Presentation by Ruth Crumey, The National Archives. Given at the London Museum Librarians and Archivists Group conference "Not Museum Pieces" 10 September 2009.

2. Your Archives: collaboration and user engagement Ruth Crumey 10 September 2009

3. Your Archives Why we created Your Archives Options Lessons learned The Future of Your Archives

4. Why we created Your Archives Readers keen to share their knowledge but how could we harness a willingness to engage while maintaining “standards”? Staff had created a knowledge base in various formats – could this be shared more widely?

5. Online options Websites Blogs and forums Wikis

6. MediaWiki Free to download Widely used Wiki mark-up OpenSource

7. What did we need from a wiki? Simple to search and edit Indexed by popular search engines Page protection Collaborative An audit trail Basic technical requirements Export and re-use capability

8. Policy Post-moderated Terms & Conditions Relevance Appropriate content Moderators are not content editors Language Other concerns Links Legal issues Images and other formats

9. MediaWiki provides: Spam filter Registration Control levels Feedback Protection

11. Technical support

12. Risks

13. Wikipedians

14. Support your users

15. Beta version

16. Moderators

17. Exit strategy

19. Inappropriate

20. Risks

21. Trust and accuracy

22. Editorial authority

24. The Future of Your Archives Extending discussion in Your Archives – Next Steps Help our users to develop Confidence Quality Technical skills Developing our skills Technical Other risks

25. “Wikipedia approaches its limits” Deletionists argue for a tightly controlled and well-written encyclopedia that provides valuable information on topics of widespread interest. Why should editors waste time on articles about fly-by-night celebrities or wilfully obscure topics? Inclusionists, on the other hand, believe that the more articles the site has, the better: if they are poorly referenced or badly written, they can be improved – and any article is better than nothing. After all, they say, there is no limit to the size of the site, and no limit to the information that people may want. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/aug/12/wikipedia-deletionist-inclusionist The Guardian 12 August 2009