The other idea I would love to talk about is the idea of distributed document transcription as I explain it in my blog post: Archival Transcriptions: for the public, by the public.  While I do love what reCaptcha does at the word level and Footnote.com does with locations, names and dates – I still think there is a place for a centralized web-based system where digitized documents can be uploaded and then transcribed & verified by volunteers. I think this would be especially powerful for smaller archives.

I would love to hash out this idea with others as well as learn what other projects like this might already exist.

I would love to discuss ideas for visualizing aggregated data.

My personal focus has been on descriptive data about archival record groups and manuscript collections – with a stress on subject terms, quantity of materials (think total linear feet), subject terms and physical location of the materials.  I worked on a prototype visualization tool called ArchivesZ – but I have also seen many other inspirations for alternate approaches.

General topics I would like to include:

• leveraging standard markup, such as EAD (Encoded Archival Description), to support aggregation of  information about collections both within and across institutions
• the challenge of non-standard subject terms
• the coolest visualizations we think could be adapted to this type of data (my current obsession being the TimeRiver as exemplified by the NY Time’s box office revenue visualization)

I think that these ideas could coordinate well with what Laura mentioned in An archive aggregator.