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

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