Digital Archive and Exhibit Assignment

Due Wednesday, December 16th by 5pm

Build an online archive and exhibit of primary sources using the Omeka software. This archive and exhibit should be valuable for both scholars and for the general public: anyone who is interested in your topic.

Archive

Definition: A physical archive is at least partly defined by the fact that it contains unique items, items considered “primary sources” by researchers: letters, manuscripts and other private papers, organizational records, photographs, and an increasing amount of multimedia. A digital archive also consists of these primary sources, but in a digital archive, items are often but not necessarily unique. See the examples below for more on this subject. It is also the case that a digital archive, confusingly, can contain both born-digital items (e-mails, web pages, digital audio and video recordings) and digitized items with a physical counterpart that exists in a physical archive somewhere. A digital archive, then, is defined primarily by 1) the implicit promise that its items will be preserved for the long term, and 2) the existence of professional archival metadata, about which more below.

Nature of items: The items in your archive should be items that would be called “primary sources” in the context of historical research. Examples can include almost anything except scholarly writing: manuscript documents, e-mails, historical newspaper articles, images, video, music, web sites. For more about primary sources (and for a short list of some of the most important digital archives on the web), see the American Library Association’s guide to using and finding primary sources on the web at http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/rusa/sections/history/resources/pubs/usingprimarysources/index.cfm

Number of items: As a very rough guideline, we are asking you to include about 25 items in your archive. However, what constitutes an “item” is sometimes difficult to determine, and the number of items in the archive is only one small aspect of how valuable your archive is as a historical resource. See the grading criteria below for more on this subject. Some students have asked for permission to scan and describe one significant multi-page document, and while such a project is really more of a historical editing project than a digital archive (moreover, Omeka is not the best tool for such a project), it is acceptable for fulfillment of this assignment. These single-document projects will be more exhibit-oriented than archive-oriented. Again, be sure to read the grading criteria below as you plan your project.

Metadata: One thing that distinguishes an item in an archive from an item elsewhere is that the item in the archive is described. This description helps researchers find the item, and, when they find it, to retrieve some essential facts about its provenance and context. Items in an Omeka archive are described using the Simple Dublin Core metadata standard; “metadata standard” is just a fancy way to say “the pieces of information that should be provided for the item.” The Simple Dublin Core metadata standard says that you should provide 15 pieces of information about an item (when possible): Title, Creator, Subject, Date, Rights, and so on through 10 more data-entry fields. All fields are optional, and all fields may have more than one value (several Subjects, for instance).

Permissions: You will undoubtedly find that you have a difficult time determining whether you have permission to include certain materials in your archive. Copyright is an extremely complex subject, and we will go over it at length in class. But for right now, for the purposes of this assignment, keep in mind two things:

1. Items in the Omeka system can be made private, and indeed, are private by default. This means that you should feel absolutely safe in including any and all items for the purposes of this course assignment, because you can always restrict the ability to see these items to people enrolled in this course.
2. However, please do your best to create a digital archive that will be mostly or fully open to the public. If you are in doubt about whether you can include items in your archive, you can always ask for permission to include them. Please learn as much as you can about fair use before asking permission, however, and please do not pay for scanning services or for reproduction rights without consulting with me first. If you do decide to ask for permission to include items in your archive, be sure to keep good records of all your discussions / correspondence related to that permission.

Core Values

Image from http://derangementanddescription.wordpress.com/2009/07/13/core-values/

• New York Council of Metropolitan Libraries digitalMETRO archive at http://nycdigital.org/dmetro/ — This “archive” is simply a collection of 133 digital collections from libraries around the New York metropolitan area, from NYU’s Afghanistan Digital Library to Yeshiva University’s images of illuminated pages from the Prague Bible. This digital archive is a good example of a “meta” archive, one that (unlike a physical archive) contains non-unique materials. It would be easy to create a simple web page that lists the links to these digital collections, but by treating the digital collections as “items” in an archive to be thoroughly described in a standard way, digitalMETRO provides new, useful, usable information for researchers.
• Richmond Academy of Medicine’s Oral Histories archive at http://demo.richmondacademyofmedicine.org/ – These oral histories were doubtless recorded specifically for this project, so this archive is a good example of a digital archive with entirely unique materials. Moreover, the items were doubtless originally recorded in a digital format (”born digital”), so it only makes sense to archive them digitally; this is a “pure” digital archive in that way as well.
• The Culper Spy Ring archive at http://aphdigital.org/projects/culperspyring/ — This archive is a good combination of non-unique and unique materials. Many of the items also appear in the Library of Congress’s American Memory project, but some of them are unique scans of unique items physically located in the East Hampton Library.

Exhibit

Definition: Archives and especially museums have vast collections of items in storage, only a small fraction of which are on display on any given day. The online exhibit you make for this course (using Omeka’s built-in exhibit builder) will, like a museum exhibit, be a meaningful selection of items from your archive accompanied by explanatory, interpretive text.

Examples:

• digitalMETRO Art and Design at http://nycdigital.org/dmetro/exhibits/show/design — The New York Metropolitan Libraries Council has made an exhibit called “Art and Design,” which selects, features, and discusses items related to Art and Design from Columbia, Cooper-Hewitt, Parsons, and Yeshiva libraries.
• The Workings of the Culper Spy Ring at http://aphdigital.org/projects/culperspyring/exhibits/show/culperworkings –  Selects just a few key documents from a collection of nearly 500 items in order to explain how the Culper Spy Ring operated.
• Marking Time in Place at http://medievalplaces.com/exhibits/marking-time-in-place — “Experiencing Medieval Places” is a website that archives original, modern photographs of medieval churches, castles, and other sites. The archives contain many general images of medieval places, and this exhibit highlights “the various ways that time was delineated in medieval spaces through artistic works,” pointing out, for instance, that “Calendar images appeared in churches on floors, doorjambs, and windows.”

Criteria for Grading

This assignment will be graded on four criteria:

1. Collection — Is this a new, interesting, and valuable collection of items? Will it be useful and interesting both to historians and to the general public? Is it useful because it contains unique material that can’t be found elsewhere, because it puts online material that wasn’t previously online, or because it collects formerly dispersed sources into one place? How many items are in the collection? Are they items worthy of being collected and archived? Does the collection draw on all available sources, or has its creator apparently overlooked major related repositories?
2. Metadata — How complete, accurate, and helpful is the metadata? Does the metadata follow standards? Does the metadata create interesting and useful links between the items in the archive?
3. Apparatus — Does the exhibit highlight something meaningful and interesting about the materials in the archive? Is the exhibit text clear, interesting, and helpful? Are there useful additional web pages on the site, e.g., “About this Project,” “Timeline,” “Biographies”?
4. Mechanics — Is everything spelled right? Does the site work? Do all the links work? Do all the images load? Have the rules of the assignment been followed? Is it a reasonably attractive web site? When necessary (such as for any quotations in the exhibit text), are any secondary sources properly cited?