:Mozilla Digital Memory Bank Blog

This is slightly off topic, but we thought some of you would be interested in an article that CHNM Director Roy Rosenzweig just published in the Journal of American History. Entitled “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” the article attempts to ascertain both the usefulness of Wikipedia as an historical resource in particular and the potential of peer-produced history in general. In many ways, the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank is CHNM’s attempt to prove that potential as we hope to build a permanent archive of Mozilla history mainly through voluntary contributions from members of Mozilla community itself. As Olivia mentioned in the previous post, we will be conducting a set of traditional oral histories to supplement and provide context for the collections, but our real hope is that your contributions of email, chat transcripts, blog posts, digital photographs, and documents will form the core of those collections.

Good luck to Olivia and Ken, who will be spending the week in the Bay Area interviewing community members, and thanks to all of you who are taking time out to help us.

-Tom

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We’ve added the first of 14 interviews that we’ve conducted over the past few months to the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank. Check out this interview with Darin Fisher from March 2006.

In the coming weeks and months we will be adding the other interviews we’ve conducted. Also, Ken and I will be in Mountain View next week and hope to interview as many people as possible while we’re there.

Many thanks to Darin and to everyone else who has taken the time to talk with us!

Olivia

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We’ve started to receive some really great content from users here at the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank.  To date seven files have been uploaded, and if you browse via the map interface, you’ll notice that the site is now officially international (hopefully intercontinental isn’t far behind).  Most recently, Steven Garrity added several sketches made on notebook paper, which led to the creation of the Firefox logo.  Neil Marshall and AndyEd have contributed screenshots documenting other historical moments in the story Mozilla’s development.  These are great artifacts and are exactly what will make this project succeed as a central repository for Mozilla-related objects.

Thank you to all who have added to the DMB, and we look forward to many more.

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The Mozilla Map is now quasi-functional and has been integrated into the site (replacing, sadly, the fun map mock-up). Because few of our archive entries are geo-coded, the map is relatively sparse (get to it, people!). Also, there are some bugs to be worked out, including the map’s search function, but we’re getting there.

The completion of this portion of the site puts us one step closer to full functionality! The timeline is still under construction, so enjoy the Men At Work while you can…

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