After more than a decade of using Twitter, Jeff Guin explains how curated lists became more useful to him than the general feed. Organized around fields such as archaeology, archives, built heritage, conservation, and digital humanities, the lists function as a lightweight professional listening system. The post is less about Twitter itself than about deliberate information architecture: creating focused channels that help practitioners find useful people, conversations, and ideas amid the noise of social media.
Tag Archives: Social Media
Pinterest, Flickr, and the Road to GLAM-Wiki: Getting Collections Out of the Catalog
Two Othmer collection experiments—ballooning postcards on Pinterest and ceramic Christmas cards on Flickr—show an early shift from catalog-bound collections toward platform-native interpretation, GLAM-Wiki, and public knowledge infrastructure.
Social Media brings connections, lessons in ‘User Studies for Digital Library Development’
Lessons from contributing to User Studies for Digital Library Development and why audience research should shape digital collections, services and platforms before technology choices are made.
Preservation social media leadership: The early days
Looking back on a 2009 presentation to the Preservation Technology Advisory Board, this piece captures a moment when social media still felt experimental inside historic preservation. The argument was already bigger than platforms: preservation needed online leadership, mobile thinking, training, and above all human relationships. The reflection also records how open and optimistic that early period felt before social media became more commercialized, centralized, and professionally managed.
2006/2016: What’s changed over ten years in #DigitalHeritage
Ten years after first experimenting with social media at the National Park Service, this reflection takes stock of how digital heritage had changed by 2016. Institutions were becoming more open, participatory, story-driven, and comfortable with technology, while individuals increasingly blended professional identity with public advocacy. The piece also asks what had been lost along the way and whether institutional adoption had kept pace with the deeper cultural changes created by networked media.
#DigitalHeritage 1-2-3: APIs, Apps & Social Media Preservation
A compact digital-heritage briefing on APIs, mobile apps and the challenge of preserving social-media content while keeping digital collections accessible.
Book Review: On Art, Leadership Impact and Leadership
Four compact reviews connect social-media practice, personal calling, impact, and leadership. Read together, the books form a snapshot of the questions shaping Jeff Guin’s professional thinking in the mid-2010s: how to build a distinctive public presence, do work with intention, learn through repeated practice, and keep strategy tied to purpose rather than activity.
Livestreamed Interactive Webcasts for Cultural Institutions
This case study examines livestreamed webcasts as a way for cultural institutions to extend programs beyond the building while allowing remote audiences to participate in real time. Rather than treating video as simple documentation, the approach combined live production, audience interaction, moderation, institutional expertise, and post-event reuse. The project explores how relatively accessible technologies can turn a physical program into a broader public conversation when participation is designed into the experience from the beginning.
Book Review: The Impact Equation
A review of Chris Brogan and Julien Smith’s <em>The Impact Equation</em>, focused on the challenge of building a distinctive online platform without flattening one’s voice to fit the crowd. The book’s argument resonated with the early Voices experience: digital reach matters, but only when it is paired with clarity, usefulness, and the willingness to be recognizably different.
Expanding Your Heritage Circles on Google+
A 2012 primer on using Google+ Circles, Hangouts, interest discovery, and profile networks to connect heritage professionals and advocates. The platform disappeared in 2019, but the post remains a useful snapshot of an early attempt to solve enduring problems: segmenting audiences, finding communities of practice, and combining live conversation with networked publishing.