Participatory Digital Archives

Posted on October 9 2012 by natalie.milbrodt

I’m thinking most right now about ways to invite and encourage the creation of oral histories and other documentary records for the archives by a huge variety of participants while maintaining rigorous professional and scholarly standards in my institution’s practices.  In other words:

How do we strike a balance between making participation appealing and simple while maintaining quality control over the records we’re collecting?

I would really enjoy learning more about the ways other THATCampers have mobilized participants new to oral history and digital archives to produce wonderful contributions.

About natalie.milbrodt

Twitter: @natalie_milbrodt
Website: www.queensmemory.org
 I graduated from Michigan State University with a BA in Interdisciplinary Humanities and a Specialization in Film Studies. For the next decade, I worked in Detroit and New York City as a filmmaker and as a content developer for an interactive exhibit firm specializing in experiential design. I developed the Queens Memory Project digital archives as an MLIS graduate student in 2010 on behalf of the Department of Special Collections and Archives at Queens College and the Archives at Queens Library. This oral history-based digital archives came out of my interest in the challenging art of interviewing and my desire to create a stronger relationship between the people of Queens and our public archives. The project has recently become a paid position and now I face the exciting challenge of further incorporating the project into its partner institutions' regular operations. All posts by natalie.milbrodt →

One Response to Participatory Digital Archives

  1. Lauren says:

    Natalie, great questions, I’m looking forward to this discussion tomorrow. In our program, it feels like we can create double the work for ourselves curating “crowd sourced” content, in order to provide standardized output. Struggling with this as well for the SAA oral histories.