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New community archives website.
by Gordon Joly at 11:53 20/10/06 (Forum::Community::General)
There is a new community archives website. It was launched a few weeks ago.

http://www.communityarchives.org.uk/

Through my involvement in two local history groups, I was made aware of this new website. Since my first visit, the website has been re-launced with a directory of archives, grouped into four categories.

1) Black, minority and ethnic communities
2) Local or regional communities
3) National collections
4) Special interest communities

The home page is at

http://www.communityarchives.org.uk/

and the webiste is under the umbrella of the National Archives.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

A colleague in one of groups made contact for technical advice on the creation of a digital catalogues, and was immediately directed to research "meta tags" and the Dublin Core as a standard.

Many groups still use some very old software for digital archives, and pay hundreds of pounds to licence the software. I have promoted wikis (Mediawiki, open source) as a simple and straightforward approach to archives (and some record keeping). Mediawiki has some limitations: the main issue is that we have a demand for archival of video. I have also had requests for a spell checker (to support users with dyslexia), but in general the group seems to like Mediawiki. I have given them training in Mediawiki, and was very pleased to find that two of the group had used Twiki a year or two ago.

http://www.mediawiki.org/

http://www.twiki.org/

I have adopted the philosophy that the wiki is open to all, as individuals, but that we website is the agreed result of work done inside the wiki.

--
gordo

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