I was yesterday in Helsinki (Helsingfors) in Finland at #m11i, Media 2011 information: Digital spår symposium organised by Brages Pressarkiv together with YLE The Finnish Broadcasting Company, KSF Media and the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. My own presentation was about information seeking and source criticism.

Kate Theimer (ArchivesNext) held an excellent (ok, the slides, the summaries in the blogosphere and what she told me in a mail give a strong impression that the presentation was excellent, I was unfortunate enough to miss this year's SAA meeting) presentation on the concept of participatory archives. I do quite agree with her that there is no satisfactory definition of a participatory archive.

ArchivesNext raised a number of interesting points about the nature of participation in a participatory archive in a thought provoking blog post on building participatory archives.

How to manage cultural heritage assets? What visitors are thinking about? What about digital technology and social media? I have been working with several cultural heritage institutions as a consultant, have professional experience on working in a museum with information management and dissemination, been teacher, lecturer and conducted research on diverse aspects of cultural heritage information.

I was suddenly blogged by Karolina when I was having a lecture at Lund University at the Department of Cultural Sciences last week. Otlet, the new blog of the archival, library & information and museum studies can be found at http://www.abm.kultur.lu.se. Other interesting blogs on the same topic are, e.g.

 I was last week on wednesday and thursday (9-10/12)  at DISH 2009 (DIgital Strategies for Heritage) conference in Rotterdam. My own presentation Participatory management of heritage assets (presentation also attached to this article) discussed participation, strategies and critical success factors for engaging users and experts vs. amateurs dichotomy.

In comparison to library contexts, user perspective and user studies have received noticeably little practical attention in archives and in the context of management of archival materials and archival information. I am addressing some of theissues of communication and user participation in archival contexts in an article published yesterday in Archival Science.

The aim of research project is to evaluate the benefits of e-Science infrastructures based on participatory digital archive in humanities oriented research and to frame the critical success factors of e-Science in small geographically dispersed research group. The study aims to answer the questions by addressing the specific issues of