CHNM was recently awarded a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to fund Omeka’s development, and we’re currently in private beta. If you’re interested in getting on the invitation list to download and test Omeka, email us and we’ll notify you when there are additional spaces. You’ll also get current information about Omeka’s development at the Omeka blog.

One of the exciting things about Omeka is that it;s extensible for ‘oth themes and plugins. Similar to WordPress, Omeka allows administrators to FTP files into the respective directories, then easily activate extended features. There are tons of possibilities with this. Many projects at CHNM were started using earlier versions of Omeka and deal with collecting oral histories, like the September 11th Archive. Omeka has a contribution plugin so that you can perform similar collecting.

With the passing of Roy Rosenzweig, founder and director of CHNM, we’ve set up a site called Thanks, Roy to gather stories and images about him. The site honors his contribution to us all, and is run by Omeka. Whether you knew Roy or not, I’d encourage you to take some time to visit the site. The contributions so far are nothing short of heartfelt and inspiring. Thanks, Roy.

The Whites. We don’t like them. But we arn’t savages and out of control either. Whites are good for trade and weapons so we have to keep a balance to get guns and supplies. One thing though is we believe in a life for a life and this could be an issue is someone from the tribe gets themselves killed in town. Any Armed Whites coming into our lands is fair game and most likely won’t survive an encounter unless they choose to leave naked and humble. White woman often were playthings for single braves and found their womanhood a bit battered from the encounter but rarely were they killed. Children often were adopted if their parents were dead and made full members of the tribe so no mistreatment of our adopted children. All soldiors entering our lands are killed outright unless there is a treaty made. They travel in groups so once again for safty sakes don’t ever travil alone. Alone and armed is a fast way to die. Don’t expect the white men to talk first if you’re armed. Don’t go into town armed, an armed Indian is fair game in town. Going unarmed means you’re there to trade in peace.

Note: Any grammatical or spelling errors haven’t been changed from the original documents.

I’m not sure if the title is fitting, however I may be the first Second Life historian. In the very least, The Sigil Archive seems to be the first of its kind – attempting to preserve the history of an entire Second Life sim. A search on Technorati for “Second Life historian” came up with nothing, and a Google search only returned one vague result. Historians, why aren’t you doing research on Second Life? In today’s Web 2.0 world, if is doing anything remotely interesting on Second Life it usually appears in a blog somewhere, but I hope that I’m wrong and others are out there. History informs our identity and culture, which makes the preservation and understanding of history a crucial part of life. The history of Second Life simulations is no different. The importance of this became evident when I was recently in the Wild West sim called Tombstone. Tombstone is one of several Wild West simulations that appeared following the demise of Sigil, and the basic narrative structure (time period, location, etc) is incredibly close to Sigil. I had a discussion with a citizen, where I asked if he had ever been to Sigil – he responded no. To my surprise and delight, he explained how he is starting a virtual newspaper in this Wild West simulation – without realizing that there had been the Sigil Tribune at one point. Without having history to root our experiences, everything we do seems new.

Many Second Life amateur historians exist, in fact it’s increasingly popular. Individuals will maintain a blog for their avatar, where they account their journeys into the vast corners of the metaverse – often cataloging what they witnessed along-side images to document the experience. Historians must focus contextualize the accounts of individuals, as well as preserve documentation of these environments and individuals involved. SLHistory is a wiki that offers a space for community knowledge building regarding the history of Second Life, but at this point lacks any comprehensive research and documentation of simulations. In my research of Sigil, I began by traveling through the simulation documenting images of buildings and people, and recording their names. After the sim went offline, I contacted several former citizens including the mayor, who have provided me with a great deal of information including primary documents regarding the sim’s creation. These documents instantly became invisible to the virtual world when the sim became inactive – but many copies were stored in the inventory of users. As digital historians we must take active steps to preserve these documents.

Let me close by saying that there are individuals studying the history of virtual worlds (broadly speaking). Bruce Damer is compiling a virtual worlds timeline, cataloging the origins and evolution of social virtual worlds. Timothy Burke has a great blog posting regarding virtual world methodology and the lack of textual sources that influenced me a great deal. If we agree that virtual worlds are becoming increasingly important within society including education, then the need to archive and record the history of these emerging new media environments becomes clear.