Edinburgh City of Print: web 2.0 technologies.

Bromage, Sarah

Abstract

Technologies such as Flickr and YouTube and iTunes are increasingly being utilised to showcase the collections of a wide variety of institutions. Archival and heritage collections frequently feature on these platforms alongside holiday snaps and personal movie footage. This paper will explore the unique opportunity for book historians to embrace these innovative technologies in the form of Web 2.0. Edinburgh: City of Print is a partnership project between the Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records (SAPPHIRE) and City of Edinburgh Museums. The project aims to highlight Edinburgh’s rich printing and publishing heritage through the online provision of photographs, film and sound recordings relating to the museums collections. Edinburgh City of Print utilises Web 2.0 technologies to catalogue and provide a virtual museum display of Edinburgh’s key printing and publishing collections. Discussion will focus on the general methodology of the project, its collection practices and the use of Web 2.0 applications and how they can provide virtual access and encourage non-traditional visitor interaction with physical museum collections. Web 2.0 represents an opportunity for institutions to reach out to those who would not traditionally visit academic or heritage sites, but who daily frequent these sites in cyberspace. The paper will explore the benefits of this type of access to collections whose permanent display is limited by available exhibition space. The paper will conclude with discussing how knowledge of the technological advances of the 20th Century are being made accessible utilising the digital revolution of the 21st. This will be achieved through detailing the role played by former Edinburgh printers’ who gave freely of their time to visit museum stores, identify machinery and to record oral testimony of their experience of how individual print machinery would have been used. This oral information is particularly valuable as knowledge of traditional work practices is in danger of being lost and the great technological advances of the last century have made the tools of this trade unrecognisable.

Citation

Bromage, S. (2009, June). Edinburgh City of Print: web 2.0 technologies. Paper presented at Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Conference, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing Conference
• Start Date: Jun 23, 2009
• End Date: Jun 27, 2009
• Publication Date: 2009-06
• Deposit Date: Mar 31, 2010
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: web 2.0 technologies; Edinburgh City of Print; social networking; Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records; Sapphire; printing; publishing; heritage; virtual access
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/3732