4,000 visitors!

By complete chance we were looking at our website statistics this morning just at the point where the number of unique visitors to this blog reached 4,000. In total 6,624 visitors (including returning visitors) have looked at the blog since it began in August 2009 with 11,808 page views.

As you can see from the map, people viewing the blog come from all over the world.



As well as this blog you can also find us online in the following places:

• The University of Dundee webpages for Archive, Records Management and Museum Services (ARMMS) and the Centre for Archive and Information Studies (CAIS)
• The CAIS twitter account
• Museum Services' twitter account
• The bookmarks we save on delicious
• Images from Museum Services on Flickr

We're really pleased that so many people find the blog interesting and useful. Please let us know if you have any comments or suggestions on how we could change or improve things.

NOTE: we use Google's Analytics service to track our web statistics and the screenshots are taken from there.

ARMMS and CAIS online

One of the benefits of writing this blog has been that it has made us think about the online services we use and what information should be where. Most of the things we do online are aggregated via this blog, but we thought it might be useful to post a summary.

The traditional aspects of our roles within Archive, Records Management and Museum Services (ARMMS) are explained via our pages on the University Website. Here you can find information on our services and collections. Similarly, the first port of call for information on the Masters degrees in Archives and Records Management by distance learning offered by the Centre for Archive and Information Studies (CAIS) should be the CAIS web pages. In particular, you can find information on all the courses that make up our degrees (and that can be taken individually for Continuing Professional Development) here.

Our courses are delivered via a browser using the Univeristy's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). All the courses are fully supported by CAIS' tutors during the semester and each tutor is a practising subject expert and a Honory member of the academic staff of the University of Dundee. Using the VLE means that we can offer a richer and more interactive learning experience than is possible with traditional workbook-based distance learning courses.

We're keen to make sure that anyone interested in our work, collections or courses can access information or connect with us in as many ways as possible, but we want to make sure that the services we use provide something worthwhile rather than just using the technology 'because it's there'. We have two twitter accounts set up to provide regular updates on what we're doing, where we are and to highlight upcoming events or interesting items from our collections. The account for Museum Services can be found here and the account for CAIS is available here. Matthew has also begun to upload images of some of the highhlights form the Museum collections to Flickr to give anyone who can't get to Dundee a chance to see some of the items. Similarly, the Archive Catalogue, as well as containing the catalogue information needed to understand and access our archival holdings, contains digital images of some of the items from the collections.

The CAIS community currently consists of a network of c.200 students, thrity or so tutors and all our alumni and professional mentors. The CAIS Facebook group was set up to provide a way for all those connected with CAIS to maintain friendships and links with each other in an informal environment, should they want to.

We're continuiung with our experiment in crowd-sourcing to develop a link library for recordkeepers on delicious. Thanks to all those who have contributed so far. To anyone who wants to suggest new links for the library, there's information on how to do so in this post and new contributions would be welcome.

Fiannly, we'll continue to post here and we hope that everyone who drops in from time to time finds what we post interesting. As usual, we'd love to hear comments on any of the above as we continue to develop our online services.

A Tasty Experiment

Since the establishment of CAIS we have built up a significant network of students, tutors and mentors, all of whom contribute to the success of the courses in archives and records management that we offer. Each of our thirty courses was written and is tutored by a subject expert or experts, the majority of whom are external to the University. Currently, we have two hundred or so registered students (both postgraduate students and people enrolled on courses for their continuing professional development) and every Masters student has a mentor who is an experienced record keeping professional local to them. Finally, we have a network of alumni who have completed their studies.

The size and diversity of the CAIS network means that we have an opportunity to develop some interesting and useful resources. One of things we have begun to develop is a link library of online materials relevant to CAIS’ students. Using a small sub-group of our tutors and the delicious social bookmarking site we have established a process that we think can ultimately create a rich resource. You can see the small number of links we've added so far as we've been refining our ideas at delicious.com/CAIS_Archives.


Clearly this resource won’t just be of use to our students. We’re hoping to develop something that contains links which should be of interest or relevance to any archivist, records manager or other information professional. To that end, we would like to invite contributions from anyone in the record keeping community who uses delicious and is interested in helping build the link library and making it as worthwhile as possible.

All we’re asking is that whenever you save a bookmark on a record keeping or related subject with your own delicious account (which is free) you tag it 'for:CAIS_Archives' (without the inverted commas). That sends the bookmark to our inbox and we can then save it for inclusion in the main list. The reason we've used this approach is so that we can keep a modicum of control over the vocabulary we use for tagging. As the list of links grows the tags will become crucial for discovery. However, we will take into consideration any tags you have already attached to the link.

As far as we’re aware no-one has tried to develop a link library in this way. Although we know of lots of very good online bibliographies, literature reviews and wikis on archival and records management subjects and we’ve seen sites by record keepers that aggregate blog posts, news items and tweets, we’re not aware of anyone who has tried to develop a resource like this by crowd-sourcing bookmarks. We think that there is a lot of potential here and hope that colleagues will support the development of the resource. Obviously, we'd love to get comments and suggestions for how this could evolve or hear from anyone who is involved in a similar project.