by Lisa Rabey

If you are following any blogs on social media, the one that should be at the top of your list is Mashable. While at times the writing is a bit sensationalistic, Mashable is great for getting news and information as it happens making it one of the definitive sources on social media and networking on the web.

Anyone old enough to remember the days when McDonald’s used to change their signs when they sold X number of burgers? Fan fare and promotions were a blazed the numbers climbed and once McDonald’s hit 99 billion burgers, it stopped counting.

Today, Mashable reported that Twitter reached 10 billion tweets. Here is how the numbers work out: Twitter begins in early 2006 and it takes nearly 2.5 years to reach the first billion tweets (fall of 2008). One year later, it quintupled the number of tweets (from one billion to five billion) in 1/3rd of the time. And six months later, Twitter doubled that figure to ten billion tweets served.

Yowza.

And unlike McDonald’s, Twitter is not going to stop counting.
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by Rachael Clark

Skill One: Evaluating the Collection:

The five skills essential for developing digital collections have collectively been my mantra since I “inherited” over 4000 images from a university archivist’s external hard drive. These images were uploaded into Luna Insight, without a plan, and their catalog records are extremely incomplete.

My task has been to organize the collection into subject areas and develop a metadata schema. Remembering the five skills is a tremendous help! These skills include: evaluating the collections, needs assessment for the project, knowledge of technologies, metadata standards and project management. Each skill listed above is actually a multifaceted aspect critical to the creation of a digital library. Today, we will discuss Skill One– Evaluating The Collection.
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by Kim Schroeder

In teaching multimedia archive,s I think about the future of our content constantly. Like a new mother, I fret for its security, growth and health. What is THE answer for our degrading media, emulsions, for our software obsolescence and our equipment falling down around our ears?

Recent discussions on the AMIA listserv brought new energy to this discussion and I wanted to put my spin on this. The subject line was “What’s Not Cool About Cold?” and it solicited some serious discussion about whether we have made a horrible mistake for a generation of archivists and content.

Jim Lindner argues that the imminent demise of tape players is more important in an archivist’s preservation decision than our focus on the imminent degradation of the media itself. The latter being our big decision to place much of our media in cool or cold storage. The group discussion mentioned the fact that many of our players are no longer supported by their manufacturers and the simple math that the lack of machines and the existing wear on their parts will not even cover the playback of the volume of archival tapes awaiting…migration? This hits a deep reality. Have we lost hundreds of thousands of hours of archival motion under our watch? Maybe even millions or billions of hours?
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by Kim Schroeder

I spent the last week writing and editing a book chapter on process management for digitization. My head has been trying to process all that I contemplated while doing such an intensive session.

I think that a lot of process management comes down to skills that we often no longer practice. These oldies but goodies are classics that we need some reminding about. The most important is…LISTENING.

We Twitter, we Facebook and we Blog but we are not necessarily listening to each other. Engaging colleagues in the process of digitization or any other information management process makes a huge difference in creating efficiency. More brains are always better than one!

The next skill is one that many of us are skilled at but do not have time for: analysis.
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by Lisa Rabey

One of the great things about Social Networking is the ability to transparently publish information across various social networks simultaneously. When I update my personal blog, without additional interaction by me, updates are sent to my Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed accounts. This is done via the magic of APIs and the widgets that utilize the existing sites API information

API is short for “Application Programming Interface,” and essentially allows third party developers to create new ways, or mashups, of the existing technology with other technologies – hence the transparency of publishing my content from my blog to other sites. One could argue that this ability is at the heart of Social Networking since personally I’d be less inclined to re-post my content repeatedly on other sites, which means more work for me and also takes out the “Gee-whiz!” factor when introduced to new mashups or widgets that will do it for me.
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by Katie Dishman

It started a few years ago when the Pirates of the Caribbean became a box office success. Then there were the sequels, with Captain Jack becoming a favorite new character. Don’t forget the periodic news stories about Somali pirates kidnapping people over the past several months. Later Michael Crichton’s last book, the posthumously published Pirate Latitudes, is all about those sea-loving rapscallions. But there is a faction of pirates in Sweden that have been making waves the past few years as well.
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by Kim Schroeder

After teaching so many archival and technology classes, I began to realize the incredible depth and breadth of our loss of data. Over the last three decades billions of discs have been created and sold and presumably used. What has happened to these discs? To the data? If even 5% was worth saving for historical purposes, that is still about one and a half million discs to save and migrate. Has that been done?

We all know that the answer is “no.” So that means that we need to look at what is important and what level of effort is necessary to save it. I know that we can not save everything and I know that we would not want to. As Nik Cubrilovic mentioned in a recent Washington Post article entitled “Letting Data Die a Natural Death”: “Not only is a lot of this data not important, but do we really want to keep it? I certainly would not want a full account of everything I did in my youth sitting on a server somewhere. I am also certain that we do not want the record of our as a society time being documented and discovered by future civilizations based on Twitter messages.”
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by Lisa Rabey

One of the things that makes social networking is the ability to comment and share whatever it is you’re reading or interacting with to others in your group, whether by email, Facebook, Twitter or social bookmarking sites. On the flip side, one of the downsides is that for nearly every site you interact with, you almost always have to create a login to participate. This is not necessarily a bad thing in that it allows you to control what information about yourself that is available to the site admins, it allows the site admins to also gauge who is using their service and it is helpful if you consistently frequent the same sites on a regular basis.

Personally though, I’m fairly lazy. [Read more...]

by Mies Martin

It is quite common for those who work within the library and archival professions to get caught up in the never ending twists and turns of technology. This particularly happens to those who are new to the profession. For instance, I can remember quite fondly of my graduate work at Wayne State University where I was absolutely convinced that librarians and archivists must not only understand programming, but they must also strive to do as much of their own programming as possible. Naivety is a wonderful thing, especially when you awake from it.
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by Lisa Rabey

It’s all well and good to get super excited about technology, but without examples of these technologies in action, what’s the point of being super excited? With that being said, every Friday AMPed will be showcasing a website that takes these technologies and really makes them work, whether in design, implementation or as a mashup. These are websites that are taking their outreach and content to the next level by making their sites not only more aesthetically pleasing but also more interactive with their audience.

This week, we’re showcasing Haystack, the online archive of Colby-Sawyer College. What is great about Haystack is that not only is it aesthetically pleasing, easy to browse and navigate, but it also uses social networking tools to allow the reader to re-share the information to Delicious, Digg, Facebook and other sites. Haystack also relies fairly extensively on open source software for their backend.

We’ll let Kelli Bogan, the archivist at Colby-Sawyer, explain more:
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