Creating an “archive” in a digital context means creating a virtual representation of an archival collection online. This is often done to make materials more accessible and to preserve physical items by reducing handling. Digital archives can include born-digital materials or digitized versions of physical items, such as photographs, newspapers, letters, artifacts, and paintings.
In What Do You Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers, Trevor Owens explains that the word “archive” can have many meanings, anything from records management to web archives like the Wayback Machine. For purposes here, I’m defining an archive as a digital collection of related items.
Adding collections online opens up opportunities for users to engage directly with materials. Tim Sherratt, in It’s All About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People, discusses how digital tools allow users to interact with collections on their own terms. He challenges the traditional gatekeeping role of cultural institutions and instead chooses to focus on the collections themselves. Sherratt states, “Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the institution and the public, we can focus on the relationship we both have with the collections” (Sherratt, 2011, p.8).
In our class activity, we were tasked with adding items to a experimental Omeka collection. I chose to work with materials from the Library of Congress’s suffragette collection. The process was fairly user-friendly as I was somewhat familiar with the Dublin Core metadata schema from previous library science coursework. I added four items with the corresponding metadata: a newspaper article, an editorial cartoon, the Seneca Falls report, and a photograph from a suffragette demonstration. Using items from the Library of Congress collection made the process simple as each record included all the metadata. I was able to copy much of it directly and create tags based on the Library of Congress Subject Headings.
Creating this digital collection made me reflect more deeply on Sherratt’s ideas of interacting directly with the “stuff.” By placing historic items online, the public can engage with and explore these items on their own terms. After adding the Suffragette collection, I began to think about how I could have curated the collection in a new or interesting way. I would love to explore Omeka more, and possible curate an original collection next time.
Works Cited:
Trevor Owens, “What Do You Mean by Archive? Genres of Usage for Digital Preservers,” The Signal: Digital Preservation (Blog), (February 27, 2014).
Tim Sherratt, “It’s All About the Stuff: Collections, Interfaces, Power, and People,” Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 1 (Winter 2011).
Kat, thank you for your reflection about archives and your experience with Omeka items and collections! I am also glad to hear that you found the platform to be very user-friendly (I’m biased, I’m a huge fan of Omeka). One of the things that I greatly enjoy about Omeka is that it persuades us to think about the “stuff” at an item level. In many cases, our interaction with archives begins at the top– the archive itself, then the box, the file, and finally the item. By focusing on the item first, we get to appreciate how sources are the building blocks of narratives. As with Omeka, you must create the item before you can organize it into a collection or exhibit!