Michelle,
It is my hope, Michelle, given your prominent status in the archival
community and the EAD community in particular, you might bring attention to
my earlier work with EAD and wikis, and potentially benefit by it should the
archival community now be ready to embrace it. I would be interested in
working with you to establish this as a priority and helping you with this
project, particularly if you wish to write an article on such a topic.
I created a sample wiki cataloging record I called WikiMARC (Apr 2008) and
also an EAD finding guide (Mar 2008):
http://archivopedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=WikiMARC_1931666091_
http://archivopedia.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sample_finding_aid
At the time, I wrote on the latter, “EXPERIMENTAL: This may be the first EAD
finding aid for a wiki.” Both the MARC record and the EAD finding guide are
most certainly not perfect. They were not designed to be especially pretty
or user friendly, but as prototype templates designed to test what was
possible in terms of software capability and functionality.
With an interest in integrating archival finding guides into the delivery
mechanisms of RSS feeds, I came up with a way to integrate full-text EAD XML
documents so they could be distributed by RSS. I then copyrighted how to do
this at the Library of Congress and received a software copyright for
“Encoded Archival Description (EAD) template distributed via Really Simple
Syndication (RSS) feed” in 2009. (Whether it still works today, given
possible changes in commercial RSS feed readers, I do not know. However, it
seems certainly possible to design a commercial RSS feed reader that goes
hand-in-hand with RSS-enabled finding guides. Nevertheless, RSS Syndication
of EAD finding aids feeds and feed reading does work to this day within the
wiki software using the copyrighted template and the Wiki RSS Reader for
Wikimedia displayed here: http://archivopedia.com/wiki/index.php?
title=Sample_finding_aid_for_RSS
I also experimented a bit with a wiki-based Digital Collection with the idea
that wikis might be used for this purpose as well.
http://archivopedia.com/wiki/index.php?
title=Women_Working_in_Aeronautics_%26_Astronautics
After evaluating my wiki and some of the experimental work on it, I was
invited by the author to be one of five paid Technical Reviewers for the
book MediaWiki written by Daniel Barrett and published by O’Reilly in 2008.
One of the other technical reviewers was Brion Vibber, Chief Technical
Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. http://books.google.com/books?
id=2dhL5V3pLHkC&q=bohle#v=snippet&q=bohle&f=false
I have subsequently turned my attention to uses of artificial intelligence
and machine learning regarding archived data in linked, unlinked, delimited,
and even unstructured formats.
Shannon Bohle, MLIS, CDS (Cantab), FRAS
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