Facilitated by Suzan Alteri and Dan Reboussin

Digital curation is the “active management of digital resources over the life-cycle of scholarly and scientific interest.” We will discuss several activities that can be undertaken once a collection is online in order to improve scholarly access. State of the art access depends on the acknowledgement of both social and technical aspects of the way information is indexed by online search engines. Effective curation allows researchers to discover relevant collections they weren’t already aware of prior to conducting an online search. Examples of curation activities to be discussed and demonstrated include: creating detailed metadata, building a rich scholarly context on collection landing pages, creating useful subcollection divisions, and contributing to appropriate sites in ways that support online discoverability.

How can GoogleEarth maps be used to the best effect in digital archive projects? Amy Giroux and I would like to continue the discussion on the use of digital mapping as a conversational feature in interactive digital archives. We have each employed GE map overlays to enhance our archive projects, employing the layering properties and tour feature with the intent of generating comments and feedback from site visitors, as well as providing visual guide points for historic processes (i.e., population and demographic changes over time, land use changes, etc.).

We are interested in hearing what others have experienced, and in exploring the opportunities and limits of this technology as a generative feature in interactive archives.

Gainesville THATCampers have proposed sessions on creating digital archives, making exhibitions for those archives, and learning TEI editing for documents within said archives. These promise to be excellent sessions and I hope they all make the cut. With that said, I’m sure many of us are hands-on learners who would benefit from a session in which we further apply our newly learned skills about digital archives with (hopefully) the benefit of some more-experienced individuals on-hand to help us think through the technical steps as well as any ethical, legal, and aesthetic issues that might arise.

Here’s what I propose: I’ll make myself a guinea pig and offer up my still-in-beginning-stages Digital Archive of the Birth Control Review (a little magazine run by Margaret Sanger from 1917-1929) for experimentation, critique, and play. By looking at an archive that is in the early stages of development – and designed by a neophyte – rather than one that is polished and exemplary, this session will provide a useful counterpart to those proposed by Patricia Carlton, Mark Kamrath, and Lourdes Santamaria-Wheeler.

I will begin the session by briefly introducing the archive, mentioning some of the questions and pitfalls I faced in getting the archive to this stage, and explaining the concerns I have going forward. Then, depending on the interests of the group, we could break into smaller groups to discuss/work on/play with discrete topics such as digital archive design (what works and what doesn’t about this particular archive) or TEI editing one of the magazine’s issues.

Full disclosure: I am not an expert in digital archives, coding, or preservation techniques. Yet I think my lack of knowledge is actually an asset here. In talking through the steps that led me to begin the Archive of the Birth Control Review, and getting feedback on the site from experts and novices alike, my hope is that non-tech-savvy individuals such as myself will gain inspiration for and insight into the process of starting up a digital archive.

The Archive of the Birth Control Review can be found at birthcontrolreview.omeka.net/. This archive aims to make the periodical more accessible by housing a searchable index of all issues (no comprehensive index currently exists), as well as guided collections of articles from the magazine on topics such as eugenics, race, suffrage, and WWI.

Glenn Willumson, School of Art & Art History;  Richard Freeman, Smathers Libraries

Supported by a library mini-grant, this project is a collaborative venture between the library and the School of Arts and Art History to make the photographs of the construction of the first transcontinental railroad available to the public.  Professor Glenn Willumson digitized the original large-format (10 x 13 inch) glass-plate negatives made, by Andrew Russell, photographer of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1868 and 1869.  Richard Freeman, University of Florida’s anthropology librarian, oversaw the creation of the website, which makes approximately 190 of his 240 photographs widely available for the first time.  Equally important, the website will be dynamic, encouraging interactivity with its viewers in hopes of gathering knowledge associated with the photographs–about photography, railroad technology, the mid-19^th century West, the growth of cities, the extent of Russell’s documentation, and the location missing photographs from this body of work.  It is hoped this digital photographic archive will be a first step in a larger digital project that will make the almost 1000 stereographs of the railroad construction available to the public and prove to be a model for future collaborative efforts on campus and with users throughout the world.

This session aims to explore what Laura Millar calls the challenge of creating, managing, and preserving digital archives in a dynamic digital environment. In an effort to think about approaches to preservation and access, especially of primary or material source projects, and the life of digital archives in general, this session aims to examine such topics through two lenses.

One, a digital initiative call Digital Archiving Resources (DAR) www.dar.cah.ucf.edu/ and the kinds of general issues its contents raise, for instance, about provenance, access, and best practices for building and long-term sustainability.

A second lens through which to address issues of representation and trends in preservation is an examination of the specific relations between public and private archive practices and the role of memory and user participation in sites like the September 11 www.911memorial.org/ As archivist Barbara Craig observes, the appraisal of records – that which makes something memorable and worth preserving—is complicated by the disparate meanings and functions of the archived objects. Preserving the memories of the donors while also providing the larger social and cultural context requires a broad and ethical understanding of memory that is both challenged and strengthened by user-generated content.

What is TEI? What can you do with it? How can one get started with TEI editing? What avenues exist for publishing online with TEI encoded projects?

TEI (or the Text Encoding Initiative) is a way to prepare archival documents to be coded and searched electronically.   This session aims to explore TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) through an examination of two mark up projects:  the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive and Scholarly Edition www.brockdenbrown.cah.ucf.edu/   and a digital edition of Virgil’s Aeneid (dissertation).

In addition to understanding how one can use an XML editing tool like <Oxygen> www.oxygenxml.com/, the session will illustrate the process for coding texts in basic structural ways along with more in-depth interpretive ways or tagging.

Time will also be spent exploring traditional publishing platforms such as XTF xtf.cdlib.org/  and more recent initiatives such TAPAS  www.northeastern.edu/nulab/tapas/    It will also examine the state of cutting edge XML tools such as Juxta Editions.

Participants will learn basic processes of creating exhibits, including content selection, best practices, design and presentation considerations, and guidelines for writing labels.

Original content created by presenter will be shared, including label writing tips and templates, sample timelines, and exhibition proposals. Both physical and online exhibitions will be discussed.