What a Digital Archives SHOULD be!

For those of you who have not seen it, Columbia University has a very fine example of what online collections should be: accessible, intelligible, easy to navigate, and educational. Their Mapping the African American Past (at www.maap.columbia.edu) . It contains a very rich selection of maps, primary source accounts, photos, streaming video, a very slick historic maps interactive timeline (http://www.maap.columbia.edu/place/index.html), and (in my opinion, most importantly) LESSON PLANS (http://www.maap.columbia.edu/module/index.html)! Columbia has given a guide to teachers in 8-12 grades of how to integrate the primary source materials from their collection in to high school history classes. This is a well conceived plan that I have been advocating for years, it is one thing to read about history and see a 3"x5" map in a textbook printed who knows where, it is a very different and engaging experience to read first hand events and research history on your own. By engaging students still in high school and showing them the importance of primary source materials, we can strongly illustrate that not all knowledge can be found on the Wikipedia site. Check it out for yourself and tell me what you think.

Importance of Accessibility

One of the distinct advantages that electronic records offer over traditional analog materials is the ability to make them much more globally accessible - multiple users at the same time, accessible at 3am on a Saturday, from anywhere in the world, etc. But one of the greatest areas of accessibility that is often overlooked is how we, as archivists, can make our holdings accessible to an entirely new group of researchers -- those who are visually impaired and/or have reading disabilities. While speaking at a media event in Bellevue back in January, I met George Kerscher, Secretary General, from the DAISY Consortium and learned about some amazing work they are doing with XML standards to increase the readability of any web based information. DAISY stands for Digital Accessible Information SYstem and they have been working with Adobe, Microsoft and any other major vendor that will listen. By using special XML tags, digital readers are better able to convene the context of the information (such as when new paragraphs start, or section headers). Microsoft and Adobe have incorporated 'save as' functionality for DAISY XML into their latest offerings, and I think it is worth exploring for incorporation into how archives save and web render their documents. Learn more about DAISY here: http://www.daisy.org/