VRA 2013 Reach Out, Beene

CSI: Capturing the essence,

preserving the past

Senior Studio Art @ Lewis & Clark College: e Archives, 1993-2013

CSI

•  C – Collaborative Creation •  S – Scalable & Sustainable •  I – Intuitive, Integrated, & Iterative

(CSI bring to mind detectives, investigation, and forensics? Good! is project encompassed all of three of these)

Facets of the project •  Preservation (institutional history, digital, archival,

metadata, intellectual) •  Development and Design of a new online

archives. – Collaboration with project team –  ID stakeholders & audience – List of desirables (investigation of platforms) – Goals & outcomes – Timeline & workflow – Assessing the stages of work (digitizing, cataloging,

migration, development, etc.) •  Iterative design feedback loop: faculty & students

e original format, 1993-2007

e intermediate format 2008-2009

e last episode: Digital images (jpegs) 2008-11

Desirables for new system •  Functionality: – Search & browse by (graduating) year, artist, studio

specialty (worktype) – Needed to be intuitive in design – Needed to be aesthetically pleasing for our target

audience – Needed both closed and open systems because of

evolution of copyright & IPR policies

Lessons applied from other projects •  Metadata creation & collaboration •  Ways of viewing, ways of searching/browsing •  Ways the site might be used •  Feedback loop! •  Sustainability and scalability

Settling on Omeka •  Exhibits plug-in •  Aesthetic design •  Flexible and scalable •  Easy to upload items; A/V items too! •  Intuitive – a “google” like search bar with good

results; a robust “advanced search” feature with fields easily modified by admins

•  Quick fixes and more than one admin (collaborative metadata and collaborative exhibits)

•  We had the human resources

Takeaways •  It’s always evolving •  Overall, a great success! •  Omeka is *SUPER* flexible (which is a good

thing, but can also be a bad thing) •  Other things are written in code and NOT

flexible •  e value of institutional history surmounts any

pain of digitizing and investigation •  e response to the site – faculty, students,

alumni, pub-com, external constituents – has been overwhelmingly positive