Excuses, THATCamp, Metadata, The Center, And More Archiving!

Hello readers! My apologies, again, for the delay in posting! I worked a lot of hours last week, plus school, so I have not really had time to sit down and write! So here we are now, nearly 5 days late. I'm a terrible person!

Let's recap shall we?  

Saturday February 16, 2013 I had the opportunity to attend THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp) which was held in downtown Orlando. THATCamp is an "Unconference" where "humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot." It was really interesting! They had several time slots and three rooms. At any given point and time there was essentially three presentations being held. I unfortunately was only able to attend two presentations because I had to be at work at 2:30pm. The two presentations I was able to attend were: The UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research Projects and H-Net 2.0.

The UCF Center for Humanities and Digital Research presentation discussed two particular sites. The first was The Charles Brockden Brown Archive. This presentation discussed the creation of an electronic archive. From the conception of the idea to the creation of the archive, and all those involved in between. The whole archive was created by a small group of researchers, but required national collaboration. This gave me the idea of having the GLBT History Museum of Central Florida look into ways of possibly collaborating with other national GLBT history museums. Who knows, maybe one day there could be an online archive for the history of the GLBT Community on a national level!

The second presentation I attended was the DAIS- Digital Archiving Information System. This one was created by graduate students in the UCF Text and Technology Program. Basically this site serves as a one stop shop for digital archives. It not only informs on how to create a digital archive, but it provides access to numerous digital archives throughout the country. Instead of serving as a simple directory to other digital archives, this site provides abstracts of each digital archive in their database. This provides the researcher with enough information to make a decision as to whether or not a particular archive would serve them properly. It is quite the feat and seems very promising!

The other presentation I attended was that of H-Net 2.0. Dr. Cassanello skyped the creator of the site, and he gave us an overview of the history and evolution of the site. This site has peer-reviewed essays, discussions, book reviews, etc. all on a scholarly level. In the past it was primarily updated by e-mail. By doing this, it provided access to people in countries that would normally not be able to contribute due to limited internet. For example, countries in Africa. Unfortunately though, as technology has changed, the site had to change as well. E-mail has become a dying form of communication and the site realized they were loosing subscribers and thus had to revamp their means of procuring information. It is now a site that is no longer updated by e-mail, but set up more like social media. The new site looks to be very promising.

Tuesday February 19, 2013 I met with Laura Cepero who is a metadata editor for RICHES of Central Florida. She gave a presentation about metadata, OMEKA, and the RICHES Mosaic Interface. 

Metadata at first seems complicated, but is actually pretty interesting and I'm sure easy once you get the hang of it. It is essentially a means of describing digital items (documents, letters, photos, etc) with key words so that researchers can easily find them. I like to think of it as more of an advanced form of the hash tags used on Twitter. 

OMEKA is a site that you can host your own archives on. Many of the University's digital archives are hosted by OMEKA (The university however, has their own servers, thus they have more storage space than OMEKA provides). OMEKA provides different templates and all the tools one needs to create their own digital archive. It's pretty much amazing! 

Speaking of amazing, let's talk about the RICHES Mosaic Interface! This is really an awesome feat! "The RICHES Mosaic Interface is the central internet location for content created through the RICHES projects and links to sources on Central Florida available from other repositories around the state." Basically, it displays a satelite image of Central Florida, and as you zoom in, and click around, you can discover the history of the different areas of Central Florida! One of the more complete areas on the site is Sanford. It is still relatively new and has a lot of room to grow. One of the cool features of the site is that it is able to "harvest" information from other repositories with compatible sites!

Thursday February 21, 2013 I stopped by the storage unit and picked up 6 of the 9 boxes of The Center collection. I was able to go through 5 of the 6 on Thursday alone! Which was quite an accomplishment if I do say so myself! My finding aid is now about 17 pages long, and it keeps growing! I've made a lot of progress, but still have much to do! I am almost done processing the special collections, the next step will be to process the exhibits. I also need to rehouse the Brian Arbogast collection. I hope to get a lot of work done during spring break which is apparently next week! I am currently sitting in the RICHES office and about to get to work! I will post another update on Friday (for real this time!)

Until then,

-Kyle the intern