Archives, Libraries and Learning Labs

Learning labs and Makerspaces. What do these terms call to mind for you? They are new "buzzwords" for a path and purpose that many libraries and museums are planning for their futures. I believe that these spaces would be valuable additions in Archives as well.

Encouraging non-professionals to interact with archives
in a participatory / learning lab environment benefits the
participant and the archives.

The function of makerspaces and learning labs is to engage our communities and invite them to be participants in an experience rather than just an audience for it. These specialized spaces are a natural outgrowth of the Participatory Museum promoted by museum professional Nina Simon. Nick Stanhope and Nick Poole, respectively from History Pin and Collections Trust in the U.K., dscribe the future of a the participatory experience:

"When digitisation (and by extension, collecting) has considered the user, it tends to think of them as an end-user, an ultimate beneficiary. But we live in an age of participatory culture...What we believe we are heading towards is an age in which the user isn't at the end of the process, but is intimately written into every part of it - from selection, to assessment, to prioritisation, to digital surrogacy, to interpretation, distribution and use. It's a model that is already apparent in programmes like Historypin, which are re-coding cultural practice from an inherently user-focussed and participatory perspective."

Locally, participation is one key to the healthy future of the small community archives especially.  Beyond updating exhibits and focusing collections, I believe that dedicating a space to a "learning lab" will draw in visitors, encourage engagement and even increase volunteerism.

Collaboration has a role to play here too. The local library can team up with the historical society to encourage overlapping engagement experiences. In my case, as a high school librarian, I am working to bring the schools into the mix. We have begun cooperating with the local historical society and will help them digitize their materials. We will have a dedicated area in our library where students can learn about about archives. Our students will be essential in collection development and making plans to create a school archives that reflects our fifty year history in our current school building.

At our school library, I aim to establish workstations for data entry. Perhaps our lab will include a program such as PastPerfect to familiarize participants with classification. Additionally, participants will help design exhibits using mindmapping software. They will help us design marketing materials -- brochures to teach our classes about collections -- using photoshop and other tools. In short, they will learn about primary sources, have a chance to interact with them, have an opportunity to think about them, and make a difference in the protection of history in a way they would never have without a learning lab environment.

Of course, creating an archival makerspace invites many questions related to the safety of materials. Creating a digital environment for visible participation will ensure the security of items. The core volunteers will continue to be those working with unique items. Casual participants will usually be exposed to what is in the collection without actually handling originals. My hope is that many participants will develop enough of an interest to "move up" and want training to handle originals. If they never move beyond primarily digital interaction, that's okay too.

I am on the ground floor with my thinking about creating this space. I plan it to be just one area among many that makes information accessible and understandable to participants in my library. Other spaces could include building materials for robotics, enhanced by a book collection on engineering or a writing lab with blogging stations. The possibilities are endless. The future of archives and libraries is exciting.

What Does "Community" Mean in the 21st Century? Why is it important?

Last week, I Asked on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+: "What is community? Where do you find it? Is the idea of community changing?" This post explores what community means in the 21st century and why it is still important.

As someone who specializes in helping local communities, I use that word - "community" - quite a bit. I realize that it is hard to define, a bit squirmy, and loosely tossed around. So after my friends at the "Library as Incubator Project" sent me their guest post article on Serving Artists in Your Community last week, I began to try to nail that word down again by getting input from others on its definition. I thought that perhaps the idea of community is changing and that it means different things to different people. While these thoughts were confirmed, I was also surprised by how some others interpret that word.

The ideal of "serving the community" is something I think that all cultural heritage institutions can ascribe to. I have long believed that the prime purpose of archives, libraries, and museums is to document and support communities. In order to claim such a lofty goal for all of our work, the term needs to better understood. Defining "community," would in part show how our audiences overlap and how we can better work together to serve a common purpose.

Preparing early in the week for the "Library as Incubator Project" post had me thinking about the idea of a general audience for museums, libraries and archives. The specific focus of the Project's work from the perspective of librarians got me thinking about whether or not archivists could create similar tools and outreach efforts to focus on a particular "community." Can archivists, curators and librarians share communities and offer different services that target the same audience, perhaps even in a collaborative way? Are we all serving the same "community"? Are we even all part of the same "community"? Is the idea of "community" changing in a way that can enhance our efforts to reach out to our public audience?

Definition of Community

Here's the definition of "community" that I offered in my blog post on the subject last year. It is in fact still the post for which I consistently get the most hits on my blog site:
"A community is a formal or informal group with a common history or culture. The community can be based around a geographic area, trait, or topic of interest. Communities come in the form of:

• Families
• ethnic groups
• civic organizations
• governments
• informal and formal social groups
• educational institutions
• colleagues
• causes
• geographical locations / neighborhoods"

To me, "community" is a noun representing people. It matches this idea presented by a Twitter friend:

"[Community is] A supportive/interactive membership of individuals with a common interest - tho[ugh they] may possess a different outlook/set of goals."

I was surprised by some other people's responses though. Not everyone defined a "community" in people terms. Not everyone defined "community" as a noun. And some people even saw it as a negative thing rather than a positive one. Here are some alternate definitions that were shared:

Community as Action

On Twitter, someone responded: "Community is the act of sharing, kindness, collaboration, support & combining resources." I responded to the person who wrote that, that I had not thought of  community it as a verb. The writer wrote back to me: "... Community involves participation, therefore it is an action." Okay. Great. I think I like the general thought behind that idea.

Community as a Feeling

Facebook allows for more detailed responses. Some one wrote, "Community to me is a sense of belonging. The first communities for many of us were those within a family and grew to include our neighborhood, school, or community. As our physical boundaries grew, so did our sense of community -- such as identifying with a specific region, or state, or nation. But as we grow and age, I think it evolves into many differing layers which are by choice and not happenstance - those kindred spirits which become a community - those sharing common ideals or interests. Those first layers of community may stay, evolve, or dissipate." 


I like the idea of community as a feeling, more than just as people. It makes sense to me that collections can help foster that feeling and the differing "layers" the writer describes by shedding light on overlapping communities.

Community Eroding

Another person on Facebook poetically described the erosion of "community" and the idea that we were losing that sense of belonging and losing that idea of comfort and kindness. I wonder, can promoting libraries, archives and museums, as "community" hot-spots that serve to retain the ideal of collaboration and shared knowledge help re-boost the sense of security that people like the writer may find slipping away in a faster paced society?


Community as Place

One person didn't see "community" relating to people at all, but saw it as inherent in buildings. "community is buildings with memories. Community is where I grew up and where I remain active now…." I asked for clarification and received this response: "[Community is] buildings who have seen some years- where people say 'if these walls could talks.' [They] can be beautiful or ugly but have stories." I asked for more clarification. I asked if buildings embody communities that go back many generations and the writer responded: “often times yes. Not all buildings do though. A church or community hall, yes. But a 1970s roller rink can sometimes but not always. A church for sure, but a 1990s roller rink can have memories of a community too….i think bldngs can be the most concrete part of a memory. May not remember exactly what happened but people remember bldngs." 


I think that this point of view would certainly serve to show the importance of cultural heritage institutions serving as community building blocks, but rather than the collections serving the purpose alone, the edifice in which the collections are housed are just as important. I think the idea of the geographical locations or neighborhoods that I included in my bulleted list of communities fits in with this idea.

Community as a Romantic Construct

Another person responded "Community is hard to define, yet historians use it to understand the way people lived. It is mostly a romantic construct… Any negative memories are lost in the retelling over time."

I'd like to think that positive and negative build communities and it is not all romanticized. Yet, another person responded that the idea of "community" could be an old-fashioned one where people believed in safe spaces and perfect neighborhoods for all, even though they never really existed.

Community Representing Class Distinctions

Along these lines, my U.K. friends on Twitter pointed out that overseas " 'community' started out in 80s as euphemism for housing estate, working class, black..usage widened..but still mealy mouthed…" In response, I pointed out that the word "community" is centuries old and hasn't always meant that. The writer responded: "indeed, i was thiking of its more recent currency in culture and politics..slippy, slidey,elisions of meaning." 


This was a new idea to me and a way of using the term that I don't think we use in the United States. It brought home the point that community is a "squirmy" word and not necessarily a positive one to everybody.

Cultural Institutions Nurturing Community, Dialogue and Engagement

The definition that I think I like best is the last that I saw. It was not directed at my question, but I saw it on Twitter under #musesocial, which was considering the idea of serving community from its own angle last week: "Perhaps "community" is not group of people so much as safe space for nurturing dialogue/participation." 


Along these lines, I would like to emphasize that is what cultural heritage institutions do best, or what they have the potential to do best if they accept that niche, is nurture dialogue and civic participation. By recognizing a common audience and like-minded goals across instiuttions, perhaps we can together use the term "community" to foster our sense of purpose, to promote knowledge in many forms, and to provide that "secure" space for public engagement.
***
Do these ideas of community resonate with you? What else would you add? How do you see the idea of community serving cultural heritage, organized human knowledge, and society in general?

Pinterest for Cultural Heritage

I belong to a small local group of women entrepreneurs who work together to share their expertise and experiences. All of them are brilliant and many of them are social media gurus. When they suggest that I check something out, I try to listen. Thanks to my listening, and thanks to my friend @suddenlyjamie from Suddenly Marketing, I now have a new favorite social media tool that I think is worth pointing out here. Pinterest has burst on the scene as a vision board style tool that at first glance seems best for play. After spending the weekend getting to know the site, I now believe it is so much more than this and that cultural heritage institutions should absolutely use it. This article is about why you should try it and how.

The first thing you will notice on Pinterest is that it is a clean, nice looking site. The concept behind it is straightforward too. Find an image that you like online and "pin" it on your Pinterest page using their handy little button that sits on your toolbar. (I use a similar button to click on gifts to add to a wishlist for a site called Findgifts.com, as a point of comparison for those of you who are familiar with that site.) Your Pinterest page is made up of "boards" or little windows in categories of your choosing so that you can organize images as you wish. Jamie shared a great article covering the basics of Pinterest.

http://pinterest.com/melmannon/

So during my Pinterest weekend, I created the following categories to get me started: Museums I've visited and recommend, Interesting Documents, Fabulous Artifacts, Save Libraries, Favorite Places, Art, Archives, Quotables, and Gardening. Each contains photos I've found on the Internet and "Description" that I've added that describe the picture and/ or why I've chosen the picture for my Pinterest page. From my page, I can see the latest things put on Pinterest and choose to "follow" others and see what they are pinning. I can connect with friends; I can see statistics on how many people are "repinning" what I've pinned. People can comment on what I have pinned.

Early Observations about Its Value

1. For collection sharing and possibly for collaboration - I asked on Twitter which museums are using Pinterest. The Indianapolis Museum of Art responded that they use it to post images from their collections.  http://pinterest.com/imamuseum/ . I can easily see the potential for them to also link to collections from other institutions that relate to their own to create a collaborative Pinterest venture. Pinterest gives you the option to allow others to pin to your page. I have not explored this yet, but I think this can help to make it another kind of valuable collaborative tool that makes room for a participatory experience.

2. For driving Internet traffic and discovering the interests of your audience - Pinterest tells me which of my "pins" are most popular and I can use this to drive people to my Pinterest site. I can also use this to drive Pinterest traffic to other social media sites I manage and to my web page. For example, I made a collage of orphan photos a few weeks ago that I posted on my blog. I pinned it - linking from the blog - in a Pinterest category that I called "ArchivesInfo." I can tell from my Pinterest statistics that a few people have "repinned" the image. From my blog statistics, I can see that many more clicked the image to view my blog post where the image lives.

I can similarly drive traffic by linking to related information in the "description" section. For example, in my category on "Museums I've visited," I realized that there were quite a few museums about which I've written blog posts. So in the comments section on specific applicable museum pins, I've added links to these posts. My National Heritage Museum pin is a sample of this.

3. For sharing expertise - One of the "pins" that I created in a category called "interesting documents" relates to a diary that I recently found in the public library in Kennebunk Maine. My friend commented on the diaries started and we began a conversation about the act of diary keeping and about paper preservation. Cultural heritage institutions can keep this in mind to encourage similar information sharing about collections and educational topics.

4. For generating dialogue - When I created the category "Save Libraries," I was thinking about all of the images, cartoons and news articles that I've seen out of Britain discussing their library closures. I am going to continue following events overseas and in the U.S. about the state of libraries and add more pins as news develops. I am also going to try to find a way to place questions or comments that get people thinking about these events. I can see a museum using Pinterest this way to encourage dialogue about their exhibits. Or,  a library can choose an interesting image each day that can get people talking about a specific topic. This would have the added advantage of encouraging people to visit the library's web site and think about the role of the library in the community. To make it a participatory experience, encourage people to explore the information and pictures you introduce. Suggest a topic and encourage patrons to go seek more images for their own Pinterest pages to share with you.

In short, I have been on Pinterest for three days and already see limitless potential here for museums, libraries, and archives. Please give it a whirl. If you are already using it, please let us know how. What advantages do you see for sharing cultural knowledge through Pinterest?

Participatory Community Documentation

The archives community documentation model described in Cultural Heritage Collaborators is quite naturally a participatory one. Diverse members of communities work together to ensure that there is sufficient documentation to describe all aspects of their society for future generations. This type of collection development work involves archivists, museologists, librarians, the professional community members with whom they interact from day-to-day, and their patrons. However, the community documentation work I described in my book is from an archivist's perspective, relying most basically on our standard methods of collection development that include listing what information we seek and who might potentially have knowledge of it. My museum colleague, Nina K. Simon, helped add a new dimension to my thinking when I saw her new video"Visitors as Participants" yesterday. (Though I've read her book The Participatory Museum, there was something about her presentation that helped ignite a spark in my brain and I highly recommend that you watch it too.)

Though archivists create marvelous exhibits and have opportunities to create interactive and educational programming for an audience, this is not at the heart of what we do. I think it is fair to describe us as gatekeepers of information -- gathering, holding, and providing access to recorded forms of human knowledge for those who wish to delve into it. The resources we hold have the potential to educate, challenge, and open communication about human activities as much as a museum artifact. If archivists recognize this potential, we can find new and perhaps better ways of accomplishing tasks we've performed in the past.

Archives collection development relies on the attention of our communities. We need to explain to the average person why their personal papers may be of interest to us. Over and over again we hear stories about valuable manuscripts are found in someone's attic. Or, we hear about newly found documents that shed light on a particular issue, changing our thinking about history. Creating an understanding that the old papers may have value is not an easy task. The participatory museum model offers us a valuable method for public outreach and attention.

I am reiterating the need for archivists, librarians and museum professionals to work together. Here is an opportunity for archivists to collaborate neatly with their museum counterparts who are generally more expert at this type of work than we are. Through the creation of activities that invite audience participation, Nina describes institutions gathering new documentation that offers diverse perspectives on culture. The Minnesota 150  project conducted by the Minnesota History Center is one model Nina offers us. The Center sought nominations for "the people, places and things that shape our state," then created an exhibit and book based on their work. Information such as that gathered here could be a boon to archivists seeking to document humanity.

With this in mind, I will leave you with these two questions:
1. Have you explored what aspects of your community need documentation? How can you invite outsiders, who may have more knowledge about certain community activities than you, to give you their ideas about what should be documented?
2. Presuming you have a strong mission and collection development policy, and know what needs more thorough documentation in your community, how can you invite community members to give you information? How can using the museum world's participatory model help you reach out more effectively to a potential audience? Are there museum people in your community who can help you do this? How would both groups benefit?

If you are not already doing so, invite the cultural heritage professionals in your community to sit down together for discussion regularly. Explore ways you can help each other reach out to new audiences. Take advantage of your diverse expertise to make your work better and to make your community a better, more self-aware, and more culturally enriched place.

Communication: The Value of the Give and Take

I began college as a communication major. One of the first things I learned as an introductory student is that communication involves back and forth dialogue, a give and take. If I speak to you and you do not respond back to me, we are not communicating. Communication, the back and forth, give and take, is very important in civilized society. For the purposes of this blog post, it is especially important to cultural heritage professionals and organizations that care to be successful in what they do. The give and take, smoothly flowing exchange of information, allows the conversation initiator to evaluate a reaction to what has been said and to adjust perceptions and activities accordingly. It seems like an easy concept, but the actual act of communicating to get intended results can often take a lot of concentrated effort.

As a writer, I often wonder how my writing is perceived. I worry if others enjoy what I've written, if they agree or disagree, or if my message has reached an audience at all. When I write a book and it sells, that gives me some sense of success. When I tweet or blog and someone starts following me, I get the same feeling that I'm doing something right. I know that someone finds at least my concept interesting, but it is rarer for me to get more helpful information than that to allow me to further evaluate what I've done. If someone takes the time to e-mail, that closes the communication loop and gives me direct feedback that can help me improve my writing and communication skills.

The challenge for institutions and individuals trying to communicate ideas is to encourage the feedback. How does a conversation initiator tell the receiver that a reply is appreciated and provide enough incentive for that receiver to accommodate the request? After all, replying to information we receive takes time and we have to (consciously or unconsciously) consider the act of replying worth our time.

For example, here's a not a- typical morning conversation with my six-year-old:
Me: "I bought a special snack that you can have after school today."
Daughter: No reply
Me: "I bought you a cookie at the bakery."
Daughter: No reply
Me: "Are you happy that I bought you a cookie?"
Daughter: "Yes"
Me (a wee bit aggravated): "How about a 'thanks for thinking of me mom'?"

On good mornings, the conversation may go like this:
Me: "I bought you a cookie at your favorite bakery. I bought the one with the colored sprinkles. You like the colored sprinkle one best don't you?"
Daughter: "Oh yes! Thank you mom!"

In the second conversation, I immediately offered all the information up front and ended with a question that invited reply. Because my daughter was excited from the start that the treat was a cookie from her favorite bakery and that I had considered her preferences in my decision about which cookie to buy, her excitement was ramped right out of the starting gate. It was worth it to her to reply to me, so that next time I was near the bakery I might again consider her and she'll again get what she likes. (She knows I'm a sucker for thanks and a kiss too!) In the first exchange, she was probably thinking whether or not the snack I bought was "special" for her or for me and then was considering what kind of cookie I got her. Rather than focusing on the conversational exchange, she was focusing on what she was getting out of this little arrangement I had set up. Notice too how much shorter the more successful conversation was. There was an immediate push pull. I gave information and asked a question. She answered.

Communication can be difficult one-to-one, like in the exchange with my daughter. It is much more difficult when it is one-to-many or many-to-many. Do you ever feel like you're jumping up and down shouting "look at me, look at me!" but you don't know to whom you are shouting? Do you ever look at all the entertainment and educational options that surround you and try to figure out how you can communicate to your potential audience that your institution is the one they should visit? The key to solving these issues is communication - not just the outreach from your institution, but devising means to get feedback.

The give and take allows you to change what you are doing. It shows your potential audience that you truly are considering their desires and feelings. It also makes individuals feel more empowered. Your organization becomes less stand-offish (a perception we all know that many have of us) and your approach is more personalized when you invite a response and user input. When I told my daughter that I thought she liked a certain kind of cookie best, it showed her that her opinion matters. I was less the bossy mommy and more the guiding mommy.

A few resources have come across my desk in the past few weeks to promote this idea of the give and take. Those wishing to pursue a give and take strategy should also consider that there are many ways to do it including one-to-one, to groups in person, through media, or on the Internet. Choose multiple strategies, but always make sure there is a way for users to give you feedback. Try to devise strategies that make them want to give you that feedback.

A few sources new to me:

Nina Simon's "The Participatory Museum" discusses multiple methods of encouraging feedback. Her handbook provides a great jumping point. You can pursue some of her suggestions or use her ideas to jog your own communication creativity.

Open Spaces: bringing new people to museums, libraries & archives through self-organised learning groups. http://bit.ly/bhJybw . This British program encourages institutions to create new programs that acknowledges an individual's desire and need for continuing education throughout their lives. It promotes the cultural heritage institution as a learning partner.

Meta Data games is an Internet based game for augmenting access to records http://www.tiltfactor.org/?page_id=1279: I am anxious to see how this pilot project by Dartmouth College progresses. Even more than libraries and museums, I think my beloved archives suffer from communication issues. (Maybe because people usually give me a blank stare when I tell them I'm an archivist, but if I say I'm a curator or librarian there is recognition in their eyes?) We have been working hard for decades now to provide more readily available access to archival materials. Archives are great communicative tools, giving us information and waiting for us to respond. Unfortunately, very few have access to archives and they sit on the shelves like a conversation waiting to happen. I think Dartmouth might help change that!

Participatory Archives and Face-to Face Communication

Andrew Flinn's 'An attack on professionalism and scholarship'?: Democratizing Archives and the Production of Knowledge discusses the value of community archives and the desirability of encouraging a participatory archives model. Flinn passionately argues for the need to shift the professional archivist's thinking to include the role of the non-professional, interested citizen, to advance the work that archivists do. Embracing democratization (or democratisation with respect to my English colleague) in the archives means giving users and potential collaborators a sense of ownership in the work that we do. Flinn notes that "...archives held in the community could be as important as those held in public archives." He advocates for persuading communities to share their knowledge and that specialists in diverse fields often have a better understanding of the materials held in cultural repositories than those who are charged with caring for those materials.

Flinn seems to present a challenge in the second half of his article, if you subscribe to the idea that the next step for archives is to be more inclusive and participatory, the next step to consider is how to encourage those outside of the archives to buy-in. In my opinion we must convince potential collaborators that: 1. We value what they say. 2. We are actively listening to their input 3. Their input is being put to good use.

Flinn discusses some of evidence of success in online collaborative initiatives such as The National Archives' (UK) "Your Archives" project, while earlier in the article he notes that "...in themselves, new technologies do not guarantee such a transformation [to democratic impulses]."
Once again, I find myself struggling with ideas of old and new. Technology is not the only input into the community we need to consider. While it has great benefits for archives in terms of access and reaching users we may not otherwise have reached, we cannot abandon successful methods that do not relate to computers and digitization.

In tandem with Flinn's article, I am reading Nina Simon's "The Participatory Museum." Her book emphasizes how different users may need different entry points into a museum. While one may feel comfortable walking through an exhibit with a brochure in hand, another may want an audio guide. Another person may want an activity that invites them to interactive with the exhibit to keep them engaged. With this in mind, we need to consider alternative means to invite individuals to participate.

Many of the people with whom I work are not Internet savvy. In fact, many need to be cajoled into going near a computer and just trying it. It is not effective to try to convince them of the value of using a computer while at the same time convincing them of the value of archives. Perhaps in a generation or two this will change and everyone will be comfortable with a computer. When that happens, and as technology advances and the becomes more personalized, the multiple access points we use for participatory archives will need to be revisited. For now, as my blog title today suggests, we must not abandon face-to-face communication. And for those of us who have never tried getting out of the archives and into the community, now would be a good time to do it as we explore the ideas of "participatory" and "crowdsourcing."

Encouraging users to bring their archives and their ideas to professionals through thoughtful programs is one way to make outsiders feel welcome. Public speaking, networking, attending community events and just making ourselves visible is still the best way to increase trust and participation. Telling individuals face-to-face that they are important, that the histories of their families are important, and that the records they hold in their possession are important, is vital to successful collaboration and democratization of our work. If we can reach out in-person, we can show that we are listening and valuing the individuals in our community, and we will receive the support and collaboration we seek.

Our challenge then becomes putting the buy-in to good use. What kinds of collections, programs, additional access points, exhibits, etc. can we create with our new non-professional partners to show them what they say matters? Rather than creating the programs FOR an audience first and hoping they will come, this shift in thinking will allow us to create programs WITH our audience, truly democratizing what we do, while highlighting our community and civic roles, and ultimately strengthening us and our purpose.