Social Archiving: Turning old material into a social media tool
What am I going to with my old photos? How many times have you heard that? When photos were physically printed at least you could write the names of Aunt Agatha and Uncle Fred on the back and maybe there would be a date. Now digital material is being accumulated at a phenomenal rate and tracking its content and people in it presents a major challenge.
If you mention archiving, images of dusty rooms full of boxes of old documents comes to mind. If you talk about digital archiving people start thinking about specialist products designed to allow one to capture and present, manage and sell digital content, movies and stills, i.e., their focus is on gathering digital content to control its distribution and sale.
But what happens if you have a mass of old material and what you want to do is to capture and present it to people to drive social engagement? The likes of families and educational institutions have lots of content but they are not interested in selling it. If just gathered into an archive such that it can be searched requires the viewer to plough through potentially masses of material, a lot of which may not be relevant. This is for a very limited audience of researchers, not your average viewer.
So, there are two archiving worlds:
· historical archiving, where the onus is on the user to find material, i.e. they have to do the “pulling”
· social archiving, where material is “pushed” to out to the user
Social archiving by presenting material to the user in an engaging way will encourage interaction, commenting and feedback and drive further interest in the archive. This concept is essentially a cross between Dropbox (hosted storage) and Facebook (social interaction). Capturing material and then using sophisticated tagging allows one to build “views” through the content called “galleries”. So, the “social archive” holds the data once and allows the archivist to build multiple galleries from that content, with the ability to publicly or privately, individually or by group, post that a new gallery has been built or updated, driving interest and consequently user traffic.
From an institutional perspective this can be monetized, for example, through products designed for alumni engagement. Calls to gather material will increase interaction alone but then delivering regular gallery updates will generate further interest and likely donations and legacies. There is nothing more potent than posting an old photo looking for names and reminiscences to generate a response from alumni!
From a business perspective this provides an easy way to have a highly visual “shop front” and generate interest in an indirect way, without explicitly being a web store. Organisations like museums, stately homes and the like can generate interest in their capabilities, facilities and merchandise and an interesting archive can drive direct web traffic and subsequent visits.
From a family perspective, it will encourage members to dig into cupboards and find old photos and then annotate them. This will likely allow links with the likes of Ancestry.com and family members can drill into their history, which TV shows like the BBC’s “Who do you think you are” have exploited. It will also avoid the awkward question of what will happen to old photos when someone dies. If digitised and annotated, they can remain alive forever or be discarded safe in the knowledge that they are of no interest to later generations.