Anne Summers Innovative Ideas Forum 2009: National Library of Australia

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Anne was introduced as the second speaker of the day by Warwick Cathro. She discussed “The implications of web-based social networking for cultural heritage institutions”.
Many of Anne’s papers are held at the NLA (interesting to note in passing that “Anne Summers was selected for preservation by the National Library of Australia”). She noted, however, that her digial record is changing the amount of her files and papers.
Anne explored the implications of web-based social networking for cultural heritage institutions and discussed the generational change that is occurring in the recording of events. She noted the richness of archived collections of papers and illustrated her discussion with her work on Sir John Monash and Sir Keith Murdoch. She pondered the archival and curation processes for digital artifacts of more recent generations.
She discussed how cultural institutions might manage transient technologies.  She used her own on-line digital identities to explore some of these issues.
Her website is a self managed site. it is used for book promotion, posting articles and speeches. Her blog (the blog) is a forum for the discussion of ideas and issues.
Anne has been using Facebook for some eighteen months and described her use of it for social networking. She noted, in particular, the use she made of Facebook for sharing links to newspaper and journal articles and columns. Anne noted too the use she made of Facebook for marketing and promoting events. She used the example of the Pen Poem Relay as a way of promoting causes too.
Anne considered the role newspapers will play in the recoding of events given analyses of trends such as these. She discussed briefly the contribution of the Huffington Post to on-line journalism.
She concluded her talk with a discussion of approaches to scholarly research and commended the serendipty possibilities available to those who left their digital research desks and explored rich archives of material reposited in cultural institutions such as the National Library of Australia.
Library Labs’ posts about Anne Summers’ talk can be found here and here. This is the link to questions put to Anne after her talk.

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