During the past few years I’ve begun several indexing projects – newspapers, yearbooks, etc. As I do the indexing, I sometimes become interested in researching the names I come across. Naturally, I want to share this information as broadly as possible. Yet, I feel limited in my options to do so.
So, here is a theoretical question. If you had a yearbook photo of a graduate that you wanted to get into the hands of potential family or researchers that may be interested, how would you do it? Pretend you had 100 photos that you wanted to do this with. What would be your strategy for sharing if you had to limit yourself to a few minutes to do it? Where would you feel you got the most “bang for your buck?”
In my next post, I’ll discuss my view of the advantages/disadvantages of various options but I’m eager to hear from you.
Where to Share?
These days we are at a digital crossroads for where an individual can choose how to share records.
In the past, creating a website cost tens of thousands of dollars. With today’s technology, Blogger and WordPress make it easy to create your own free blog and begin sharing immediately.
There are sites that are responsible stewards of records, but those who post the records are most often volunteers, and there can be a delay between your submitting the records and the records being posted.
There are sites such as SankofaWiki, Footnote and WeRelate, that offer a balance between the two, if you have the time to share but don’t wish to have your own blog, you can post your records on those sites, but you must learn the posting protocol for each site.
These days you can choose from a variety of ways to share, it just depends on which option best fits your needs.
Toni
First, i’m going to assume you have the right to share the photos, from your US published yearbook of 1922 or earlier (and some other special cases). An index of yearbooks and photos, not including the photos has a slightly different set of answers: This blog seems to be a great place to post a text document like that. (See below for notes about the Internet Archive indexing for sustainability.)
I worked for RLG during the development of Archive Grid http://www.archivegrid.org/ and Cultural Materials (http://www.oclc.org/research/activities/past/rlg/culturalmaterials/default.htm ), and those projects inform these answers.
Criteria i would place high in my solution to the “here are 100 images” would be (a) that the location is indexed by the major search engines and (b) that the location supports comments (that are in turn indexed by the main engines) . I would also put a high value on being part of a greater destination.
Right now i find a Pro account at Flickr to be an easy to meet my needs, but i question the long term sustainability of such an endeavor. When i stop paying, only the 200 most recent images will be available in the photostream and then there’s the threat that if free account is inactive for 90 consecutive days, it may be deleted. The Smithsonian and other major cultural institutions are having great success with Flickr in sharing and discovering more about the images that they share. The sustainability question remains.
Another possibility is the Internet Archive: “Please contribute books, audio, and video files that you have the right to share.” So, that’s not individual images, but documents you may scan — again with attention to rights. However, getting another website scanned and included in the Internet Archive (currently by making sure the site is in http://www.dmoz.org ) is a way to create a persistent repository for your content.