Unit 12: Digital Online Archives


I submitted 5 photos to the Northern Virginia Digital History Archive, mostly photos of the weather, including two from the snow storm in January 2016. In looking through my photos from the past five years or so, I was surprised to find that I didn't have many of local landmarks or historical places in Northern Virginia. Therefore, I've contributed mostly photos of inclement weather, of which I apparently have a few. 

 For the record, it appears I submitted the first entry for the Leesburg collection! 

 The Northern Virginia Digital History Archive is easy to browse through, though a little more cumbersome to include contributions. The descriptions above each free text box could be more explanatory to encourage contributors to follow a uniform writing style. I was expecting to classify my photos in each of the collections it pertains to, but that must be done during the administrator approval. As the collection grows, user tagging might be an easier way to order the images without too much administrative time. 

Looking into other digital archives, I found the Early Americas Digital Archive, maintained by the University of Maryland Libraries' e-Publishing Initiative. I found this archive to be more interesting than others I located because it is a collection of electronic texts. Unlike other digital archives, this archive does not include pictures of original source documents -- it is literally just the words these documents contain. I hadn't thought of an archive of words only, as opposed to pictures of artifacts that could be read. The site is easy to use, with full text search and browse functionality. I especially appreciate that there is a running list of newly added works on the site. 
Project Update: I'm still plugging away, collecting information for each of the military installations to be included in the story map. I found ArcGIS easy to use in my experimentation, so I'm more interested in gathering content at this time. 

Comments

  1. Professor Charles EvansJuly 5, 2017 at 4:23 AM

    Thanks for the suggestion of the UMD archive. I will check that out.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unit 13: Data Visualization

For the data visualization project, I pulled information about population in counties of Virginia from 1790-2000 from the National Historical Geographic Information System  (NHGIS). I narrowed my data visualization down from every county in Virginia to those in what I would consider Northern Virginia. Many of the counties, including Alexandria and Prince William, did not have sufficient data to make meaningful entries in the chart. I chose to capture 1900-2000, as opposed to 1800-1900, because of the amount of information available. I found this project very challenging, both in terms of finding the data set, and in formatting the above chart using Google Charts . The search functionality in the NHGIS system was not intuitive and the sheer breadth of information available was overwhelming. I pulled several sets of data before deciding on county population changes. It is easy to see a far and away change in Fairfax County, which in 2000 was at a whopping 9
Read more

Unit 14: Big Picture, User Participation Projects and Crowd-Sourcing (Genealogy)

This chapter from Rosenzweig is perhaps the most compelling yet, at least to me. I am looking to pursue a master's in library science with a focus on archiving, and probably digital archiving at that. The discussions about how perilous the integrity and accessibility of digital collections are in this week's chapter struck home.  It's startling to read that "the foremost American authority on the longevity of various media, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), still cannot give a precise timeline for the deterioration of many of the formats we currently rely on to store precious digital records." So much of the personal records we care about and rely on are stored in computers and on servers. If I lost my computer and online data storage, I would be losing a significant amount of important documents and personal photos. On the flip side, I wouldn't print out every document and photo either. It will be interesting to see where digital ar
Read more