The Schlater project is a group assignment that has been utilized for the past few years in our Public History Method & Theory class. It involves a collection of World War II correspondence between the grandparents of Angie Schlater, a former Loyola Public History PHD student. The collection is vast, comprising of several-page long letters from most days spanning several years during the war. Though the letters form the crux of the collection, photographs and various ephemera are also included.

I’ve a personal stake in this project, as I have been digitizing the letters for Angie on and off for the past year- and I hope to finish it up sometime in the near future. However, this Omeka site is one that my group created during class in the fall of 2010. Looking back on it now, with far more comprehensive familiarity with the letters themselves, I’m able to grasp just how valuable a site like Omeka can be in terms of utilizing metadata for navigating archival content.

In the spirit of lost films and old Hollywood, here are a few recent posts from cultural critique blog Flavorwire.

The museum itself has recently received a well publicized renovation. Though I have not had the chance to visit the new space, I noticed their website had also received an image overhaul in the past year or so. As far as museum websites go, this is one of the better ones I have seen. It’s stylish, pleasing to the eye, and easy to navigate. The necessary links used to make way around the website are prominently displayed below the heading, and beneath this, current happenings at the museum receive center stage, taking up most of the page.

I would say the most noteworthy feature of the Museum of the Moving Image’s website, is their collections page. If the definition of public history, at its most basic, is to make history accessible to as wide an audience as possible, this museum has done a splendid job of making its holdings- the self-professed “nation’s largest and most comprehensive collection of artifacts relating to the art, history, and technology of the moving image”- available to the public. You can then browse the rich array of digitized artifacts- 6,831 of the museum’s 130,000 in total- by filtering your search through both “artifact class” and by “collection subset.”

But aside, it’s also thought provoking. We muse sympathetically upon Yahoo and Hotmail and Friendster- former internet phenomenons which have gone the sad way of the dinosaur punchline. But as fluid as the internet- and technological development itself- is, does this mean everything on the internet is subject to eventual obsolescence? Or is there such a think as the ultimate email server (gmail?) and the ultimate social networking site (facebook?)

Laser Disc: Born of the analog to digital shift that caused the demise of the VHS, the laser disc began manufacture in the mid 1980′s, enjoying a brief spike in sales in the early 1990′s. These large, shiny discs seemed the way of the future, in that retro 1980′s way where everything shiny and space-age looking did. Alas, much like slap bracelets, the promise of Hoverboards, and NASA’s Space Shuttle Program, laser discs were not the way of the future. People tired quickly of the large and cumbersome medium, which often required viewers to get up and flip the disc over just as Return of the Jedi was getting to the good part, completely ruining the Princess Leia experience. Laser Discs, which were large, expensive and difficult to store, were rapidly replaced by the more portable, and far more affordable DVD. Manufacture ceased entirely in the mid 1990′s.

• Should institutions place their entire collections online and make the experience digital? How would that entice visitors to attend the institution and have a multileveled experience?
• Are visitors capable of ‘self-directed learning” with little to no direction? How does a museum know the visitor’s learning starter point?
• What is the balance between individual agency and curatorial authority? Is it possible for visitors and curators to truly co-author/co-create?
• Is a museum truly able to offer a personalized, adaptive experience? Why is democratization of remediation desirable/undesirable?
• Is a cultural product inherently meaningful due to that interaction with and creation by the visitor?
• Is communication between museums and visitors essential?
• Susan Hazan’s article “A Crisis of Authority: New Lamps For Old” states that a common criticism museums receive as they shift to more technologically based exhibits is a privileging of “information over the object.” Is this a fair criticism? Do museums have a responsibility to privilege one over the other? Is it possible for new media to work in tandem with tangible objects without usurping them?
  

Now, this is not to say I didn’t experience mild to moderate anxiety every time one of these social media went obsolete. I deal poorly with change. I resisted switching from friendster to myspace when all of my friends did, put forth similar resistance when they all moved from myspace to facebook and, though facebook seems far from the precipice of being replaced, the presence of twitter gives me similar anxiety.

I’ve recently been coerced into opening a twitter account for Public History Media class. Though I’ve yet to tweet yet, our assignment was to “lurk” around twitter, which I have done plenty of myself already. I’ve looked quite frequently at the pages of friends and of institutions I am interested in, but for some reason, never felt compelled to join twitter and frankly, am a little terrified of it. As I did a little more lurking, I tried to figure out why. It is more than just vague anxiety that twitter will render all other social media obsolete and I’ll be forced- yet again- into a social media upheaval. What is it about twitter that is so intimidating?