What are scholars looking for from archives and museum collections?  How can digital content staff at these institutions help?

The Henry Ford has been digitizing its collections for several years, and recently started a project to rethink its entire digital presence, including the presentation of its collections online.  Brian Wilson (Digital Access and Preservation Archivist) and Ellice Engdahl (Digital Collections & Content Manager) would love to facilitate a TALK session to pick the brains of willing graduate students, professors, and other scholars at THATCamp to find out what you’d like to see from online archives and museum collections in general, and in particular, from our collection.  Do you want data downloadable en masse?  If so, what types of data would you want, and what formats?  What existing museum and archive digital experiences do you like most—or least?  What features do you use most?  What features do you use least, or not at all?  What do you want from archival material (e.g., OCR) versus from museum objects (e.g., 3D printable files)?  Are there things you’re interested in that could be specific to scholars of technology history, or do you think they would be universal across disciplines?

This is not an official requirements gathering session for our digital presence, but we’d like to start a general conversation so we know how we, as museum and archives staff with content digitization and access responsibilities, can best support scholars in their work.

How does the perception of technological collections as social objects affect the way in which we approach our work? Assign value? Determine significance? How does this differ when the social object is related to the arts instead of industry? Using the Henry Ford’s current IMLS funded project to locate, conserve, research, and digitize the communications collections as a backdrop, let’s <strong>talk</strong> about some of the larger issues surrounding technological museum collections.

I’m interested in discussing tools and methods that could be used for research, teaching, and publishing in the history of computing. This would presumably include general web development, but also primary sources that might be amenable to distant reading, open data sources related to economics / tech components of GDP etc, likely sources for web scraping, approaches to online exhibits and timelines like the ones at http://www.computerhistory.org/. There’s also the question of how to (or whether we should) archive and make publicly accessible technical documentation including specifications, requirements, and code. Software preservation might also be of interest.  My immediate interest is to enhance the visibility of national computing histories and enable transnational comparisons and collaboration, but the global picture is important too. I’d be more than happy for the conversation to take in the broader history of technology.

This is a proposal for a Make session to give SHOT’s online presence a small but helpful boost. Over the session, we would improve SHOT’s Wikipedia page (which used to be very sad but has recently been updated to be a little bit better), SHOT’s Facebook presence (the conference-centric page is quite useful, but the automatically generated organization page is terrible – just look at that picture!), and so on. I have thought about starting a slightly larger project on collecting and making available programs from *all* the SHOT conferences, back to the very beginning – perhaps combined with a map interface (an early draft can be found here).

I can add that SHOT is evaluating how it can use social media more actively, and that I’m chairing an ad hoc committee that will present a report on SHOT and social media to the Executive Council at this meeting. One of the proposals there is for SHOT to recruit a social media editor, and the outcome of this session might be helpful for that person (and thus also for the organization as a whole).

I’d be happy to offer to lead a session on how to teach history of technology (or other topics) using WordPress as a learning platform. I have gotten increasingly frustrated with my university’s LMS Cambro (based on Sakai), and decided to build my own WordPress setup for both teaching online classes and – most importantly – for providing an arena for students to write and discuss. I know many other people do the same, and I would love to both share what I have learnt and also to learn from others. I could start the session by simply demonstrating my current WordPress course setup and providing some information about how others could build something similar. The goal is to not be overly technical, but to instead focus on the pedagogical possibilities and limitations.

It’s now less than a month left before THATCamp SHOT starts, so it’s about time to start proposing sessions. As you may now (and as you can read more about in the THATCamp guide to proposals) we set the schedule for the THATCamp together, at the opening of the event, but we do this based on session proposals that the participants come up with. This website is a good place to do that, and it allows for discussion, comments, and feedback. The key thing is that we do not propose individual talks in these sessions – instead, the session is an opportunity for people to get together to discuss or work on a topic they share an interest in. Each session has a session leader (which is often the person who proposes the session).

There are roughly four things people do in THATCamp sessions: Talk, Make, Teach and Play. Sometimes one session contains elements of all these, but it’s also a fair taxonomy for THATCamp sessions. In a Talk session proposal, you offer to lead a group discussion on a topic or question of interest to you. In a Make session proposal, you offer to lead a small group of hands-on collaborative working session with the aim of producing a draft document or piece of software. In a Teach session, you offer to teach a skill, either a “hard” skill or a “soft” skill. In a Play session, anything goes – you suggest literally playing a game, or you suggest some quality group playtime with one or more technologies.

The THATCamp proposal guide has several examples of such sessions. If you look at these proposals, you can also see how other participants actively comment and signal their interest in such sessions. Please do the same with the THATCamp SHOT proposals – this will ensure that we can have an efficient and productive unconference! The only set thing at the THATCamp is opening, lunch, and ending – the rest is up to us!