Week Nine

It was quite a busy week! In addition to my record stripping of Maryland State Colonization Society records, I attended several events. Collaborating with another staff member, we completed an updated brochure for the Legacy of Slavery project. It was just in time for the November 1 opening of the Maryland State Archives exhibit, Flee! Stories of Flight from Maryland in Black and White, at the Banneker-Douglas Museum. With approximately 70 people in attendance, the event featured an overview of the exhibit by archives staff, a historical reenactment of a life of a runaway slave, and remarks on slavery and the Underground Railroad by historian Dr. Ira Berlin. I met and had exciting conversations with Theodore "Ted" Mack, chair of Maryland’s African American History and Culture Commission and his fellow commissioner, anthropologist Dr. Cheryl LaRoche. I also briefly met Dr. Berlin, a member of the commission that advises the work of the Legacy of Slavery in Maryland project at MSA.

Later in the week, I attended an OCLC webinar about ArchiveGrid, an archival discovery system. It’s meant to be a one-stop shop for researchers (from family historians to seasoned scholars) to search for archival collections around the world. Soon to be free (!), ArchiveGrid will allow institutions of all sizes and technological capabilities to contribute finding aids in several formats. OCLC hopes to work with SNAC and regional archival union catalogs. This may finally do for archives what WorldCat did for libraries.

National Archives, Washington, D.C.

To end the week, I attended a social media forum at the National Archives in D.C. Prior to the forum, NARA held a social media fair to highlight their social media initiatives with Tumblr, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Wikipedia. Alex Howard (Government 2.0 Correspondent, O’Reilly Media) moderated the panel formed by Sarah Bernard (Deputy Director, White House Office of Digital Strategy), Pamela S. Wright (Chief Digital Access Strategist, NARA), and David Weinberger (senior researcher, Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Highlights of the program:

• Pamela Wright gave us a sneak peek of NARA’s new Citizen Archivist Dashboard which will allow members of the public to volunteer their time and expertise such as by transcribing documents, contributing to a wiki, or uploading photographs of records that they’ve scanned. She also stressed the importance of government agencies considering records management implications BEFORE diving in to social media programs.
• Alex Howard gave a history of social media, ending with the significance of Google +, which adds a social layer to the entire web.
• David Weinberger, proclaimed an “internet philosopher” by Alex Howard, threw out the notion that social networks are not owned by the public (i.e., not open source or communally owned) but held in private hands, giving users very little input in how our information/contributions are used and managed.