I Me Mine

Thing Five: Online chat

I've set up my Meebo account. On the settings I enabled IM history just cause it says history but I don't really know what that means. I noticed there is an option to only receive messages from friends which I will activate if there turns out to be spam. I also changed the window background color to purple.

I then turned my procrastinating self to trying to set up a chat with my mentor Amy. It took some doing trying to find a time factoring in the time difference between Williamsburg and California. This could be a problem. Our users at work are either in California or they're in Japan or Europe. Email works well with Japan and Europe for collaboration because you each are working on your part of the project be it a report or research when the other is asleep and then you send it at the end of your day so it is ready for them at the beginning of theirs. Very time effective. Anyway, chat would not work in those cases. And the folks in California just pick up the phone when it's too much back and forth for email.

(Having my chat right now... the mystery is why is Meebo showing my buddy as offline when she is obviously online.)

Our assignment asks about previous chat experience. Once, long ago, someone in our group at work tried to get us all on the AOL IM thing. He set us all up with the software and usernames and everything. He was the only one we ever contacted using it. Our biggest problem with it was the lack of a record. Maybe it was just us archivists (he was in the database side of the shop) but we hated being without a record of what had been asked and agreed. It worked to his advantage 'cause he could deny that he said he would trek down to our basement lair soon to check on that problem we were asking about. Anyway, maybe the IM history setting that I mention in my first paragraph solves that issue. Having a history did not exist back then. Imagine, archivists with no history! Think I'll go play with the IM history thing, see what that is about.

Slipping and sliding

Thing Four: Slideshare

Well, I set up my Slideshare account with no problems. Once there I thought I'd check out what's available related to the Society of California Archivsts (SCA) and SLAC (my institution).

SCA got a number of hits, but upon checking into them it appears that they are mostly hits that include the individual words. I tried the search trick of placing my phrase in quotation marks, but the results weren't much different so I'm not convinced it worked. It looked like there was one real hit, problem was, the More link at the end of the abbreviated description wouldn't work on IE8 and so I could not confirm and the slides themselves did not provide the necessary metadata of when and where the presentation was made. One observation was that the page layout was similar to YouTube (including the More link). Looks like some standards are emerging in presentation so new visitors don't have spend a lot of time wandering around a page.

UPDATE: Was able to get the More link to work from home on Firefox and yes indeed this presentation is from the SCA meeting last spring in Riverside. Bonus, it is about crowdsourcing (though not a surprise, of course someone talking about a 2.0 kind of thing would be the most likely to put his slides on Slideshare). Looks like there're some interesting projects to learn more about. Regret that I didn't go to that session as I expect more was said than appears in the slides.

Metadata in a Crowd: Shared Knowledge Production

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I then turned to searching for SLAC stuff. Powerpoint is a huge part of the culture here so I was surprised how little I found without even trying to exclude the totally science presentations. But another bonus, several of the ones I did find were à propos to either 2.0 ...

The Secret Life Of Social Media

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... or archives or preservation:

• http://www.slideshare.net/maconrad/era-research-and-slac/
• http://www.slideshare.net/DigitalPreservationEurope/preservation-and-reuse-in-high-energy-physics-salvatore-mele-presentation
• http://www.slideshare.net/narodnitechnickaknihovna/scoap3-anne-gentilbeccot

Final observation: Slideshare may be useful for finding presentations, but a good presenter does not put everything in the slides. Sometimes they use notes in the Powerpoint, but look at my first example and you'll see that most of the notes are no notes. So ultimately, I believe you can only get the tip of the iceberg on these presentations. The upside is as David says on slide 6 this is a new way of getting information and it leads to picking up on some of it and surf/searching it further as I may do with some of Kevin's items.