Oprah gets archives and goes genealogical

As noted by a BC archivist on the ARCAN-L mailing list (02010 03 09), today's Oprah Show looked at celebrities and their family histories. There are other links you can explore about some of these individuals, including former Friends star Lisa Kudrow who happens to be one of the executive producers of the American reality series Who Do You Think You Are?, which is based on a BBC TV program of the same name. With Oprah's interest in archives, can fame and fortune for archivists be far behind?

The Experts' Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media whitepaper from WordStream

Here's an interesting whitepaper from WordStream, a search marketing company, called The Experts' Guide to Keyword Research for Social Media.

Google Public Data Explorer available in Google Labs

The Google Public Data Explorer is now available in Google Labs. The data sources are mostly from the United States. Google is looking for feedback.

Source: "Google Adds Public Data Search Tool To Labs", Matt McGee, Search Engine Land, 02010 03 08

ArchivePress, a UK blog-archiving project

According to its front page, ArchivePress

is a blog-archiving project being undertaken by the University of London Computer Centre and the British Library Digital Preservation department, funded by the JISC Information Environment Programme under its Rapid Innovation Grants Call (03/09).

The project will explore practical issues around the archiving of weblog content, focusing on blogs as records of institutional activity and corporate memory. As an alternative to the web crawling/harvesting approach of the Internet Archive and the UK Web Archive, ArchivePress will test the viability of using RSS feeds and blog APIs to harvest blog content (including comments, embedded content and metadata). The archived content will be stored and managed using instances of Wordpress, thereby maintaining the blogs’ native data structures, formats and relationships.

We hope to develop tools and methodology that will enable organisations to use simple, free, open source blogging software to manage a central archive of designated institutional blog outputs, even if they are spread over different blog hosts and platforms. The benefits of this approach will include:

• targeted gathering of selected weblogs



• improved reliability and authenticity of records



• citable blog content with persistent identifiers



• automated, ongoing harvesting, via newfeeds



• accessibility of content, using native blog interfaces


• 
  use of native web and database file formats, compatible with registry-based preservation activities.

Source: ARCHIVES mailing list, 02010 03 08

Museum Computer Network 2010 Conference call for proposals

The Museum Computer Network 2010 Conference Program Committee is delighted to announce the call for proposals for MCN's upcoming conference in Austin, Texas, Oct 27-30, 2010. We'll be accepting proposals from April 5 - May 3, so start sharpening up your ideas!

This year's innovative program will include not just a great line-up of papers and panels on the theme of I/O: The Museum Inside-Out/Outside-In [link to http://mcn2010.pbworks.com/Conference-Sessions] but also a "slow un-conference" - Seizing the Tiger by the Longtail [link to: http://mcn2010.pbworks.com/Slow+Un-conference].

If the topic or problem you most urgently need to discuss with your peers and experts in the field is not covered by the scheduled papers and sessions, then propose an un-conference session and MCN will help bring together the conference's brightest and most experienced minds for your un-conference session.

Check out the conference planning wiki for more details:
http://mcn2010.pbworks.com

Source: DIGLIB mailing list, 02010 03 05