Harnessing Collaborative Technologies: Helping Funders Work Together Better

This report was produced through a joint research project of the Monitor Institute and the Foundation Center. The research included an extensive literature review on collaboration in philanthropy, detailed analysis of trends from a recent Foundation Center survey of the largest U.S. foundations, interviews with 37 leading philanthropy professionals and technology experts, and a review of over 170 online tools.The report is a story about how new tools are changing the way funders collaborate. It includes three primary sections: an introduction to emerging technologies and the changing context for philanthropic collaboration; an overview of collaborative needs and tools; and recommendations for improving the collaborative technology landscapeA "Key Findings" executive summary serves as a companion piece to this full report

Advancing Foundation Archives: Advocacy, Strategies, and Solutions - Proceedings from the June 12, 2019 Meeting

Organized in collaboration with our partners the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health, the Advancing Foundation Archives Conference held on June 12, 2019m at the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York City was the first convening in nearly three decades to address the importance of managing, preserving, and providing access to foundation records and archives.The meeting brought together archivists, grants managers, foundation leaders, information specialists, historians, legal experts, and many others to share ideas, practices, and resources. Most importantly, its goal was to build a community of archives advocates confronting a new and daunting challenge – how to collect, preserve, and provide access to the rising tide of born-digital records created by foundations.The information professionals and foundation staff who gathered in New York in June 2019 shared the belief that creating, preserving, and providing access to foundation records are critical activities, whether they are done to provide access only to staff or to external researchers as well.Though more than one hundred people attended the 2019 Advancing Foundation Archives Conference, the organizers realized that many more could benefit from a resource that captures key learnings. To present the meeting in text form, the editors of the new Proceedings publication have condensed one hundred pages of transcripts, fleshed out concepts where needed, and gathered additional resources  into the following sections:Perspectives of Foundation Stakeholders describes how stakeholders in foundations engage (or do not engage) with the archives. This includes board members and foundation executive leaders, but also staff across the foundation who often are the most prolific record creators. Motivating Issues and Events examines some of the scenarios that often give rise to the idea of building an archive – a major anniversary, a retiring board chair, a litigation threat – how attendees wrestled with those ideas, and where they turned for help. Records Management and Archives discusses information management, from documents, to email, to audio and video files, to data sets, and how information managers are building infrastructure to handle the tidal wave of digital files.Internal Access and Storytelling explores how describing and applying metadata to records can help staff more easily find and use the archives to inform their work.Public Access and Storytelling describes how foundations make their history accessible to the public, from exhibits, to published histories, to transitioning archives to an external repository. 

Beyond the Bandwagon: Curating Cultural Memory at Milner Library

Archival and manuscript materials record human experience; they document how people have lived, worked, interacted, and thought about the world. These unique or rare materials make visible the experience and impact of individuals and organizations within their respective cultural, geographical, historical, local, and educational milieu. By exploring such documents and objects, patrons can see and investigate these relationships firsthand. Primary sources form the bedrock of humanistic research, personal inquiry, and engaged teaching. With this volume, we invite you to explore the unique and rare materials housed in Milner Library’s Special Collections and Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield University Archives as well as the services that bring them to life for readers worldwide. Contributed essays from scholars and collection stewards highlight how a small sample of these rich collections facilitate teaching and learning within the Illinois State University community and beyond.https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/mlp/1032/thumbnail.jp

Smart Objects and Open Archives

Within the context of digital libraries (DLs), we are making information objects first-class citizens . We decouple information objects from the systems used for their storage and retrieval, allowing the technology for both DLs and information content to progress independently. We believe dismantling the stovepipe of DL-archive-content is the first step in building richer DL experiences for users and insuring the long-term survivability of digital information. To demonstrate this partitioning between DLs, archives and information content, we introduce buckets : aggregative, intelligent, object-oriented constructs for publishing in digital libraries. Buckets exist within the Smart Object, Dumb Archive (SODA) DL model, which promotes the importance and responsibility of individual information objects and reduces the role of traditional archives and database systems. The goal is to have smart objects be independent of and more resilient to the transient nature of information systems. The SODA model fits well with the emerging Open Archives Initiative (OAI), which promotes DL interoperability through the use of simple archives. This paper examines the motivation for buckets, SODA and the OAI, and initial experiences using them in various DL testbeds

Way of the Ferret: Finding and Using Resources on the Internet

This source-book is designed to aid educators in exploring the Internet.https://scholarworks.wm.edu/educationbook/1000/thumbnail.jp

The Semantic Web … Sounds Logical!

The Semantic Web will be an enabling technology for the future because as all of life\u27s components continue to progress and evolve, the demand on us as humans will continue to increase. Work will expect more productivity; family will demand more quality time, and even leisure activities will be technologically advanced. With these variables in mind, I believe humans will demand technologies that help to simplify this treacherous lifestyle. As patterns already indicate, one of the driving forces of technological development is efficiency. Developers are consistently looking for ways to make life\u27s demands less strenuous and more streamlined. The benefits of the semantic web are two-fold. Conceptually, it will enable us to be productive at home while at work, and productive at work while at home. The Semantic Web will be a technology that truly changes our lifestyle. The Web has yet to harness its full potential. We have yet to realize that in addition to computers, other machines can actually participate in the decision-making process via the Internet. This will allow virtually all devices the opportunity to be a helpful resource for humans via the Web. It must be taken into consideration that the Semantic Web will not be separate from the World Wide Web, but an extension of it. It will allow information to be given a well-defined meaning, which will allow computers and people to work in cooperation. With this technology, humans will be able to establish connections to machines that are not currently connected to the World Wide Web. For the Semantic Web to function, computers must have access to structured collections of information and sets of inference rules that they can use to conduct automated reasoning (Scientific American: Feature Article: The Semantic Web, 3). Using rules to make inferences, choosing a course of action, and answering questions will add functional logic to the Web. Currently the Semantic Web community is developing this new Web by using Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Resource Description Framework (RDF) and ultimately, Ontologies

Public History and School

How do schools and public history influence each other? Cases studies focusing on school and public history around the world shed light on the intricate relationships between schools, students, teachers, policy makers and public historians. From why Robben Island is not included in South African curriculum to how German schools shape Holocaust memory, the case studies offered in this book sheds light on a current topic

Increasing the voluntary and community sector’s involvement in Integrated Offender Management(IOM)

As part of an undertaking to increase voluntary and community sector (VCS) involvement in service delivery, the Home Office set up an initiative to provide small grants to VCS organisations to work with IOM partnerships. The Home Office commissioned an evaluation of the initiative which aimed to: explore the strengths and weaknesses of the funding model; identify perceived barriers and facilitators to voluntary and community sector involvement in IOM; explore how the Home Office might best work with the VCS to encourage and support their capacity to work in partnership with statutory agencies; and identify any implications for the delivery of future similar projects

Sign Here!

Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media features a number of articles from different fields, reaching from cultural and media studies to literature, film and art, and from philosophy and information studies to law and archival studies. Questions addressed in this book are: Will handwriting disappear in the age of new (digital) media? What happens to important cultural and legal concepts, such as original, copy, authenticity, reproducibility, uniqueness, and iterability? Where is the writing hand to be located if handwriting is performed not immediately 'by hand' but when it is (re)mediated by electronic or artistic media? Sign Here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media is the first part in the series Transformations in Art and Culture