I hope that everyone is safe and well! Here is a link to my webpage: https://dceducationandimmigration.omeka.net/items/browse! As I have mentioned before, I hope to create a digitized collection materials from the DC Public schools archives. Because of this Covid-19 situation, I was only only able to visit the Charles Sumner Museum and Archive twice. The documents that I digitized while there were meant to be starting points as they are mostly minutes from DC Board of Education Meetings. Before everything shut down, I had just begun the process of viewing reports and documents mentioned in the Board of Education minutes. Regardless, I still think the documents I have been able to digitize are valuable.
Before moving to adding materials to my Omeka.net site, I created deliverables à la Brown’s Communicating Design. I especially found creating a super simple persona and competitive analysis helpful for determining core components of the site.
Given my inability to access the physical documents in the Sumner archive, I’ve been thinking about including relevant newspaper articles. However, I need to look into copyright issues before doing so. Besides that, I am planning to create as many relevant collections I can (I had bigger plans for this and still plan to add more once I can access the archive again). Any and all suggestions for changes/additions/something else would be greatly appreciated!
Hi Elisabeth, thanks for sharing this work! It’s great to see how the project has been developing and come along. The set of documents that you’ve scanned and produced metadata for seem like really interesting content and it’s great to see that they have gone from being only available onsite at the archive to being available online like this.
Overall, I found your online collection to be straightforward and easy to navigate. Also, thanks for sharing the image of you Competitive Analysis deliverable. I think that is a great kind of thing to hang on to for you’re portfolio as an example of the kinds of work you’re now equipped to do in support of digital projects.
At this point I think your plan to focus on making some collections is a great idea. It’s fine for a project like this to not include a ton of items. This is particularly true given the situation we are in now where getting back to scan more material is not an option. With that noted, I think if you wanted to do something like build out the about section or other parts of the online collection that start to demonstrate the kind of stories that you can tell based on these resources that could be productive. I think there is a good chance that users coming across the site might not understand it’s significance, so thinking through how to get that to come across could be a good area to focus some effort on as you work through the rest of the semester.
Overall, great work! Creating this kind of metadata and scanning documents like this is a good bit of work and it’s great to see how well this is all coming together.