Friday, July 24, 2009

Choosing Sessions to Attend: Good Trouble

If you're anything like me preparing for (or at least thinking a great deal about) Sustainable Archives: AUSTIN 2009, the list of things you would like to do and "have to" to do is growing exponentially. Here are a couple session suggestions related to reference, access, and outreach with more to come in the new issue of the RAO Newsletter next week. Are you part of or know of a session you think RAO members won't want to miss? Feel free to share your two cents in the comments.

A couple sessions looking interesting to my eyes today:

Session 101: Building, Managing, and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online

Session 104: The Real Archives 2.0: Studies of Use,Views and Potential for Web 2.0

Session 306: Omeka: Using Web 2.0 Technologies to Enhance Digital Content

And in a recent message to the RAO listserv Doris Malkmus shared how Session 404: Collaborative Teaching and Learning in the Archives: Assessment and Insight she is part of may be of particular interest to RAO members:

"As part of the panel, I will report on current research about faculty practices using archival and online primary sources to teach undergraduates; Barbara Rockenbach will discuss the library at Yale's new, active learning approach to user education for undergraduates, and Magia Krause will present an assessment tool she developed to test student learning before and after user education. Chair Peter Wosh will comment on the significance of these findings and fresh approaches. This session should prove valuable to all archivists working in an academic setting and to anyone working with novice researchers or interested in new practices in teaching history and user education."

What has caught your eye?

1 comment:

  1. When I looked at the program, I thought these three looked interesting.

    SESSION 201 - Videogame Archives: Collecting, Preserving, and Providing
    Videogames offer some of the thorniest aspects of digital preservation and also raise questions related to traditional models of creation, representation, access, and stability. This interactive discussion provides a general overview of videogame preservation theory and practice. Panelists address specific archival issues of collecting, describing, preserving, and providing sustained access to these materials.

    SESSION 303 - Sleeping with the Enemy: Hate Collections in Catholic, Masonic, and LGBTQ Repositories
    Repositories with collections that document minority or historically maligned communities may collect material produced by groups and individuals who are intent on the destruction or disenfranchisement of these communities. These hate/bias collections can present challenges related to management, collection development, access, and use. In this session, representatives from Catholic, Masonic, and LGBTQ archives discuss some of these challenges and why they collect hate material.

    SESSION 608 - Lasting Memories: Sustained Use of Collections of Tragedy
    During the past few decades an alarming number of catastrophic events have affected university campuses. Documenting tragic events of institutional history is a difficult task. Sustained access to these collections by researchers, filmmakers, and families creates an unusual balance between privacy and memory. In this session, archivists from Marshall University, Syracuse University, Texas A&M, and Virginia Tech describe the collections that document tragedies at their institutions and the wide range of researcher use.

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