what will the museum of the future be like?

Good examples of "web 2.0" access to archives?

How do we make traditional archival materials more accessible, more engaging to visitors? One example is the Smithsonian site search: http://collections.si.edu/search/

At the Jewish Women's Archive, we have tried to expand ways to explore with "tag clouds" to illustrate keywords and date ranges in our Encyclopedia (http://jwa.org/encyclopedia). The information is further exposed as people browse the Table of Contents (http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/toc )

What examples excite you? Who is pulling people in to engage with and re-use/remix archival materials?

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan O'Donnell on August 16, 2010 at 10:56pm

At the moment, pretty much anything by Tim Sherratt tickles my fancy. He builds new ways to explore other people's collections.

His Identity Browser lets you easily identify and embed people (and other entities) into any page - even this blog comment. So, for example, I can easily insert a link to Peter Couchman's file on People Australia.

Most of his tools are demonstration projects or toys. Lots of fun to play with, and good examples of what is possible.

Use his Population Browser to have a look at the male population of different Australian states over the course of the First World War (1914 - 1918). Quiet statistics, telling a terrible story.
Play with his Who Am I? or Headline Roulette to as ways to explore the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Australian Newspapers archive respectively.

And if you want something flashy, have a look at the way that he has embedded the National Archives of Australia records into CoolIris, as described in his Embedded Archives blog post.

Tim is doing fun stuff, and showing what is possible with a bit of ingenuity and some good code. The more that archives expose their metadata in open, standardised ways, the more people like Tim can do with them.

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Permalink Reply by Ari Davidow on August 26, 2010 at 4:38am

Yes, this is excellent stuff. Did he do the New Zealand cite which takes a city map and lets you browse it through time?

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Permalink Reply by Amelia Bowan on September 22, 2010 at 5:34pm

Thank you so much Jonathan! Tim's work is incredible!

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Permalink Reply by Ian Noah on September 15, 2010 at 10:34pm

I have just started working on a museum digitisation project for www.sierraleoneheritage.org, so am fairly new to this subject area, However, Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharpe, who is a member of museum3 and recommended it to me (thanks Johanna) was kind enough to also mention the following sites - in addition to the Smithsonian - as interesting examples/sources of current good practice:-

1. www.alaska.si.edu
2. www.rrnpilot.org
3. www.robinboast.com

By the way, I also agree that Tim Sherratt's work, as suggested by Jonathan O'Donnell is really very good! (Thanks Jonathan.)

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Permalink Reply by Tim Sherratt on October 8, 2010 at 11:09am

Sorry I'm late to the discussion, but thanks for the nice comments folks. I suppose I should add to Jonathon's list of my stuff The History Wall, which can pull together date identified data from all sorts of sources, and of course Mapping Our Anzacs, which provides a Google maps interface to 360,000+ WWI service records. You might also be interested in my Emerging Technologies for Provision of Access to Archives report.

Generally speaking, the place to start for information on the Archives2.0 world is the ArchivesNext blog and the associated wiki. The winners of ArchivesNext's Best Archives of the Web awards provide some great examples of the use of web 2.0 tech.