Really interesting episode of TWiT this week:
Just over a year ago I added Google Analytics to this blog in an attempt to get a sense of who, if anyone, was stopping off to read the thoughts of a record keeper. I'm not going to analyse the figures below in any way, other than to say I imagine they are a lot smaller than some of the more popular record keeping blogs (ArchivesNext, Records Management Futurewatch, Records Junkie, the Digital Archive etc). This might be due, in part, to the sporadic way I post.
I'm posting these figures just in case anyone is trying to get a feel for the popularity and reach of record keeping blogs. I hope they're useful and I'd encourage others to do the same. It would be interesting to develop a sense of the size of the online readership for archival and records management issues.
11 MARCH '08 - 27 MARCH '09
VISITS
• 3,194 Visits
• 1,824 Absolute Unique Visitors
• 5,412 Pageviews
TOP FIVE COUNTRIES (visits)
• 1,991 United Kingdom
• 846 United States (with at least one visit from 40 of the 50 States. California, Minnesota and Texas have sent the most visitors)
• 105 Canada
• 55 Australia
• 21 Netherlands
TRAFFIC SOURCES
• Search and direct traffic was the most common source of visits (1,746)
• Of referring sites, other record keeping blogs sent the bulk of the remaining visitors with ArchivesNext, Records Junkie, Records Management Futurewatch and the Archives Blogs aggregation site topping the list. (Tip of the hat here to Kate, Russell, Steve and Mark).
BROWSERS AND OS
• 41.36% Firefox
• 37.51% IE
• 9.89% Safari
• 80.18% Windows
• 17.38% Mac
Despite the high number of Windows users I found the preference for Firefox interesting.
CONTENT
The most popular posts were:
• two point oh dear ii
• 'two point zero', 'two point o' or 'two point oh dear'?
• web 2.0 for archivists
The popularity of these posts is mirrored in a noticeable spike in traffic when the debate about archives/RM 2.0 was being held across several blogs, including this one, last autumn.
Reports on the JISC RM conference and the Archives Hub's Archives 2.0 conference have been posted recently:
JISC conference
Archives 2.0
They are worth looking into if you missed the conferences.
I attended some of the digital lives conference at the British Library this week and have been reflecting on some of what I heard.
It's not a new thought but the proliferation of the digital services and devices we use is staggering. Just thinking of my own use over the last nine years or so gave me pause:
2000-2003 I had an email account and access to the internet a work and a mobile phone, but that was about it. I was still using a walkman to listen to music when I travelled and the only real digital things in the house were my CD player and my old PC (which didn't even have a modem).
2003-2006 Digital photos and music. Broadband at home. Started posting to the odd online discussion. I was reading blogs but didn't tend to comment on them. At work we began teaching our distance learning courses in archives and records management fully online using the University's VLE.
2006-2009 In terms of hardware I use much the same as I did in the proceeding three years (it's just things have become a bit fancier (smartphone rather than a standard mobile, faster Mac etc)). The real change has been the amount of things I do online. I suspect I'm typical in that I was very much a passive consumer of the web in previous years (browsing and online shopping), but since 2006 I've started writing this blog, I'm on twitter, I was on bebo for a while but have switched to facebook (you go where your friends are!), I use Skype etc. The whole web as a platform metaphor has become something very important to the way I communicate both at home and at work.
What struck me when thinking about this is how quickly parts of my life have become digital and how normal that seems. We don't tend to take the long view with technology, but the changes really are remarkable. Similarly I was struck by how much more obvious, clear and easily identifiable my trace has become. We really are leaving parts of ourselves everywhere and I''ve blogged in the past about some of the concerns that raises.
That digital trace is what many of the sessions at the conference were about. What are the ways to identify and capture digital lives for posterity? The legal and ethical implications of that process were also discussed throughout the days I was there. However, what struck me was the self-conscious nature of our digital trace. I write this blog knowing (hoping!) that others will read it. Similarly I use facebook to share things with friends and twitter to communicate in a way that I know is basically public. There is a process of self selection that goes along with all of that which is different to writing a letter or penning a private diary. In a world where vast digital storage means that we can potentially keep everything, does the self-conscious nature of online activity change the way that we approach appraisal or the questions that we have to ask during that process? When private archives are more than a few bundles of letters should we be more selective and more knowing about the self-conscious nature of what we are examining?
Another recurring theme of the conference was that of aggregation (and the difficulties caused by EULAs). If we ignore the legal issues for a moment, it was suggested that because we live our digital lives via a number of disparate and largely unconnected systems then some aggregation is likely to be necessary to represent the digital life of one person. What I'm not clear about is how that changes our notions of the importance of context. How do we preserve the context of something from facebook when it is stripped from its place as part of a social activity and placed alongside a blog post? Similarly, if a photograph is taken from a computer and forms part of a digital collection is something lost where that same photo is ignored in an online environment (because it is a duplicate), but where the context provided by that environment is different (the picture is part of an album with a different name, there are tags attached etc)? Is that re-contextualisation important and if so how do we decide that? Should we be trying to preserve all the contexts which any one digital object may have? Is that even possible?
I'd be interested to hear the thoughts of others on these issues as they were the ones which I kept coming back to again and again at the BL conference. I'm not sure what the answers are, but I am sure that these are questions that should be part of the conversation re archives 2.0.
I thought this was rather nice for a light Friday afternoon post. The image below is my twitter mosaic. Tip of the hat here to Euan as I found this via his blog.
Just in case you've missed it this week (and if you don't use twitter you may well have) there's been something of an explosion of record keepers and repositories using twitter and following each other. It all stemmed from a post on David's Digital Archive blog where he listed 15 people that archivists may want to follow. This caused something of a rush of new connections between those of us who use twitter. As David said in his follow up, no one is sure where this will go but 'a small, vocal and flourishing micro-blogging community' seems to have been created.
Kate also mentioned the new connections on twitter this week on her ArchivesNext blog. As is usual with Kate's blog, the comments are great and really worth reading. I left a comment there on why and how I use twitter and I've reproduced it below as context and a brief explanation of why I think the service has so much potential.
[There are lots of different ways to take advantage of twitter. We're using] the @CAIS_Archives account as a one-many feed that can also be rendered in different places (on a website, a blog, an intranet etc).
I struggled to see the value of my own account (@Al30) at first as it just seemed to be another tool for throwing things out there and I wasn’t sure if I needed that. What changed for me was when I found myself following 10-15 people saying (and linking to) interesting or useful things (as well as all the fluff about the weather/pets/food etc). That meant I starting getting a constant drip of things that I found worthwhile. The stage after that was when I started to enjoy the fluff too and developed a much more rounded picture of the people I was following.
Ultimately, I think the beauty of twitter is its simplicity. Everyone uses it in their own way and for their own purposes. Consequently everyone finds their own value in the service. I think that’s why twitter has the traction it does and why it seems to fascinate so many people.
As a quick follow up to my posts about twitter last year, I thought I'd mention that we're starting to use twitter at work as a way of putting out little items of news, links etc. If you're interested in finding out how well this goes you can see our tweets and follow us here. We'll also be adding a feed from twitter to our website soon.
