theorywatch

Had some interesting final projects in “Digital Collections” this semester, ranging from a Community Overdrive audio collection of Aesop’s fables, to a fantasy collection of celebrity memorabilia, to a historical account by a child patient at the Eastern Oklahoma Tuberculosis Sanitarium, to pilot projects for ongoing collection activities at the University of Oklahoma School of Dance, the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, the Oklahoma Historical Society, and the American Choral Directors Association. Two people were working on a digital repository project, which was new for this class, which tends to be rather image-driven! One really nice project focused on developing metadata for spoken language recordings in the Caddo language. An excellent paper also, on the difficulties faced by designers trying to make a collection user-friendly for people at various points along the autism spectrum (this one was obviously too difficult to do as an actual project during a one-semester class!)

This was also the first time I offered people the chance to choose between putting their collections on OMEKA or on CONTENTdm, and there were some interesting challenges on both platforms, which I hope people realized was a valuable learning experience (even if there were some panic-stricken project moments along the way, such as “where did my collection go!”

Of course, the readings as always were fascinating (at least to me, though I suspect that some people wished I wouldn’t have assigned the entire NISO Framework for Building Good Digital Collections.)

And the final exam involved explaining what made the Galaxy Zoo a collection… or not. (No, that’s a joke— there was no final exam, as this class was mostly a survey/studio class for collection design.) Unfortunately, I don’t know when I’ll be teaching this one again… but I do know that some excellent digital collection builders emerged from this class, hopefully with their inspiration intact (and possibly even enhanced)!