Posts Tagged ‘thatcamp

03
Sep
09

THATCamp Austin reflections

By Audra 3 Comments
Categories: Archivist Education & Training, Collaboration, Librarian Education & Training and Web 2.0 & Archives
Tags: , , , ,

With THATCamp Pacific Northwest coming up next month, it’s about time I posted about my experiences at THATCamp Austin. I think I’ve been delaying this post for a while out of simultaneous excitement that I got to participate and fear that I’ll be exposed as a big groupie of all the amazing folks who participated in THATCamp.

This year was the first regional session of the original THATCamp, or “The Humanities and Technology Camp,” first held by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. As a user-generated “unconference” consisting of discussion groups, training sessions, and “dork shorts” demonstrating new projects, THATCamp is an ideal kind of spontaneous, creative outlet for  newbie archivists/digital humanists/historians.  Lisa Grimm was one of the archivists in attendance in June and wrote this inspiring post about the potential for THATCamp in Austin.

A few weeks later, THATCamp Austin was  born (care of Lisa Grimm, Ben Brumfield, Peter Keane, and Jeanne Kramer-Smyth). As I read the excited tweets about the program and encouraging news that anyone interested in digital humanities could apply, my hesitation about being a public library archivist/special collections librarian among digital humanities folks began to subside.  I applied and my idea to discuss redefining the  boundaries of memory institutions was accepted!

Overall, I could sense that the environment at THATCamp would be supportive, energetic, and a lot of fun. My enthusiasm grew as I got to the UT-Austin lecture hall where our event would be held. A narrow hallway was filled with smiling faces, free pizza, and free t-shirts thanks to some angel sponsors and a few incredibly hardworking organizers.

We settled ourselves in an auditorium in the basement of the building, with live tweets popping up on the overhead screen. Open discussion, creativity, and freedom of thought was the order of the evening — I was overjoyed! We shouted out our potential topics and organized ourselves on loosely-related themes. I chose to participate in the session on crowdsourcing in digital projects and was a discussion leader for the session on “web x.x and diversity and community.”

I didn’t take notes. For the first time in my career, my ubiquitous notebook sits devoid of scribbled entries, doodles, or quotes. Perhaps it’s because I found it faster to type than to write…so most of my remarks, in reverse chronological order, can be seen via tweets:

Perhaps the best thing about THATCamp was being given the opportunity to speak freely about new concepts with intelligent, creative folks in a non-competitive, relatively unstructured environment. No one had to submit a proposal a year in advance (many of these projects and ideas will have morphed multiple times within a few months). I relished the chance to meet some of the emerging contributors to my field and have conversations with my colleagues without the constraints of a formal panel. I am so grateful to have been there and cannot wait to see what concepts and innovations come out of future THATCamps!

30
Aug
09

Reflections: SAA Austin (Tuesday/Wednesday)

By Audra Leave a Comment
Categories: Archivist Education & Training and Web 2.0 & Archives
Tags: , , , , ,

I’ve finally gotten myself and my notebook together in the same place for a little while to post some thoughts on the Society of American Archivists / Council of State Archivists meeting! Thank goodness they’ve started posting session presentations at the meeting site, session audio/video on facebook, and archiving tweets on TwapperKeeper!

The Research Forum was filled with ups and downs, innovations and regurgitations. The day was broken down into topical sessions, and each speaker got 10 minutes to reveal the main idea of his or her research or project. I enjoyed Paul Conway’s presentation on “visualists” and what he calls the “end of image cataloging,” going beyond the search to user navigation. There were a number of speakers who discussed supercomputing and high-level information architecture, which I must admit was over my head and somewhat out of my area of interest.

My favorite part of the day was the poster session. I hope it can be bigger, longer, and perhaps separated topically next year. Among other great posters, I got to speak with a representative from Denver Public Library, whose poster focused on the Alliance Digital Repository, a collaboration of Denver-area libraries. The project was IMLS-funded and started out with an optimistic, “we’re family” vibe. It ended up with a lot of money spent and little in the way of true collaboration, including the absence of any DAM system. His final words of advice: create contracts of understanding and write everything down when collaborating.

I presented near the end of the Research Forum during the session on “Formulating Community Practice.” I will follow up to this post with a fuller description of my presentation. As the only representative from a public or community-based organization, needless to say I was humbled seeing my name alongside representatives from OCLC, UNC-Chapel Hill, and others. I was not sure, given my topic, that I should have been selected to speak. Perhaps it was the relatively small scope of my project, or perhaps it had to do with my ability to explain the challenges of my project. It is my hope that I can speak more intelligently about the process of empowering and collaborating with community-based organizations in future years.

I also got to participate in THATCamp Austin, which I’ll post about shortly.

On Wednesday I took the ACA Certified Archivist exam. I will have more to say about that experience in a few weeks when I find out the results! All I can say right now is that I was the first to finish the exam that morning, which could be a very bad or a very good thing.

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