Once that is secure there will be time to reimagine and reinvent. The DistList as it is now is irreplacable and I agree with much of Dale’s comments.

As for the idea of wikipedia – I personally don’t see it as a replacement for some of the other types of content. I think looking at the history of changes on Richard and Daniel’s excellent entry on Art Conservation-Restoration shows the challenges in keeping an entry appropriately vetted.

The AIC wiki catalogues should be live soon and then I will be excited to hear from colleagues on how people want to use the platform to expand content.

“The imminent demise of CoOL and the ConsDistList marks the biggest shift in information sharing for conservators since the profession started printing journals.”

I am overwhelmed by the utter irony that at the brink of Web 3.0 semantic tagging technologies, CoOL and the ConsDistList, both Web 1.0 technologies, were extinguished by Stanford University without so much as a month’s warning to the nearly 10K users around the world. There is a criminal disregard and astonishing lack of reciprocity for the nearly 100K authors who supplied content to the DistList and CoOL archive implied in this action. Were any of the users of CoOL and the ConsDistList given the opportunity to create a succession plan for Stanford University Libraries voluntary hosting services? Sorry, not even a day’s notice. Stanford University Libraries and Stanford University decided to pick-up their preservation toys and “go home”, with no regard to the rest of us in the sandbox.

But, what now, Richard? The desire for the world-wide conservation community to communicate, share, explore, ask for help, undertake collaborative clinical trials and critical analyses have all been demonstrated by Walter Henry and the ConsDistList beyond the shadow of a doubt. The need for such a platform only expands exponentially with every passing day, (sometimes I think, by the hour!). And yet, the fragility of the access and permanence to the information has been tragically underscored by Stanford University’s remarkable inability to responsibly transfer management of the site. When any entity, public or private, wants to pull the plug on an electronic archive or platform, there is no guarantee that anyone new will be asked to sustain the information.

Can and should we, as you say, “rely on **everyone** to manage, create, and update the information”? What are the “best” ways for conservators to share, distribute and SAVE electronic information? I, among others who have long wished to do so, have been too tardy in thanking you and Daniel Cull for authoring the impressive Wikipedia article on Art Conservation/restoration. Fantastic effort! I am awestruck by the thoughtfulness, historical context and reflective tone. You ask in your blog post if this Wikipedia page might take a place in the future of CoOL. I would love it if you could post a link explaining how ongoing content changes and archived information could be posted, organized and linked on a Wikipedia page.

I don’t know enough of how Wikipedia works but I imagine that the page could work as a gateway to other private and public blogs and web pages. Or could Wikipedia actually hold and archive the “acreage” it would take to hold the expanding and increasingly resolved body of professional conservation knowledge? I like that image but, wow, to have it organized within historical context and semantically tagged? I like what fills my imagination!

On a simpler, more practical scale I can imagine that, like current blog pages and Twitter entries, there might be links to topic pages such as “current job listings”, “current questions in deterioration and stabilization of coatings”, and links to blogs on current clinical trials of treatment materials and analytical techniques, such as Nancie Ravenel’s Pemulen page: http://www.pemulentr2.pbworks.com .

What sparks my interest most is your idea that conservators can re-imagine CoOL and the ConsDistList by expanding the use of what has increasingly become one of the most productive platforms for the development of professional knowledge: “collaborative networks” using “social media applications to handle our information sharing.” “Current social media applications such as Facebook, Ning, LinkedIn, Twitter,” and collaborative hosted knowledge development Wikis such as PBWorks are creating a new, daily workspace for conservators willing to use the net. These new, networked information development platforms are exciting in that they are both Read and Write interactive. And they renew the remarkably innovative promise first made to preservation professionals by Walter Henry and the ConsDistList: the users control the content.

The range of platforms and their respective time commitments run the full range and have become a part of my scheduled weekly activities. I can read, learn, ask, contribute and evaluate both short-term and long-term juried conservation information now as never before. And the information is no longer simply written. Now there are videos, voice, animated charts, multi-media and real-time videoconference presentations that can show you how something looks, feels, sounds and behaves. Downloads can be considered repeatedly and at my convenience, allowing me to learn without interrupting my daily work flow commitments. I can plan my own windows for professional development, research and worldwide collaboration. And I can do a great deal without expensive travel costs.

Even the potential loss of archived information may, and I emphasize the word may, be better served by a widely distributed network of independent blogs, wikis and social networking sites. Such a decentralized network prevent the massive loss or archived information when a sole-source hosting service quits, merges, sells itself, falls victim to economic bad times or gets hacked.

Still, what worked especially well for the ConsDistList will be sorely lacking with a more distributed network of posts, pages and Wikis: A single, universally accessible format, dependable and regular instances, the easily scanned summary at the beginning of each instance and the structure of new queries, discussions of past queries, announcements and job postings. Even new blog, Wiki and web pages could be announced and indexed on the DistList! That single-source, news-headline, announcement format was hard to beat!

Also missing will be the single archive of searchable keywords, subjects and authors and the go-to site for worldwide links to preservation-related organizations and indexes. Everybody else, including AIC, copied the ideas and formats at CoOL. What a great testament to Walter Henry!

It seems obvious to me, now, that conservators need both: we need both a broad network of independent, museum, grad-program and national conservation lab web, Wiki and social network pages AND a single, international, serial, emailed query and announcement platform. The former takes individual-USER initiative, which appears to be at an all-time high right now and is growing. The latter will probably require international collaboration of professional organizations, which could likely ruin a really good thing.

Conservators, archivists and preservation professionals: let’s insist that our respective preservation professional organizations, national museums and education centers to support and re-establish and archive CoOL and the ConsDistList with haste. Email, call or write your membership organizations, national museums, national archives, research institutions and graduate programs to tangibly support the re-establishment of Conservation On-Line, (CoOL), the conservation distribution list, (ConsDistList) and their archives.

And then, for some instant and more reliable gratification, join-up with a number of your most interesting professional colleagues, pick a problem you’ve all be curious about and start an exhaustive, reader-interactive Wiki to develop a heavily juried, authoritative discussion on the topic! It could be surprisingly simple and rewarding!

One of the great things about CoOL as it has been is that while Stanford generously hosted it, it didn’t come across as Stanford’s product. It felt like it was by and for the larger conservation community.

While I appreciate what AIC is, I also feel it is important to acknowledge what AIC, or any other conservation organization, is not, and that is the larger conservation community. I feel it is important that no aspect of futureCoOL should be connected to membership to AIC, or any other organization.

So, as Richard McCoy states in his post, I too hope the new host “work to make themselves a platform for the creation and sharing of this information” and “that they rely on **everyone** to manage, create, and update the information.”

The other problem with forums is that they are not so “searchable” in the same way the distlist archive was easily searchable and the way wikipedia is easily searchable.

I don’t know if wikipedia is the answer to all our needs, but, I do know that everything on CoOL could (in theory) go on wikipedia and be a valuable resource for both conservation as a profession and an idea.

Maybe though its time to try out a variety of things and see what get’s the best “take up”.

Richard thanks for the post, and all the comments thanks for the ideas. Some good stuff.

As a side question: AIC + Wiki = What’s this all about?

Cheers,

Dan

Everything that the DistList was about could be covered in these forums, while introducing a new level of interactivity. While social media sites such as those mentioned in this post are useful to an extent, Im just not so sure they are as universally accessible as theCoOL/DistList medium. In my opinion, an interactive platform would probably find the most success if it were hosted by our own organization. We are already spending quite a bit for AIC memberships, and having quite a bit of experience in this area I think they could quite easily implement these forums without much of a budget increase if any.

Just my two cents..