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| Airship Snowflake from the portfolio of Tammy Corzine |
These days, increasingly large amounts of money are being spent to support digitization, or scanning, of a wide range of existing collections. The final project for my library Information Organization and Access course was to create information web pages for a hypothetical collection. Each group picked from a list of genres, these included: art, biological speciments, comic books, maps, music, personal papers, rare books, toys, and video collections. Collection specific pages had to discuss the content and scope, preservation strategies, target user community, and overall organization of items in the collection. As I progress through these courses, the digital content collections housed at BalloonHQ are always in the back of my mind.
I signed up for the toys genre, but couldn't quite sway my classmates to choose balloons as an area of focus. :-)
BHQ hosts an extensive photograph collection (over 65,000 database entries), 17 years of email forum archives, 8 years of featured columns, an international directory of balloon artists and industry leaders, coverage of pivital industry events, book reviews, biographies, and a growing collection of balloon-related YouTube video links. I can forsee a time in the future when BHQ could offer internships, in order to encourage young balloon artists to pull together information discovered from researching our digital archives. There is a lot of history buried in all those email posts. And these are just the digital collections housed at BHQ.
Even though balloons are biodegradable and have a limited existence, there are a lot of related physical materials that could also be collected for long term archival. Instructional books, videos and DVDs are obvious choices. Pumps, dipping molds, product packaging, manufacturer promotional items, product catalogs, toys and games that incorporate balloons, and a wide range of items that depict them. The bulk of the knowledge of the early days of ballooning is still in our grasp. Despite our best efforts, much of the information is widely scattered and held by aging individuals (heck, we're all aging... I've just turned 40!). Perhaps we should band together; seek out the personal papers and oral histories of the past and present leaders of our community. What balloon collection appeals to you? What would you choose as the most important group of items or information to collect, preserve, and provide access to, in the years to come?
It's been awhile, a long while, since I wrote a BHQ column. I started paging back through the 2008 months, wondering if I'd even written a column this year. I did (yay me), documenting all the communications about the California balloon legislation in June and reporting on balloon conventions early in the year. "Ha ha", I thought. "I've gotten back at Larry for slacking on column writing for the past few years!" In reality, it seems both Larry and I have pulled a good joke on John... expecting him to not only get all the columns out on time, but to also cover for us by writing the BHQ Ramblings at the last minute from time to time. Someone recently posted to the list about the great column Larry wrote in December. John wrote that one. (Big thanks go out to John. Thank you John.)
Larry's been his usual busy self and I've had an exceptionally full year with trips to Glacier National Park, Peru, and Las Vegas. This time last year, I was completing a graduate level class on curation of digital data and realizing that I was going to apply for the Master's graduate program in Library and Information Science here at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Apparently, one Master's degree is not enough! (Sorry Geology, there's more to life than postglacial lake processes).
I'm now about halfway through the program; I've been offered a Fellowship so I can fast track my degree and finish by August, 2009. This is an exciting opportunity. However, it means that I will have to miss Twist and Shout this year (booooo) and most other balloon events as well. I probably won't be drafting a column for another 6 months. (Ha ha, Larry and John). There are a heck of a lot of writing assignments for graduate classes. Some days I think I have no more words stored in my finger tips.
I got a chance to hang out with Larry a few months back. We were talking about the early days of BHQ, all of the hugely proffitable web sites we *didn't* create in the past 17 years, and all of the projects on which we are perpetually behind. Larry stated that the BHQ software and web components that were so exciting when we first developed them are now more than a decade behind the times (ouch). We're so retro!
No matter how many projects we've got hanging over our heads, we're still so happy to count all of you as part of our close-knit community. I'll really miss not seeing everyone for the better part of the upcoming year. Have a fabulous time at all the jams and conferences. - Sheena
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| Winter Wonderland Centerpiece |
Merry Lee Nafus is the owner of Buck's Party Shop and Sunshine Balloons in Enid, Oklahoma USA. The staff recently offered a full range of balloon decor for a Winter Wonderland themed event; the Snowman Scene is vibrant and full of merry fun. Their portfolio features a wide range of classic balloon decor, tailored for all sorts of occasions.
Visit the portfolio of Merry Lee
