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.