Sharing the work

May 17th, 2010 |

Here’s a bit from my THATCamp application:

Many of the tools of Web 2.0 and social media offer opportunities for collaboration, between institutions as well as individuals, yet the opportunities are not taken. Museums, archives, and universities could make use of tools like Google Wave, wikis, etc to share information. I would like to be part of a discussion the stumbling blocks that prevent collaboration, and possible solutions or routes which could be taken, even if they’re small steps. I’d also love to hear other people’s ideas for collaborative projects.

Here’s where I started from: I work in a historic house museum, and I have friends who are professors, grad students, librarians, and fellow museos. We have great conversations and a lot of our work overlaps. We share the info informally but there isn’t an officially sanctioned way for us to combine and collaborate and make the resulting information available to everyone.

My personal dream-project is some sort of shared wiki or webpage for all the Early American Republic sites and scholars in Virginia. There are so many overlaps in individuals and events; rather than every place recreating the wheel we could benefit from shared ideas.

I’d like to have a conversation about collaborations between different kinds of institutions, both ones which have worked and ones which failed (and the whys of both).  It would also be helpful to discuss strategies to encourage TPTB to engage in collaboration.

I may also join in the conversations proposed by Jeffrey McClurken and Chad Black, to raise the questions of where and how libraries and museums fit in to classrooms and academic scholarship.

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3 Responses to “Sharing the work”

  1. THATCamp 2010 » Blog Archive Says:

    […] link heavy to read). I think there may be a few interesting intersections with the proposal from Megan Brett and I’m particularly curious for any suggestions from Chad Black, Priya Chhaya, Karin […]

  2. Eli Says:

    I’m really interested in the challenges and opportunities of collaboration between small house museums and heritage institutions. One great (non-DH) example of smart partnerships is Historic Germantown that link together fifteen museums around a shared ticket and programs, with a joint branding campaign. However, I know there were many challenges to bring this coalition together and the process could be supported by a website of the sort you propose. Would the CUNY Academic Commons be a good model? I’d be curious to extend your imagined digital community to include local historians of all sorts throughout the mid-Atlantic, with the ability to create groups for house museums, preservation advocacy groups, historical societies, genealogists, 19th-century sites, 20th-century sites, coastal, Piedmont, Appalachian…

  3. THATCamp 2010 « A Magpie Historian Says:

    […] which are well worth Yaking about (should that have 2 ks?). I didn’t propose a session for my blog post (tl;dr is “academics/faculty need to engage with non-acads because everyone will […]

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