Sections

Work your way through the following sections:

Portfolio checklist

Here’s a summary of all the tasks and activities you should have added to your portfolio as you worked through this module:

  • The basics: Below is a table listing most of the headings on the Small Museums Cataloguing Manual worksheet. By reading the manual, and the Dublin Core guidelines, I want you to create a ‘mapping’ that indicates how the Manual’s fields can be represented in Dublin Core. Include notes where necessary to indicate what sort of guidelines or limits (such as controlled vocabularies) might need to be applied. Some mappings will be obvious, but some might require a bit of creative re-purposing. If you think there’s no way of representing a field in Dublin Core, leave the column blank and explain your decision in a note. Copy the completed table into your portfolio.

  • Arrangement and description in archives: The Documenting the collection page talks about the importance of ‘original order’ in archival description. In a few sentences, describe what you understand ‘original order’ to mean, and why you think it is important. Add this to your portfolio.

  • Documenting limits: In your portfolio write a minimum of 200 words describing a situation where it might be necessary to control access to a collection. What types of metadata might help you document, understand, and manage these limits.

  • Digitisation planning: Read Terras’s chapter and the resources linked above while thinking about the factors that determine the success of a digitisation project. Imagine that you’ve been given the job of planning the digitisation of a large collection of material documenting the activities of political protest organisation that was active in the 1970s and 80s. The collection includes publications, posters, and photos, as well as unpublished letters and meeting notes. With worrying too much about detail, I want you to draw up a table that identifies possible costs, risks, and benefits (aim for at least 5 of each). Where there are risks, try to identify strategies that could minimise them. Write a minimum of 400 words, and add the finished table to your portfolio.

  • Digitisation beyond images: Include the link to your corrected article in your portfolio. Feel free to do more than one – look at the text correctors’ hall of fame for inspiration!

  • Make your own web archive: Create an archive of a site using Webrecorder.io, share the link via Slack, and add it to your portfolio. In a minimum of 100 words report on the result. Do you think it provides an accurate representation? What might future historians miss out on?