On the last day of NCPH, I attended one of the last sessions: Graphs, Maps, & Trees: Imagining the Future of Public Interfaces to Cultural Heritage Collections. The panelists/working group grappled with the same issues that we have been discussing all semester: story-telling, 3D vs. 2D representations, copyright, citability, usability. How do you tell a complex story visually?
Several of the panelists have wrestled with these issues since the heady days of the CD-ROM. Questions have never been answered; more questions have been generated by Web 2.0. Instead, some folks have reconciled themselves to never truly knowing the answers to the following questions:
1. Why did a visitor come to my site?
2. How is a visitor using my site?
3. What are the visitor’s technical competencies?
4. How do I know when I have finished a web/social media project?
5. How many/what type of IT technical skills does a historian need?
6. What are you allowed to do with online data? (Copyright or distribution restrictions)
In the library world, best practices have evolved and are distributed via white papers or conferences. Historians have not constructed similar mechanisms. The panelists bemoaned the lack of research or case study sharing in the profession. they had to look at non-history journals for guidance. Museum personnel noted that institutional visitor studies are typically proprietary.
Since the questions above were first generated 20 years ago and have withstood technological change, the time has come to talk of many things. Even the walrus would recognize that now is the time to actually research and then define best practices.
Alrisha - The Knot 