Catching Back Up and Baby Steps

Once again I have been confronted with what appears to be the classic problem for someone like me when it comes to keeping up the pace on a course such as Clio-Wired. Take me away from the structure of having classes and I find that doing all those things that I should do on a regular basis and that everyone who works in and around this area does do on a regular/daily basis  gets pushed to one side as I end on concentrating on other issues. I truly believe that this is the biggest problem for someone of my age who literally is caught with a foot in both camps – still of an age where all this ’stuff’ is fascinating and still want’s to learn, but old enough to still feel more at home with books and papers and not worrying about or working on websites, design or otherwise, on a daily basis.

Anyway, as yet another example of where history and the web are moving, I attended a conference at the National Archives last week for historians in the federal government. I sat in on a number of panels wherein the common themes were “how do we deal with all the data that we have/are collecting?” “How do we access it?” “How do we organize it?” What was interesting was to sit and watch the body language of many of the participants in the audience and chart the divide between those to whom doing anything with the web other than using a search engine was totally alien and they would never move out of their safety zone and those who were so comfortable with working with the web in all formats that they were clearly frustrated that they could not move faster.

One of the most fascinating panels was that held by the Army Corps of Engineers. One of their biggest issues was the sheer volume of data being brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan and how to manage that volume. They have neither the people, resources or money to effectively deal with the problem – net result more and more data is piling up. One of the panelists did talk to some new software that is helping in organizing files and data that is helping somewhat but it does not address their major problem. There was a nice plug for CHNM and GMU as a whole from a former MA graduate who was on the panel and spoke highly of the center and its goals. I also chimed in and spoke to the Clio program and put a plug in for Omeka.  But you could tell the vast majority of the audience while agreeing that employing Web 2.0 technologies is the way to go it was up to someone else or “the next generation” of historians as some guy in his mid-50s said during the Q&A session. One of the overriding issues that I took from the conference is the feeling that we are rapidly approaching a ‘gap’ between those of an older generation who don’t want to leave their safety zone and those coming along – much fewer in number – who are going to have to confront some of these issues. And to complicate matters, in the middle are people like me who knows just enough to be a threat to himself and the whole concept of Web 2.0, who see the value of where we are headed, wants to swim in the deep-end of websites and the understanding of Web 2.0 and is desperately trying to let go of the side and swim away. I am slowly prying his fingers off the wall one by one and inching further out but it appears that there are still many in our world of history who, despite the continued reassurances that HTML, Omeka, Word Press etc, are not to be feared do not want to let go of the side of the pool.