Stop Drifting in Cyberspace Fill Out My Survey!
Welcome to my initial foray into polls, the basic concept of this post is to build upon my recent suggestion for ‘la otra conservation’ and to begin to ask some basic questions about where we are, as conservators, in the world of Web 2.0. I decided to do this as an initial first step to see if any useful data could be developed. If it is then more probing questions could be asked, if you have any suggestions please leave them in the comments.
Clay Shirky said “every url is a latent community” and I believe he is right, my initial reasoning for developing this blog was to try out the software and also to see if it was possible to blog about conservation things that interested me… well, I have managed to do both of those things, although I made a mistake in thinking that it would be harder than it has turned out to be. I thought that I would be pretty safe to mess around with this for a couple of years without anyone noticing, although apparently not… with over 5,000 hits last month, I seem to have developed a bit of a readership which wasn’t the intention. So, now that the blog does seem to be developing a bit of a community (multiple guest bloggers, numerous comments, many other blogs referencing this blog, etc) I wondered if I can ‘pick the brains’ of that community to find out more about our collective online conservation life. These questions then should be considered a “part one”, over time I really want to begin to ask the bigger question – Where next for digital/online conservation?
Hi Daniel, nice survey, I wasn’t quite sure what you meant by open access publishing though – online journals? Or does this include things like The DistList, website content etc? Presumed you meant the more formal options with a higher level of editing/peer review.
Good point,
I was thinking along the lines of the definition on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access_(publishing) or more simply “access to material via the Internet in such a way that the material is free for all users to read and use”. I was thinking more along the lines of open access journals, newsletters, magazines, etc. Not just “online” because online access can still be blocked, i.e., maybe available to members only, etc, and I wouldn’t count distlist or websites, as a general rule, as although they are usually free for all, they’re not an open access version of publishing, they are something slightly different.
Thanks for filling out the survey.
Cheers, Dan.
Hi Daniel,
thanks for posting this survey. I’m not a Conservator, myself (I’m a Senior Curator at a Visual Arts Documentation Centre in Rome – crdav, it’s on twitter, too), so I’m not sure if you will find my answers very helpful, though…
Cheers,
Alessandro
Hi Alessandro,
How funny, I was just looking at http://museumstudies.tumblr.com/ Please go ahead all answers will be interesting.
Cheers,
Dan
I did…
Yeah, that’s funny! Hope you liked Museumstudies – I launched it only a few weeks ago, when leaving for Kabul (now I’m back again), so maybe it has to get it’s “adult shape”, yet…
Cheers,
Alessandro
Hi Daniel,
I filled out the survey. When I was getting the results I couldn’t stop pondering how selective the survey audience is, and how the results would not reflect all types conservators in the field, but just selective few of us who are tech savvy, already read blogs etc. I think some folks should be sent out the survey in a different format to get a wide range of ideas put together.
Thanks for keeping your blog updated.
Best,
Ozge
Ozge,
Haha.. you’re totally correct. It’s a survey of my audience, and not of conservation as a whole. I too would love to see a wide scope survey, I’d actually like to see an institution take on doing this… maybe not AIC they seem to send out surveys every few weeks.
However, that being said, even from a very small group of people answering the survey, i am finding the answers to be very interesting. You can check out the % by pressing the “view results” button on each question.
I’m looking forward to reviewing it a few days from now to see how the percentages have changed.
Thanks for doing the poll, for commenting, and for reading the blog.
All the best,
Dan