Ari Davidow

Ari Davidow is Director of Online Strategy at the Jewish Women's Archive, a small virtual archive. The position allows him to knit together several important strands of his professional life. He began as a typographer decades ago, and found himself less interested (but not at all uninterested) in the aesthetics of perfect type than in finding ways to make more information available to more people more usefully. Equally important was his discovery that BBSs, and now the web, provide tools to create and strengthen community. Ari is looking forward to discussing what this all means and the tools that are making it possible.

• Posts: 26

Towards a Fedora Community for Small Archives

At last fall’s MCN conference, and again at Museums on the Web this spring, I spoke about work that the Jewish Women’s Archive is doing to set up its own repository using open source software. The basic repository we built uses Fedora with the lightest interface imaginable (ActiveFedora)–all we could afford on our own–and is [...]

On the recent invention of the internet

Ah, the irony. We were interviewing a candidate for a job today. She said how fortunate she had been to have come of age just as the internet (yes, she said, “internet” – not “web” was “created”—IM when she was 13 (about a decade ago by my estimate of her current age), and then Facebook [...]

Goodbye MCN 2008, it was grand knowing you

Another MCN over. I’m probably going to have to wait a day or two for things to sink in for me to figure out what I’ve learned. Sometimes it isn’t even the presentations themselves, it is the casual mentions by a listener, or the casual conversation in a hall. My own archive, for instance, has [...]

Open Source Digital Asset Management/Preservation on the Cheap

I’m not seeing much blogging about MCN2008. (I suspect because, as usual, too many of us are having too good a time networking and attending sessions, abetted by the rather unfortunate lack of technical facilities–wireless, comes to mind–that would often be present at a gathering of, uh, techies. Expect some changes as we prepare for [...]

twitter, skype, and the continuing confusion of time and space

This was going to be the blog post on twitter. Twitter is a “micro-blogging” service in which people note their day-to-day trivia in posts of 140 characters (or least). A few weeks ago, there was a nice discussion about the service on the MCN-L list, and it sounded like just about everyone but us was [...]

Off the network drive, into the internet and still in the swamp

I sometimes despair. While I think that we slowly make slow progress in terms of doing smarter work, better, I occasionally encounter the heated query from elsewhere that makes me wonder whether those of us who are paid to be thinking about IT actually think. (Given the bizarreness of some of the election charges and [...]

Adding network services without the overhead

Some people’s summer vacations involve lots of doing nothing, preferably in a notably scenic locale. In my family, summer vacation involves lots of hard work at a music camp suitably located in a most scenic locale (in this case, north of Montreal in the Laurentians). I’m the week-long music camp IT guy.

Community on the web – whuzzat?

“Community” is one of the web’s most popular buzz words. Ten years ago, we all knew that community on the internet referred to message boards, those (sometimes) sophisticated descendents of computer bulletin boards or listservs. It seemed inconceivable that a wealth of message board networks would not soon take over the internet. As it happens, [...]

Web 1.0 minds learning in a web 2.0 world, slowly, slowly

Oh, the tangled webs we weave. Every two years our organization holds a summer workshop for educators. In our case, these tend to be excellent educators, but not necessarily web-savvy or technologically driven people. Two years ago, in fact, there was nothing in the curriculum that dealt with the web, despite the fact that we [...]

Digital Preservation, Content Management, and the Digital Divide

I confess to gleeful dogmatism and a frequent difficult in seeing problems from new perspectives. Get my attention and I’m fine, but until you get me to actually, actively listen, I’m as liable to miss the point as the most stereotypical Fox News bombaster. In recent months, I have been exasperated by folks who insist [...]