Rose Family Archive Project proposal & design document LIS654 Tom Rose

Objective Repository contents – Family photos, texts (letters, articles, etc.) – Digital formats: JPEGs, PDFs Intended audience – Family and friends Resources? – Wotan server space – No expectation of outside resources – purely voluntary

Workflow Inventory & organize physical collection – What do I have? – How do resources relate to one another? Digitize material – Scanning & editing Upload/Import to Omeka – Arrange files in an interesting way

Physical collection Various container types, poorly labeled Stored in different rooms Preservation issues – Deteriorating photos, mold How to organize? – By “subject” or “contents” of items? – By “source”?

Organize by Source Three distinct sources (“family units”) – FAM001: Ken/Chris Rose – FAM002: Bob/Kay Rose – FAM003: Jodi/Tom O’Leary Gray areas? – Digital photos? – “subcollections?” Family within family (great-grandma’s stuff mixed in) – Future additions?

Conducting Inventory Archivist Toolkit – Advantages View relationships between resources Similarities to Omeka – Collection structure – Create “items” with “instances” – Tagging possibilities – Disadvantages Required fields make data entry unwieldy Difficult to “change your mind” about structure

Digitization Item selection – Don’t scan everything – Focus on… People-centered photos Notable events (Birthdays, holidays, travel) Scanning specifications – 300dpi JPEGs – files for Omeka – Scan with border – File names?

Identifiers Purely “dumb” identification – Six-digits, – Items numbered in sequence – No regard for collection/relation to other items Except… objects with multiple files (e.g. multiple pages) – Append _### in sequence to identifier Only complicates things – What if I something needs to be moved to another collection? – What if I scan something “out of sequence”? – Metadata generated at the same time as identifier Largely based off content of photos (few labels on photos)

Metadata (photos) Title – Brief summary of photo Description – Longer description offering context Identifier – 6-digit sequence Subject – people Coverage – spatial info by name Date – YYYY-MM-DD, if known – else, “n.d.” Format – Image/jpeg Type – StillImage Tags

Metadata (text) Title – Title of document Description – Longer description offering context Identifier – 6-digit sequence Subject – People; topics Coverage – spatial info by name Date – YYYY-MM-DD, if known – else, “n.d.” Format – Text/pdf (accurate?) Type – Text Tags

Omeka: Collections One collection for each physical collection – FAM001, FAM002, FAM003, etc. Items added to respective collections – Separate CSV files needed for each collection

Omeka: Plugins (confirmed) Exhibit Builder – Used to display related items together and connect them with commentary. Useful to provide insight most users will not have. Docs Viewer – To display PDF files. Simple Contact Form – To encourage feedback

Omeka: Plugins (speculative) EAD Importer? – Could be used in conjunction with AT’s EAD Export function. Timeline? – Used to permit browsing chronologically; – Will consider this when a wider date range is represented in the repository.