What's Old is What's New

Library 2.0 for YouNELA Annual Conference – 2008

Elizabeth Thomsenhttp://www.noblenet.org/ethomsen/

The Old Days We read about things in books, but seldom had access

to the source material

Primary sources were curated, most of us just saw carefully selected images, movie clips, quotations from letters, etc.

Someone else decided what was important.

Spinning Room Boys, Salem, Massachusetts Lewis Wickes Hine, National Archives

Lewis Hine ProjectJoe Manning’s search for the stories and descendants of child laborers photographed by Hine

Shorpy

An active blog of old photographs

Library of Congress on Flickr

Movies

For the Living 1940’s movie about New York housing projects

Living Room Candidate

TV campaign commercials back to 1952

BBC Memory Share Oral history project on YouTube

The Future of History

• There will be more of it

• More complex written record: e-mail, blogging, wikis, social networking, Twitter, IM, text messages, etc.

• What happens when we die?

• Digital Dark Ages?

Geography is History

Visual WakefieldLucius Beebe Memorial Library

People are Interested…But not as passive consumers

• Comments, conversation and stories

• Contributions and crowdsourcing

• Creativity through remixing and mash-ups

• The end of “look but don’t touch”

Make it easy for people to find and share

• Tags, names, numbers, addresses, geocoding• Bookmarkable links• Code for embedding images• Badges and other tools• Multiple RSS feeds • Widgets, gadgets, plugins, apps• Copyright

Encourage Participation

• Encourage users to share their own photographs, home movies, memories, and more…even though it means giving up some control

• Encourage people to use your material and create new tools…even though it means giving up some control

Thank you!

Elizabeth Thomsen

http://www.noblenet.org/ethomsen/

et@noblenet.org