Governance

We want the Elliott Archive to be inclusive: Anyone interested in this project is welcome to join our Elliott Archive Advisory Committee. In addition, we will actively recruit people to represent a diverse set of viewpoints. Specifically, we want people on the committee to represent:

• Oregon Department of State Lands

• Elliott State Research Forest Advisory Committee

• Oregon Department of Forestry

• College of Forestry at Oregon State University

• Society of American Foresters

• Environmental groups, such as The Nature Conservancy

• Indian tribal governments

• School districts

• Industrial forestry firms, such as Weyerhaeuser

We will hold meetings electronically (probably through Zoom) so people can easily attend.

Collaborative Authorship

We want this website to operate like Wikipedia by encouraging everyone with relevant information to work collaboratively. Wikipedia's focus is to be the world's encyclopedia; our focus is much more limited: We just want to create a comprehensive and authoritative website about the Elliott State Forest and its history. So we want to make it easy for anyone to upload documents or add new pages and information to the archive. For this reason, we are willing to make anyone who asks into an authorized Editor of this website. Any editor can revise descriptions, add new pages and make other changes to improve things ... we really do want to work together with you.

How we intend to work together

To build the Elliott Archive, we will need to work together to: 1—find, 2—collect, 3—organize and 4—preserve information.

1. Find Information

The first step is to figure out what historical information exists and where it can be found. This may sound easy, but it's often the hardest and most important part of creating a good archive. Consider this quote from "No Need to Fear FOIA" by Melinda Moyer (available at https://www.theopennotebook.com/2017/08/22/no-need-to-fear-foia/)

One of the big challenges with FOIA—what some call “the FOIA dilemma”—is that in order to get the information you want, you have to know that it exists, what agency has it, and, ideally, in what form it is kept.

Information about the Elliott State Forest is currently scattered across many state government computer systems, cabinet files and archival storage boxes. Relevant information can be found in various Department of State Lands offices, Oregon Department of Forestry offices, and Oregon State University offices.

Our goal will be to assemble a comprehensive website about the Elliott State Forest as efficiently as possible. That will likely require exploratory discussions to determine what information can be easily found.

2. Collect Information

Large amounts of digital information can be transferred and made public quite rapidly. For example, folders full of hundreds of files can be moved into a publicly accessible dropbox with just a few mouse clicks and a good Internet connection. So when data already is in an electronic format, it won't take state employees much effort to share it with us.

At the other end of the scale, some of the best information about the Elliott State Forest is locked inside the heads of aging but informed people. The best way to capture this sort of information is very labor intensive: to record and transcribe oral histories. Because this sort of information can be so valuable, we've done a fair amount of this sort of work (as is described in the History page).

3. Organize information

Raw data cn be so confusing it's worthless. A good curator will organize, label, and transform raw data into useful information -- without imposing a personal bias on the archive. If you are willing, we will give you Editor privileges so you can help us organize data into useful information.

4. Preserve information

File formats change, people die and passwords can get lost, so careful plans need to be put in place to make sure the Elliott Archive will withstand the ravages of time.