Next Monday sees the introduction of a new series of posts “Moments in Time…” and a new blogger.
General Post Office at Martin Place, c.1901
Rhonda Campbell will be posting on a weekly basis here at Archives Outside. Rhonda is the Project Officer, Digitisation at State Records NSW and project manages the digisitation of record series. She is a very experienced archivist and has a specialised knowledge of our photographic collection.
In the new series, Rhonda will be presenting a photograph from our collection each week and asking you to help us by adding to its metadata. Whether it be the when, what, or where, we hope to fill in some of the blanks. Many photographs in our collection are undated or we have been unable to verify the location in the image. To be able to do so would be beneficial to those who use the records.
We already receive help dating photos and/or verifying information from some of our Flickr friends (such as the image above) for which we are grateful. And we look forward to your help!
Jill Livingstone says:
I am loving these posts and really looking forward to the photographs. Keep them coming.
Jill
Anthea Brown says:
Thank you Jill, I’m so glad you enjoyed this series. Perhaps “Ann Item” will re-surface for another set of posts in the future.
I’m looking forward to the new ‘Moments in Time’ series, too!
Liam Wyatt says:
This is great news. Rhonda is fantastic and I’m very much looking forward to what she has to share with us.
If you’re looking for a way to get the public to assist with improving metadata at the State Records, can I point you in the direction of what the German Federal Archives are doing with Wikipedia?
They uploaded thousands of images to Wikimedia Commons (the multimedia repository behind Wikipedia) so that those images could be used in Wikipedia articles and generally given a new lease of life. In return, Wikipedians have been submitting metadata improvements by the bucketload! Here’s the list http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bundesarchiv/Error_reports (in german).
I’d love to see the SRNSW do a similar thing! :-)
-Liam Wyatt, VP Wikimedia Australia
Rhonda Campbell says:
Hi Liam, thanks for the show of support!
Initially we are just trialling the idea of user input to enhance metadata for our photographs through the blog. We are going to see how this goes and how it impacts on our internal systems. The Bundesarchiv page is very impressive.
Australian Lebanese Historical Soc. F.Backes Pres says:
Thank you State Records for exploring new ways to communicate with and involve your users. Many years later, we are still getting positive feedback from the photographs on your site which lead people to want to know more or to fill in some gaps in our own research regarding Lebanese settlement.
It is easy to see the fantastic opportunities the blog will deliver State Records. Good luck Rhonda!
Johnk67 says:
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