Campers

Lise Summers

I'm the preservation program manager at the State Records Office of Western Australia, which means that I decide what gets preserved, reformatted, etc, but don't actually do it myself. Since 2000 we have been digitising large (over A0) plans, and last year we finally got enough money to get a program to put them on the web. Now we are looking at other material, and are discussing ways of adding value to the collection and the catalogue, through tagging of collection entries, wiki, sidebars, who knows.

I'm also an independent historian, interested in community and local histories, environmental and urban history. My thesis was on designed public open space in the City of Perth, and I've written presented articles on intercolonial exhibitions pre 1890, wildflower legislation and town planning, all in Western Australia.

I've had a mac since 1984, been on the internet since about 1986 and while I'm not an early adopter, I'm trying to keep up with the digital world. I've joined Facebook, and have an archives blog on Wordpress - Inthemailbox, but I'm not on Twitter, and unless my daughter gives me back my mobile phone, I won't be contactable on my mobile by the camp either!

My Posts

Crowdsourcing the information rich catalogue

August 4th, 2010 § 1

Lise Summers – I’d like to propose a General discussion session on creating information rich catalogues.  Essentially, I’d love to be able to add something like tags to our online catalogue, in a way that retains the authority structure and links of the ‘master’ catalogue, while at the same time allowing researchers to add information about file contents, even images of pages, to the catalogue. 

The National Archives UK have a wiki page, as does PROV, but neither of these links back well to the main catalogues.  Museums are using thumbnail images of their collection as a way of enticing this sort of user content, and there is the NLA newspaper project, also imaged based.  But what if you don’t have or can’t have images?  Put it all on Wordpress and post tags?