In Clay Shirky’s keynote address at Smithsonian 2.0 he makes the point that we, as an online audience, rely on each other to dictate what is good or worth looking at. So what does this mean for online history sources who might not have the presence that juggernauts like wikipedia and youtube have? This also goes back to the case studies of public history websites that we looked at. What makes a history site reliable? How do you make a good site look good, without as we noticed publishing a book, journal article, etc.?

CNN had an article today that I thought was interesting and relevant to our readings this week. It discusses the recent upset over the racist picture of Michelle Obama and search engines’ (mainly Google’s) role in it. I suppose it’s kind of an alternate perspective to the readings this week that offer guidance on how to be a top search result. Search engines have not only become an economic but also a political tool. What do you do when being a popular search result is working against you? What responsibilities do search engines have or should have in these situations?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/02/google.search.obama/index.html

The readings this week seem to put a fair amount of weight on adding meta tags to your site. As a frequent google user I do see how valuable it can be, if you are so lucky as to be indexed by google. How does one go about using meta tags and do they serve a function outside of search engines?

Based on the readings for class today and after describing more items, I’m still a little confused about using DCMI Type Vocabulary. I was able to identify, after visiting the website, which “type” to use for my item, but “Text” seems to undescriptive. I guess I’m used to using the Art and Architecture Thesaurus; is it acceptable to also include these terms, such as “correspondence”, in my dublin core description?

Every time I try to connect to the server through Filezilla on my computer it takes a long time of retrying over and over again. All the information I enter is correct and eventually it connects but often after a long time. Is this a common problem, or am I doing something incorrectly?

With the readings this week, I of course began to think about how I will go about scanning paper documents for my archive. Since not all archives are able to scan documents for researchers and if they do they can often be more expensive, is it possible to scan copies of the documents? Will the quality still be good enough to use? If they’re not, would it be a good idea to include a transcription, especially for handwritten documents?

My question is pretty short probably not simple. From Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig’s discussion section on “Getting Started: Text and Images,” I wonder what advantages there are to learning HTML instead of using an HTML “translator”?

Dan Cohen mentions in both the lecture on YouTube and the Journal of American History “Interchange” discussion the overwhelming abundance that digital-born records presents. He discusses techniques that can be developped to help researchers navigate these massive collections, but I wonder what this means from an archival perspective. Appraisal traditionally has been as much a matter of practicality and limited physical space as an intellectual process. When millions of emails can reside in one server, appraisal becomes more an intellectual necessity. How have archivists already begun to deal with this problem? Is it even practical for archivists to attempt to appraise such massive amounts of records?

The link to my bibliography from Zotero 2.0 is: http://www.zotero.org/kaitmedley/items/collection/1292525

The original purpose of copyright law, to protect new work and encourage creativity, seems to be getting farther and farther from the reality of copyright law in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Many copyrights are now held by the larger institutions, publishers, music labels, etc. who have the money and staff to produce works created by others. Now that the digital age allows so many people to publish their own work for free, how do we see the uses of copyright law changing? Is it possible that copyright law could return to the protection of the creator rather than the producer?

Earlier today I was listening to a book lecture online by Mary Beth Norton about the Salem Witch Trials, and for me I think it made clear both why collaboration is essential and why it may be such a challenge for historians to adopt. Norton by her own anecdotal admission had done days work of tedious research only to discover that someone had already done that exact work. The value of collaborative research is far to great to ignore. However, at the same time I think many academics would be much more hesitant to collaboratively create a single historical work. I do think there is a great difference between collaborating on research and collaborating toward an end product, as some of the readings elucidate. I wonder if we should put equal emphasis on both and if the former will lead to the latter.