Activity 2.2.5 (Curation & Preservation): Use Omeka to experiment with creating a mini digital archive

As you might have inferred from the examples I’ve already given, my father was a prolific writer who held—and maybe even continues to hold—the record of having the most number of Palanca awards in literature. When he died, he left behind a great number of documents of cultural and historical importance, as well as a massive library of books. To safeguard this inheritance, I ended up creating two archives/collections:

• The Edgardo B. Maranan Digital Archive consisting of scanned versions of documents in his archive (which include metadata related to the physical analogues of the documents, such as their physical location in the physical version of the archive); and
• A public lending library that was catalogued on LibraryThing.

Now it’s your turn to experiment with building a digital archive.

1. Identify a collection that you want to build. Perhaps you have a trove of love letters that your grandparents exchanged back before you were born? Or do you think the photographs you’ve ever taken when you went on an out-of-town trip would be of value to others? Do you happen to have access to historical documents or ephemera associated with a local folk hero? Or maybe you have a folder full of your siblings’ childhood drawings? Are you interested in the life and works of a famous artist (writer/musician/visual artist/chef) and want to capture some aspect of their life through an archive? This is just an exercise, so choose anything that you think could constitute a small collection that would have value for some kind of audience.
2. Choose a curation and preservation tool from the list presented in Module 2.2. Tools for authoring digital humanities projects. I used Mukurtu for the EBM Digital Archive because it offers a sophisticated way to create access permissions to different groups of people, but I recommend that you start with Omeka. (If you choose Omeka, sign up for a free account on Omeka.net.)
3. Start building your collection. Upload 5-10 entries in your archive and add all the appropriate metadata. What’s important isn’t the quantity of entries that you accession, but that you explore and understand the different kinds of metadata that you are asked to enter when engaging in an archival project.