I’m currently attending the Society of American Archivists annual meeting, here in sunny San Diego. It’s my first SAA meeting, and I feel like I could be at Museums and the Web or the Museum Computer Network conferences. Just take a look at some of the sessions:

Choose Your Own Arrangement: Using Large-scale Digitization Efforts to Process Image and Audiovisual Collections

Commemorating the Civil War: Transforming the Historical Record Through Digitization

To the Community and Beyond: Engaging Users to Interact with Participatory Archives

Crowdsourcing Our Collections: Three Case Studies of User Participation in Metadata Creation and Enhancement

Linking Data Across Libraries, Archives, and Museums (disclaimer: this is my own session)

80,000 Volunteers Can’t Be Wrong: The Case for Greater Collaboration with Wikipedia

Solving Our Problem with Authority and Sharing: Current Developments and Prospects

etc.

Really, this isn’t surprising. Once you get past processing and into raw data, the challenges and opportunities are almost the same. Makes me wonder if I’ve been doing an archivist’s job all along. And it enforces my perception that the walls separating the disciplines are becoming thinner and thinner.

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