. Challenges
• Online submissions can contain less descriptive
metadata.
• Submissions vary in quality—and you can’t tamper with
the original—because the variety of contributors building
your new collection. You have to be comfortable with
that variety.
• Use: will be wide and unpredictable.
• Project don’t run on their own:
• Requires a dedicated institution w/a person who maintains the
site, vets contributions.
• Requires dedicated outreach.

20. Online Collecting as
Web 1.5
“for all the potentialities of online collecting and
democratizing the past, remember that any project
still requires a great deal of analog hands-on history
work.”
Why Collecting Online is Web 1.5: http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-
new-media/essays/?essayid=47
• Even with these challenges, it is still a good
approach.

21. Many Civil Rights Projects,
not collecting from public
• Lots!

22. What is Next?
• Any new collecting projects must be designed
mobile-first

23. Design Mobile First:
Responsive Design

24. Distributed Collecting
Approach
http://braceroarchive.org

25. Community Resources

26. Involving Students
http://historyharvest.unl.edu

28. Lift Every Voice Can
Share Every Voice