PROVcommunity: a social experiment in a digital world

Asa Letourneau set up PROVcommunity for the Public Record Office Victoria just three weeks ago. It is a social networking ning for people to meet and discuss the Victorian archives. It also incorporates the PROV wiki where people can set up a topic or add information to an existing page. Asa works in the Online Access team across a range of initiatives including online exhibitions, social media applications, and website development.



More and more I have been looking at social media and considering how PROV might use these applications to increase public awareness of, and access to Victorian government archives.

To date PROV has experimented with Flickr and a wiki, however, we have not had a place where users and staff can discuss the archives free from the confines of a physical location or the limitations of Web 1.0 functionality. Given that the world of social media is so new (especially to the archives sector) and moving so rapidly, I thought the first thing I would do would be to take a leap of faith and create a PROV ning.

PROVcommunity came into the world three weeks ago and is a trial initiative to explore ways in which PROV can promote understanding of the state archives through community discussion in an online environment. It is a virtual meeting place where researchers can share, discuss and ask questions about the Victorian state archives in a relaxed and welcoming environment. Visitors can add photos and videos, check out the latest news in the archives world and hopefully get to meet some really interesting people!

Having a ning will hopefully allow PROV to not only communicate more intimately with our users, but also give us the opportunity to hear what our users are saying about PROV. What I’m personally really looking forward to is seeing the degree to which PROVcommunity brings people with similar interests together, and furthers their knowledge of the state archives.

I can see the ning providing a whole raft of learning outcomes for both public and staff alike: skills development (creating and using social media), crowd sourcing (evaluating information gaps in data sets), and opening up for public discussion draft initiatives/strategies on a scale that has not been possible before.

One of the best things about creating the ning has been the type of discussions it has already started within PROV itself: How best can we promote and make accessible the archives in a radically changing Web 2.0 environment? How are our users’ expectations changing as they become more familiar with the benefits of social media applications, that is, hyperconnectiviity, shared knowledge, shared power?

We all now have an obligation to tackle these questions in a timely fashion and I’m hoping that PROVcommunity might provide some of the answers and possibly some new questions for us all to think about!

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