Teaching and Learning archives?

As an archivist, I'm very intrigued by self-archiving systems such as suggested today by a professor over email. Teaching faculty have a weekly meeting called Friday Forum where often the subject involves teaching or research. The idea is to create an archive, open to the Earlham community, with syllabi, teaching practices, improving discussion, etc. Earlham is very much a teaching institution, and this makes a lot of sense to me. While here at Earlham our physical archives focuses primarily on print material, it is clear to me if we want to continue archiving and chronicling Earlham's history we need to pay close attention to systems like ELS and other ways that Earlham's history is being archived--including students uploading pictures to photo sharing sites like Flickr. Of course, teaching is such an essential part of Earlham's mission having an archive--online or physical--devoted to teaching and learning is a great idea. (assuming of course people submit material!)

One aspect of systems like ELS that intrigues me the most is the ability for social tagging, which allows many users to identify the subject of a particular item rather being limited by Library of Congress subject headings or other such controlled vocabularies.

I'm excited about projects like this that can capture Earlham's history and teaching practices in ways we haven't always been able to do- for example, we might get a professor's papers after they have retired or died, but with digital files items can be captured in real time--of course, it is possible we might not always want to do this or professors could be concerned about confidentiality and copyright. I think the positive aspects outweigh the negative and hopefully these are challenges we can work on here at Earlham.