Love at the Mainframe, date unspecified

Audience:

The project aims to develop a historical collection of catalogues, magazines, photographs, print advertisements, illustrations, and manuscripts documenting the history of computers as a cultural reference. Coming from CUNY, a public institution that values accessibility of education, we strive to make the collection accessible to anyone, from professional researchers to those with a more casual interest in computer history. It aims to be a resource for technologists, media ecologists, archivists, designers, and artists alike.

Computers have made a position in media, culture, the work place, etc. One way to examine impact is through brochures and advertising materials companies have produced to promote their products. It represents the culmination of a companies work, from the design and development of the products to marketing and promotion of the brand, and how this process has changed over time.

Social Media Strategy:

We will create Instagram and Twitter accounts to use these platforms for promotion and build relationships with the audiences and share content. The social media manager will post at least one photo per day on Instagram. Because Instagrams algorithm is complicated, the times of the Instagram posts will be crucial. According to an articles posted on statusbrew.com, the best times to post on Instagram are between 10AM & 3PM, ideally either before work, during lunch, & after work with the context that most users work 9-5 and on weekdays. For Twitter, the best time to post is at 9AM all days of the week. Tweeting during happy hours at 5PM and 6PM garners high engagement, as people just get off their work and check their feeds. Although tweeting may reduced to one to two tweets per week.

To maintain user engagement, the website as well as Instagram will be able to accept submissions from users who wish to share their own documents, images, photographs that they believe is engaging and note worthy. Contributors can include graduate students, curators, archivists, or technology enthusiasts.

The ideal tone on our platforms will be casual, but also educational.

Because we are using Wax, we want to try to promote our archive in their examples, and potentially post about our existence in the code4lib slack channel, twitter, etc.

Communication and Website:

We will promote the project with a foundation that includes a completed basic: landing page, about page, Brows Collections, Resources, and a process blog which recaps our research processes and significant images we particularly liked. The blog may be construed into a zine in PDF format for users to browse through.

Visual Identity & Logo:

A logo is still in the process of being created.