Riley: Week 8

With my still limited experience with Omeka and digitization, I think that creating a digital archive primarily means creating the best digital representation possible of an item for researchers to use. These items can include letters, photographs, images of objects, and more. As someone who uses digital archives regularly for my own research, I am most familiar with digitized letters and documents in digital archives. These letters and documents always appear as high-quality scans of the original documents, to the point where they include stains and tears. In this way, it’s almost like being in a physical archive, though of course there are still fundamental differences.

I’ve also become familiar with digitized posters over the summer in my job with the school. I spent approximately nine weeks over the summer working on digitizing the quickly growing collection of World War II posters in the University’s possession. Something I had not realized before starting the job was how much research goes into archiving something properly. I did hours of research finding artists, publishers, publication dates, and other information on the posters in order to properly catalogue them.

I decided to use some of these posters to make a small exhibit in Omeka, which I’ve linked here: Recruitment For Women’s Wartime Labor: Military and Civilian · The Omeka Sandbox

Another thing that I’ve learned about digital archives over the summer is that consistency and searchability are important. I took a categorizing and cataloguing class over the summer, and these two things came up a lot, and I ended up applying them regularly to my job digitizing posters. At the same time, I’ve learned that things like tags and descriptions are extremely subjective and vary from archive to archive, institution to institution. One resource that I’ve found very helpful is the Library of Congress Subject Headings database. As you might be able to tell by looking at the subjects for my posters, I utilized it heavily here.

I’ve found (in my, once again, limited experience, that I really like Dublin Core as a method of classification. I like that it’s incredibly open for any sort of object you want to classify; terms like “contributor” and “creator” leave a lot of room for interpretation, which I like. As I read over the summer for my job with the Dale Center, this was the exact thinking that the people who designed Dublin Core had when designing it, which I like. As someone who’s still interested in pursuing museum education, I like that it’s an online classification system that is designed specifically for online “exhibits”. Something that I learned over the pandemic is that online exhibits are something that museums and archives are really starting to take more advantage of to reach out to a wider audience. In my museum studies class at Millsaps, which mainly focused on art museums (as that was the professor’s specialty), we “visited” several international art museums, and that was an experience that really stuck with me.

Overall, I really enjoy Omeka, and I look forward to using it more in class tomorrow! I hope to make some more exhibits on our class page, maybe based on theme/topic. I have approximately 60 posters saved as files on my computer, so I could get varied with it!