1. In "Transcription maximized; expense minimized? Crowd-sourcing and editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, the authors bring up the issue of crowdsourcing when it comes to professionals as well as volunteer work. They ask, "Are volunteer-produced transcripts of sufficient quality?.." As well as, "could crowdsourcing then render obsolete skills of a professional scholar transcriber? Do you think that having community volunteers coming in and do a job that a professional trained to transcribe could be paid to do is ok? Does allowing the volunteer to transcribe exploit their services, or does it give them a unique opportunity to work with materials that they may have never come into contact with?
2. Jeremy Hunsinger discusses the issue of a non-traditional archive such as the one he manages that exists from the Virginia Tech tragedy. He mentions that in the earlier phase of the archives creation, an overwhelming amount of items related to the Virginia Tech shooting were donated. Overtime, the massive amount of people who were interested in looking at items and donating items to the collection have dwindled as we move further away from the event. The fading memory or at least interest in the archive made Hunsinger ask, "what is this archive?" and, "what happened to the users?" Do you think that the amount of users on a yearly bases can determine the importance of the archive? Or, is it the archive and its contents, traditional or ephemeral, ultimately more important? How can archives of tragedy such as this manage these massive collections of most memorialized history.
3. There is a large fear that giving content away will either cause misuse or loss in profit for museums/historical societies and other repositories. In Web 2.0 Basics it explains, that sharing content is more conducive than keeping it locked away. Many museums have seen an increase in membership and community involvement. However, images that were once safe in the repository are sometimes misused online without proper citation. Does the misuse outweigh sharing content?
4. Do you think social media sites such as Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc. are helpful for cultural institutions or are just a passing fad that will eventually be obsolete in managing media relations? How can they help an institution? How can they hurt?